This is one of those things that sounds almost too simple to be true.

But once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And I’ve run enough experiments to be quite confident about it.

Your skeleton and your bite are not two separate systems. They are part of the same skeletal system.

And if you don’t understand that connection, you will spend years doing exercise and bodywork that delivers almost zero lasting change in my experience.

How the bite relates to the skeleton

Here’s the basic principle. Anything that changes in the skeleton will reflect in the bite — meaning the way your upper and lower teeth come together will shift, even if only subtly.

Why? Because your bite is not just a function of where your teeth sit. It’s a function of your teeth position, your jaw position, your skull’s position on the neck, and how the entire skeleton is arranged beneath all of that.

Every single one of those variables feeds into how your upper and lower teeth make contact when you close your mouth.

Think about what that means. If your spine shifts — even slightly — during exercise, that shift travels up through the neck to the skull, to the jaw, and ultimately changes the relationship between your upper and lower teeth.

The bite is essentially a readout of your skeletal position. It’s one of the most sensitive feedback mechanisms in the body, sitting right at the top of the entire musculoskeletal chain.

This also means the relationship runs in both directions. Do something to your body and it changes your bite. Do something to your bite and it changes your body. They are locked together.

It’s like a two-way mirror

This bidirectional relationship is worth sitting with for a moment because I don’t think most people have ever considered it.

When you exercise — when you stretch, lift, move — your skeleton shifts. Even temporarily, it shifts. And that shift shows up in the bite. The mirror reflects the body back through the teeth.

But it also works the other way. Change the bite and you change the body.

Orthodontics is the most obvious example of how this goes wrong. When braces move teeth and flatten the curve of spee, the jaw and skull have no choice but to reorganize around the new geometry.

The spine compensates. The posture changes. The whole skeleton adapts — downward. The mirror reflects the teeth back through the body, and the body deteriorates in response.

A flat mouthguard does the same thing in reverse in my experience. Remove the old habitual occlusion, give the jaw a neutral surface to land on, and the skeleton starts organizing upward. The body responds to the new bite geometry the same way it responded to orthodontics — except this time the change is positive.

Your bite is changing your entire life

Here’s the part that should genuinely surprise you: your bite has been changing your entire life, in ways you’ve never noticed.

How do I know? Because your skeleton has been changing. The two things move together — always.

Every shift in your spine, every change in your posture, every subtle postural deterioration you’ve accumulated over decades has been registering in your bite simultaneously. You just didn’t have articulating paper in your mouth to see it.

Most people assume their bite is static — the teeth are where they are, and that’s that. But the bite is a living readout of a living skeleton. It shifts constantly.

The question is just whether those shifts are moving you toward inflation or collapse.

How I learned about this connection

I discovered this empirically through experiments I was running in 2017 and 2018, during an extended period where I was obsessively tracking my own bite changes.

At the time I had a lower flat plane splint — essentially a flat acrylic surface that sits on the lower teeth.

Using articulating paper, I would bite down onto the splint and it would leave ink marks wherever my upper teeth were making contact. I’d then use a dental drill to grind down any heavy spots until all four back teeth on either side were leaving even, balanced marks. That was my baseline — a perfectly even bite registration.

Then I’d go and do exercise. Hard exercise, sometimes yoga, sometimes other movement. An hour or two of real effort.

Afterwards I’d put the splint back in and check the contacts again with the articulating paper.

They had changed. Spots that were there before were now missing. The contact pattern had shifted, sometimes significantly.

This told me something important: the exercise had moved the skeleton, and that movement had reflected in the bite. The jaw and spine had repositioned. And that repositioning was visible, measurably, in the contact pattern on the splint.

Here was the problem though. A couple of days later, without wearing any mouthguard, I’d check the splint again.

The contacts were often even again. Exactly as they were before I exercised.

I repeated this experiment numerous times to make sure.

You can validate this connection yourself

You don’t need a dental drill or a custom splint to see the basics of this relationship.

You can buy articulating paper on Amazon for a few dollars — it’s the same paper dentists use.

• Put a strip in your mouth, bite down a few times, and look at the marks your upper teeth leave on your lower teeth.

• Take a photo. Note which teeth are making contact and where.

• Then go and do some exercise. Something meaningful — not a gentle walk. Come back and bite on the paper again.

• The contact pattern will have changed. Guaranteed. Spots will have moved or disappeared. New contacts may have appeared.

What you’re seeing is your skeleton having moved — and that movement expressing itself through the bite. It’s your body telling you that exercise did something. The skeleton shifted (probably toward a better position).

The problem is what happens next.

What this connection actually means

Without something supporting the new position in place, the bite — and the skeleton — reverts.

Within a couple of days usually (in my experience).

The way the upper and lower teeth are shaped to fit together is likely the culprit. You see even though your skeleton may have changed a bit… the way your teeth are shaped didn’t change. They still fit together best the ‘old way’.

So whatever the exercise achieved, the body undoes it.

This is why yoga leaves people feeling good temporarily, then tight again.

Why osteopathy gives relief that fades within a week.

Why massage, stretching, and every other form of bodywork seems to require constant repetition with no cumulative gain.

It’s not that these things don’t work — they do work, in the moment. The skeleton moves. The body improves. The bite changes. But without a mechanism to support the new bite position, the old occlusion takes over and resets everything.

A flat mouthguard solves this problem

Here’s why: when you wear a flat surface on your teeth — something that removes your existing occlusion and replaces it with a neutral plane — the teeth no longer snap back into their habitual contact pattern.

The old occlusion that pulls the jaw and spine back to their collapsed position has been removed. So when exercise moves the skeleton into a better position, the mouthguard gives that new position somewhere to land and stay.

When I started wearing a rubber mouthguard at night alongside my exercises, the contacts on my tracking splint stopped reverting. The changes held. And then they compounded — each session of exercise building on the last, instead of resetting back to zero.

In my experience, there is no point in exercising for structural change if you’re not wearing something that allows the skeleton to hold its gains. You’re pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. The exercise works. The bucket just can’t hold it.

A flat mouthguard is the bucket with the hole sealed.

Closing thoughts

Someone in our community recently DM’d me and asked if it was worth wearing a mouthguard even if they didn’t have any major health issues and were relatively happy with how they looked.

I asked them… “hmm. Do you exercise?”

And they answered that they exercised regularly and spent about 10 hours per week either in the gym or doing yoga.

So my response was… “I guess i’m saying that in my view… you are throwing those 10 hours down the toilet if you’re not wearing something flat between your teeth that holds your gains.”

This sounds like heresy today I know.

I don’t think it’ll sound like heresy in 10-20 years.

I was browsing Youtube sometime back when I came across this video below.

Basically it’s Shaq talking about how he never used to play very hard in practice. And it had given him a bit of a bad rap in the league back then.

For example, I think Kobe Bryant used to get on his back about it and it was one of the numerous causes of strife in their relationship when they played together on the Lakers.

But the reality is… I think Shaq was right.

And he was probably unwittingly listening to his body.

Athletes are typically respected for playing hard in practice

In sports coaches & athletes love to recite the mantra of “you play how you practice.”

And players that play really hard in practice are often highly respected for it.

For example Micheal Jordan.

I loved Jordan growing up. And he was known for always working really hard in practice.

He played in practice like it was a real game. Day in and day out.

But when he was playing for the Washington Wizards in 2002-3 at age 39-40 he was a shadow of his former self. Despite the fact that in his early 20’s he probably had some of the best biomechanics of anyone that ever played in the league.

We all accept this as being the ‘norm’ in NBA basketball (ie. retiring before the age of 40), but with the understanding I now have of these biomechanics… I don’t think that needs to be the norm at all.

And rather I think at least part of the reason that Jordan’s biomechanics had declined so quickly at the end of his career was that he worked too hard in practice. Plain and simple.

Why is it not a good idea to play hard in practice?

When you have a locked bite (ie. upper & lower teeth come together in a fixed position) then the more you exercise, the faster you collapse. That is my view on how the relationship works.

And essentially it is because the exercise is shifting the skeleton a bit (for the better), but the locked bite is preventing that shift from happening.

So you end up wearing down your teeth faster because the upper and lower teeth are coming together in a way they are not positioned to and tooth wear is the end result..

And as you wear down your teeth faster, your skeleton collapses faster.

So you decline faster and end up having to retire faster.

Smart coaches will run lazy practices

The smart play if you have a locked bite is being lazy at practice. Memorize the plays, but don’t exert your body too much doing them.

And I say that as someone that played on my high school basketball and lacrosse teams for numerous years, plus played baseball for my town for many years growing up.

I spent hundreds of hours in ‘practice’ and in hindsight I think it’s poor logic to practice hard.

The skeleton will only get worse, not better (unless of course the person is wearing a mouthguard to sleep).

Also, a compensating body will play less consistently. I’ll explain.

I don’t think practicing makes you much better

The other thing i’ve learned in recent years is that I don’t think practicing actually makes you better.

