What is jawmaxxing?

The story of how an alternative theory of dentistry made its way from medicine's fringes to an audience of young men online. This week we try to make sense of jawmaxxing with help from Panic World’s Ryan Broderick. Panic World https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/panic-world/id1740187810 Garbage Day https://www.garbageday.email/ INVCEL - Reply All https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h59o Support the show at searchengine.show! https://www.searchengine.show/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Before we start this week, I need your help. We need your questions for Alison Roman, chef, cookbook writer, the undisputed heavyweight champion of Thanksgiving. She is the host of the excellent podcast Solicited Advice, but we're bringing her to Search Engine, and we need your questions for her. Not about the meal of Thanksgiving, but about all your questions around it. Like, the leftovers, the meals that come immediately after, how do you recover from the malaise, how do you begin to heal the soul of a fractured nation? To submit your question, go to searchengine.show. There's a form there. This is going to be a special segment only for our paid subscribers. It's going to go on our incognito mode feed.

• 0:43PJ Vogt?

  So if you're not signed up, I mean, 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. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Bombas. If you're not a fan of cold weather, let me tell you how I survive it. Bombas, they make the ultimate lineup of socks, slippers, and outdoor footwear designed to keep you snug and warm all winter.

• 1:25PJ Vogt?

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• 2:21PJ Vogt?

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• 3:50PJ Vogt?

  Hello, Ryan.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Oh, do you record the whole thing? Is that how you do it?

• 3:54PJ Vogt?

  The whole thing. Maybe you're gonna say something charming and surprising. Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  I've been watching The Wire for the first time. Similar philosophy in that show. You gotta catch it on the wire.

• 4:05PJ Vogt?

  You should check out, after you're done, there's this mob drama on HBO that's really good called The Sopranos.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:17PJ Vogt?

  What were you doing all the last 20 years?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  I'm sorry. I'm working class, so we didn't have HBO growing up. Wow. I didn't realize, you know, we were from different worlds like that.

• 4:32PJ Vogt?

  What did you guys watch?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Oh, my parents have very bad taste, I think.

• 4:36PJ Vogt?

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

• 4:42Speaker 01

  I walked in, uh, 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?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  I think he literally was like, Sofia Coppola is pretty good in this movie. I was like, oh, Jesus Christ.

• 4:57PJ Vogt?

  It is. I've only seen, I've seen Godfather Part One. I think I've seen most of Godfather Part Two. I don't, Three is the bad one, right?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I've never seen the whole thing. I watched it between ad breaks with him. It didn't look good.

• 5:08PJ Vogt?

  Wow. Um, I've met your dad. Your dad has been on Crypto Island.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  That's right. He has.

• 5:13PJ Vogt?

  He's really such a charming guy.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  He's having a great time right now, now that his boy's back in the White House.

• 5:19PJ Vogt?

  Oh, was he a Trump voter?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Oh, he's always been a Republican. Yeah. I mean, he's like, you know, normal-ish about it, but.

• 5:26PJ Vogt?

  Do you guys argue or do you just like agree to disagree?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  You know, I try to find places to argue with him, but it's like tiring and sometimes he's like, I do this for a job. I don't need to do this when I'm with you. Like, I find it quite useful now that like, you know, when I'm home, he takes me out to like a shitty dive bar full of like Joe Rogan guys, because I understand their psychology perfectly now.

• 5:45PJ Vogt?

  Oh, really?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:57PJ Vogt?

  What do you feel like you understand that like all the sort of New York Times political reporters who are hanging out at diners don't?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  There is a Donald Trump in every single town in America, multiple probably. Guys who just believe that like they should be allowed to do whatever they want. They're sick of dealing with like zoning regulations or like the light department or whatever it is. And so for Donald Trump, it's very inspiring for them to like be the Trump of their town. And it's not political. It's just like a power. It's like a, you're in your middle ages and you don't want to listen to anybody.

• 6:31PJ Vogt?

  You know, I had a moment this week.

• 6:35PJ Vogt?

  I had a moment this week. Can I tell you the moment that I had?

• 6:37Speaker 01

  You can tell me the moment you had, yeah.

• 6:38PJ Vogt?

