Ryan Broderick
Appearances
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
The whole thing. Maybe you're going to say something charming and surprising.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
In the past, mankind had straighter teeth and more chiseled chins. Today, we have more crooked teeth and softer chins. Why is that happening? Could we stop it from happening? A mainstream dentist will offer you braces or Invisalign and say, your jaw shape is mostly genetic, there's not much else to be done here, and also, did you remember to floss?
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What is jawmaxxing?
Yeah. I've been watching The Wire for the first time. Similar philosophy in that show. You got to catch it on The Wire.
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What is jawmaxxing?
An orthotropist has a much more exciting story to tell. They believe this change to our jaws, which is really observable, they think it's being caused by some change in our environment as recent as the Industrial Revolution. Okay, but here's where the Mews get beyond any good evidence and deeply into their own sales pitch.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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 Mews' teaching. To Ryan, there's something familiar here, something he sees in a lot of esoteric movements.
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What is jawmaxxing?
The thing that I find kind of links a lot of these is that it all sort of comes back to the solutions of the angst of modern life are found totally within yourself. And I'm going to sell you how to find it inside of you. And obviously 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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
You should check out, after you're done, there's this mob drama on HBO that's really good called The Sopranos.
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What is jawmaxxing?
And I think orthotropics is equally solipsistic because it's saying you can literally change the inside of your mouth if you work hard enough.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Right. It's like Americans are funny because we're both like, we're a paranoid, conspiracy-loving country, but we're also a country that is very founded on the idea of self-improvement. And so those things kind of twin in a funny way where there's always a new person with a new diagnosis of what's wrong with society, but the promise is always the same.
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What is jawmaxxing?
They're going to sell you something that helps you change yourself in a way that resists it. Right. Can I just pause for a second, though, and say, obviously, you and I are talking on a podcast, but you and I are also, like, talking, like, I can see your face.
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What is jawmaxxing?
And there is something a little bit funny about, like, these two, like, soft-chinned, round-mouthed men just laughing at the idea that this could ever be improved.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Yeah, but, like, you know, women like me, so, like, I don't need any of this stuff. I can be soft.
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What is jawmaxxing?
So I watched that for the first time and then I was like, I want to stay in this world a little bit. So then I started watching The Wire. what were you doing all last 20 years i'm sorry uh i'm working class so we didn't have hbo growing up wow i i didn't realize you know we were from different worlds like that what did you guys watch My parents have very bad taste, I think.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Just know that I know that somewhere there's a board of like triangle chinned giga chads who are like these losers. Like the scales could be dropped in their eyes if only they would follow the light in the way. Like I know how they see us.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Yeah. Sorry, boys. I can make eye contact, which means I can watch all the anime I want and still talk to girls.
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What is jawmaxxing?
His idea is you're going to do like mouth sit-ups to have straighter teeth. That's basically it. Yeah. And what does this actually mean? What is he doing with this theory? How is he testing it on people? Is he making money?
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What is jawmaxxing?
He is testing it on people. In 1986, he leaves the traditional world of dentistry. He self-publishes a book about his theories. And he's just sort of doing his thing. It doesn't really sort of matter for our story until we jump back in in the 2000s, which is when little Mike, his son... joins his father's practice in the London suburbs, becomes an orthotropist.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Mike Mew, John's pride and joy, is on stage at a conference at Harvard. From the waist up, Mike looks like an academic, just dressed with a suaveness that borders on inappropriate. Underneath his blazer, a pink button-up, undone one button too many. As your eyes drift up past his neck, you see what will so compel the internet.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Mike Mew nearly has the face of an academic, except, I must admit, for his jaw. A jaw you'd kill for. It's like he's managed to construct, in real life, the bottom third of the Giga Chad's face. An upside-down triangle, adorned here with a soul patch that, as a reporter who tries to tell things straight, I have to admit is totally working.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Stephen Hawking, the late theoretical physicist with ALS, in Mike Mew's speech, Hawking serves as an example of someone famous for having a weak jaw. The gospel, according to Mike, more or less the same ideas his dad offered in that original 1981 article. Diet and tongue posture.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
And I think one thing that maybe has been memory hold or like normal people just like didn't experience is that around 2011, 2012, as these large social platforms started to flicker on at a scale that started to matter culturally, a lot of insane people who had been using them quietly for many years suddenly became very famous by accident. Like... Flat earthers would be one.