I’ll give you an example.

When I played on my JV and Varsity basketball team I remember how inconsistent my jumpshot felt depending on the day.

Some days my legs felt more sore or tight than others and I often adjusted how I shot the ball a bit to make up for it. Because my arms would need to make up for the power that was not coming from the legs.

I contrast that now with how i feel now when i’m shooting a ball with my son (we occasionally go to an indoor hoop and shoot around a bit as a way of spending quality time together).

My shot feels more consistent as my legs are never sore (in part because I don’t play that much, but also in part because i never get sore due to these biomechanics).

I intuitively feel that if I had this knowledge when playing basketball in high school I would have been a far better player. Because i was a shooter and consistency is everything.

Closing thoughts

My point today is to challenge some of the conventional thinking as you learn more about how biomechanics works.

Especially if you started the process and are feeling how it works on your own body.

If you’re like me… I think you will start to realize that some of the traditional notions of what is ‘good’ for you are flat out wrong.

Do you really need a lot of practice? Or is it better to just focus on improving your biomechanics and practice in a bit of a lazy way?

I’m not saying you need to take everything I say as fact. But I am saying…. think logically and challenge the notion yourself as you go through this biomechanical journey.

This past weekend I had a friend from business school visiting town and we had dinner. I’m not going to use his real name so i’ll instead call him “John”.

John is now in his mid-50’s and he’s had a rough stretch for about the last 20 years.

You see we met during our MBA in 2003 when John was in his early 30’s and I was in my late 20’s.

He was a solid guy who had an engaging way about him and we became pretty good friends. But he had a tough time focusing and so he never did well in school.

To the extent that he was kicked out of the MBA program.

And the ensuing years were not really any nicer to him. It consisted of a string of poor investments, failed startups, a career that never really took off, etc.

And so now in his mid-50’s he’s still struggling a bit. Trying his best to roll with the times, but now with the responsibility of a wife and two young children.

Meanwhile there are folks that we know from our MBA program that are very wealthy. Folks who did not have to struggle like John or I did, especially as this past decade was a roller coaster ride for me due to my health issues.

It was two divergent paths and we were on the losing end.

And in a way you can say that it was predictable to some extent. Because even back in our MBA program all those years ago there was a sort of ‘pecking order’ where you could probably predict who was going to be more successful.

I was struggling with my voice and my health a fair bit even back then. So i’m sure that if people were asked… both John and I would not have been near the top of the list.

And in a lot of cases those predictions about how various people would fare in the future probably came true to a large extent.

But what if you could change that pecking order? Even this late in life?

Wouldn’t that be cool?

I think so.

There is almost always a pecking order

In life, in almost every group there is going to be an unwritten pecking order after some time.

Everyone in their head has probably formed a prediction of who is going to be the most successful, least successful, etc.

And you would probably be surprised on how well those perceptions align between different people.

It is typically based on some mix of how the person looks, their personality, their confidence, their voice, their background, etc.

After you have gotten to know someone for awhile… you often feel like you have a sense for how far they’re likely gonna make it.

They may not actually make it that far, but you develop a feel for where their ‘ceiling’ is likely gonna be. And some people will have a much higher ceiling than others.

This perceived pecking order then determines how others treat you and how interested they are in developing a long-standing relationship with you.

It sounds cold and calculating… but what i’m talking about is just human nature. Especially in an MBA program.

Biomechanics are almost always behind this pecking order

When people are creating these perceptions a lot of what they are using as signals are things that, in my view, are a direction function of biomechanics.

For example, in my own experience, these biomechanics directly impact things like:

• how good you look

• the confidence you exude

• the resonance of your voice

• how quick you think

• how well you can analyze complex problems

• how friendly you seem and how well you connect with people

On all six of these items above… in the past decade I view that I have very clearly improved when my biomechanics were good, and worsened when my biomechanics were worse.

And so that means the signals used to place you in the pecking order can be manipulated with this biomechanical process.

Change the biomechanics, you change your position in the pecking order

The positive message I guess i’m trying to send here is that this pecking order that life tends to place you into is not static.

Or rather it is even far less static than most folks tend to believe.

And i view it as a sort of line graph like the one above.

Some folks will be ahead of you (eg. they had a more successful career, look better, etc).

But if they don’t know about this biomechanical process then in my view you can automatically assume that they are declining at some rate. Because aging = slow biomechanical collapse.

And if you are disciplined about this process then my experience is that your slope will be heading upwards.

Therefore at some point in the future… depending on each of your slopes… you will eventually surpass them. Some people you will pass faster than others.

And that will continue to hold true until knowledge about these biomechanics is democratised and therefore no longer a source of competitive advantage.

I think about this a lot (perhaps because I’m jaded hahaha)

I’ve been thinking about this notion a lot for some years already and it is kind of a source of motivation & comfort.

Because I am very competitive by nature.

And for almost my entire adult life I felt like I was pulling a ball & chain behind me with my health. Particularly since 2014.

And so there are some folks that took a strong lead over me on this pecking order of life some years back already and probably figure they left me in the dust.

But I view that i’m closing the gap now. And i’m coming hard and fast. Such that eventually I will cruise right by them.

Maybe in a year. Maybe in a few years. Maybe it’ll even take longer than that.

But eventually it’ll happen because our trajectories are on opposing slopes. They are aging, thinking slower, probably feeling less and less energy, not handling stress as well, getting less creative, etc.

And i’m clocking up on all of these things for the past five years.

When I do catch up to them, they’re gonna think to themselves.. “Damn where did that mofo come from? I thought i’d dusted his ass.”

But by that point I’ll be looking at them from my rear view.

Closing thoughts

My message to my friend, John, at the end of the weekend was….

“Ok… you’re in your mid-50’s. You’ve had a tough run of life…. but are you gonna accept where life has placed you? Or do you have it in you to fight and claw your way back? Because I’m saying it’s possible.”

With that I gave him four mouthguards.

The tools to potentially change his spot in life’s pecking order. But it was definitely not going to be easy, nor was it going to be quick.

As his body had gone through a lot of damage. Just like the shape my beat-up body was in back in 2021 when I first started this latest 5-year ascent back.

So the rest is up to him now.

Perhaps he’ll follow through on it and years from now he’ll go to our 30-year MBA reunion with our old classmates remarking “Damn John… you did really well for yourself!”

Or perhaps he’ll continue his current trajectory down because it was too ‘hard’ for him.

Whichever it is… at least there is a path now that in my experience… actually works.

There’s a ton of looksmaxxers out there flashing their before and after transformations.

Some of them have a lot of legitimate change.

Some of them are more a function of lighting, angle and neck positioning.

But today I want to break down how I view remodelling because I think it will clarify why I still consider myself the king of this game.

There are two dimensions to remodelling in my experience

The two dimensions are based on my theory that the skull & skeleton inflate like a balloon when you improve your biomechanics. Something I talked about here:

And so these two dimensions are:

1- The actual inflating (stretching) of the soft tissue
2- The bones shifting around under the soft tissue as more space is made from dimension 1

Makes sense no?

You stretch the soft tissue through this biomechanical process (ie. mouthguard + stretching) and as a result things have the space to shift around for the better as a result.

The more you inflate… the more things can shift around.

One dimension is a lever, the other is chance

I view the first lever (ie. the inflating) to be a lever that you can control. Meaning that you can wear a mouthguard more, you can spend more time stretching, you can get faster at stretching, etc.

The second lever (the bones shifting around) I consider absolute chance. Meaning that you have no real control over how the bones shift around. Your body will decide based on the compensation pattern it is in and how it is unwinding.

Some people will show very rapid change, whereas others will show slow change. And this honestly probably had very little to do with what they were doing and more to do with one person being luckier in terms of their compensation pattern.

But despite this…. it is natural for a person who shows rapid improvement in their symmetry or jawline to assume that they are ‘better’ at the process.

My experience tells me that they are wrong.

And rather they were just lucky that their compensation pattern allowed them to show visible change faster (ie. they got lucky on dimension 2). Often after this fast change… you will see that most of these folks will more or less plateau for an extended period after.

And the fact that it was luck is provable (in my view) because when others try to do the same exact ‘tricks’ that they do… very few of them will achieve the same result (ie. it’s like a lotto).

I wouldn’t be surprised if 90%+ of the folks following Oscar Patel are finding this out the hard way (particularly the ones that are not using a flat mouthguard).

Because he assumed he had some special skill that others didn’t know when in fact he mainly just got lucky on dimension 2 and is probably only slightly better than average on dimension 1. Let me explain.

Dimension 1 (inflating) is where you need to invest in getting fast

Ever since I first figured out the basics of how these biomechanics worked (back around 2016) I realized that it was the stretching part that you could control.

I would try to stretch specific parts of my face or neck or body… thinking that I could improve that specific section but it never worked that way.