  I've got mold, I think, under my floorboards and I was like trying to find a guy to deal with the mold. And I called the mold guy and he was like, well, there's basically, New York State passed a regulation in 2016, apparently, that says you can't have a mold guy come to your house. You've got to hire a different guy to come to your house and prepare like a plan for the mold guy to follow. And like, the idea is they don't want mold guys going around ripping everybody off. So now there's the guy who makes the mold test and the guy who checks for the mold. But the guy who does the mold test, he was like, yeah, it's 500 bucks. And I was like, what?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  That's why we just got to get rid of the Department of Education. You know, we just got to, that's why Elon Musk has to make our government more efficient. No, but I do think there's something very radicalizing, unfortunately, about dealing with any single government regulation in America because they're all completely, I'm allowed to say this because I've lived in a country, you know, the UK is not exactly efficient, but their government services are at least put together with a bit more thought. I've seen what could be. So I'm comfortable being like, America just like maybe shouldn't have a government, actually, because like, we're really bad at it.

• 7:49PJ Vogt?

  Okay, we'll, we'll stop this being political, by guys in 30 seconds. But I do just want to say, I think the way I've been feeling this week has been, the problem is like, the right is always just like, the government, which we constantly sabotage, sucks until we have no choice but to destroy it. And the left is like, the government should take care of everything. But also, we have no curiosity about whether they're doing a good job, how to make them do a better job. It's just like, we have Eric Adams for mayor in my city and we're running around being like, we should be in charge of everything because look what we did. Now that we've solved the political polarization issue in America.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  I think we've got it, yeah.

• 8:29PJ Vogt?

  Can you introduce yourself?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  My name is Ryan Broderick. I am the author of the Garbage Day Newsletter and the host of the new Panic World Podcast.

• 8:38PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Jaw maxing is a facial exercise you can do. I mean, you're like me. You've got a J.D. Vance chin. It could be better, right? You could make it more-

• 9:19PJ Vogt?

  By J.D. Vance, you mean we both have soft, round-

• 9:22Speaker 01

  We have soft millennial features, yeah.

• 9:24PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  We look good in an American apparel hoodie, but not so much, you know, as a mega Chad.

• 9:30PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:40PJ Vogt?

  And wait, can I actually ask you about mega Chads and giga Chads?

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:44PJ Vogt?

  So, I have stepsons.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Sure. You're the dad that stepped up.

• 9:49PJ Vogt?

  Yep. It's really, it's a very strange way to learn about internet culture.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  I'm sure.

• 9:55PJ Vogt?

  Like, my exposure to mega Chad and giga Chad, 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.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Right. And the sort of giga Chad idea is like, 4chan many years ago, 4chan users came up with like the idea of like the perfect man, the Chad.

• 10:16PJ Vogt?

  And were they joking, or were they not joking? Did they know? Does anyone know?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I sort of take everything that happens in 4chan as kind of like arch performance art. At least, it starts that way very often. So, in the earlier memes, it was like, popular women were Stacy's and popular men were Chad's, and Chad's go with Stacy's. And it was sort of part of this idea of like- Early pick up artist communities trying to like codify sexual dynamics. And so the Chad was like the archetypal man. And because these men who were talking about this are like insane nerds, they were using anime power scaling.

• 10:52PJ Vogt?

  And what's anime power scaling?

• 10:54Speaker 01

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

• 11:06PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so it's like these nerds are trying to define, and when I say nerd, I don't mean that pejoratively, I just mean it descriptively, but these nerds are trying to define like kind of alpha jock masculinity. But as they're trying to do it, their anime inflected nerdiness creeps through. And so first they're like, well, there's this thing called a Chad. And they're like, just like in like Digimon, there's this thing called a Giga Chad.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:29PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:57PJ Vogt?

  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 cheekbone, absurdly roided out muscle man. These are black and white photos that border on the uncanny, almost AI generated. And people start referring to this image as the Giga Chad, like the Chad to rule all Chads.

• 12:37PJ Vogt?

  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 GigaChad face, like the Sigma face, is just something you see them pulling at each other and then cracking up. We had Jim Carrey. They have this. But again, as Ryan says, the GigaChad is both a joke and a not-joke at the same time.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  So GigaChad was definitely supposed to be kind of a parody, but it doesn't really matter.

• 13:21PJ Vogt?