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What is jawmaxxing?
I mean, my parents don't have impeccable taste, but I also sometimes watch stuff without them.
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What is jawmaxxing?
You know, a lot of these kind of... Like, these people were using the internet very quietly, and then in 2012, algorithms started to mindlessly serve content to people. And that's probably the easiest way to view what happens here, because in June 2014... One of Mike's videos is shared to sluthate.com. Jesus. Interestingly enough, it's shared by a user named The Orthodontist. Uh-huh.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Mike denies that he did it. Okay. But suddenly, all of a sudden, there is a new orthotropist jaw exercise called mewing that is very popular in the world of incel dump.
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What is jawmaxxing?
I walked in, last time I was home, I walked in on my dad watching Godfather Part 3, and he's like, this movie's pretty good, huh? And I was like, oh, okay. I think he literally was like, Sofia Coppola is pretty good in this movie. I was like, oh, Jesus Christ.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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 inceldom.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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. But all you need to know today, if you're unfamiliar, incel refers to involuntarily celibate.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
And then that's where you get the black pill stuff, which is like full-on spree shooters. And it all sort of starts with this idea that the men that we paid to help us ripped us off.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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 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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
It is. I've only seen, I've seen Godfather Part 1. I think I've seen most of Godfather Part 2.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
3 is the bad one, right? I've never seen the whole thing. I watched it between ad breaks with him. It didn't look good. I've met your dad.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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?
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What is jawmaxxing?
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. I think that's exactly right.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Astor Skye is this young man who he's Chad-like, although maybe a kind of emo Chad. Pointy jaw with swoopy hair above. Astro Sky has nearly 300,000 viewers on this video, which is entitled, Why Mewing is Important to All!
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
And it wasn't just Astrosky 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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
He's having a great time right now, now that his boy's back in the White House.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Do 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 licking. He's like a European white nationalist that makes videos like, do white men need to get tougher?
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What is jawmaxxing?
Okay, so this guy looks like a guy on the cover of, like, a romance novel, kind of. Like, he's got the long center part hair and, like, the goatee mustache thing. But, like, this guy was both white people are the best, men are the best, you should Mew? Exactly.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Oh, he's always been a Republican, yeah. I mean, he's, like, you know, normal-ish about it, but... Do you guys argue, or do you just, like, agree to disagree? You know, I try to find places to argue with him, but it's, like, tiring, and sometimes he's just like, I do this for a job. I don't need to do this when I'm with you.
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What is jawmaxxing?
The adversaries the Golden One is referring to are normal orthodontists.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
The whole time that these Chad influencers have been adopting Mewing as one of their concerns, they've been sending some of their audiences back to Mike Mew. And so over the years, Mike has become an influencer in his own right. His videos over time reflect that. They now have proper YouTube thumbnails. He adds music. He begins to reach audiences in the millions.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
By 2019, jaw maxing online had become such a thing that gum brands emerged that promised to hulk up your jaw so that it is more Chad-like. Rock jaw gum, jaw liner. There's even a device for sale called Jawsercise. Do you want to see it? Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Like, I find it quite useful now that, like, you know, when I'm home, he takes me out to, like, a shitty dive bar full of, like, Joe Rogan guys, because I understand their psychology perfectly now. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. I mean, I've had so many conversations with these guys who are like... deciding the future of our country now. And I understand how they think and what they want.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Okay, so what's happening is like they're playing like wah, wah, wah music and these guys are chewing on little rubber balls that look like the ball gags that sexual fetishists would use. Yes, exactly. But like the people are mostly sort of male and female jocks. It's a very, very strange mashup of cultural signifiers. It says you put it in your mouth. You put it in your mouth.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Chew repeatedly. Chew repeatedly. Oh my God. And so by 2019, according to Vice, mewing is like big enough as a trend on YouTube that YouTube is aware of it. This is also when you start getting like a bunch of SEO spam stuff and also like genuine news outlets defining what mewing is. By 2020, the New York Times is profiling the muse. Obviously, they gave them a nice big portrait.
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What is jawmaxxing?