Rather time and again I concluded that if you stretch one part of the body, you essentially stretch the whole thing. For example I would stretch my feet or legs and realize my bite had changed. Or i’d see lines on my face and notice that something had shifted in my face.

And therefore you just need to find the stretch that works the fastest for you.

For me that was my ‘fast method’.

And true speed in my experience always meant stretching and breaking the skin.

For example this is the skin stretching and breaking today (June 22, 2026) around my left ear.

This happens almost everyday these days after i do my stretches.

And this is my right ear.

Note that the skin is also breaking on many other parts of my skull, for example between my eyes, the top of my forehead, the top of my neck where it meets the hairline, etc.

And sometimes it stretches and breaks on various parts of my body as well. For example it happened at my waistline over a period of weeks just recently.

I know some of you are probably thinking to yourself.. “Ken you got Psoriasis dude…”

But I can tell you with 100% certainty that I do not. If I do not do my stretches.. this does not happen. Period.

There is direct cause & effect.

I’ve tested it many times in the earlier days as well. And note that I’m doing my ‘fast method’ on and off for almost 10 yrs.

For example I was breaking thru the skin daily back in November 2024 when I wrote this article:

I have been able to break thru my skin daily for about the past two years or so.

And my skull is ‘inflating’ and remodeling as I do.

I know because I see lines as things shift and note how the shape of my skull and face is changing. I’m slowly putting the angles back in.

Dimension 1 is where the true kings are crowned

So to conclude… it is the people that are stretching/inflating the fastest who in my book are the true kings in this game.

And the very fastest are likely going to be able to stretch and break through the skin relatively consistently as I am.

A fair number of people have already written to me and told me that they do achieve this, but not consistently.

Consistency is, in my experience, a function of how well you ‘feel’ how this works on you skull. There is a cycle to it, which is how my fast method works.

I put a stretch into the system, then I take in slack and take out what I like to call ‘torque’, which i’ve always found to be key to helping nudge the structures of the skull into change faster.

I’ve done this for ~10 years on my body and it has always worked plus/minus the same (ie. the skin always stretched and broke). It also always coincided with the time when my skull remodelled for the better the fastest.

And while it may work slightly differently on some folks… logic dictates that since our skulls and skeletons are all engineered the same… the same process likely works on everyone.

The people that are not breaking through the skin (which is the vast majority of looksmaxxers out there)… are just not going very fast on dimension 1 in my view.

And remember that there is a soft tissue ‘end’

I’ve talked about this in the past, but I think it’s good to iterate it again.

There is an ‘end’ in my experience and I achieved it at least once before. But it was many years ago.

I talked about it in this article which i wrote back in July 2024:

Essentially when you can put a balled up paper towel under your lower lip (as in the above photo) and there is no longer a crease (at the top of the arrows)… you have hit the ‘end’.

Which in my view/experience means the soft tissue is fully inflated and the skeleton and skull are correctly positioned.

Why is this chin area my gauge for the ‘end’?

Well because it’s when i broke thru the skin of this chin area and got rid of the crease that my entire skeleton and skull aligned like it never had before.

And i have a strong feeling the same will be true of every human being.

So it is a race to the ‘end’.

And until you hit the ‘end’… in my book you are not in a position to make any conclusions about the limitations of this process.

Because you ain’t done yet.

And in many cases (based on my experience)… you are probably years away from being done.

Closing thoughts

Today i wanted to clear the air about how I view that this biomechanical game works.

As many folks believe that the person who looks the best in a photo is the best at these biomechanics.

And that is not my experience or view at all. Because these folks simply got lucky on dimension 2 and are still not able to break through the skin on dimension 1 (ie. they are still slow).

Though whoever prefers to continue to believe that can be my guest.

It’s all subjective after all… till someone hits the ‘end’ and demonstrates that they are the true Jedi Knight of this game.

Maybe someone will beat me there.

But from my current vantage point… I highly doubt it ;)

Because even if the person looks good and their skeleton is in relatively good shape… they will still probably find they are years away from being able to get rid of the crease and thus hitting the ‘end’.

And their body still has a lot of ‘inflating’ and remodelling to do before it gets there.

Anyway, as I like to say…. “It’s a game to the end.”

I’m a big Knicks fan and I just caught the game 5 this morning when I woke up.

It was yet another terrific come-from-behind victory to win the NBA finals.

It was the first time they’d won since 1973 (3 years before I was born).

And yet the Knicks were the reason I got into basketball back around 1988 when I was around 11 years old. That was the time of Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley and Mark Jackson. And then a few years later came folks like John Starks.

I was a huge fan back then and would try to catch almost every game on tv.

But for many years after that time I hadn’t been that into basketball till this season….

…this year I tried to catch almost every Knicks game on Youtube (at least the highlights). It was a team that seemed to have something special about them again (like the days when they had Ewing & Starks).

Anyway, i’m not gonna bore you by rambling on about the Knicks, but watching the finals did give me the inspiration for today’s article, which is about ‘authenticity’.

You see there were tons of stars courtside watching the Knicks like Adam Sandler, Taylor Swift, Kylie Jenner, Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, etc.

But there was one person who stood out as being far more authentically passionate than anyone else. By a lot.

And that was Timothée Chalamet (the acting star who has done films like Dune, Wonka and many more.

The reason for that in my view… is that the guy has very solid biomechanics, which allows him to come off very authentic naturally.

First let’s see Timothée in action

When you see Timothée he always gives off this authentic, edgy vibe.

Like he’s just naturally passionate and fearless.

For example watch the video of him above in the Finals where he starts yelling at some Knicks fans and then runs in and hugs them. How many celebrities do you know could pull that off and make it look authentic?

Not many is the answer.

In fact I can’t think of one off the top of my head. They would all look fake.

But for Timothée… if you follow him a bit off camera you see that he is pretty much always this same edgy, authentic guy.

And he doesn’t need alcohol or drugs to pull it off. It’s just him.

Here’s another video above where he ripped off his shirt after game 4 and then grabbed the ET channel’s microphone.

The guy has something about him that I bet even most top celebrities are jealous of. He’s just ‘real’ in a way that most of them cannot be.

Timothy’s authenticity allows him to pull off things most others can’t

There are many actors that can play many different personalities when they are on camera. Folks like Leonardo Dicaprio come to mind.

But off camera…. Dicaprio does not come off that edgy or passionate.

At least for many years.

When he was young though… I actually do think young Leo had it.

Leo lost it pretty early in his adult life though (in my view). As his biomechanics took a turn for the worse.

Whereas Chalamet seems to be retaining his much better (and longer).

And it’s what allows him to do things most actors would never even consider. Like showing up in this rap video below.

You can tell he’s passionate about the music and it’s kind of like he belongs in this video.

He pulls it off.

He’s “authentic” even in unusual and difficult situations.

Clav is also an example to a lesser extent

Someone asked me a little while back why I thought Clav has blown up recently.

And I didn’t hesitate to answer.

It’s very simple… the guy has pretty solid biomechanics naturally and so he comes off authentic.

I (and most people) probably don’t agree with what he is saying… but he doesn’t come off fake when he says it. Whereas a lot of these other looksmaxxing influencers just don’t have that same level of authenticity (they seem more scripted and less interesting).

And quite often Clav’s put in situations that most people would not feel comfortable in. I’ve seen quite a number of clips where someone is hostile towards him and he pretty much always keeps his cool and does not back down.

So while i’m not a fan… I can understand why his fans watch him.

For many of them he probably represents the version of themselves they would ‘like to be’. The ballsy one that speaks his mind even when the people around him are likely going to react negatively to it.

But i do think Clav will eventually mess it up by doing something artificial (I heard he has started aligners) and at some point he’ll lose his authenticity and his newfound ‘stardom’ will probably depart him just as fast as it came.

Because to have staying power in this game of authenticity… you need to know how to keep your biomechanics tight. And he’s got all the wrong ideas about how that works.

My ‘authenticity’ has improved consistently the last few years

So how did I arrive at these conclusions about the connection between authenticity and biomechanics?

Simple. I experienced them myself.

In the years when I was not doing well my ‘authenticity’ would vanish. I’d be in my head when i was around people. Thinking about what they wanted to hear. Thinking about how I wanted them to like me.

This almost never happens to me anymore. Simply because my biomechanics has improved (ie. i made no other effort).

I almost never have any internal dialogue in my head when I’m talking to new people and so i come off more authentic.

In part because when you’re not in your own head it allows you to actually listen to what they are saying and react to it.

So conversations feel more natural and interesting.

Biomechanics is more than just aesthetics

I’ve been observing this connection between biomechanics and authenticity for a number of years already.

And to me it’s obvious.

But it’s important to realize that biomechanics is not the same as physical attractiveness even though they do generally correlate.

So it’s not that all better looking people are more authentic. That is obviously not always the case with certain good looking celebrities who come off pretty fake.

Rather for me biomechanics is not just about the physical, it is also about function. And authenticity is one of those invisible signals that I’m always paying attention to in order to determine how good the person’s biomechanics really are.

