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 Smads, we call up internet culture reporter Ryan Broderick.

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 drop money. It'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? 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 impeccable 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 three, 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, I've seen God of other part one. I think I've seen most of God of other part two. Three is the bad one, right? I've never seen the whole thing. I watched it between and breaks with him. He 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, normalish 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 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 what, 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 up to be what do you feel 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 like 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, 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 a plan for the mold guy to follow. And the idea is they don't want mold guys going on ripping everybody off. So now 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 do that. That's why Elon Musk has to make our government more efficient. And 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. I'm comfortable being like America just maybe shouldn't have a government actually because we're really bad at it. We'll stop this being political. 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 from Air in my city, and we're running around being like,

We should be in charge of everything. Yeah. Now that we've solved the political polarization 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, Ryan?

John 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. Yes. We look good at 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 gigachad, if you will, you can theoretically do this facial exercise to give yourself a sharper, more defined chin. And we can actually ask you about megachads and gigachads. 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, 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 gigachad idea is like fortunately many years ago, fortune 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 or at least it starts that way very often. So in the earlier memes, it was like popular women were stasis and popular men were chads and chads go with stasis. And it was sort of part of this idea of like,

early pickup artist communities trying to like codify sexual dynamics that and so the Chad was like the archetypal man and because these men who are talking about this are like insane nerds they were using anime power scaling and what's the 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. 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

kind of alpha jock masculinity. But as they're trying to do it, they're anime-inflicted nerdiness creeps through. And so first they're like, well, they just go to Chad, and they're like, just like in Digimon, there's this thing called a gigajad. 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 are 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 hypermasculine jock who women love, it kicks around on the internet for about a decade. Sometimes Chad's drawn this 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 cheekbone absurdly rotted 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 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 of 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 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? It's 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 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 giga-chad, they have now been floating around for almost eight years. John 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 say. So wait, so where does the story of jaw maxing start? John maxing starts in the 1960s, actually.

This is, can I tell you, it's a perfect podcast because it's only back story. Yeah, and it's just nothing but lore here. After the break, a British orthodontist named John Mu.

Welcome back to the show. So before the break, we were about to get into the lore of John Maxing. Ryan says that story actually starts many decades earlier.

In the 1960s, a British orthodontist named Dr. John Mu comes up with an idea that he's calling orthotropics. So, the simplified 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 Mu, 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 Mu's introduction to a mainstream audience, but he'd been at it for quite a while. The first time Mu'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 and more natural, more realistic way to have straight teeth.

Yeah, so this is from the OrthoTropics.com website all about this idea. Soft food weakened our jaw muscles. The indoor living encouraged allergies while early weaning created abnormal tongue habits. 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. Ortho-tropists 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 its own 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 an invisible line and say, your jaw shape is mostly genetic. There's not much else to be done here. And also, did you remember a flaws? And orthotropist has a much more exciting story to tell. They believe this changed 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 mew's 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 within you. And I think that's why a lot of conspiracy theories start there as well. And I think orthotropic 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 there's things kind of twin in a funny way where there's always a new person with a new diagnosis of which we're in 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.

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 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 is gonna ever be improved. Yeah, but, like, you know, we didn't 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 triangle chins, giga-chads, where these losers, the scales could be dropped in their eyes if only they would follow the light in the way. I know how they see us. Sorry, boys. I can make eye contact, which means I can watch all the anime I want and still talk to girls. So this starts in Britain. John Muse has this idea. His idea is you're going to do mouth sit-ups to have straighter teeth. That's basically it, yeah.

And what does it 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 Lil Mike, his son,

joins his father's practice in the London suburbs becomes under one of the tropists. And in 2012, Mike Mu 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 suafness 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 job, 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. And upside down triangle, adorned here with a sole 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.

Steven Hawking, the late theoretical physicist with ALS. It might use speech. Hawking serves as an example of someone famous for having a weak job. 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 ideas plugged into internet.

