An American influencer who’s literally built a career out of hitting himself in the face with a hammer just got rattled on 60 Minutes Australia and all of a sudden I’m patriotic now.
On Sunday night, 60 Minutes Australia profiled 20-year-old Floridian creator Braden Eric Peters, better known as Clavicular, who’s turned “looksmaxxing” into a full-blown business model. He boasts about starting testosterone at 14 because “there’s no reason for me to go to the gym and work out in any way other than the most efficient one, and that was with anabolic steroids”, and explains to journalist Adam Hegarty that “bone smashing” as creating “micro-fractures in specific areas of your face” so the bone “grows back stronger”. Add in his admission that he uses methamphetamine because its long half-life keeps his appetite down all day and you’ve basically got a self-harm starter pack being sold as self-improvement.
The segment set out how looksmaxxing targets adolescent and young men with a cocktail of drugs, surgery and self-harm, and featured Melbourne aesthetic surgeon Dr Angie Taras calling practices like bone smashing “shocking” and stressing “there’s just absolutely no scientific evidence behind most of the things that they are talking about”.
Clinical psychologist Dr Zac Seidler warned the trend is fuelled by a “real dark undercurrent of nihilism” telling boys that unless they maximise their looks, “you will not be able to have a mate… you will not be able to have financial success and status”, and that it ultimately leads to “self-destruction”.
Peters, meanwhile, is very happy to preach that physical appearance is the basis for all success, particularly with women, and that young men are “living in the worst dating market that has ever existed” unless they mould themselves into his idea of hot. He positions looksmaxxing as a way out of involuntary celibacy, even though the term itself comes from incel forums, where men blame women for their lack of sex.
When Hegarty points out that “looksmaxxing was obviously a term created by the Incel community” and asks how he feels about being linked to that crowd, Peters insists, “I’m not linked to that group in any way. Looksmaxxing is self-improvement, right? So it’s about, uh, potentially even ascending out of that category… one of the goals is to disassociate from being an incel and overcome that”.
Totally diva.
The wheels properly come off when Hegarty raises Andrew Tate. Tate, a self-described “misogynist” who is set to stand trial for alleged human trafficking in Romania, has been spotted at a Miami nightclub with Peters and white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes, and has also filmed gym content with him. So Hegarty asks the kind of question any Year 10 media student could see coming: “You’ve obviously shared company with Andrew Tate and other, dare I say, rather, controversial figures. Why do you spend time with people like that?”
For someone who spends all day telling boys to toughen up, Peters folds instantly.
“All right, have a nice day,” he replies, accusing Hegarty of trying to “make this… political” before attempting a personal sledge that wouldn’t make it past the group chat. He suggests he could have dug into “who your wife cheated with”, only for Hegarty to calmly respond, “I’m not married”, leaving Peters to scramble: “Maybe you’ve got to looksmaxx then. So I could teach you about looksmaxx and then maybe you could switch that up… Thanks for the time. Appreciate the interview”.
Because Clavicular’s cameras never stop rolling, we then get the bonus tantrum. Back at his livestream setup, Peters calls Hegarty “a slimy bastard”, “piece of s***” and declares “F*** that guy. I don’t like him”, before clarifying his stance on Tate in case anyone had somehow missed the vibe.
“Yeah, of course, no Tate’s my boy and we’re going to be doing a collab soon… I got no problem associating with Andrew Tate,” he tells viewers, proudly confirming that walking out of the interview wasn’t about factual accuracy, it was about not wanting to say the quiet part out loud on Australian TV.
For people who’ve been watching this pipeline in real time, this all tracks. When I interviewed advocate Tarang Chawla last month about the Manosphere, he described it as “a pipeline dressed up as self-help”, saying “a lot of it starts with confidence but ends with entitlement”, and that many boys are just looking for “a sense of identity, purpose and belonging” when they get pulled in.
He argued it isn’t some fringe corner of the internet, but “a form of radicalisation” that “feeds on loneliness and then turns that into blame”, with women and feminism cast as the villains.
So when a young man who sells extreme body modification and anti-feminist talking points to a mostly male audience storms out the moment a journo connects him to incels and Tate, it doesn’t just feel like a TV meltdown. It’s a neat little snapshot of how fragile this whole “self-improvement” empire looks the second anyone asks who, exactly, it’s teaching boys to worship and who it’s teaching them to hate.
Lead image: 60 Minutes
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