If they’re stuck in their head and reacting slow… i know that something is likely not biomechanically correct even though things look relatively good from the outside.

Closing thoughts

Authenticity is considered this natural talent in society today.

It helps you in pretty much anything you do. Acting being one of them.

Which is probably why Timothée Chalamet has risen from very humble beginnings to being considered one of the top 100 actors today.

But in my experience it has almost nothing to do with talent and everything to do with biomechanics.

If you wanna come off ‘authentic’ you need to fix your brain so it reacts passionately and naturally. You cannot be stuck in your own head.

And the way you do that…. is you fix the structure that houses that brain (ie. the skull) via these biomechanics that I talk about.

You see… with time as you do this process you’ll learn that good biomechanics gives you an entire arsenal of weapons that you start to wield better and better.

Which gives you all kinds of advantages in this game we call ‘life’.

My dad sent me this video below over the weekend.

It’s by a former teacher turned cognitive neuroscientist who focuses on human learning.

He starts the clip by boldly saying: “Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.”

GenZ is scoring more poorly on everything from attention to memory to IQ. Even though they go to more school.

He starts crossing off other possible explanations (eg. says that it cant be biology since it’s too short a time period, etc).

And concludes that its the digital tools that are available in school today. Essentially he is blaming the slide on digital technology.

As if this is some big coverup by ‘Big Tech’ which is victimizing our youth.

I rolled my eyes. Because I think he’s completely wrong.

I am very confident it is biomechanics.

What i’ve learned from observing my 11-year old son

I feel like observing my son (who now has pretty good biomechanics) has given me an inside view into both GenZ and Gen Alpha. Note that he was born in 2014 and Gen Alpha officially starts from 2013.

That said I see lots of GenZers in his high school plus I work with a number of them (up to age 29 is considered GenZ).

And what I noticed with my own son is that yes… he indeed uses his iPad a ton, plays a lot more online games than i did when i was his age (I was playing the old school Nintendo back then), and watches a ton of Youtube (whereas in the 80’s I’d watch sitcoms like “Family Ties” and “The Cosby Show”.

All-in-all he does spend a lot more time on a screen than i did and also spends a lot less time on his homework (but I was a nerd and he is not).

His cognitive function, however, is solid in my view.

For example, I played on my high school chess team and was the #1 board for three years in a row. My son, however, beats me almost half the time these days and I don’t really think i play any worse than i did in high school (as my brain works quite well these days).

Also I can see him figuring tons of things out on the fly as he is playing his networked video games.

So my experience observing him is that he is lazier than i was, spends more time on screens than I did, but he is just as sharp.

I also think times have changed

By this I mean that when I was in school getting good grades was a pretty secure path to a solid job and career.

When I graduated college in 1999 I had about five high paying job offers from a mix of consultancies and investment banks.

This has changed massively with all the layoffs in the past couple of decades. Stable careers are few and far between these days.

And so I do not see kids these days having nearly as much faith in traditional careers. Most of them have seen how that has NOT worked out very well for their parents.

And many of the successful role models they see on Youtube (eg. MrBeast, etc.) were not the ones that got good grades. Rather they were the ones who were also playing lots of games and learning to make money from what they’re passionate about.

So my point here is… I don’t think kids see the point of studying and getting good grades nearly as much as my generation did. And so this naturally hits their motivation.

The generational slide

The biggest thing I have noticed among the younger generation is how they are often more biomechanically impaired than my generation was.

Particularly if they come from places like the US.

Why is that?

Well I’d already written my hypothesis about that in this article:

Basically each generation gets a bit worse because a compensated mother likely compensates the child while still in the womb.

And so while you don’t genetically ‘inherit’ biomechanical collapse… you do potentially physically sort of inherit it.

And how I see this manifest itself in these youngsters is across numerous dimensions:

• They are generally ‘softer’ (ie. less confident, etc)

• They focus and retain information worse

• They are more prone to emotional swings and things like depression

• They have poorer attention to detail

• etc.

But do I think this stems from them having had more access to digital tools?

No. I think it’s almost completely about biomechanical collapse.

My own little ‘experiment’

I like using my company as my own little science experiment.

I offer a free Reviv to everyone in the company. Some accept and use it while others don’t.

Then I mentally sort of track the trajectory of folks over time.

And I pretty consistently can tell that the folks are wearing the Reviv in a disciplined way are clocking up in terms of attention to detail, how efficient they are, etc.

Whereas the folks who politely declined are the ones who I see making little to no progress (sorry to those of them who are reading this but this is straighttalk haha).

Some of the ones that declined are far more educated and experienced than the ones who use it. And so while they might have a naturally higher IQ and ability to deal with complexity…. it often doesn’t give them an advantage on things like their attention to detail and productivity.

And I can proudly say that despite the fact that I just turned 49 yrs old and am ~2x older than most of my team members… I more than hold my own with all of them in terms of productivity, focus and attention to detail.

Why?

Because what i’ve learned the past decade is that it’s not about age. It’s about biomechanics and trajectory of biomechanics (eg. I’m improving very quickly).

Closing thoughts

Once you start to see the world through my lens you start noticing just how often you see conclusions that are based on correlation rather than causation.

Today’s article is just another example.

Neuroscientist blames technology on the cognitive slide that has happened the last couple of generations.

But completely misses what I consider to be the true root cause - BIOMECHANICS.

And because biomechanics so directly influences so many things… you see this same exact pattern across tons of fields.

For example why have things like ADHD, depression, obesity, and neurological disease ramped up?

Same thing… biomechanics.

How will I be proven correct one day?

Simple.

One day these biomechanics will be understood and leveraged by almost everyone and you’ll see all of these issues that we’d blamed on other things start magically clocking back up. Mark my words ;)

A couple weeks back someone in our community asked me about my coffee usage and whether it had changed.

And i’d honestly never thought about it before.

But as I thought about the question… I realized my consumption of coffee had in fact changed quite dramatically in the last 4-5 years.

Enough so that I think it warrants writing about as perhaps some of you might experience something similar.

First, some statistics on coffee

Coffee is not just a beverage. At this point it’s a full-blown cultural institution.

66% of Americans drink coffee daily, consuming an average of 3.1 cups per day — equivalent to over 400 million cups served nationwide every single day.

The US coffee market was valued at nearly $23 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $32 billion by 2033.

And then there’s the cafe explosion.

The US cafes and bars market is set to nearly double from $81 billion in 2024 to $165 billion by 2033, fueled by changing consumer behavior, growing coffee culture, and what researchers are now calling “social dining needs.”

Starbucks alone operates over 10,000 company-owned US locations.

Independent specialty cafes are multiplying in every city neighborhood.

Coffee has become a ritual, an identity, a social lubricant, a productivity prop.

The cafe is the new office, the new living room, the new therapist’s waiting room.

People don’t just drink coffee anymore — they perform it.

The caffeine debate

The science on caffeine is genuinely mixed, and anyone who tells you it’s definitively good or bad is oversimplifying.

On the positive side: a comprehensive review consolidating over 100 publications found coffee linked to reduced inflammation, improved glucose metabolism, and increased fat oxidation, with drivers who used caffeine staying alert showing a 63% lower risk of crashing.

A review published in Ageing Research Reviews found that regular coffee consumption added almost two extra years of healthy aging on average.

On the risk side: the FDA recommends a maximum intake of 400mg per day — roughly two to three cups — with excessive consumption linked to insomnia, headaches, and anxiety.

Research also shows that consuming more than five cups per day increases risk of certain conditions and mortality, particularly in people with slower caffeine metabolism.

So the honest answer is: moderate coffee consumption appears to be fine and may actually be beneficial. Heavy dependence is a different story. And the question nobody is asking is: what drives heavy dependence in the first place?

I’m a coffee lover

I’ve been drinking coffee my entire adult life.

Actually, it started even earlier than that.

When I was around 11, during my annual trips to Japan to visit my family there, I fell hard for the canned sweet coffee-milk drinks that are everywhere there — in every vending machine, every convenience store. It’s a whole culture over there and I was completely in on it from the first sip.

As an adult I never really got into making my own coffee at home. I’m a cafe person. Ever since my late nights at the cafe studying in college.

I never had one of those fancy ‘real’ Italian-styled coffee machines in my house and so it just never tasted nearly as good when I made it at home.

For the past six years, living in Thailand where it’s hot basically every day of the year, I’ve gravitated almost entirely to iced cappuccinos. Cold, easy, caffeinated. Works perfectly in the heat.

And this shop above, Cafe Amazon, is one of the chains I frequent here. For ~$4 I can get a tall glass of Ice Cappuccino delivered to my house in about 20 minutes. That is when you know you’ve got it good!

Anyway, I genuinely love coffee.

I’m not writing this as someone who quit coffee and found enlightenment.

I’m writing this as someone who noticed something about how often I drank it.