And I think one thing that maybe has been memory hold or like normal people just like done 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.

Flatterthers would be one. A lot of these people were using the internet very quietly, and then in 2012, algorithms started to mindlessly serve content to people. 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 insulin.

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 jutty or jaw.

Ryan says this notion was taking off in the world of Inceldom. The world of Inceldom, in case you're not familiar, 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 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 pick up 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 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 spray shooters. And it all sort of starts with this idea that the men that we paid to help us rip 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 pill. The red pillars were committed misogynists who believed that women had too much power that only through self optimization and manipulation could be convinced 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. These things happen.

And it's not that like installs 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 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 AstroSky 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 pin up with. There are things you can do to change your face and it won't cost you a penny.

Astro Sky is this young man who he's chad-like, although maybe a kind of emo chad, pointing jaw with swoopy hair above.

AstroSky 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. You 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 a good tongue posture. This is 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 AstroSky for guidance. And it wasn't just AstroSky promising that exercise could change not just your unlovely body, but your unlovely face. John 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, he's a golden one. The golden one is 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 Mews' channel below, and I suggest that you watch through all of these videos. I am about halfway through.

Okay sweet 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 gold one, is referring to our 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 Mewey.

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 possible technique that involves placing a 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 leaders, Mike Mew, the third generation of Mew men to proselytize orthotropics. He has finally found his flock.

This theory is called orthotropics. Orthogostrate, tropose 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 Meer, 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 that promise to hulk up your jaw so that it is more Chad-like, rock-jaw-com, 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 they're playing like, whoa, whoa, whoa, 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. You repeatedly. You repeatedly.

Oh my god. And so by 2019, according to Vice, Muing is big enough as a trend on YouTube that YouTube is aware of it. This is also when you start getting a bunch of SEO spam stuff and also genuine news outlets defining what Muing 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. Welcome back to the Land of the Healthy. September 2021, Brett Weinstein and Heather Hanging 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, that doesn't make a would 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 mal-exclusion. 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, so I believe Mike Mu, who I actually had on my podcast, Mike Mu, I think has cracked the case.

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 that.

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 worth Adonis are saying that Mike Mew is crazy. He's saying something coherent and they aren't. The science is not done by consensus. It's not a democracy. It's not a 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. Does someone like me? That suggests his ideas are wrong. Does 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

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. Shall we come? Yeah. Okay. Here. Young Jamie on the ball as always.

Here 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 a show.

There's a, I believe it's named 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. It's like, I think you put your tongue and your palate and you stress. And in that episode, he reveals that he's been jawsersizing. 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. What do you do this at? Do you do it in the trunk? Do 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, I go like, it's like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah

No, you're not crazy. No problems. Well, you got problems. Yeah, that's true. That's my problem. I try all kinds of other things. No, you're probably always trying to better yourself. Yes. And that's annoying for me. So I try to better my face and try it literally like my draw has gotten stronger because of this. I've been doing it for years. Joe Rogan is a job actor.

Or, I mean, maybe Joe Rogan is a job actor? 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 giga-chad faces and giggling. To them, this was a bit brain wrap. 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 post 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 oral nasal breathing or mandibular jaw drop in N-R-E-M and R-E-M. 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 that 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. Draw a surgery if draw 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 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, 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 gotta 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. 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. 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. 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 kinds of men that exist in a civilized society. Do you want to be a stoner? Do you want to be a cool guy? Do you want to be a cop? All kinds of men that exist, and you can pick one. I don't remember being particularly toxic. I bet it's horrible. I bet it's 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.

Brian, thank you for this. Thank you. This was really fun. My job's our size 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 out. 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 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 Vout, and Shruthi Pinmanini, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis, a theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazzarian. Additional production support from Sean Merchant.

Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Burman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Prello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey. J.D. Crowley, Rob Miranda, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Moore Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Schott.

Our agent is Orin Rose and Bomb ETA. 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.