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It's hard to imagine anyone's not signed up for incognito mode. The prices are so reasonable. But if for some reason you're not, you can do so now at searchengine.show. Help me help you. Ask Alison Roman anything. 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? The whole thing. Maybe you're going to say something charming and surprising. I've been watching The Wire for the first time. Similar philosophy in that show. You've 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 uh i'm working class so we didn't have hbo growing up wow i i didn't realize you know 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 impeccable taste, but I also sometimes watch 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 think he literally was like, Sofia Coppola is pretty good in this movie. I was like, oh, Jesus Christ. It is. I've only seen Godfather Part 1. I think I've seen most of Godfather Part 2. 3 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. 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 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 to disagree? You know, I try to find. places to argue with him but it's like tiring and sometimes 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 all the 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 they should be allowed to do whatever they want. They're sick of dealing with zoning regulations or the light department or whatever it is. And so for Donald Trump, it's very inspiring for them to be the Trump of their town. And it's not political. It's just like a power. It's like 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 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... don't want mold guys going and 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 that's like what
That's why we just got to get rid of the Department of Education. 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 – 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. 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. 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, Brian? 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... By J.D. Vance, you mean we both have soft, round... We have soft millennial features, yes. 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 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 GigaChad, I think, came through them. Like, I know that it's...
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. 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 as Stacey's. And it was sort of part of this idea of early pickup artist.
communities trying to 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... For instance, in Digimon, if you become a very high-level Digimon, you might have Giga.
attached to the front of your name. 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 they're
anime-inflected nerdiness creeps through. And so first they're like, well, there's this thing called a Chad. And they're like, just like in 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 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 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 GigaChad. Like the Chad to rule all Chads. This is the GigaChad music. Of course, there's the 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 Giga Chad 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 Giga Chad is both a joke and a not joke at the same time. So Giga Chad 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. We're like, he really... understands that 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 GigaChad. 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? John Maxing starts in the 1960s, actually. 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. No one likes nasty surprises. Like when your favorite artist brings out a concept album that on listening should probably have been kept as just an idea. That's why with QuickCheck, you can check if you're eligible for a Capital One credit card without affecting your credit score. And you'll always know the API you'll get before applying. Credit with no nasty surprises. That's one good thing.
Search Capital One. 34.9% APR representative variable. T's and C's apply. 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 uh-huh so john mu he sets up a dentistry practice in this 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 so 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, 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
Inclusion 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 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 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 links a lot of these is that it all 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 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-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 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 were... followed 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 Mewes has this idea. Yes. His idea is you're going to do mouth sit-ups to have straighter teeth. That's right. That's basically it, yeah. And what does this actually mean? What is he doing with this theory? 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 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. Hello. Welcome. Thank you very much for inviting 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 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 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 it's 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 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 a scientist, 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 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 inceldom.
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 inceldom.
The world of Intel, in case you're not familiar, I actually reported a story about the surprising origins of Intel 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 their 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 spreeshooters. 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 the black metal scene in Europe in the 80s. This sort of idea that 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 happen to put up with. There are things you can do that change your face, and it won't have to cost you a penny. Aster 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! All it took for me was a consciously not giving up on this... tongue posture idea that I'm suggesting from Dr. Yoo and John Yoo. 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 about mewing and before i begin to elaborate i'm just gonna say that i will link dr mike muse channel below and 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 goatee mustache thing. But, like, this guy was both white people are the best, men are the 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 adds 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...
or expensive orthodontics. If one way to view the internet is as an infinite number of cults with an infinite number of leaders, Mike Mu, the third generation of Mu men to proselytize orthotropics. he has finally found his flock. This theory is called orthotropics. Ortho for straight, 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 Charles,
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 promised to hulk up your jaw so that it is more chad-like, rock jaw gum, jaw liner. There's even a device for sale called Jawsercise. Do you want to see it? Oh my god! Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so what's happening is like they're playing like wah-wah-wah music and these guys are chewing on little rubber balls that look like... the ball gags that sexual fetishists would use yes exactly um 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 muse obviously they gave them a nice big portrait
But the biggest moment in all of this, 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. 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 uh 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 wit of sense.
It can't be bad genes, right? It's too rapidly progressing. And look at skulls of people from pre-industrial revolution, and you don't have malocclusion. You don't have people with jaws and teeth that look like our model. They think it has something to do with soft food, right? Right. Exactly. I believe Mike Mew, who I actually had on my podcast. Mewing. 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 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 Mu 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. Chewing 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 his show. And now Rogan's telling the story of the muse.
mewing just one more interesting fact rogan has picked up making his show there's a i believe his name is named john mew there's a there's a 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 in your palate. And in that episode, he reveals that he's been Jawsercising. 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 face. For your jaw reps? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where do you do this at? Do you do it in the truck? I do it in my house. Okay. Like in my office. It sits in my office. I put it in there, and sometimes when I'm scrolling things online, it's like... Yeah, I'm crazy.
You're not crazy. I've got problems. You've got problems, yeah, that's true. That's my problem. 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's 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 choking 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 rub. 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,
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 pallet 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 gut check myself and not become a crank, I am always like, okay, this thing that is confusing to me and strange right now, is there a corollary to 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 like
Be like, okay, so that's normal, and I'm not normal. There's no concept. So you're just sort of free to pick and choose whatever you see online that you like, which I have to imagine is probably exhilarating. 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, I'm 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.
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. I think it's not, I don't remember being.
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 exercise is arriving in a couple weeks, so I will let you know how it works. 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. And I will take questions with the search engine team. 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? Searchengine.show. 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 Vogt, and Shruti Pinamanani. And it's produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support from Sean Merchant. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perrello, and John Schmidt.
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