I found that I drank a lot more when I was more collapsed

There were periods in my life the past decade — where coffee wasn’t really optional. I could easily put down four or five cups in a day without thinking about it.

It wasn’t about enjoying the taste. It was a dependency. I always wanted one nearby.

If I was trying to concentrate on something and didn’t have coffee, there was a level of restlessness to it — like part of my brain was waiting for the caffeine before it would properly engage. I’d sip on it constantly, refill it, reach for another one every hour or two during the day.

Particuarly in 2014, the year that the Vietnamese dentist filed my teeth down, I remember wanting to make myself a fresh coffee almost every hour. It was like fresh caffeine was the only way i’d get my brain to concentrate for even 5 minutes back then.

Looking back now, I think I might know what may have been happening.

When the skull deflates and the brain gets compressed, neurological function drops. Alertness drops. The ability to concentrate, to sustain attention, to feel mentally present — all of it degrades.

And caffeine is a very effective short-term patch for that. It forces a neurological response that the brain is struggling to generate on its own.

So you end up chasing it. Cup after cup. Not because you’re addicted to the taste — because your brain genuinely needs the chemical stimulus to function at the level you need it to function.

At least that’s my interpretation.

Now I only drink about a cup a day

These days I only drink one coffee a day and half the time I don’t even finish it.

Plus I no longer need it be fresh from a cafe. I just stock my fridge with the ready-to-drink iced cappuccinos.

The dependency is gone.

I don’t feel the pull toward it I used to feel.

I don’t hit a wall mid-afternoon and think “I need a coffee right now.”

My alertness and ability to concentrate don’t seem to hinge on whether I’ve had caffeine. I drink it because I genuinely enjoy the taste and the ritual — not because my brain is holding me hostage for it.

It’s a noticeable shift.

And it tracks precisely with the improvements in my biomechanical structure over the same period.

One possible interpretation… when the skull is properly inflated and the brain isn’t being compressed, the nervous system functions the way it’s supposed to.

Trigeminal stimulation is working. Blood and cerebrospinal fluid are circulating properly. The brain generates its own alertness and focus — because the physical environment it’s sitting in allows it to.

You don’t need to outsource that to caffeine anymore.

Closing thoughts

I’m not telling you to quit coffee. I love coffee. I’ll probably drink it for the rest of my life.

But if you’re the kind of person who feels genuinely dysfunctional without four or five cups a day — if you feel like you can’t concentrate or get going without it — I’d encourage you to consider whether that’s really about the coffee, or whether the coffee is compensating for something else entirely.

The caffeine debate in nutritional science will go on forever. But nobody in that debate is asking why certain people’s brains seem to need the chemical stimulus so badly while others are perfectly functional on one cup or none.

I think the answer is structural. And I think fixing the structure makes the dependency go away on its own — not through willpower, but because the underlying problem has been addressed.

Here’s something that took me years to fully appreciate.

The body isn’t stupid. In fact, it’s extraordinarily intelligent. And one of the most underappreciated things it does is compensate — constantly, without you ever knowing — for structural issues that would otherwise cause problems.

The trouble starts when you override that compensation. And that’s exactly what modern dentistry does, over and over, to millions of people who think they’re improving themselves.

The body is extremely smart

You’ve probably met someone who has noticeably crooked teeth — real misalignment, not just slightly uneven — but who is physically impressive.

Great posture, strong body, good energy, solid presence. You look at their teeth and wonder how they got away with it.

A young Arnold Schwarzenegger is a good example of this (pictured above). Even when he was winning Mr. Universe bodybuilding awards, he had very clearly imperfect teeth.

So how is that possible? I mean have I not said in the past that teeth are a reflection of the skeleton?

Well the answer in my view is that the body compensates very well and finds its own equilibrium.

When teeth are crooked but natural…. the jaw, skull, and spine arrange themselves around whatever issues there are. It’s not perfect, but you don’t need perfect to still have a terrific, well-functioning body.

The soft tissue is a bit deflated but the skeleton was allowed to compensate on its own.

The nervous system has organized itself around it. The whole body has found a working solution.

This is nature doing what it does very well — solve for function within the constraints it’s been given.

People with naturally imperfect teeth can have great biomechanics, great neurology, great physical capability. Because even if the architecture isn’t textbook, it’s natural.

When you tamper with it, things go wrong

The problems begin the moment someone “fixes” their teeth.

The moment you put braces or aligners or pull teeth to create space, you are not improving on nature — you are overriding it.

The compensation system the body spent years building suddenly has suddenly had a sledgehammer applied to it.

The geometry it organized itself around is gone, replaced with something artificial that the skull, jaw, and spine were never prepared for.

And this new dental geometry is never biomechanically correct. Orthodontists think about alignment in two dimensions — they want the teeth straight when you look at them from the front.

They are not thinking about the curve of spee. They are not thinking about supporting multiple jaw positions. They are not thinking about what happens to the soft tissue surrounding the skull when they apply these artificial changes.

So you override the body’s compensation mechanism with something that isn’t just different — it’s structurally inferior. The skull starts to deflate. The spine starts to compensate for the new geometry, poorly. The whole system, which was working just fine, is now fighting against a disruption it didn’t choose and can’t fully resolve.

That’s what I call biomechanical collapse. And it’s what I see, over and over, in people who “fixed” their teeth and also spent a decade iterating on myself to figure out how it works.

Young Tom Hardy is a good example

Tom Hardy in his 20s and early 30s was one of the most physically impressive actors in Hollywood.

Not just in terms of what he could build for a role — the Bane physique, the Warrior physique — but in terms of raw structural quality. Wide jaw, great facial dimension, a body that responded to training in the way that only structurally sound people’s bodies do.

He was known for his transformative roles that demanded intense physical preparation. And he delivered. Every time. The body was responding because the foundation underneath was solid.

Now look at his teeth during that period. In the early 2000s, Hardy’s teeth were completely natural — slightly crooked, not particularly bright, with a signature uneven edge that gave his smile a rough, masculine charm.

Nobody would call them perfect. But the body built around those teeth was performing great. That’s the compensation mechanism working exactly as it should.

His neurology was sharp, he looked great, his physical output was extraordinary. That’s what a body looks like when the structural environment is intact — even if the teeth aren’t Instagram-ready.

When he changed his teeth, his body changed

Over the years, Hardy’s smile underwent a noticeable transformation — his teeth gradually became more aligned, whiter, and more uniform. This happened from around 2018 or so.

The natural imperfections that defined his early-career look were refined away through what dental observers believe included whitening, possibly veneers, and possibly some orthodontic work (like clear aligners).

The smile got more polished, but in a subtle way. Tom wasn’t looking for the Hollywood ‘perfect’ smile.

Rather as you can see in this pic above his changes were subtle. He wanted to still more or less retain his authetic smile but just be a bit more aligned than before.

The problem is… that even small, artificial changes will impact the body.

In a recent interview with Esquire, Hardy — now 47 — admitted that his body has hit a wall. Two knee surgeries. A herniated disc. Sciatica. Plantar fasciitis. A pulled hip tendon. His words are worth reading directly: “It’s like it’s all falling to bits now, and it’s not going to get better.”

That is a man describing biomechanical collapse. And he’s only 48 (the same age as me).

Now compare that to Travis Pastrana, who I wrote about recently — a man who has broken over 90 bones, suffered more than 25 concussions, and is still competing at the Race of Champions at age 41. The difference isn’t the abuse each body took. The difference is the structural environment each body is operating from.

Why is Tom falling apart fast now?

Well in my view the answer is that the compensation system got overridden. And once that happens, the body stops healing the way it should — because it’s spending all of its resources trying to adapt to a structural environment it can never quite reconcile.

When it goes downhill it’s not just physical

The other thing you will find when people are sliding downhill from tampering with their body’s natural structure is that the slide is not just physical, it’s mental.

And I noticed signs of this with Tom. For example he’s had clashes with the producers of Mobland and was recently fired from the show.

Also he commented, “I’ll collapse like a house of cards under too much pressure,” not long ago about his need to change his body for different roles

This is a person who sounds like he is pretty stressed out.

And while i’m sure the pressure is real… my own experience is that you absorb it relatively easily when you’re biomechanically healthy. But it beats you up if you’re not.

Closing thoughts

Leave the body alone and it compensates brilliantly.

Intervene without understanding what you’re doing — which is what virtually every cosmetic dental procedure does — and you pull the foundation out from under it.

Tom Hardy’s early body was a product of great natural structure and an intact compensation mechanism. Tom Hardy’s current body is paying the price for what came after.

This is why you will see some people with great bodies but very crooked teeth out there.

And some people with very nice, straight teeth but bodies that are falling apart.

Respect the intelligence of your body.

That’s my advice.

I saw this image above on my Facebook feed earlier in the week and it struck me.

Were Brenda and Dylan from the 90’s hit show 90210 really dead?

You see it’s important to remember that I lived outside of the US since mid-2018 and so I missed both of their passings.

