Search Engine - What is jawmaxxing?

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

The story of how an alternative theory of dentistry made its way from medicine's fringes to an audience of young men online. This week we try to make sense of jawmaxxing with help from Panic World’s Ryan Broderick. Panic World Garbage Day INVCEL - Reply All Support the show at searchengine.show! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before we start this week, I need your help. We need your questions for Alison Roman, chef, cookbook writer, the undisputed heavyweight champion of Thanksgiving. She is the host of the excellent podcast, solicited advice, but we're bringing her to search engine, and we need your questions for her. Not about the meal of Thanksgiving, but about all your questions around it, like the leftovers, the meals that come immediately after, how do you recover from the malaise, how do you begin to heal the soul of a first?

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The prices are so reasonable. But if for some reason you're not, you can do so now at search engine. Dot show. Help me. Help you. Ask Allison Roman anything. Okay. As for this week's episode, our question, what is jaw maxing and how did it go mainstream?

After Smads, we call up internet culture reporter Ryan Broderick. This episode of Surge Engine is brought to you in part by Square. Square, the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, detailing cars, or running a design studio, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. I like seeing Square in action at my local coffee shop. They use Square for payments, and it just makes everything feel effortless.

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That's vanguard.com slash impact. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. Oh, do you record the whole thing? The whole thing. Maybe you're going to say something charming and surprising. Wow. Yeah. I've been watching The Wire for the first time.

Really? Similar philosophy in that show. You got to catch it on the Wire. You should check out after done. There's this mob drama on. that's really good called The Sopranos. So I watched that for the first time, and then I was like, I want to stay in this world a little bit. So then I started watching The Wire.

What were you doing all the last 20 years? I'm sorry, I'm working class, so we didn't have HBO growing up. Wow. I didn't realize, you know, we were from different worlds like that. What did you guys watch? My parents have very bad taste, I think. I mean, my parents don't have impagable taste, but I have. also sometimes watched stuff without them.

Sometimes. I walked in, last time I was home, I watched it on my dad watching Godfather Part 3 and he's like, this movie's pretty good, huh? I was like, oh, okay. I think he literally was like, Sophia Coppola is pretty good in this movie. I was like, oh, Jesus Christ. It is, I've only seen, I've seen Godfather Part 1. I think I've seen most of Godfather Part 2.

I don't, 3 is the bad one, right? I've never seen the whole thing. I watched it between Abbreaks with him. It didn't look good. I've met your dad. Your dad has been on crypto-Ireland. That's right. He has. He's really such a charming guy. He's having a great time right now, now that his boy's back in the White House. Oh, was he a Trump voter?

Oh, he's always been a Republican, yeah. I mean, he's like, you know, normal-ish about it, but... Do you guys argue, or do you just, like, agree or disagree? You know, I try to find places to argue with him, but it's, like, tiring, and sometimes he's like, I do this for a job. I don't need to do this when I'm with you. Like, I find it quite useful now that like you know when i'm home he takes me out to like a shitty dive bar full of like joe rogan guys because i understand their psychology perfectly now oh really oh yeah i mean i've had so many conversations with these guys who are like deciding the future of our country now and like i understand how they think and what they want and it's not nearly as deep i think as people make it out to be

what do you feel like you understand that like all the uh sort of new york times political reporters who are hanging out of diners don't there is a johnald Trump in every single town in America, multiple probably, guys who just believe that like they should be allowed to do whatever they want. They're sick of dealing with like zoning regulations or like the light department or whatever it is. And so for Donald Trump, it's very inspiring for them to like be the Trump of their town. And it's not political. It's just like a power. It's like a you're in your middle ages and you don't want to listen to anybody. You know, I had a moment this week. I had a moment this week. Can I tell you the moment? Can I tell you the moment?

that I had? You can tell you the moment you had, yeah. I've got mold, I think, under my floorboards, and I was, like, trying to find a guy to deal with the mold. And I called the mold guy, and he was like, well, there's basically, New York State passed a regulation in 2016, apparently, that says you can't have a mold guy come to your house. You've got to hire a different guy to come to your house

and prepare, like, a plan for the mold guy to follow. And, like, the idea is they don't want mold guys going on ripping everybody off. So now there's the guy who makes the mold test and the guy who checks for the mold, but the guy who does the mold test, he was like, yeah, it's 500 bucks. And I was like, what? That's why we just got to get rid of the Department of Education. You know, we just got to that's why Elon Musk has to make our government more efficient. No, but I do think there's something very radicalizing, unfortunately, about dealing with any single government regulation in America because they're all completely, I'm allowed to say this because I've lived in a country, you

