It was a typically balmy April evening, and Braden Peters, age twenty, had fainted again. Music pulsated faintly over the speakers of the empty Miami bar. Peters and his two companions had sought this isolated sit-down spot after he began showing symptoms of drowsiness and delirium. “How fucked up are you?” asked one of them, laughing and feigning indifference. He offered Adderall, but Peters was clearly in bad shape. Now he had slumped over, and his buddies couldn’t pretend not to be alarmed. Then, abruptly, the livestream cut out.
Soon, the media was on the case. Peters had overdosed in front of his fans and parasocial adorers. It was the second time he had lost consciousness on stream, right on the heels of multiple felony charges. Getting booked, it turned out, had been an excellent and unforeseen chance to get a professional mugshot: to “anglemaxx” with his finely chiseled jawline and steely glare, to “mog” the other Broward County inmates with an instantly viral bad-boy portrait.
“Peters’s face was the product of years of looksmaxxing.”
Peters’s face was the product of years of looksmaxxing. He began taking steroids at age fourteen after plunging into the online bodybuilding subculture and the so-called manosphere. He saw steroids and pharmacology as a “video game cheat code.” Looksmaxxing, Peters argues, is a salve for the insecure, as he once was.
Better known by his trade name, Clavicular, Peters has vaulted into popular consciousness over recent months for methods that include bonesmashing (hitting his cheekbones with a hammer) and microdosing meth to “lean out.” Lately, his life has consisted of up-to-twenty-four-hour “IRL streams,” attending parties, and building a rap sheet for general tomfoolery.
He is also doing interviews, and storming out of many of them. Peters is peeved at the political buzzards circling above, drawn in by the stench of controversy: the incel origins of looksmaxxing and his one-off hangout with the antisemitic streamers Myron Gaines and Nick Fuentes. He thrives on provocation and shock, but wants to transcend politics. He would rather journalists ask him about his true passion: the science of good looks.
Scaling the heights of beauty was not painless for Peters. He says he has sterilized himself permanently through premature testosterone injections. But he has at last “ascended,” in his parlance. He is fond of citing studies which prove that the most gorgeous specimens of mankind enjoy all manner of superior life outcomes. In his view, we are all biased to treat attractive people better. Why defy this basic truth? We contort ourselves to seek the favor of others in manifold other ways. Why not maximize our bodies, too?
“In his view, we are all biased to treat attractive people better.”
Yet Peters appears to be unsure what exactly all that favor is for. He tells the documentary journalist Andrew Callaghan that beauty helps one “to be successful in general”—in a career, in dating. Are any of those domains important in their own right? Peters wavers: Dating for pleasure has no “ROI,” he scoffs, and getting married and having kids is “comical.” Beyond that, he hated being a wagecuck. Actually, he says, those who socialize and go on dates without livestreaming it are “jester,” and have “misprioritized lives” when they “should be on PubMed reading various different studies on how you could looksmaxx.”
Perhaps looks are for their own sake, then. But Peters repeatedly concludes that once someone has reached “full ascension,” he can decide for himself what’s valuable beyond. Round and round he goes, trusting and then defying the priorities of normies.
In December, the conservative podcaster Michael Knowles sniffed out the paradox and subjected Clavicular to a two-hour-plus Socratic dialogue on his philosophy. Assailed with reasonable objections, the budding celebrity found himself pinned in a snare of his own making. Knowles, playing Diotima, closed in and began to instruct the young Socrates in marriage, the arts, spiritual life, and “booksmaxxing.”
But to Knowles’s bafflement, Peters repeatedly sprung free. He admitted that there may be higher goods than beauty, and in an ideal world we would all chase them—but our world, he argued, is just too broken. “Unless society was ready to rebuild, it’s very much a cope to try to go against it and go against its ways,” he told Knowles—“even if it’s wrong.” The world has become too superficial, status- and looks-obsessed, and we must all thrash in its filthy waters simply to stay alive. Diotima presses on, but Peters’s ears are blocked to her instruction. What is your beauty for?: what kind of “jester” question is that!
Another philosopher of the body, Bryan Johnson, has been a household name for far longer than Clavicular. Johnson seeks not beauty but eternal life. In his thirties, he made $800 million selling a payment processing company to PayPal. Now approaching fifty, he employs a medical team to optimize his life-extending treatments: magic mushrooms, repurposed diabetes drugs, and his own hyperbaric oxygen chamber (mechanical tubes known for suffocating unsuspecting users or catching fire). Johnson would like to turn his body into a small science experiment for all of humanity’s benefit.