I was struggling myself at the time when they both passed and so I was more in survival mode and didn’t really have the time or motivation to stay up with US pop culture.

And so it came as an honest shock when I saw that two of the biggest stars of the 1990s were gone.

I still remember being a young high school student in New York sitting in the kitchen of my mother’s house and watching this show religiously every week. It was the glamorous life I hoped to lead one day (note I was an unfashionable dork at the time).

Anyway I looked it up and it was true…. both died before 55 despite having seemingly very good biomechanics while they were on the show.

It reminded me a bit of the story of Matthew Perry dying, which i’d already written about earlier.

I decided I needed to dig in.

About Beverly Hills, 90210

Beverly Hills, 90210 premiered on Fox in October 1990 and became one of the defining cultural events of the decade.

The show followed Brenda and her twin brother Brandon Walsh, who moved from Minnesota to attend high school in Beverly Hills, navigating the wealthy and beautiful world they’d landed in. It ran for ten seasons and launched careers that defined a generation.

The cast became genuine superstars. Jason Priestley, Jennie Garth, Tori Spelling, Ian Ziering — all household names.

But two actors stood above the rest in terms of cultural impact: Luke Perry, who played brooding bad-boy Dylan McKay, and Shannen Doherty, who played lead character Brenda Walsh.

Their chemistry on screen made the show.

Their real-life turbulence kept it in the tabloids.

Shannen was known for feuds with cast members and being difficult to the point that the producers wanted her off the show.

Luke, on the other hand, was typically in the media for his massive teen-idol status.

The Brenda & Dylan love story

Brenda falling in love with “bad boy” Dylan McKay was the central romantic engine of the early show — she lost her virginity to him, survived a robbery with him, navigated her first real heartbreak through him.

Perry and Doherty had a screen chemistry that felt real because it was raw — two young actors with enormous energy and presence, playing out a teenage love story that millions of people watched every week.

It was an on-screen relationship that people remembered for decades. And both of the people who made it happen are now gone.

They both passed away very young

Luke Perry, known best for his role as Dylan McKay on Beverly Hills 90210, died on March 4, 2019, after suffering a massive stroke.

He was just 52 years old.

The cause was attributed to a blood clot blocking a blood vessel, cutting off blood flow and oxygen to his brain. His sudden death left loved ones stunned — by all accounts he had seemed to be in good health prior to his passing.

His autopsy pointed to atherosclerosis — a buildup of plaque in the arteries — as the primary driver, combined with family history. His father had died at 35 from a heart attack. The medical establishment chalked it up to genetics and diet.

Nobody asked whether there was a structural reason his cardiovascular system was under that kind of pressure at 52.

Then Shannen.

She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, went into remission two years later, then announced in 2020 that the cancer had returned as stage 4.

By 2023, it had spread to her brain and bones. She underwent brain surgery, multiple rounds of radiation, and chemotherapy infusions delivered through ports implanted in her chest.

She died on July 13, 2024 at her home in Malibu, California. She was 53.

Two people from the same show. Dead within five years of each other. Neither made it past 53.

Was dental work involved in Luke’s case?

There is no smoking gun here.

For Luke Perry, I haven’t found documented evidence of major cosmetic dental intervention.

When you look at his teeth in his photo above (probably in his 20’s) you can see that the back teeth come in a bit like a horseshoe.

And then later when you see him in this photo that was probably around age 50 you can see that the teeth still do come in.

Which to me shows that he never fixed it with dental work. As a dentist could easily convince someone to fix this ‘imperfect smile’ with something like braces or a palate expander.

However, Luke, seems to have chosen not to do that. Which coincides with what I know of his personality (ie. he wasn’t very superficially-driven and rather was known for being low key and grounded).

So I think what we are seeing with Luke is biomechanical collapse the old fashioned way (ie. not dentistry-induced). Rather just “au naturel”.

How about for Shannen’s case?

Shannen did appear to have braces when she was a freshmen in high school back in 1986 as you see in the pic above (you can find the original here).

And her story lines up with what I think you’ll find with lots of cases where someone had braces in their teens.

They seem to be healthy and even attractice for some period of time but then start to head downhill and age very rapidly a lot sooner than others.

For example in this image in 2024 (below) she already looks a lot different than wwhen she was on the show.

In general i’d say that her skeleton and skull had evolved in a more unnatural way than what we saw with Luke Perry.

Plus she had a history, even while on 90210, of being very difficult. Which also points to something unnatural going on as I hear something similar from many folks that had braces as teens.

So to conclude I do think that the braces as a teen played a key role in her decline and eventual death later on.

It was the damage to the foundation early on that led to an eventual collapse.

Closing thoughts

Two of the most recognizable faces of the 1990s, both dead before 55.

Luke Perry’s stroke gets attributed to genetics and cholesterol. Shannen Doherty’s cancer gets attributed to delayed diagnosis and bad luck. Both explanations are incomplete.

When I look at where people’s skulls and spinal structures were by the time these illnesses hit, I see the same thing I always see — a body that had been under sustained structural pressure for years before the disease manifested.

A skull deflating. A spine compensating. The health being a function of those two things.

The body doesn’t lie. The structure always tells the story before the diagnosis does.

Two icons of a generation. Gone too soon.

Most people look at Travis Pastrana and think: that guy is insane. And they’re not wrong.

But there’s something else going on with Travis that almost nobody talks about — and that is the foundation that allows him to take all the damage from the crazy stuff he does and bounce back from it.

It’s not luck.

In my view it’s clearly biomechanics.

Who is Travis Pastrana

Travis Pastrana is an American professional athlete known for his success across multiple disciplines — freestyle motocross, rally racing, NASCAR, and stunt performance. Born in 1983, he was competing nationally on a dirt bike before most kids have their driver’s license.

He rose to prominence in the early 2000s, winning titles in the AMA Motocross and Supercross 125cc divisions in 2000 and 2001. He became a multi-time X Games gold medalist and achieved numerous milestones in freestyle motocross, including being the first person to land a double backflip in competition in 2006.

The achievements kept stacking. He became a four-time Rally America champion, competed in NASCAR’s Nationwide and Truck Series, co-founded Nitro Circus in 2003, and in 2018 paid tribute to his childhood hero Evel Knievel by successfully completing three record-breaking jumps in a single night — 52 cars, 16 buses, and the Caesars Palace Fountain — for a total of 484 feet of jumps. In 2022 he added a World Powerboat Championship to the list.

By any measure, Travis Pastrana is one of the most decorated action sports athletes who ever lived.

Travis has damaged himself a lot

Here’s where it gets hard to believe.

According to a 2019 interview, Pastrana has broken more than 90 bones and suffered more than 25 concussions.

Just have a look at some of his crashes in the video above and you get an idea for how he managed to do all of that.

There is a fan-maintained webpage dedicated to tracking his cumulative injuries. The list includes: seven broken wrists, fifteen knee surgeries, four tibia plateau fractures, a separated shoulder three times, a broken left foot, a broken right foot, a broken left tibia and fibula, a dislocated kneecap, torn ACL, PCL and LCL, a broken pelvic bone, multiple hip fractures, a dislocated spinal column, internal bleeding, and a broken left elbow.

At age 14, a jump went so badly wrong that his spine actually separated from his pelvis. He was left in a wheelchair for five months. “I was the third known person to have suffered that injury,” he said, “and the other two were both paralyzed — I was very lucky.”

In 2022, he was seriously injured again while base jumping in Fort Lauderdale, breaking his pelvis — which he had broken multiple times before — and nearly bleeding out.

By his own account: “I’ve been out cold on film about 30 times. Broken bones is a hard one to keep track of.”

This is a human body that has been through things most people cannot fathom.

But he’s always recovered quickly

Here’s the thing. Travis Pastrana has not just survived all of this — he has repeatedly bounced back and gone right back to competing at the highest level.

After his near-fatal spinal separation at 14, which put him in a wheelchair for five months, he bounced back so fast that nurses were marveling at his recovery rate. His doctor acknowledged at 16 that he was “at the pinnacle of physical conditioning” and would “have to do something very foolish not to heal.”

He delayed shoulder surgery for nearly a decade — despite his shoulder popping out of its socket multiple times per race — because he didn’t want to miss four months of competition. When he finally had it done in 2012, he returned quickly.

After injuries from the 2022 base jumping incident, his publicist confirmed he was expected to make a full recovery — and he went on to confirm his tenth appearance at the Race of Champions in Sydney in 2025.

The pattern is relentless. Catastrophic injury. Rapid recovery. Back on track.

Now look at Travis Pastrana’s face. Wide jaw, solid structure, good symmetry. The kind of skull that reflects a body that is fundamentally sound underneath. And I don’t think those two things — the rapid recovery and the structural condition — are a coincidence.

Good biomechanics make recovery faster and easier

I’ve written before about the body’s capacity to heal itself.

My view is that the body is an extraordinary healing machine, but that capacity is very dependent on the structural condition it’s operating from.