But the biggest moment in all of this, the sort of, I think you've been a little kind of fuzzy on how this all works. Because we're not at the exact point where it's all gonna come together. So where does it all come together?
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What is jawmaxxing?
September 2021, Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying go on a podcast called The Joe Rogan Experience.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Mike Mew, I think, has cracked the case, but... 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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
And it's not nearly as deep, I think, as people make it out to be.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
What do you feel like you understand that all the New York Times political reporters who are hanging out at diners don't?
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
There is a Donald Trump in every single town in America, multiple probably. Guys who just believe that they should be allowed to do whatever they want. They're sick of dealing with zoning regulations or the light department or whatever it is. And so for Donald Trump, it's very inspiring for them to be the Trump of their town. And it's not political. It's just like a power.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Joe Rogan is a jaw maxer. Or, I mean... Maybe Joe Rogan is a jaw-maxer. I honestly can't even tell. Is it a bit or is it not? The question we started with today, the question Ryan pointed out doesn't always matter. Mike Mew is clearly not joking about mewing. But Joe Rogan, look, for various reasons, he will be interpreted among my tribe in the least charitable way possible, whenever possible.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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 rot.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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,
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What is jawmaxxing?
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?
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
It's like you're in your middle ages and you don't want to listen to anybody.
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What is jawmaxxing?
But what gets offered here in lieu of encouragement are all these sorts of questionable scientific acronyms. The conversation gets very nuts. Quote, look, what's your IMW pallet width? There are DIY ways to measure your intermolar width at home outside of straight up getting blasted with CT, CBCT radiation at a center. Jaw surgery if jaw length is short and recessed.
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What is jawmaxxing?
Palletal expansion if IMW pallet width is narrow. These answers, one suspects, are not really helping anybody.
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What is jawmaxxing?
You know, I had a moment this week I had a moment this week. Can I tell you the moment that I had? You can tell me the moment you had, yeah. I've got mold, I think, under my floorboards. And I was trying to find a guy to deal with the mold. And I called the mold guy.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
And so the thing that really freaks me out about a 15-year-old boy now is that there is no center. There's nothing to like...
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What is jawmaxxing?
like okay so that's normal and i'm not normal right there's no concept so you're you're just sort of like free to pick and choose whatever you see online that you like which i have to imagine is probably exhilarating but 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 i don't
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What is jawmaxxing?
No, I really feel for them. Even, like, men's magazines, which were never great, and, like, Maxim was pretty terrible.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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...
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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?
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What is jawmaxxing?
You think that would be the best totem of non-toxic masculinity? I think it actually has the full canon of like kinds of men that exist in a civilized society. Like, do you want to be a stoner? Do you want to be like a cool guy? Do you want to be a cop? You know, like, you know, all the kinds of men that exist and you can pick one. I think it's not, I don't remember being particularly toxic.
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I bet it's horrible. I bet it's like unwatchable by today's standards. We had that, though. We had constant barrages of pop culture being like, these are the men you can be. And we don't really have that now.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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Ryan, thank you for this. Thank you. This was really fun. My jogger size is arriving in a couple weeks, so I will let you know how it works.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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 around ripping everybody off.
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That's our show this week. We actually have another paid subscriber announcement. What? Our board meeting is coming up. That is a Zoom meeting for paid incognito mode subscribers. Basically, if you pay to support the show, we're all going to jump on an enormous, I mean enormous Zoom meeting. And I will take questions with the search engine team.
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We will share internal metrics and minute details about the way this functions and doesn't function as a business. That's going to be on December 6th. If you haven't signed up yet, what are you waiting for? 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.
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Our show is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti 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.
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Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perrello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.
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Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vogt 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.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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I was like, what? That's why we just got to get rid of the Department of Education. You know, we just got to... That's why Elon Musk has to make our government more efficient. No, but I do think there's something very radicalizing, unfortunately, about dealing with any single government regulation in America because they're all completely...
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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. Yeah. So I'm comfortable being like America just like maybe shouldn't have a government actually, because like we're really bad at it.
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Okay. We'll, we'll stop this being a political podcast in 30 seconds, but I do just want to say, I think the way I've been feeling this week has been the problem is like, The right is always just like, the government, which we constantly sabotage, sucks until we have no choice but to destroy it. And the left is like, the government should take care of everything.
