What is jawmaxxing?

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Okay, as for this week's episode, our question, what is Jaw Maxing and how did it go mainstream?

After some ads, we call up internet culture reporter Ryan Broderick.

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Hello, Ryan.

Oh, do you record the whole thing?

Is that how the whole thing?

Maybe you're going to say something charming and surprising.

Yes.

I've been watching The Wire for the first time.

Similar philosophy in that show.

You got to catch it on the wire.

You should check out

after you're done.

There's this mob drama on HBO 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 we were from different worlds like that.

What did you guys watch?

I don't know.

My parents have very bad taste, I think.

I mean, my parents don't have impeggable taste, but I also sometimes watch stuff without them.

I walked in last time I was home, I walked in on my dad watching Godfather Part 3, and and he's like this movie's pretty good huh and 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 is i've only seen i've seen godfather part one i think i've seen most of godfather part two i don't three is the bad one right i've never seen the whole thing i watched it between ad breaks with him it didn't look good oh um i've met your dad your dad has been on crypto island that's right he has he's really such a charming guy he's having a a great time right now now that his boy's back in the white house oh did 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 to disagree you know i try to find places to argue with him but it's like tiring and sometimes it's just 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 sort of New York Times political reporters who are hanging out at diners don't?

There is a Donald 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 that I had?

You can tell me 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 around 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.

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 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, 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.

Now that we've solved the political polarization issue in America.

I think we've got it.

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, Ryan?

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 JD 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 mega chad, a giga chad, 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 mega chads and giga chads?

So

I

have stepsons sure you're the dad that stepped up yep it's really it's it's a very strange way to learn about internet culture i'm sure um like my exposure to mega chad and giga chat i think came through them like i know that it's uh there's these like black and white photos of just like a super over masculinized guy with like a super high cheekbones and a super deep chin right and the sort of giga chat 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 Stacy's and popular men were Chads and Chads go with Stacy'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 is anime power scaling?

So, like,

you know, like, for instance, like in Digimon, if you become like a very high-level Digimon, you might have Giga attached to the front of your name.

So, like, 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-inflected nerdiness creeps through.

And so first they're like, well, there's this thing called a Chad.

And then they're like, just like in like Digimon, there's this thing called a Giga Chad.

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 kicks 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-cheekboned, absurdly roited-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 GigaChad, like the Chad to rule all Chads.

This is the GigaChad music.

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 GigaChad face, like the Sigma face, is 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 GigaChad is both a joke and a not-joke at the same time.

So GigaChad 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, 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 that 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 giga chad they have now been floating around for almost eight years Jaw maxing actually predates the GigaChad, 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, 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.

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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 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.

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 an 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, um, 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, more natural, more holistic way to have straight teeth.

Yeah, so this is from the orthotropics.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 malocclusion 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 dentist 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 that 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 Invisalign and say, your jaw shape is mostly genetic.

There's not much else to be done here.

And also, did you remember to floss?

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 Mews 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 muse 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, like, 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 change 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 is 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 on 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 chinned, 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.

I can be soft.

Just know know that i know that somewhere there's a board of like triangle chinned giga chads who are like these losers like the the scales could be dropped from 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 an orthotropist.

And in 2012, Mike Mew starts uploading videos to YouTube.

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 suaveness that borders on inappropriate.

Underneath his blazer, a pink button up, undone, one button too many.

As your eyes drift out 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 you'd kill for.

It's like he's managed to construct in real life the bottom third of the Giga Chad'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 dial.

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 Mike Mew's 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 dad 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 ideas

plugged into internet and i 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 sluthate.com.

Jesus.

Interestingly enough, it's shared by a user named 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 incel dump.

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 juttier jaw.

Ryan says this notion was taking off in the world of inceldum.

The world of inceldum, in case you're not familiar, I actually reported a story about the surprising origins of incel culture online years ago on Reply All, 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, incel 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 incel idea sort of exists on the timeline.

Because in the early 2000s, you have pickup artist culture to the point where like that guy Mystery has her 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 incels.

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 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 spree shooters.

And it all sort of starts with this idea that the men that we paid to help us ripped us off.

So just to 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 pillars 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 like 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 incels 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 we're 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 Astro Sky 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 to 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 tongue posture.

That'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 Astro Sky for guidance.

And it wasn't just Astro Sky 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, he's not really big anymore, but he was very important in this sort of moment.

Oh, 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 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.

I suggest that you watch through all of his videos.

I am about halfway through.

Okay, so 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-to message thing.

But like, this guy was both white people are the best, men are the best.

Uh, 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 adds music.

He begins to reach audiences in the millions.

This is Mewing.

It's a posteral 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, all 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 leaders, Mike Mew, the third generation of Mew men to proselytize orthotropics,

he has finally found his flock.