When the skull is inflated and the bite is healthy, the spine sits properly, the nervous system functions without compression, blood and lymph circulate freely, and every organ in the body has the space it needs to do its job.

That’s the baseline from which healing happens.

When the skull deflates — through dental interventions, structural collapse, loss of vertical height — everything gets compressed and distorted. The body is fighting the distortion constantly, which means it has far less capacity left over for actual healing.

Recovery slows. Injuries linger. Surgeries don’t fully resolve. People end up in rehab for months doing exercises that don’t work because the underlying structural environment is never addressed.

Travis Pastrana has had that structural foundation working in his favor for his entire life. His body isn’t recovering despite the abuse it’s taken — it’s recovering because the platform underneath is solid.

The nervous system can communicate properly. The skeletal alignment means the body isn’t fighting itself. Resources go toward repair instead of compensation.

This is also, in my view, why you see athletes with poor biomechanics — narrow faces, collapsed spines, history of orthodontics — get one serious injury and never come back the same way.

The structure wasn’t there to support the recovery.

It’s not willpower. It’s physics.

I’ve experienced this on myself

Over the past decade i’ve seen this same pattern play out on myself time and again.

Less from major injuries like Pastrana, but more for small injuries and getting sick.

When my biomechanics were getting worse I was just far more susceptible to illness and getting injured.

When it was getting better…. getting ill seemed almost impossible and if I got injured it was typically a very rapid recovery.

In a way you even feel this in your gut. When I was not doing well my body was telling me to protect myself, get more sleep, etc because it knew that it was weak.

Whereas now as i’m improving these past few years my body generally tells me that I am very resilient. It can take damage and bounce back. I just feel it.

Closing thoughts

Travis Pastrana is one of the most injured athletes in the history of sport.

He’s also one of the most resilient. Most people credit the mental side — the toughness, the refusal to quit, the insane pain tolerance. And maybe that’s part of it.

But I think the bigger part of the story is the structure he was born with and has maintained.

• A wide, well-developed skull.

• A spine that, despite everything it’s been through, keeps returning to a functional baseline.

• A body that heals fast because the environment it’s healing in is fundamentally sound.

The lesson here isn’t “be tougher.” The lesson is that if you want your body to recover from anything — injury, illness, surgery, stress — the most important variable is the structural condition you’re operating from.

Fix the biomechanics. The rest follows.

Sometimes folks write me and tell me a bit about their lives.

Some folks are really in a very difficult situation after many years of suffering.

They spent their savings on treatments that they had high hopes for, which let them down.

They were unable to work for stretches of time because of health limitations and when they did it was at a fraction of their capability. Which in turn limited their earning potential.

And so now they are in a position that I like to think of as “life on the one yard line.”

They are just living to survive.

Most of their hope has been crushed by past promises made by dentists and medical practitioners. Promises that always turned out to be false.

Today’s article is dedicated to these folks.

I had a glimpse into what that life looks like… and it honestly scared the hell out of me.

We all start out thinking life is gonna be good

When life first starts out and we’re kids we like to think we all have a pretty good shot in life.

Study hard, work hard, do right by people… and life should work out ok.

We can all potentially be the President one day. Or found a great company. Or at least make a difference and be happy.

That is kind of what we’re brainwashed to think in most developed countries.

So we all start off with this amazing hope and plan for our lives.

We think of the achievements we’re going to have in our career. The amazing family we’re gonna have. etc.

But for some folks things head downhill quite early

For many folks these days things start heading downhill quite early.

There are so many people i’ve met through our community and various DM’s who were already experiencing major health issues in their teens.

Often triggered by extractions, orthodontics, etc.

And all of a sudden they had to stop thinking about the future because they were having too many problems right now.

They were already on defense.

Going to doctors, taking various pharmaceuticals (eg. antidepressants, etc), and making excuses for why they weren’t able to push ahead.

They probably thought there was something wrong with them.

Perhaps it was genetic?

Perhaps they attribute it to some bad event or stress that happened in their lives.

Usually everyone comes up with some type of strategy to attribute their problems to logical reasons that make sense to them.

And it’s rarely things like dental work.

Things just continue to trend down for years

The problems for a lot of these folks i’m talking about don’t seem to go away.

Rather they get worse and compound.

They never get out of the blocks and perhaps need to continue living with their parents.

Some are not able to hold down real jobs.

Inside they perhaps feel like they’ve let their parents down. Like it’s their fault. They tried their best but it wasn’t good enough.

I honestly did not know what that felt like in the first couple of decades of my life. As I worked hard, got good grades, got a good job and generally got out of the blocks in life pretty well.

It wasn’t until 2014 when I was 37 years old that my big problems started because a TMJ dentist in Vietnam had filed down my back teeth and everything started to spiral down.

After awhile i was in the thick of it. My health was going up and down for the next 7 years and it was impacting all aspects of my life.

I needed to start coming up with excuses to justify why I’d all of a sudden seemingly turned into a loser who couldn’t hold down a job.

That was the situation I was in when this pic above was taken around 2018.

After moving my family to Boston in 2017 I already needed to move again in mid 2018. Because my health made it very difficult to sustain a relatively senior position in a political, US company.

And then I found myself struggling soon after I arrived in Moscow in 2018. Turns out dealing with politics and high pressure bosses in a foreign language isn’t any easier than doing it in your own language lol.

Each night I came home and looked at my son. And thought to myself how I was glad he wasn’t yet old enough to understand how his father had essentially become a loser.

Instead he looked at me like the hero.

And that gave me hope on those dark days to keep pushing forward.

Finally you’re at your own one yard line making your last stand

I consider mid-2020 my one yard line stand.

My health had been going up and down since 2014 (7 whole years).

My parents were tired of hearing me talk about teeth. My mother’s husband literally banned from talking about it in their house.

My marriage had a lot of issues as my wife was frustrated at what was happening with me and our lives as a result.

My now 6-year old son still wasn’t developing correctly and had major sleep issues despite ~5 years of trying lots of things.

And it was with this backdrop that I found myself in Bangkok, Thailand in a job that was completely the wrong fit for me (at least for the state I was in).

I’d done it again… moved my family into a situation that was not going to work out.

I’d already leveraged pretty much all of the contacts and goodwill I had left the past seven years to keep my career going. And now there was nowhere to turn.

And with all this happening I was probably in the worst shape i’d been healthwise since 2014 (the year all of this stuff had kicked off.)

I wanted to cry but there were no tears left.

There was no empathy to turn to. Nobody who understood that I’d just expended more effort the past 7 years than i had my entire life to essentially just go downhill anyway. And I was exhausted from it all.

When I left my job in Thailand in late 2020 I decided I was going to figure this “teeth thing” out once and for all and wasn’t going to take another job till I had.

So that’s what I did. I reviewed all my journals and writings from the past and started retesting everything.

Sometimes you throw a 99-yard touchdown

From late 2020 to late 2021 I iterated on all of the stuff I’d done in the past.

I got out my old tools like the ‘tracking splint’, the clipons, my trusty dental drill, articulating paper, etc.

I reviewed all my old notes about the curve of spee, a lingual bite, etc.

And it all started to make sense again.

It’s like i’d been in a haze for years since 2017 or so. Because everything I was concluding from my experiments were things i’d concluded before (back around 2016).

But I’d forgotten it because of all of the dentists i’d gone to in those intervening years (I particularly consider that I went in circles with ALF from about 2017-2020).

This time I was gonna leave all dentists out of it. I was gonna leave the thoughts of my old friend, Marcello, out of it. I was gonna do this purely based on logic. The Ken way.

And I was gonna derive the true rules to this game once and for all… or honestly I was done for.

And that’s exactly what i’d done by Fall 2021.

I threw a touchdown from the one yard line after having taken a lot of hard hits for about seven years.

Closing thoughts

My story today is about hope.

Because I know there are a lot of people out there that have either started this process or are about to start this process and probably feel like their lives are at the one yard line.

Many of them have probably even been through a lot more than I have.

Some of them never even had a chance to get out of the blocks in life and rather feel like they’ve been treading water since their teenage years.

I want you folks on that one yard line to look up and look downfield one last time. And throw for that end zone with everything you got.

Because this journey is not easy…

…but at least in my experience it is so very worth it.

The NBA fans out there are probably aware that the playoffs are in full swing.

And as a Lakers (and particularly Luka) fan I’ve been watching all of their games.

Today before the game started the commentator mentioned something interesting. He said that the Lakers head coach, JJ Redick, said that Lebron has the lowest body fat ratio in the team at 41 years old.

And of course he then went on to attribute that to the discipline and intensive workout routines that Lebron has maintained over the years.

I of course do not agree with any of that.

I think he would have had more or less the same body fat if he’d done no special workout routine and wasn’t even a professional athlete.

In fact… he’d probably even have a better body because he wouldn’t have worn down his teeth as much.