You know, the UK is not exactly efficient, but their government services are at least put together with a bit more thought. I've seen what could be. And so I'm comfortable being like America just like maybe shouldn't have a government actually because like we're really bad at it. Okay. We'll stop this being a political podcast in 30 seconds. But I do just want to say, I think the way I've been feeling this week has been the problem is like the right is always just like the government, which we constantly sabotage sucks until we have no choice but to destroy it. And the left is like the government should take care of everything. But also we have no curiosity about whether they're doing a good job.

None. How to make them do a better job. It's just like we have Eric Adams for mayor in my city. And we're running around being like, we should be in charge of everything. Because look what we did. Yeah. Now that we've solved the political polarization issue in America. I think we've got it.

Yeah. Can you introduce yourself? My name is Ryan Broderick. I am the author of the Garbage Day newsletter and the host of the new Panic World podcast. Ryan's been covering the internet about the same amount of time I have, which is about 70 years. If you like stories about fringe internet phenomena and the way an idea can hop from the outside of the culture towards its mainstream, Ryan's a person whose work often gives me that these days. About a week ago, Ryan texted me and suggested that search engine ought to try to make

sense of jaw maxing, a trend I'd only ever noticed peripherally, mainly among online subcultures of teenage boys. And so, here we were. Okay, so what is jaw maxing, right? Jaw maxing is a facial exercise you can do. I mean, you're like me. You've got a JD-Vance chin. It could be better, right? You could make it more.

By J-D. Vance, you mean we both have soft round? We have soft millennial features, yeah. Yes. We look good in an American apparel hoodie, but not so much, you know, as a mega-chad. Yeah. So if you want your face to look more like a megachad, a gigacad, if you will, you can theoretically do this facial exercise to give yourself a sharper, more defined chin. And wait, can I actually ask you about megachads and gigacads?

Mm-hmm. So I have step-sons. Sure. You're the dad that stepped up. Yep. It's really, it's a very strange way to learn about internet culture. I'm sure. Like, my exposure to megachad and gigacad, I think came through them. Like, I know that there's these, like, black and white photos of just, like, a super over-masculative.

guy with like a super high cheekbones and a super deep chin. Right. And the sort of gigacad idea is like 4chan many years ago, 4chan users came up with like the idea of like the perfect man, the Chad. And were they joking or were they not joking? Did they know? Does anyone know? I mean, I sort of take everything that happens in 4chan as kind of like arch performance

art. At least it starts that way very often. So in the earlier memes, it was like popular women were Stacey's and popular men were Chads and Chads go with Stacey's and it was sort of part of this idea of like early pickup artist communities trying to like codify sexual dynamics. And so the Chad was like the archetypal man and because these men who were talking about this are like insane nerds, they were using anime power scaling. And what's anime power scaling? So like, you know, like for instance, like in Digimon, if you become like a very high level Digripod, you might have Gigga a time.

to the front of your name. So, like, that's... Okay, so it's like these nerds are trying to define... And when I say nerd, I don't mean that pejoratively. I just mean it descriptively. But these nerds are trying to define, like, kind of alpha jock masculinity. But as they're trying to do it,

their anime-inflicted nerdiness creeps through. And so first they're like, well, they're just called a Chad. And they're, like, just like, in, like, Digimon, there's this thing called a Gigacad. Yes. And then they're taking all the attributes they've used to label... a Chad, and they're like exponentially increasing them to a place where they're ridiculous.

Yeah, and I, you know, when you ask about, like, is this a bit or not? I think it's a not very useful way of thinking about this because context collapse is so just a part of the way the internet works that like even if you come up with something kind of funny and even in the original thread, everyone in there kind of knows it's a joke. So this idea of a Chad, this jokey meme about a hyper-masculine jock who women love, it kick. takes around on the internet for about a decade. Sometimes Chad's drawn as a guy with a Mohawk. Sometimes Chad is represented by this one picture

of this one high school football player. In 2017, a new meme circulates of a bearded, high cheek-boned, absurdly roided-out muscle man. These are black and white photos that border on the uncanny, almost AI generated. And people start referring to this image as the giga-chat, like the Chad to rule all Chad's. This is the Gigacad

Of course, there's theme music. And there are tutorials. These videos of scrawny young teenage boys teaching each other to imitate the Gigachad's bizarre facial expression. Eyebrows raised, cheeks sucked in, and a distinctive smirk. It's like a goofier version

of how you might flex your biceps and pretend to be Superman. If you've been around teenage boys in the past couple years, the Gigacad face, like the Sigma face, it's just something you see them pulling at each other and then cracking up. We had Jim Carrey.