  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 idea seriously. Again, this idea like, is this a bit or not, is kind of a useless question. It's like...

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Because there's profound power, I think, in not defining if it's a bit or not. I mean, Trump is very good at this. Where like, he really understands that like, if you never tell people if you're lying or joking or not, 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?

• 14:03PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:58PJ Vogt?

  I see. So wait, so where does the story of jaw-maxing start?

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Jaw-maxing starts in the 1960s, actually.

• 15:07PJ Vogt?

  This is, can I tell you, it's a perfect podcast because it's only backstory.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just nothing but lore here.

• 15:17PJ Vogt?

  After the break, a British orthodontist named John Mu.

• 15:41PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by MUBI. If you're tired of endlessly scrolling through streaming algorithms designed for passive background noise, you need to check out MUBI. MUBI is a global film company, bringing great cinema to the world, curating and elevating visionary filmmaking that's handpicked always. It's the kind of platform for movies you'll actually watch, fall in love with, and keep thinking and talking about long after the credits roll. One of their newest exclusive titles is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, directed by visionary writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, who you might know from I Saw the TV Glow. It's a world-expanding, genre-bending wonder starring Hanna Einbinder and Gillian Anderson.

• 16:22PJ Vogt?

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• 16:49PJ Vogt?

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• 17:34PJ Vogt?

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• 18:00PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  In the 1960s, a British orthodontist named Dr. John Mu comes up with an idea that he's calling orthotropics. So to simplify it, orthotropics is that your teeth and your jaw and all that stuff is not fucked up from genetics, it's fucked up from your environment. 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.

• 18:43PJ Vogt?

  The details of Mu experimenting on his own children, some of them are in a 2020 New York Times Magazine profile of him. According to Dr. John Mu, 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

• 19:27PJ Vogt?

  the British Dental Journal.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  It is roundly condemned and laughed away by the dentistry establishment.

• 19:34PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is from the orthotropics.com website, all about this idea. So, "Soft food weakened our jaw muscles. The indoor living encouraged allergies, while early weaning created abnormal tongue habits. And orthotropists believe that these distort the jaws and teeth. Orthodontists, on the other hand, believe that badly shaped jaws are inherited and concentrate on straightening the teeth by mechanical means using wires and brackets. They often extract some teeth to make room for others and use surgery to reposition jaws. Orthotropists believe that malocclusion is a biological problem which should be treated naturally, not by mechanics and surgery."

• 20:34PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 21:16PJ Vogt?

  "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 the 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 Muse get beyond any good evidence and deeply into their own sales pitch. The Muse family says that we can change the shape of our jaws

• 22:00PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  The thing that I find kind of links a lot of these is that it all sort of comes back to the solutions of the angst of modern life are found totally within yourself.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  And I'm gonna 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

• 23:15Speaker 01

  the inside of your mouth if you work hard enough.

• 23:18PJ Vogt?

  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 what's wrong with society, but the promise is always the same. They're gonna sell you something that helps you change yourself in a way that resists it.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:40PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, you know, women like me, so like I don't need any of this stuff. I can be soft.

• 24:05PJ Vogt?

  Somewhere, just know that I know that somewhere there's a board of like triangle chinned giga chads who are like these losers, like the scales could be dropped from their eyes if only they would follow the light in the way. Like I know how they see us.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sorry, boys. I can make eye contact, which means I can watch all the anime I want and still talk to girls.

• 24:23PJ Vogt?

  So wait, so this starts in Britain.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:25PJ Vogt?

  John Mew's has this idea.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:28PJ Vogt?

  His idea is you're gonna do like mouth sit-ups to have straighter teeth?

• 24:31Speaker 01

  That's basically it, yeah.

• 24:33PJ Vogt?

  And what is it like, what does it actually mean? Like, what is he doing with this theory? Like, how's he testing it on people? Is he making money?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  He is testing it on people. In 1986, he leaves the traditional world of dentistry. He self-publishs a book about his theories. And he's just sort of doing his thing. It doesn't really sort of matter for our story until we jump back in in the 2000s, which is when little Mike, his son, joins his father's practice in the London suburbs, becomes an orthotropist. And in 2012, Mike Mew starts uploading videos to YouTube.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Hello. I'm welcome. Thank you very much for inviting me to your conference.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  It's been an excellent conference so far.