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But also, we have no curiosity about whether they're doing a good job, how to make them do a better job. It's just like, we have Eric Adams for mayor in my city, and we're running around being like, We should be in charge of everything because look what we did. Yeah. Now that we've solved the political polarization issue in America.
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What is jawmaxxing?
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.
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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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
It's going to go on our incognito mode feed. 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?
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
Okay, so, what is jaw-maxing, Ryan? Jaw maxing is a facial exercise you can do. I mean, you're like me, you've got a JD Vance chin. It could be better, right? You could make it more- By JD Vance, you mean we both have soft, round- We have soft millennial features, yeah.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
We look good in an American apparel hoodie, but not so much, you know, as a mega Chad. So if you want your face to look more like a mega Chad, a giga Chad, if you will, you can theoretically do this facial exercise to give yourself a sharper, more defined chin. And wait, can I actually ask you about mega Chads and giga Chads?
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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 MegaChat and GigaChat, I think came through them. Like I know that it's, there's these like black and white photos of just like a super over-masculinized guy with like a super high cheekbones and a super deep chin.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
Right. And the sort of GigaChat idea is like 4chan many years ago, 4chan users came up with like the idea of like the perfect man, the chat.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
And were they joking or were they not joking? Did they know? Does anyone know?
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
I mean, I sort of take everything that happens in 4chan as kind of like arch performance art. At least it starts that way very often. So in the earlier memes, it was like popular women were Stacey's and popular men were Chad's and Chad's go as Stacey's. And it was sort of part of this idea of like...
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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 were talking about this are like insane nerds they were using anime power scaling and what is anime power scaling so like uh For instance, in Digimon, if you become a very high-level Digibod, you might have Giga attached to the front of your name.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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... 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, this is called a chad.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
And they're like, just like in like Digimon, there's this thing called a gigachad. 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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
So this idea of a Chad, this jokey meme about a hyper-masculine jock who women love, it kicks around on the internet for about a decade. Sometimes Chad's drawn as a guy with a mohawk. Sometimes Chad is represented by this one picture of this one high school football player. In 2017, a new meme circulates of a bearded, high-cheekboned, absurdly roided-out muscle man.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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. 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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
Eyebrows raised, cheeks sucked in, and a distinctive smirk. It's like a goofier version of how you might flex your biceps and pretend to be Superman. If you've been around teenage boys in the past couple years, the Giga Chad face, like the Sigma face, is just something you see them pulling at each other and then cracking up. We had Jim Carrey, they have this.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
But again, as Ryan says, the Giga Chad is both a joke and a not joke at the same time.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
So Giga Chad was definitely supposed to be kind of a parody But it doesn't really matter.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
But what you mean is that in certain kinds of subcultures where people are intentionally provoking each other, but also everyone has a tendency to take their own ideas seriously, again, this idea like, is this a bit or not, is kind of a useless question.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
It's like... Because there's profound power, I think, in not defining... If it's a bit or not. I mean, Trump is very good at this, where like he really understands that like if you never tell people if you're lying or joking or not, you can just wait for them to react and then decide if you were lying or joking later.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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?
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
So jaw maxing is the act of trying to make your jaw look more masculine. The term jaw maxing comes from another term, looks maxing. They're kind of related. The idea of like blank maxing is 4chan Reddit speak for like, you want to do it a lot. I see. So wait, so where does the story of jaw maxing start? Jaw maxing starts in the 1960s actually.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
This is, can I tell you, it's a perfect podcast because it's only backstory.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
It is roundly condemned and left away by the dentistry establishment.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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... Like this guy is like, there's a better, more natural, more holistic way to have straight teeth.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
What is jawmaxxing?
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.
Search Engine
Genesis
Yeah, but you pay a lot of money to do it, though. Oh. Obviously. Obviously. It's less money than just a normal yacht.
Search Engine
Genesis
And I was the son he's talking about. Yes. And he's talking about a Fox business host. I think her name is Susan. And she's pretty good. And I opened Twitter and she's like, you should buy the dip now. And I was like, I wonder what that would do. Let's see. And it worked. Yeah. For a little bit. And then we kind of lost those gains. But yeah.
Search Engine
Genesis
They were conventions like this, except they weren't selling Bitcoin. They were selling horse semen.