They have this. But again, as Ryan says, the Gigacad is both a joke and a not joke at the same time. So Gigacad was definitely supposed to be kind of a parody, but it doesn't really matter. But what you mean is that in certain kinds of subcultures where people are intentionally provoking each other, but also everyone has a tendency to take their own ideas seriously, again, this idea like, is this a bit or not is kind of a useless question. It's like... Because there's profound power, I think.

think in not defining if it's a bit or not. I mean, Trump is very good at this where, like, he really understands that, like, if you never tell people if you're lying or joking or not, you can just wait for them to react and then decide if you were lying or joking later. And I think 4chan logic kind of operates the same way, which is, like, you make a bit. If it's popular, all of a sudden, it's not a bit anymore, is it? So these jokey, not jokey images of the Gigacad, they have now been floating around for almost eight years. Jaw-maxing actually predates the giga-chad, but it bangs around the same parts of the internet, and for similar reasons. Men, mostly young men, online are joking about wanting to be

more masculine. At the same time, some young men online are really wishing they were more masculine. The place where one faction of these men, mostly men, starts to behave in a bizarre way, under the spell of trying to become more Chad-like, this is where jaw-maxing comes in. So jaw maxing is the act of trying to make your jaw look more masculine. The term jaw maxing comes from another term looks maxing. They're kind of related. The idea of like blank maxing is 4chan Reddit speak for like you want to do it a lot. I see.

So wait. So where does the story of jaw maxing start? Jaw maxing starts in the 1960s, actually. This is, can I? tell you it's a perfect podcast because it's only backstory. Yeah, it's just nothing but lore here. After the break, a British orthodontist named John Mew. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate

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included at no extra cost when you buy the Milwaukee M18 string trimmer. Shop seven days of spring outdoor power deals at the Home Depot, now through April 29th. Welcome back to the show. So before the break, we were about to get into the lore of jaw maxing. Ryan says that story actually starts many decades earlier. In the 1960s, a British orthodontist named Dr. John Mew comes up with an idea that he's calling orthotropics. So to simplify it orthotropics is that, Your teeth and your jaw and all that stuff is not fucked up from genetics.

It's fucked up from your environment. Uh-huh. So John Mew, he sets up a dentistry practice in the 70s, in the London suburbs, and he starts testing his idea of orthotropics on his own children. The details of Mew experimenting on his own children, some of them are in a 2020 New York Times magazine profile of him. According to Dr. John Mew, his three kids were treated almost like a. in-home medical trial.

He fed his daughter only soft foods until the age of four. He fed his two boys hard foods and tried to ensure they would breathe through their noses so they could keep their mouths shut as often as possible. He even claims that he made a head strap with a spike in it for one of his sons to try to force him into a correct mouth posture, though his son disputes this.

This profile may have been John Mew's introduction to a mainstream audience, but he'd been at it for quite a while. The first time Mew's ideas were shared in public life, was actually a 1981 article in the British Dental Journal. It is roundly condemned and laughed away by the dentistry establishment. And this is basically like the same way there's people who would tell you like, you don't need vaccines, you just need like fresh air or whatever.

Like this guy is anti-establishment but for braces. Like this guy is like there's a better and more natural, more holistic way to have straight teeth. Yeah. So this is from the orthotrishment. tropics.com website all about this idea. So soft food weakened our jaw muscles. The indoor living encouraged allergies while early weaning created abnormal tongue habits.

And orthotropists believe that these distort the jaws and teeth. Orthodontists, on the other hand, believe that badly shaped jaws are inherited and concentrate on straightening the teeth by mechanical means using wires and brackets. They often extract some teeth to make room for others and use surgery to reposition jaws. Orthotropists,

believe that malaclusion is a biological problem which should be treated naturally, not by mechanics and surgery. I should say we reached out to the Muse Clinic for comment. We didn't hear back. As always, when I encounter an idea that's strange to me, I find myself wondering why it speaks to so many other people. The Muse family alternative theories of dentistry, I want to acknowledge a lot of it sounds very strange.