• 25:19PJ Vogt?

  Mike Mew, John's pride and joy, is onstage at a conference at Harvard. From the waist up, Mike looks like an academic, just dressed with a suavness that borders on inappropriate. Underneath his blazer, a pink button-up, undone one button too many. As your eyes drift up past his neck, you see what will so compel the internet. Mike Mew nearly has the face of an academic, except, I must admit, for his jaw. A jaw he'd kill for. It's like he's managed to construct in real life the bottom third of the 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.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  I am better looking than I was seven years ago.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:28PJ Vogt?

  Stephen Hawking, the late theoretical physicist with ALS. It might 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.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Now, my point of presenting to you here is to say, if you're scientists, if you believe in the truth, you need to support me in this debate. That's how science moves forwards. We are treating one-third of the population of all westernized civilizations with a method where we admit we don't know what causes it. And we are avoiding open debate.

• 27:42PJ Vogt?

  So it's like fringe ideas plugged into internet.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  And I think one thing that maybe has been memory-holed 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.

• 28:09PJ Vogt?

  Like.

• 28:10Speaker 01

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

• 28:35PJ Vogt?

  Jesus.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Interestingly enough, it's shared by a user named The Orthodontist.

• 28:40PJ Vogt?

  Uh huh.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Mike denies that he did it.

• 28:44PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  But suddenly, all of a sudden, there is a new orthotropist jaw exercise called mewing that is very popular in the world of incel-dom.

• 28:59PJ Vogt?

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

• 29:43PJ Vogt?

  online. And those communities, over time, have just gotten more and more rotten.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:03PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, I'm familiar with this moment.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  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 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 pick-up artistry. And then that's where you get the black pill stuff, which is like full-on spree shooters.

• 30:48Speaker 01

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

• 30:54PJ Vogt?

  So just to recap, in the early 2000s, there were the pick-up 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 pick-up 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. 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

• 31:38PJ Vogt?

  welcoming in new converts, and that sometimes these new converts bring in new fringe ideas that then get added to the existing bonfire.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I think every subculture has a certain predilection to pseudoscience and craziness. One of the best examples is the fascist occultism that starts to infect like the black metal scene in Europe in the 80s. This sort of idea that like, because you've removed yourself from the mainstream, you're somewhat distrustful of everything mainstream. Like, these things happen. And it's not that like, incels were like wholesome little angels in 2012, but I think they were becoming visible enough that a lot of strange people were like, I think I could make some money here.

• 32:26PJ Vogt?

  I mean, it's also kind of like, another way to think about it would be, in a disorganized way, it's how algorithms work. It's like, algorithms... Try to identify if you like this, what else will you like? It tries to identify who else is like you. And then it puts you guys, whose attention were drawn to the same things, in a category that can be advertised to. And then 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.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly right.

• 32:57PJ Vogt?

  OK, so silly exercise is created. How does this go to mainstream?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  So it starts to break containment around 2018. And that's why you're seeing a YouTube channel called AstroSky making videos about mewing.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:23PJ Vogt?

  AstroSky is this young man who, he's Chad like, although maybe a kind of emo Chad. Pointy 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.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  All it took for me was a consciously not giving up on this tongue posture idea that I'm suggesting from Dr. Yu and John New. This area of study is new, so it's kind of like, there's not a lot of information on it. But beautiful people tend to have good tongue posture. This is part of it. There's not really much you can deny on that.

• 34:09PJ Vogt?

  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. Jomaxing was now spreading around the internet. These ideas from the Mew family pouring out of pointy jaw after pointy jaw.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Do you know about the Golden One?

• 34:46PJ Vogt?

  No, who's the Golden One?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  The Golden One is not really big anymore, but he was very important in this sort of moment.

• 34:55PJ Vogt?

  Oh, I'm looking.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  He's like a European white nationalist that makes videos like, "Do white men need to get tougher?"

• 35:03Speaker 04

  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 Mu's channel below, and I suggest that you watch through all of his videos. I am about halfway through.

• 35:16PJ Vogt?

  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 goatee and such thing. But like, this guy was both, "White people are the best, men are the best, uh, you should mew."

