What is jawmaxxing?

24:49It doesn't really sort of matter for our story until we jump back in in the 2000s, which is when little Mike, his son, joins his father's practice in the London suburbs, becomes a Northotropist. 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 suave nest that borders on inappropriate. Underneath his blazer, a pink button-up, undone one button too many.

25:32As 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 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 diet. But it's possible. If you look at someone like Stephen Hawking, whose face went wrong at a late age, you should be able to make your face grow right at a late age.

26:26Stephen 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.

27:09Now 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 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.

28:07Like? 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. Interestingly enough, it's shared by a user named The Orthodontist. Mike denies that he did it. But suddenly, all of a sudden, there is a new orthotropist jaw exercise called mewing that is very popular in the world of inceldom.

28:57To 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 inceldom, 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.

29:31But 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 pickup artists to help their confidence with meeting women in public.

30:09Those 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.

30:46And 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-pillers 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-pillers 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.

31:24That'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.

32:10These things happen. And it's not that incels were 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? 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.

32:47And 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 exercise is 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.

33:31Astro 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. Yu and John Mu. 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. And 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.

34:25And 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.

34:42Do you know about the golden one? No, who's the golden one? The golden one is not really big anymore, but he was very important in this sort of moment. 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 going to say that I will link Dr. Mike Mew's channel below. And I suggest that you watch through all of his videos. I am about halfway 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 massage thing.

35:23But 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.

36:08The 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.

36:32This is mewing. It's a possible 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. Ortho for straight, tropos meaning growth, which was inspired by my grandfather, who was a practitioner using expanded devices in the early 20th century.

37:16When 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. The promise to hulk up your jaws that is more Chad-like. Rock jaw gum. Jaw liner. There's even a device for sale called Jawsercise.

38:02Do you want to see it? Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so what's happening is they're playing 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 the people are mostly 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.

38:57By 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. Yep. Okay. We're up. Hi. What's up? Good to see you guys. Hey, Joe. Great to see you. Really good to see you. Yeah. Welcome back to the land of the healthy. September 2021, Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying go on a podcast called The Joe Rogan Experience.

39:46Just 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. Right? 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 modern jaws and teeth. They think it has something to do with soft food, right? Right. Exactly. So I believe Mike Mew, who I actually had on my podcast.

40:25Yeah, Mew, 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.

41:02It 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.

41:40To 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.

42:19Well, there are two things. One. 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 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.

42:57and it's like a stress technique. You're doing things to like stress your jaw. Like I think you put your tongue in your palate and you stress. And in that episode, he reveals that he's been jaw-sercising. 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 I go like, yeah, I'm crazy.

43:39No, you're not crazy. I've got problems. Well, 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.

43:57Joe Rogan is a jaw maxer. Or, I mean, maybe Joe Rogan is a jaw maxer. I honestly can't even tell. Is it a bit or is it not? The question we started with today, the question Ryan pointed out, doesn't always matter. Mike Mew is clearly not joking about mewing. But Joe Rogan, look, for various reasons, he will be interpreted among my tribe in the least charitable way possible. whenever possible. The incentives encourage it. But here, I honestly can't tell when he says he's chewing on a rubber ball all the time if he's not joking a little bit. Like, I believe he owns the ball. But I also hear a person who does nutty things because that's what he does, and who knows he's a little bit ridiculous, who is in on the self-optimizing joke of himself.

44:49Some 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 brainwrap. 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.

45:30Mainly 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.

46:10Somebody offers pseudoscientifically, quote, If the tongue keeps dropping during sleep, mouth tape may be needed to stop oronasal breathing or mandibular jaw drop in NREM and REM. The question these boys are actually asking is some version of, am I too unattractive to be loved? Of course they're not. But what gets offered here, in lieu of encouragement, are all these sorts of questionable scientific acronyms. The conversation gets very nuts. Quote, look, what's your IMW palate with? There are DIY ways to measure your intramolar width at home, outside of straight up getting blasted with CT, CBCT radiation at a center.

46:50Jaw 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 am 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, there were kind of, like, memetic social diseases of the MySpace age, like eating disorders or, like, cutting yourself.

47:24There 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 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.

48:05I 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 them like, it's really hard.

48:40And 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 like 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 the kinds of men that exist, and you can pick one. I don't remember it being particularly toxic.

49:20I 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.

49:40Ryan 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 was really fun. My job's our size is arriving in a couple weeks, so I will let you know how it works.

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50:25Thank you.

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53:59That'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.

54:33You can also submit those at searchengine.show. That segment with her, we're going to drop it next week.

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