Parts of it sound cruel. I'm certainly not here to suggest you ask your dentistry. for advice about which hard foods to feed your toddler or where to source a head strap with a spike in it. But some fringe ideas take hold because mainstream science refuses to entertain tricky questions that ordinary people really wonder about. And here's a genuinely good question the orthotropists love to ask. It goes like this. In the past, mankind had straighter teeth and more chiseled chins. Today, we have more crooked teeth and softer chins. Why is that happening? Could we Stop it from happening.

A mainstream dentist will offer you braces or invisaline and say, your jaw shape is mostly genetic, there's not much else to be done here, and also did you remember a flaws? An orthotropist has a much more exciting story to tell. They believe this change to our jaws, which is really observable. They think it's being caused by some change in our environment as recent as the Industrial Revolution. Okay.

But here's where the muse get beyond any good evidence and deeply into their own sales pitch. The Mew family says that we can change the shape of our jaws without surgery or braces if our kids just follow the right diet and maintain the right tongue posture. That, in effect, we can resist the way society seeks to deform us by following the Mews teaching.

To Ryan, there's something familiar here, something he sees in a lot of esoteric movements. The thing that I find kind of links a lot of these is that it all sort of comes back to the solutions of the angst of modern life are found totally within yourself. And I'm going to sell you how to find it inside of you. And obviously, I'm not saying like transcendental meditation is bad or whatever. It's produced a lot of great David Lynch films or like yoga is bad or whatever. I like yoga myself. But like there is definitely a wave of grifters who sell people this idea that everything that is structurally against you in

modern life can be solved by sort of stripping yourself down and finding it within you. And I think that's why a lot of conspiracy theories start there as well. And I think orthotropics is equally solipsistic because it's saying you can literally changed the inside of your mouth if you work hard enough. Right. It's like Americans are funny because we're both like, we're a paranoid conspiracy-loving country, but we're also a country that's very founded on the idea of self-improvement. And so those things kind of twin in a funny way where there's always a new person with

a new diagnosis of what's wrong with society, but the promise is always the same. They're going to sell you something that helps you change yourself in a way that resists it. Right. Can I just pause for a second, though, and say, obviously you and I are talking about a podcast. but you and I are also like talking, like I can see your face. And there is something a little bit funny

about like these two like soft chin, round-mouthed men just laughing at the idea that this could ever be improved. Yeah, but like, you know, women like me, so like I don't need any of this stuff. I can be soft. Just somewhere, just know that I know

that somewhere there's a board of like triangle chinned giga-chads who are like these losers, like the scales could be dropped in their eyes if only they would follow the light in the way. Like, I know how they see us. Yeah, sorry, boys. I can make eye contact,

which means I can watch all the anime I want and still talk to girls. So, wait, so this starts in Britain. Yes. John Muse has this idea. Yes. His idea is you're going to do, like, mouth sit-ups to have straighter teeth?

That's basically it, yeah. And what is it, like, what does this actually mean? Like, what is he doing with this theory? Like, how is he testing it on people? Is he making money? He is testing it on people. In 1986, he leaves the traditional world of dentistry. He self-publishes a book about his theories, and he's just sort of doing his thing.

It doesn't really sort of matter for our story until we jump back in in the 2000s, which is when little Mike, his son, joins his father's practice in the London suburbs, becomes a anthropist. And in 2012, Mike Mew starts uploading videos to YouTube. Hello. I'm welcome. Thank you very much for invite to me to your conference. It's been an excellent conference so far. Mike Mew, John's Pride and Joy, is on stage at a conference at Harvard.

From the waist up, Mike looks like an academic, just dressed with a suavness that borders on inappropriate. Underneath his blazer, a pink button up, undone one button too many. As your eyes drift up past his neck, you see what will so compel the internet. Mike Mew nearly has the face of an academic, except, I must admit, for his jaw.

A jaw he'd kill for. It's like he's managed to construct in real life the bottom third of the Gigachad's face. An upside-down triangle, adorned here with a soul patch that, as a reporter who tries to tell things straight, I have to admit, is totally working. I am better looking than I was seven years ago. That is hard work and effort.