Search Engine
Genesis
I'm like, it's just like Arabian horses. I went to a few of those conventions. They're a weird vibe. But they're not... He's right. They are very similar to this. So, obviously, when he first told me he was investing in cryptocurrency, I was extremely worried. But it turns out, like, he was pretty good about it, and he was making pretty decent money. It was also good timing for me because...
Search Engine
Genesis
I started covering it through him. And I was very upfront about that in my newsletter. I was like, my dad's investing in Bitcoin, I'm gonna just study him like a little lab rat. But I honestly think it's an interesting experience to be with someone who's actively trading it and has been at it for a while, watching the markets with him. I think it's useful.
Search Engine
Genesis
So I went in thinking Ethereum people are the freaks and the scammers and they're bad for the world and Bitcoin people are actually the reasonable ones. I have come away with a more nuanced idea of that dichotomy. Ethereum people, I mean, here they're accused of being too woke, which is blowing my mind. But they're younger, they're a more vibrant cultural space.
Search Engine
Genesis
One kid we were just talking to outside at the techno party that's happening right now was saying that Ethereum is not currency, it's technology. And I think that is a good way to think about it. Ethereum people, they want to run the whole internet on the blockchain. It's what they call Web3. They're trying to reinvent information technology and combine it with finance.
Search Engine
Genesis
Interesting idea, horrifying, depends on your point of view, I suppose. Bitcoiners, I have learned, are much more militant about Bitcoin. The Bitcoiners are much more obsessed with redefining how society works in a way that I don't see in the Ethereum community.
Search Engine
Genesis
That was the dark realization I had. In fact, just before this interview, the group of kids we were talking to, one of which was a libertarian YouTuber, kind of dropped his mask in a way that a lot of Bitcoiners do if you talk to them for long enough or have enough drinks with them, where they start talking very openly about acquiring generational wealth.
Search Engine
Genesis
And I'm not sure if your listeners are familiar with the book Neuromancer, but it's basically about a rich family that lives in space and uses cloning to store wealth over centuries, and then they get robbed, thankfully. Spoiler. But that's kind of what the people here are dreaming about. They're dreaming about a way to store their wealth
Search Engine
Genesis
for centuries or millennia and have it be able to leave Earth. And they're very serious about it. And it's kind of goofy. It's like, oh, wow, you're wearing a Rick and Morty t-shirt and walking around Miami. But then you're like, oh, you are literally preparing for a world in which you are an oligarch in space.
Search Engine
The Dave and Buster's Anomaly
So I'm in a group chat per usual with just some buddies of mine. We've been friends since college. And so Thursday, my friend Alex said, you got to try this. Record a voice memo message and mention Dave and Buster's and it will not be delivered.
Search Engine
The Dave and Buster's Anomaly
Dave and Buster's. So of course he sent us a bunch and everyone says, negative, did not get that. Nope, didn't get that. So everyone's like, what the fuck? That's wild.
Search Engine
The Dave and Buster's Anomaly
Oh, I know. Me neither. I think famous people do it because my wife has like a famous friend. That's the only way she messages. Really? I don't know. Yeah.
Search Engine
The Dave and Buster's Anomaly
I don't think they want to spend time actually typing out their thoughts. It's like a phone call without actually having the commitment of a phone call.
Search Engine
The Dave and Buster's Anomaly
Uh, what's the conspiracy about Dave & Buster's and Apple? Does Tim not like Dave & Buster's?
Search Engine
The Dave and Buster's Anomaly
Right, yeah. Is it something in a different country, England? Do they think Dave & Buster's is weird? I don't know.
Search Engine
The Dave and Buster's Anomaly
This is just a weird bug that Apple doesn't know about. Yeah, it's so weird. I know. I'm hoping you guys can figure this out.
Search Engine
The Dave and Buster's Anomaly
Hey, I was just letting you know you were fired, but I wanted us to meet at Dave & Buster's to kind of talk through the severance plan, and that didn't go through. I'm sorry.
Search Engine
DOGE and the Mystery of the State Department Teslas
And isn't it great what they're doing? Isn't it great and definitely not at all illegal or profoundly corrupt for the president to put someone with billions of dollars in government contracts personally in charge of deciding what happens to government contracts?