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  And I also wanted to say that I fully support Dr. Mike Mu in his battle against his adversaries.

• 35:41PJ Vogt?

  The adversaries the Golden One is referring to are normal orthodontists.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  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.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  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 Mu about orthotropics and mewing.

• 36:10PJ Vogt?

  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 Mu. 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.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  This 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.

• 36:53PJ Vogt?

  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 prostylatize orthotropics, he has finally found his flock.

• 37:06Speaker 05

  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 John Mu, 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 Mu, the current expert of orthotropics and the inventor of mewing.

• 37:49PJ Vogt?

  By 2019, jaw maxing online had become such a thing that gum brands emerged that promised to Hulk up your jaws so that it is more Chad-like. Rock jaw gum, jaw liner. There's even a device for sale called Jawser Size.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Do you want to see it?

• 38:06PJ Vogt?

  Oh, my God.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:08PJ Vogt?

  OK, so what's happening is like they're playing like wall, wall, wall music. And these guys are chewing on little rubber balls that look like the ball gags that sexual fetishists would use.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 38:23PJ Vogt?

  But like, the people are mostly sort of male and female jocks. It's a very, very strange mashup of cultural signals. It says you put it in your mouth.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  You put it in your mouth.

• 38:35PJ Vogt?

  Chew repeatedly.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Chew repeatedly.

• 38:39PJ Vogt?

  Oh, my God.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  And so by 2019, according to Vice, mewing is like big enough as a trend on YouTube that YouTube is aware of it.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Obviously, they give 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.

• 39:14PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Because we're not at the exact point where it's all going to come together.

• 39:18PJ Vogt?

  So where does it all come together?

• 39:29Speaker 06

  Hi. Good to see you guys.

• 39:31Speaker 07

  Hey, Joe. Great to see you.

• 39:33Speaker 06

  Really good to see you.

• 39:34Speaker 07

  Yeah. Welcome. Welcome back to the land of the healthy.

• 39:37PJ Vogt?

  September 2021, Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying go on a podcast called The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 39:48Speaker 07

  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 whit of sense, right? It can't be bad genes, right? It's too rapidly progressing. Something else-

• 40:09Speaker 06

  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?

• 40:21Speaker 07

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

• 40:26Speaker 06

  Mewing.

• 40:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, mewing, exactly. Mike Mew, I think, has cracked the case, but-

• 40:31PJ Vogt?

  This moment on The Joe Rogan Experience, fall 2021, Weinstein and Heying, 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.

• 40:51Speaker 07

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

• 41:21Speaker 06

  Exactly. Science is not done by consensus. It's not a democracy. It's not majority.

• 41:25Speaker 07

  Majority rule. Right.

• 41:26PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 41:49Speaker 07

  The punchline of the story is that Mike Mew is in danger of being driven out of orthodancha because his heterodox view of malocclusion is at odds with the central narrative around which all of orthodancha is based. Does he have clear evidence that his methods work? Yes. I've only seen it discussed online. I'm pretty ignorant about the method. It has to do with something like pressing your tongue against your palate and eating like beef jerky or something? Well, there are two things. One- Chewing gum. Okay, here, young Jamie on the ball as always. Here he goes. Keep your mouth closed and your teeth gently touching

• 42:30Speaker 07

  and move your tongue to the roof of your mouth and lightly press. Your tongue is resting-

• 42:36PJ Vogt?

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

• 42:48Speaker 07

  There's a, I believe his name, his name 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. It's like, I think you put your tongue and your palate and you stress-

• 43:09PJ Vogt?

  And in that episode, he reveals that he's been jaw exercising.

• 43:13Speaker 07

  Oh, no.

• 43:14PJ Vogt?

  That's right.

• 43:17PJ Vogt?

  That's right, baby.

• 43:18Speaker 07

  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- And I do reps with my face.

• 43:29PJ Vogt?

  For your jaw reps?

• 43:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:30PJ Vogt?

  Where do you do this at? Do you do it in the truck?

• 43:32Speaker 07

  Do it in my house.

• 43:33PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 43:33Speaker 07

  Like in my office. It sits in my office. I put it in there and sometimes when I'm scrolling things online, I go, it's like. Yeah, I'm crazy.

• 43:40PJ Vogt?

  Oh, you're not crazy.