I think it's probably more. difficult than staying on a Paleolithic diet. But it's possible. If you look at someone like Stephen Hawkins, whose face went wrong at a late age, you should be able to make your face grow right at a late age. Stephen Hawking, the late theoretical physicist with ALS, in my muse speech, Hawking serves as an example of someone famous for having a weak jaw. The gospel, according to Mike, more or less the same ideas, his death. ad offered in that original 1981 article, diet and tongue posture. Presumably, the academics at this conference don't think much of these ideas now either,

but they're not the audience that matters anymore. Their presence in this room is set decoration for the real audience. Eventually, the audience, even for just this one talk, will grow to the hundreds of thousands, because this is the 2010s, which means Mike's words are being recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Now my point of presenting to you here is to say, if you're scientists, if you believe in the truth, you need to support me in this debate. That's how science moves forwards. We are treating one third of the population of all westernized civilizations with a method where we admit we don't know what causes it. and we are avoiding open debate.

So it's like fringe idea plugged into internet. And I think one thing that maybe has been memory hold or like normal people just like didn't experience is that around 2011, 2012, as these large social platforms started to flicker on at a scale that started to matter culturally, a lot of insane people who had been using them quietly for many years suddenly became very famous by accident. Like, flat earthers would be one.

You know, a lot of these kind of, like, these people were using the internet very quietly, and then in 2012, algorithms started to mindlessly serve content to people. And that's probably the easiest way to view what happens here, because in June 2014, one of Mike's videos is shared to slut hate.com. Jesus.

Interestingly enough, it's shared by a username the orthodontist. Uh-huh. Mike denies that he did it. Okay. But suddenly, all of a sudden, there is a new orthotropist jaw exercise called mewing that is very popular in the world of insoldom.

To mew is to place your tongue on the roof of your mouth, close your lips, and lightly press your teeth together. If you do this in the mirror, you'll notice it gives your jaw a bit of a jut. But the argument that took hold online was that this was an exercise and that mewing over time would give you permanently a juddier jaw.

Ryan says this notion was taking off in the world of insoldom. The world of insoldom, in case you're not familiar, I actually reported a story about the surprising origins of intel culture online years ago on Reply Off, the podcast I used to help make. I'll put a link to that story in the show notes. But all you need to know today, if you're unfamiliar,

in-cell refers to involuntarily celibate. For decades, people who couldn't find romantic partners have found community with each other online. And those communities over time have just gotten more and more rotten. So I think to really understand this, though, you kind of have to understand where the in-cell idea sort of exists on the timeline

because in the early 2000s, you have pickup artist culture, to the point where that guy mystery has a VH1 reality show. Yeah, I'm familiar with this moment. And so all these men are paying for these classes and they're trying to become pickup artists to help their confidence with meeting women in public. Those classes don't work. And a lot of the early boards for organizing those resources start to sour. And then they create splinter communities, one of which was Pua hate, another one was slut hate. And these were the guys who would become the first in-cells.

And the very earliest conversations were guys who felt ripped off by the men that were trying to help them get laid. And that's where you, you should, start to see the idea of red pill theory, which is like this more aggressive reactionary movement against the self-help kind of vibes of early pickup artistry. And then that's where you get the black pill stuff, which is like full-on spreeshooters. And it all sort of starts with this idea that the men that we paid to help us ripped us off. So just a recap, in the early 2000s, there were the pickup artists who wanted audiences of young men to pay them to learn how to talk to women. But some of that audience turned against the pickup artists and became red-pilled. The red pillors were

committed misogynists who believed that women had too much power that only through self-optimization and manipulation could they convince women to have sex with them. The black pillars who came after didn't believe that was possible. They thought they'd lost a genetic lottery at birth and that the only reasonable response was nihilism. That's a dark story, one that's been told, one that many of us have at least an ambient awareness of, you still encounter these cultures online. But Ryan pointed out something additional, which is that fringe cultures are always welcoming

in new converts, and that sometimes these new converts bring in new fringe ideas that then get added to the existing bonfire. I think every subculture has a certain predilection to pseudoscience and craziness. One of the best examples is the fascist occultism that starts to infect the black metal scene in Europe in the 80s, this sort of idea that like because you've removed yourself from the mainstream,

you're somewhat distrustful of everything mainstream. Like these things happen. And it's not that like insoles were like wholesome little angels in 2012, but I think they were becoming visible enough that a lot of strange people were like, I think I could make some money here. I mean, it's also kind of like another, way to think about it would be in a disorganized way, it's how algorithms work. It's like algorithms

try to identify if you like this, what else will you like? It tries to identify who else is like you, and then it puts you guys whose attention were drawn to the same things in a category that can be advertised to. And then like advertisers show up with their products. And in this case, one of the advertisers who shows up with a product, it's not like he's buying ads on YouTube, but it's this strange orthotropic practice. I think that's exactly right. Okay, so silly exercises created, how does this go to mainstream? So it starts to break containment around 2018, and that's why you're seeing a YouTube channel

called Astroskyi making videos about mewing. So I'm here to tell you that the face you're born with is not the face that you have to put up with. There are things you can do that change your face, and it won't have to cost you a penny. Astro Sky is this young man who, he's Chad-like, although maybe a kind of emo Chad, pointy jaw with swoopy hair above.