This theory is called orthotropics, orthopostraitropos meaning growth, which was inspired by my grandfather who was a practitioner using expander 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 emerged that promise to hulk up your jaws that is more chad-like.

Rock jaw gum, jawliner.

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 signifiers.

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 Vice, 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 Mews.

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

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.

Yep, okay.

We're up.

Hi.

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 are 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 whit of sense, right?

It can't be bad genes, right?

It's too rapidly progressing.

Something like that.

You know, look at skulls of people from pre-industrial revolution, and you don't have male coccusion.

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.

I believe Mike Mew, who I actually had on my podcast.

Yeah, Mewing, exactly.

Mike Mew, I think, has cracked the case.

At this moment on the Joe Rogan experience, fall 2021, Weinstein and Haying, married medical establishment skeptics, they are 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 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 crazy.

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 establishment 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 malocclusion 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,

okay, here, young Jamie on the ball as always.

Here he goes, keep your mouth closed and your teeth gently touching and move your tongue to the roof of your mouth and lightly press.

Your tongue is resting.

And then just two months later, Rogan has a hunter named Ben O'Brien on his show.

And now Rogan's telling the story of the Mews.

Mewing, just one more interesting fact.

Rogan has picked up making his show.

There's a, I believe his name is John Mew.

There's a guy who has a theory about this who created this technique called mewing.

And it literally changes the structure of your jaw.

And it's like a stress technique.

You're doing things to like stress your jaw.

I think you put your tongue and your palate and you stress

and in that episode he reveals that he's been jawser sizing oh no that's right

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

jaw reps yeah yeah where 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,

I'm crazy.

No, you're not crazy.

I got problems.

Well, you got problems, yeah, that's true.

But 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 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 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 giga-chad faces and giggling.

To them, this was a bit brain rock.

I was told, quote, only a Discord mod would take any of this seriously.

And yet, I did spend some time on the orthotropics 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 in 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 oro-nasal 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 all these sorts of questionable scientific acronyms.

The conversation gets very nuts.

Quote, look, what's your IMW palate width?

There are DIY ways to measure your intermolar width at home outside of straight up getting blasted with CT, CBCT radiation at a center.

Jaw surgery if jaw length is short and recessed.

Palatal expansion if IMW palate 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'm always like, okay, this thing that like is confusing to me and 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 they were kind of like mimetic 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 like be like, okay, so that's normal and I'm not normal.

Right.

There's no concept.

So you're, 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 i don't wish to be them it's 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 them like it's really hard.

And it just makes me a 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 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 um 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 that'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 is really fun.

My job surprises is arriving in a couple weeks, so I will let you know how it works.

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Rosetta Stone.

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This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by ChiliPad.

Will my kids sleep tonight?

Will I wake up at 3 a.m.

again?

Am I going to wake up hot and sweaty because my partner leaves the heat on?

Those are the thoughts that bounce around my head when I can't sleep too.

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That's our show this week.

We actually have another paid subscriber announcement.

What?

Our board meeting is coming up.

That is a Zoom meeting for paid incognito mode subscribers.

Basically, if you pay to support the show, we're all going to jump on an enormous, I mean enormous Zoom meeting.

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We will share internal metrics and minute details about the way this functions and doesn't function as a business.

That's going to be on December 6th.

If you haven't signed up yet, what are you waiting for?

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And again, we need your questions for Alison Roman.

You can also submit those at searchengine.show.

That segment with her, we're going to drop it next week.

Our show is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.

It was created by me, PJ PJ Vote, and Shruthi Pinamanani, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Fact-checking by Mary Mathis, Theme, Original Composition, and Mixing by Armin Bazargan.

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Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis.

Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perello, and John Schmidt.

And to the team at Odyssey, J.D.

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Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving.

We'll see you in two weeks.

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Chili Pad.

Will my kids sleep tonight?

Will I wake up at 3 a.m.

again?

Am I going to wake up hot and sweaty because my partner leaves the heat on?

Those are the thoughts that bounce around my head when I can't sleep too.

And let's face it, sleep slips away when you're too hot, uncomfortable, or caught in a loop of racing thoughts.

But cool sleep helps reset the body and calm the mind.

That's where Chilipad by SleepMe comes in.

It's a bed cooling system that personalizes your sleep environment.

So you'll fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and actually wake up refreshed.

I struggle with sleep constantly and I have found that having a bed that is cool and temperature controlled actually really does make a huge difference.

ChiliPad works with your current mattress and uses water to regulate the temperature.

Visit www.sleepme slash search to get your ChiliPad and save 20% with code search.

This limited offer is available for search engine listeners and only for a limited time.

Order it today with free shipping and try it out for 30 days.

You return it for free if you don't like it with their sleep trial.

Visit www.sleep s-le-e-ep.me slash search and see why cold sleep is your ultimate ally in performance and recovery.