• 43:41Speaker 07

  I've got problems.

• 43:42PJ Vogt?

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

• 43:43Speaker 07

  That's my problem. It's I try all kinds of other things.

• 43:46PJ Vogt?

  No, your problem is you're always trying to better yourself.

• 43:48Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 43:49PJ Vogt?

  And that's annoying for people.

• 43:50Speaker 07

  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.

• 43:59PJ Vogt?

  Joe Rogan is a jaw maxer.

• 44:03PJ Vogt?

  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

• 44:44PJ Vogt?

  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 GigaChad faces and giggling. To them, this was a bit. Brain rot. I was told, quote, "Only a Discord mod would take any of this seriously."

• 45:20PJ Vogt?

  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

• 46:00PJ Vogt?

  the normal way, but he's wondering if there's a way to handle those teeth with mewing instead. A 16-year-old posts a photo of his face in silhouette, very upset about his round chin. Somebody offers pseudoscientifically, quote, "If the tongue keeps dropping during sleep, mouth tape may be needed to stop 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 width?

• 46:44PJ Vogt?

  There are DIY ways to measure your intermolar width at home, outside of straight up getting blasted with CT, CBCT radiation at the center. Jaw surgery if jaw length is shortened recessed. Palatal expansion if IMW palate width is narrow." These answers, one suspects, are not really helping anybody.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:46PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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's really hard.

• 48:11PJ Vogt?

  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. 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.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  You know what we should do?

• 48:46PJ Vogt?

  Start a men's podcast.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  We should get every American boy and young man between the ages of 13 and 23.

• 48:54PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Sit them all down.

• 48:56PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And make them watch Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.

• 49:00PJ Vogt?

  You think that would be the best totem of non-toxic masculinity?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  I think it actually has the full canon of like, kinds of men that exist in a civilized society. Like, do you want to be a stoner? Do you want to be like, a cool guy? Do you want to be a cop? You know, like, you know, all the kinds of men that exist. And you can pick one. I think it's not, I don't remember being particularly toxic. I bet it's horrible. I bet it's like, unwatchable by today's standards.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  We had that, though. We had constant barrages of pop culture being like, these are the men you can be.

• 49:33PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  And we don't really have that now.

• 49:41PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 49:58PJ Vogt?

  Ryan, thank you for this.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Thank you. This was really fun. My jaws are sized is arriving in a couple of weeks, so I will let you know how it works.

• 51:01PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Odoo. Ever feel like you need one app for sales, another for inventory, another for accounting, and the list never ends? If your software stack feels more like a source of constant daily stress than actual success, it's time to modernize your workflow with Odoo. Odoo is truly the only business software you'll ever need because it consolidates your entire operation into a single seamless ecosystem. Think about the hours lost to copying data between platforms, managing mismatched logins, and troubleshooting broken integrations. Odoo eliminates all of that by linking your CRM, e-commerce, human resources, and financial tracking in real time. Not only does it make your daily routine massively more efficient, but it also replaces multiple expensive, single-use tools,

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• 52:05PJ Vogt?

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• 53:11PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Quince. Whether you're dressing for a busy day at work, a night out, or a cozy weekend at home, having high-quality wardrobe staples makes all the difference. Quince is my top pick this year for refreshing my closet and crossing off every single person on my holiday gift list. I'm obsessed with their lightweight puffer jacket. It gives you high-end warmth and structure without any of the bulk, making it the ultimate holiday gifting choice. Quince crafts timeless items using top-grade materials such as 100% Mongolian cashmere, Italian leather, and solid gold. With world-class cashmere sweaters starting at just $60, you can wrap up pure luxury for less. Quince cuts out the retail middlemen and works straight with ethical factories, offering premium items at 50% to 80% below typical department store prices.

• 53:56PJ Vogt?

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• 54:26PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 55:11PJ Vogt?

  Our show is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pinamaneni, and is 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 Parello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Shon. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at ETA. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vogt now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks

• 55:54PJ Vogt?

  for listening. Enjoy your Thanksgiving. We'll see you in two weeks.

• 56:14PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by VistaPrint. As a small business owner running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes VistaPrint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day brainstorming new Things we could make for our show and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing search engine stickers and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. Vistaprint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, Vistaprint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve.

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