Astro Sky has nearly 300,000 viewers on this video, which is entitled, Why Mewing is important to all. Two exclamation points. All it took, for me, was a consciously not giving up on this tongue posture idea that I'm suggesting from Dr. Yu and John New. This area of study is new,

so it's kind of like, There's not a lot of information on it, but beautiful people tend to have good tombuster. You know, it's just part of it. There's not really much you can deny on that. I know that these ideas transmitted via podcasts don't sound persuasive, but the spell doesn't work in audio.

It's visual. On YouTube, an audience of young men, boys who didn't like the look of their own faces, were looking at the conventionally attractive faces of people like Astor Sky for guidance. And it wasn't just Astrosky, promising that exercise could change not just your unlovely body, but your unlovely face. Jaw maxing was now spreading around the internet. These ideas from the Mew family pouring out of pointy jaw after pointy jaw.

Do you know about the golden one? No, who's the golden one? The golden one is not really big anymore, but he was very important in this sort of moment. What I'm looking? He's like a European white nationalist that makes videos like, Do white men need to get tougher? Greetings, true friends. Today I want to talk a bit about mewing.

And before I begin to elaborate, I'm just going to say that I will link Dr. Mike Mew's channel below. And I suggest that you watch through all of his videos. I am about halfway true. Okay, this guy looks like a guy on the cover of like a romance novel, kind of. Like he's got the long center part hair and like the go-team message thing. But like this guy was both white people are the best, men are the best. best, you should Mew. Exactly.

And I also wanted to say that I fully support Dr. Mike Mew in his battle against his adversaries. The adversaries, the Golden One is referring to, are normal orthodontists. His opponents, they do not want people to be able to change perhaps by themselves, because then they can be out of a job, because then they won't have to fix people's teeth. And in fact, if you look at this video, it's not particularly popular. It's around 60,000 views. But in the sidebar are a bunch of videos by Mike Mew about orthotropics and mewing.

The whole time that these Chad influencers have been adopting mewing as one of their concerns, they've been sending some of their audiences back to Mike Mew. And so over the years, Mike has become an influencer in his own right. His videos over time reflect that. They now have proper YouTube thumbnails. He has music. He begins to reach audiences in the millions. This is mewing.

It's a bostral technique that involves placing the tongue on the roof of the mouth to gain health and facial improvements. The aim is to align the teeth, accentuate your cheekbones, sharpen your jawline, and even straighten your nose naturally, or without invasive surgeries or expensive orthodontics. If one way to view the internet is as an infinite number of cults with an infinite number of number of leaders, Mike Mew, the third generation of Mew men to proselytize orthotropics, he has finally found his flock. This theory is called orthotropics, ortho-fostrate tropos meaning growth, which was inspired by my grandfather, who was a practitioner using expanded devices

in the early 20th century. When he died, my father, Professor John Mew, the inventor of orthotropics, discovered his records, finding that it was indeed possible to grow the bone in people's faces without surgery. And now, building upon decades of knowledge and research, that my father started and culminated in my family's dedication to holistic facial development, we have me, Dr. Mike Mew, the current expert of orthotropics and the inventor of mewing. By 2019, jaw maxing online had become such a thing that gum brands emerge, The promise to hulk up your jaws that is more chad-like, rock jaw gum, jaw liner.

There's even a device for sale called Jawser Size. Do you want to see it? Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so what's happening is like they're playing like, wall, wall, wall, music. And these guys are chewing on little rubber balls that look like the ball gags that sexual fetishists would use.

Yes, exactly. But like the people are mostly sort of male and female jocks. It's a very, very strange mashup of cultural significance. It says you put it in your mouth. You put it in your mouth. Chew repeatedly. Chew repeatedly. Oh my God.

And so by 2019, according to Weiss, mewing is like big enough as a trend on YouTube that YouTube is aware of it. this is also when you start getting like a bunch of SEO spam stuff and also like genuine news outlets defining what mewing is by 2020 the New York Times is profiling the muse obviously they gave them a nice big portrait but the biggest moment in all of this the sort of I think you've been a little kind of fuzzy on how this all works yeah because we're not at the exact point where it's all going to come together. So where does it all come together? The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Good to see you guys. Hey, Joe, great to see you.