Searching for the fountain of youth is not without its dangers, as explorers and experimenters of earlier eras learned. But Johnson is dogged and serious, and he has more tools at his disposal than his predecessors. But he is frustrated at the pesky limits others put up against biohacking. He points out that law prohibits us from using unvetted longevity drugs, but we may eat junk food to our hearts’ content. “They give me the freedom to kill myself, but I don't have the right to experiment on myself,” Johnson told podcaster Theo Von in March. “I wish I had more experimental power.”
In fighting the entropy of his own body, Johnson must suffer and be disfigured. During the interview with Von, his face appeared bruised and pocked because he had injected his face with collagen in an effort to restore youthful vigor to his skin. Johnson does not take “cheat days” or enjoy things like pizza and donuts anymore. “It makes me nauseous to even think about it,” he says. His daily life is subject to algorithmic control: sleep times, nutrients, exercise. Johnson monitors 250 of his vital signs to fine-tune his health regimen. By his own telling, he is happy this way, and he would like to extend this happy life as much as possible, all while smashing new health goals.
“Johnson’s daily life is subject to algorithmic control.”
But have Johnson’s trials produced the recipe for a longest-and-least-painful existence? At times, the obvious answer slips out. “What I did is n=1, not a controlled trial,” he conceded recently, after bragging that microplastics had been eradicated from his testes. Speaking of which, could his diet and exercise be replicated for all ages? How about women during pregnancy? Those with congenital diseases? You may want to live Johnson’s perfect life, but your body is different than his—so you will need to start from scratch. Go find your own $800 million.
As Johnson transforms his body into open-source data, his loved ones’ stats have become fair game as well. “Just gave Kate oral sex. Goodnight everyone,” he tweeted—before touting the perfect score of her “vaginal microbiome report.” His son, too, joined his celebrity in 2023 with a plasma transfusion that went viral. The process of taking his son’s lifeblood, Johnson hoped, would de-age him.
Aside from objecting to his exhibitionism, we may detect something insidious in Bryan Johnson’s journey, but find ourselves unable to articulate it. Perhaps it is that his life is impoverished, that he lacks spontaneity and cannot stray outside the confines of his rigid routine. Is he really living? But experience, too, can be optimized: with a 28 mg dose of 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic extracted from the Colorado River toad, life brightened up and surprised him: “Energy overflowed. The world felt light and right. It was a new me, with new patterns, and a fire for life.”
But what is he living for? asks the skeptic. Who among us can answer this for ourselves? Johnson finds fulfillment in his health project and has a family to care for; perhaps he really is thriving. He reminds me of my high school math teacher, who ebulliently promoted his healthy diet, served fruit smoothies, and for some reason advertised chia seeds as the cure-all wonderfood. We all make New Year’s resolutions to live better, for longer. Johnson is simply following this self-improving logic more rigorously, and expensively, to its conclusion. Who can blame him?
Our bodies are inefficient. They usually don’t look the way we want them to. They make us want things that damage us. They reject foods, treatments, and exercises that make us feel energetic and happy. In letting an algorithm rule his life, Bryan Johnson is broadcasting to the world that there is a better way. He recently wondered “why we do not have a better operating manual for the human body.” The answer is that we are not machines—but perhaps we could be more like them?
The reactionary social critic Ernst Jünger prophesied a new vision in which humanity was totally reshaped by the ethic of technological efficiency. As a company commander during World War I, he watched as mortars wreaked havoc on the landscape; chlorine gas choked the body of oxygen; and the world was flattened by “fiery furnaces” of rolling steel. The last traces of heroic combat and Christian chivalry had been vaporized, and with them, the human individual.
Total warcraft was undergirded by total statecraft: Totalitarianism deleted the individual person and subsumed him into a great mobilized mass. For Jünger, in modernity man would no longer be the center of everything. Pain, extreme pain, was inevitable as we learned to break our fragile egos. And this, he suggested, was our hidden cure. The machine could not be defeated, so its logic must be embraced.
During the Great War, Jünger saw that modern man could be obliterated at any moment. But he also believed man had lost his ability to dissociate from a body that could be so destroyed. In modernity, the body was regarded “not as an outpost but as the main force and essential core of life.” With this came what Jünger called “modern sensitivity.” The body served itself, not higher ends, so it could not tolerate pain.
Johnson and Peters have transcended sensitivity to bodily pain. Perhaps this makes them a new breed of men: hypermoderns. But their bodies are not outposts to reach a higher collective machine existence: to the contrary, their desired ends, their sense of well-being—maximal beauty for Clavicular, pure undiluted healthful experience of life for Johnson—can only be lived through their bodies, as bodies.
“Today, the body remains the last moral frontier.”
Today, the body remains the last moral frontier. Clavicular and Johnson are brave somatonauts, probing our inner and outer workings. They have plunged deepest into our assumptions about fun, happiness, and status, and at last reached bedrock. Atop it they build their philosophies.
In his own time, Jünger had watched the taboos around public medical exhibits melt away, for no one could offer a sincere religious defense of the body’s sanctity any longer. Today, to the disciplines of biohacking and looksmaxxing, we similarly can offer no protest, only smirks, parodies, and murmurs of alarm.
Both of our corporal philosophers seem to brave pain only so long as the cameras are rolling. But what happens when they awake to find their bodies no longer work as planned? By Ben Sasse’s own recollection, when he found out his body was ridden with tumors, his primary concern was not for himself. Instead, the former US senator for Nebraska thought of his children. “I didn’t like the idea of my fourteen-year-old son not having a dad around at sixteen,” he told The New York Times’s Ross Douthat in April. “I didn’t like the idea of my daughters, who were twenty-two and twenty-four, not having their dad there to walk them down the aisle.”
Sasse’s eloquence has won him many admirers. He speaks in a civic register that feels increasingly alien in the clamor of our national politics. His viral moment was not a felony, a fainting spell, or a vampiric blood transfusion, but a moment when Capitol Hill photographers caught him off-guard in the early morning—unkempt, relatable, in workout fatigues.
Before 2025, Ben Sasse appeared as healthy as a man can be. He was described by Time as a “fitness nut” who could do hundreds of pushups a day. But no number of pushups could forestall the clumps of cancerous cells bubbling up inside him.
“I was in a ton of pain early on,” Sasse said, “because I had some pancreatic tumors that were essentially pushing on my spinal column.” Since then, he has opted for more pain in return for reducing nausea and fatigue. As he spoke to Douthat, the skin on Sasse’s face was scorched and raw. They were evidence of the fight to survive just a bit longer, not attempts to graft collagenous youth onto age and live forever.
Sasse is driven through his painful death-marathon and media tour by a deep-rooted faith. His advice often takes on a sermonistic form: to atheists confronting heavy questions, he says, read Romans 1. He speaks of meeting his maker. “Going through the period of suffering that I’m going through is a benefit, because it is a winnowing,” he says. “I’m filled with dross, and this suffering is not salvific. But it’s sanctifying, and I’m grateful for it.”
Death is something that we should hate,” says Ben Sasse. “We should call it a wicked thief.” Is Johnson’s view so different? His search for the fountain of youth recalls the hubris of Alexander the Great, but it is not so alien to the Christian tradition either. According to Deuteronomy, we are to “choose life,” and the Bible promises not perfect, temporary fulfillment on earth, but resurrection and eternal life. Lancelot, Galahad, and Ponce de León also sought the greatest prize. Isn’t hating death inseparable from defying it?
Four years ago, a friend of mine died suddenly and for no reason at all. Apparently, he simply did not wake up one morning; his heart stopped beating. Like me, he was 20 years of age. A mere day beforehand, we had texted again for the first time in two years. I had asked him to call at his convenience so we could catch up. That conversation never happened. I found myself at his funeral with my mind spinning apart.
“Johnson and Peters are locked in a struggle against reality itself.”
Here, then, is the stupidity of Bryan Johnson’s quest. Nothing can stay the capricious hand of God; He strikes us down in our prime. Johnson and Peters are locked in a struggle against reality itself, trying to “transcend” the slower or faster decay of their flesh. Their certainty unsettles us because we have not savored the hubris of straying outside human bounds.
Some day, the corporal philosophers will realize they have been chasing a mirage. It may dawn on them gradually; it may strike without warning. But the reckoning will be painful—worse, even, than a hammer to the face.