Really good to see you. Yeah, welcome, welcome back to the land of the healthy. September 2021, Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying go on a podcast called the Joe Rogan Experience. Just as we told that, you know, the epidemic of children's teeth not meeting correctly in their jaws and needing to be moved around by orthodontists is the result of bad genes. That's nonsense. That doesn't make a wit of sense. It can't be bad genes, right? It's too rapidly progressing. Something else. And look at skulls of people from pre-industrial revolution, and you don't have malaclusion. You don't have people with jaws and teeth that look like our. modern jaws. They think it has something to do with soft food, right?

Right. Exactly. So I believe Mike Mew, who I actually had on my podcast. Yeah, Mewing, exactly. Mike Mew, I think, has cracked the case. This moment on the Joe Rogan experience, fall 2021, Weinstein and Haying, married medical establishment skeptics, they're there to tell Rogan and his audience about mewing. But you can hear, Rogan's already kind of familiar with it. They're telling him the same story Ryan is telling me, and I am telling you. they just feel differently about its principal characters.

Mike Mew has done an excellent job not only figuring out what's causing this and how to treat it, but he's also done the work anthropologically. He's gone through the anthropological record and made the case, and it is rock solid. It is evolutionarily totally coherent. And he has looked at a comparison with other animals. Also, his argument is evolutionarily coherent. So with the evolutionary toolkit, you can look and you can say, look, I don't care how many orthodontists are saying that Mike Mew is creating.

He's saying something coherent and they aren't. Exactly. Science is not done by consensus. It's not a democracy. It's not majority rule. Right. This is all true. Science isn't a democracy or a majority rule.

In science, your ideas need to be provable, not popular. The Mew family has not proven their ideas. Mike Mew this month was struck off England's dentist register for malpractice. To someone like me, that suggests his ideas are wrong. To someone like Joe Rogan, all that really tells us is that the estuary is that the estuary finds him dangerous. The punchline of the story is that Mike Mew is in danger of being driven out of orthodontia because his heterodox view of malaclusion is at odds with the central narrative around which all of orthodontia is based. Does he have clear evidence that his methods work? Yes. I've only seen it discussed online. I'm pretty ignorant about the method. It has to do with something like pressing your tongue against your palate and, eating like beef jerky or something?

Well, there are two things. One. Showing gum. Okay, here, young Jamie on the ball, as always. Here it goes, keep your mouth closed and your teeth gently touching and move your tongue to the roof of your mouth and lightly

press. And then just two months later, Rogan has a hunter named Ben O'Brien on a show. And now, Rogan's telling the story of the muse. Mewing, just one more interesting fact, Rogan has picked up making the show.

There's a, I believe his name, is him John Mew? There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a,

a guy who has a theory about this, who created this technique called mewing, and it literally changes a structure of your jaw. And it's like a, a stress technique.

You're doing things to, like, stress your jaw. It's, like, I think you put your tongue in your palate and you strut. And in that episode,

he reveals that he's been jawser sizing. Oh, no. That's right. Ha ha ha ha. That's right, baby. I have a device that I use. I forget what it's called,

but it's basically like a half of a rubber ball that I put in my mouth and I bite down on and I do reps with my face. For your jaw reps? Yeah, yeah. What do you do this at? Do you do it in the truck?

Okay. Like in my office. It sits in my office. I put it in there and sometimes when I'm scrolling things online, I go like, yeah, I'm crazy. Yeah, you're not crazy.

You've got problems. Well, you've got problems, yeah, that's true. That's my problem. It's like I try all kinds of other things. No, your problem is you're always trying to better yourself. Yes. And that's annoying for people. So I try to better my face.

I try it literally like my jaw has gotten stronger because of this. I've been doing it for years. Joe Rogan is a jaw maxer. Or, I mean, maybe Joe Rogan is a jaw maxer. I honestly can't even tell. Is it a bit or is it not? The question we started with today. The question Ryan pointed out doesn't always matter.

Mike Mew is clearly not joking about mewing. But Joe Rogan, look, for various reasons, he will be interpreted among my tribe in the least charitable way possible, whenever possible. The incentives encourage it. But here, I honestly can't tell when he says he's chewing on a rubber ball all the time if he's not joking a little bit.

Like, I believe he owns the ball. But I also hear a person who does nutty things because that's what he does and who knows he's a little bit ridiculous, who is in on the self-optimizing joke of himself? Some boys are taking mewing seriously, but I wonder if it's not reached as big a stage as it has because of all the people who just find it funny.

When I asked my stepkids about it, they thought it was cringe search engine was covering this at such a late date. They knew it didn't actually work, and they immediately started making gigacad faces and giggling. To them, this was a bit. Brain round. I was told, quote, only a Discord mod would take any of this seriously.

And yet, I did spend some time on the orthotropic's subreddit, where more credulous teenagers do end up, reading their posts where they lament the state of their jaws. Mainly it reminded me of how I felt when I was 16, looking in the mirror at my overbite and persistent unibrow, thinking, wondering, is there anything I could do to this face that would make a girl want to look at it? Of course, at the time, the mirror was not providing answers.

Today, the internet can. On the subreddit, a 17-year-old makes a post titled, Guys, what do I do? He shares his x-ray scans, telling the board his orthodontist wants to remove his wisdom teeth the normal way, but he's wondering if there's a way to handle those teeth with mewing instead. A 16-year-old posts a photo of his face and silhouette, very upset about his round chin.

Somebody offers pseudoscientifically, quote, if the tongue keeps dropping during sleep, mouth tape may be needed to stop oronasal breathing or mandibular jaw drop in NREM and REM. The question these boys are actually asking is some version of, am I too unattractive to be loved? Of course they're not. But what gets offered here in lieu of encouragement are all these sorts of questionable scientific acronyms. The conversation gets very nuts.

Quote, look, what's your IMW palette with? There are DIY ways to measure your intermolar width at home, outside of straight up getting blasted with CT, CBCT radiation at the center. Jaw surgery if jaw length is short and recessed. Palatal expansion if IMW palette width is narrow. These answers, one suspects, are not really helping anybody. I was trying to think if this had ever happened before. As an exercise, just to like gut check myself and not become like a crank, I am always like, okay, this thing that, like, is confusing to me in strange right now, is there a corollary to like the MySpace age, which is when I was 15.

And I was trying to think about it. And obviously, like, there were kind of like memetic social diseases of the MySpace age, like eating disorders or like cutting yourself. There were these sort of like fringe, harmful ideas that were bouncing around Internet subcultures at the time. I think the difference was that we still had a monoculture to kind of gut check against. And so the thing that like really freaks me out about, you know, a 15-year-old boy now is that there is no center.

There's nothing to be like, okay, so that's normal and I'm not normal. Right. There's no concept. So you're just sort of like free to pick and choose whatever you see online that you like, which I have to imagine is probably exhilarating, but got to be confusing. And I think it's going to be really harmful in a certain way for when they're forced to interact with like, especially members of the opposite sex, which is fraught enough for young men. I don't wish to be them.

It seems really hard. No, I really feel for them. Even, like, men's magazines, which were never great. And, like, Maxim was pretty terrible. Like, it's basically, like, it's really, it's very confusing to be a young man. And anyone who's ever culturally cared to show up enough to help with that, at best, they're trying to sell you, like, questionable deodorant. And at worst, they're trying to, like, push you in a really bad direction.

And it just seems like there's no way to talk about this stuff without sounding, like, an insane person. Yeah. But I look at it, like, it's really hard, and it just makes me a little. little bit. Like, it makes me feel for them. You know what we should do? Start a men's podcast. We should get every American boy and young man between the ages of 13 and 23. Yeah. Sit them all down. Yeah. And make them watch Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. You think that would be the best totem of non-toxic masculinity? I think it actually has the full canon of like kinds of men that exist in a civilized society. Like, do you want to be a stoner? Do you want to be like a

cool guy, do you want to be a cop? You know, like, you know, all the kinds of men that exist, and you can pick one. I think it's not, I don't remember being particularly toxic. I bet it's horrible. I bet it's like unwatchable by today's standards. We had that, though. We had constant barrages of pop culture being like,

these are the men you can be. Yeah. And we don't really have that now. Ryan Broderick, the kind of man you could be. If you like the way he tells stories about the internet, he does this every week on his new podcast, Panic World. and on his very excellent newsletter. It's called Garbage Day.

We will have links to both in the show notes. Go subscribe. I do. Ryan, thank you for this. Thank you. This was really fun. My job is arriving in a couple weeks, so I will let you know how it works.

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