And the reason he has the lowest bodyfat in the team is very simple… he, by far, had better biomechanics than anyone in that Lakers team. The guy was an absolute beast in his prime.

But the point I want to make is a bit different today…. I want to discuss why Luka Dončić is considered the younger ‘future of the franchise’ despite being more collapsed than Lebron.

First let’s talk a bit about Luka Dončić

So i’m a huge fan of Luka Dončić.

Why?

Because he’s such an amazing scorer (probably the best in the NBA) despite being a pretty shitty athlete.

The guy has the biomechanics of perhaps a college player but definitely not someone on the All-NBA first team.

What is amazing about the guy is how he has taken an almost analytical approach to playing basketball. More so then anyone i’ve ever seen in my ~40 years of watching basketball.

He gets his defender with their weight on the wrong foot and creates just enough space to get his shot off.

Or he changes speed on his drive to the basket to get his defender to drop off him just enough to lay it in.

The guy pretty much never gets blocked despite being slow and not jumping very well. And this despite the fact that he shoots A LOT and teams are often throwing double teams with their best defenders at him.

I just find him so unique. Kind of an “anti-Michael Jordan” haha.

Luka is considered the future of the Lakers because he is younger than Lebron

Luka is only 27 years old right now.

Which is considered to be in your ‘prime’ in the NBA.

Lebron on the otherhand is 41.

So everyone refers to Luka as the future and Lebron as getting ready to retire.

This despite the fact that Lebron is in my view far more athletic than Luka still.

And athletic ability tends to correlate very strongly with biomechanical structure in my experience.

So in a way… Lebron is actually YOUNGER than Luka from a biomechanical perspective.

Which is something that is further supported by his better stamina, jumping ability, flexibility, strength, etc.

So is there any true advantage to being younger?

This is the next question you should be asking.

Does Luka have any true advantage over Lebron due to the fact that from an age perspective he is younger?

And the answer is yes, but not in the way you would think.

You see…. Lebron’s game very much depended on his athletic ability. His ability to jump out of the gym and go right around or even through people with his quickness and strength.

So the fact that he has declined biomechanically means that he is now playing at only a shadow of the level that he was playing at in his prime. And this despite the fact that he’s still biomechanically ‘superior’ to Luka.

Luka, on the otherhand, developed his game being biomechanically inferior. And so he’s able to operate at his peak level despite being ‘more collapsed’ than Lebron.

Therefore in a way Luka has the advantage that he can continue to play at around his peak level for another 10-15 years whereas Lebron would probably have become too much of a shadow of his former self in a year or two to not retire.

And so pride and media pressure will probably push Lebron to retire in a year or two.

But some interesting things to think about

Basically what i’m saying is that Lebron will probably retire in a year or two despite being biomechnically younger than Luka who is in his prime.

But the only reason for that is the type of game they play. Lebron depended a lot on his athletic prowess whereas Luka never did.

Now if Lebron were to able to develop the type of game that Luka has (ie. using his body very smartly and changing speeds to create shots) than in my view Lebron probably still has more years left in him in the NBA than Luka does.

And that is even without a mouthguard or any knowledge of biomechanics.

Because I don’t think ‘aging’ actually exists in reality. Which is something I explained here:

What we call ‘aging’ is just biomechanical collapse. And if someone is less collapsed than someone else then the reality (in my view) is that if all other things were equal… they have more years of playing pro ball ahead of them than the more collapsed person.

Closing thoughts

Today i’m trying to draw your attention to a different way of looking at athletes’ careers.

It’s not about age because age doesn’t exist.

Only biomechanical collapse exists.

But you’ll still see athletes (eg. Lebron) retire ahead of more collaped ones (eg. Luka) because typically their peak performance depended on athleticism far more.

If, however, that person understood all of this then hypothetically all they would have to do is successfully adopt a different style of game that works for their level of biomechanics.

Which is actually exactly what a lot of pro athletes do in the twilight of their career.

Or of course they could just wear a flat mouthguard to sleep and hypothetically extend their career forever. Hahaha

Everyday I check the comments on our various ads.

And there’s a particular ad that talks about anti-aging, which seems to gather at least one comment a day to the effect of “what is wrong with aging gracefully?”

And it happens so consistently that I’ve come to conclude that it is a sign of a trend. Kind of a backlash against trying to cheat the aging process.

Which when you see how crazy the anti-aging industry has gotten… I can kind of understand.

But I view aging a bit differently because of these biomechanics.

I don’t view it as being mandatory.

To me aging is kind of like saying that you need to just accept that your Macbook will get slower and slower till you get rid of it.

When that is factually not true. You could in fact wipe the hard drive completely clean and it should operate about as fast as the day you purchased it.

To me the body is kinda the same.

And today I want to explore this topic a bit.

There are tons of “anti-aging” products out there

The anti-aging industry is absolutely massive. The global anti-aging market was estimated at nearly $80 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $137 billion by 2035. Towards Healthcare In the US alone, the market is expected to grow from $21.6 billion in 2025 to nearly $40 billion by 2034. (source: Towards Healthcare)

That is a staggering amount of money being thrown at the problem of getting old.

What’s it being spent on?

• Anti-wrinkle creams hold the largest single share of consumer spending, while injectables like Botox and fillers are the fastest-growing segment.

• Hair colorants, UV filters, collagen supplements, and nutricosmetic capsules.

• Retinol serums. NMN capsules. NAD+ infusions. Red light therapy panels. Peptide creams. Cryotherapy.

• The longevity influencers pushing Bryan Johnson’s $2 million-a-year protocol.

All of it aimed at the same basic goal: slow the clock.

Social media is turbocharging the whole thing.

74% of consumers aged 25 and under say skincare content on social media affects their behavior, and 83% of Gen Z women report purchasing beauty products after seeing creator content. (source: Grand View Research)

This isn’t just a middle-aged vanity market anymore. Twenty-year-olds are buying anti-aging serums because an influencer told them to start early.

The industry has correctly identified that people don’t want to get old. It has completely failed to identify why they’re getting old or what to actually do about it.

Society is having a bit of a backlash

At the same time, there’s a counter-movement.

“Age gracefully.”

“Embrace your wrinkles.”

“Getting older is a privilege.”

You see it all over social media — the message that aging is natural and beautiful and we should stop fighting it.

I understand the sentiment. The pushback against $500 face creams and dangerous procedures makes sense. And I’m not here to tell people they need to look young to have value.

But here’s what I’ve noticed about the people who preach aging gracefully most loudly: they’re almost always the ones who aren’t aging that badly to begin with. They have good structure. Wide faces, decent spines, natural teeth. They look at themselves at 55 and think “I’m aging fine, what’s everyone else’s problem?”

That’s not wisdom. That’s luck they’re mistaking for philosophy.

Because on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who are doing everything right — clean diet, regular exercise, good sleep, the whole stack — and they’re still aging rapidly. Their faces are hollowing. Their bodies are declining. Their energy is dropping. And nobody has a good explanation for why. They just get told to try harder or accept it.

I have a different explanation. And it has nothing to do with diet or sleep or cortisol or any of the things the wellness industry fixates on.

But what if aging is not mandatory?

I don’t think aging is inevitable. I think it’s a function of biomechanical collapse — and I think it can be halted and, in many cases, fully reversed.

Here’s the core argument. As we lose dental height — through grinding, orthodontics, extractions, veneers, or just the natural wear that accelerates when the bite geometry is wrong — the skull begins to deflate.

Think of it like a balloon. The soft tissue surrounding the skull loses pressure, caves inward, and starts compressing everything inside. The face narrows. The spine compensates. The brain gets slowly squeezed.

That process is what we call aging. The wrinkles, the hollowed cheeks, the stooped posture, the cognitive fog, the declining energy — it’s all downstream of the same mechanical event. It’s not time doing it to you. It’s physics.

And if it’s physics, it runs in both directions. You can reinflate the balloon. You can restore the vertical height. You can reverse the collapse. I’ve watched it happen in myself and in hundreds of people in my community. The face fills back out. The posture straightens. The brain wakes up.

No cream has ever done that. No supplement will ever come close.

I plan to look younger in 20 years than I look today

I want to make a bet with you.

Come back in 20 years and look at me. I think I will not only look younger than I look today — I will function better. More energy, sharper cognitively, better posture, stronger body. Not “good for my age.” Actually better than I am right now.

Most of you probably think i’ve completely lost it. That I am delusional having listened to myself for too long hahaha.

I see it different. I see it as a logical extension of what I have already seen playout for 4-5 years now since late 2021 when I fully figured out this biomechanical puzzle.

You see it’s not that I’m correcting my health & function while still aging in other respects. I literally think that everything that is associated to aging is going in reverse.

My complexion is getting better. I got rid of my wrinkles. My hair has gotten thicker and I got rid of a bald spot. It has also gotten less grey.

On the function side i’m able to maintain a pace of working 12-14 hour days non-stop without burning out at age almost 49. I’m more efficient and think clearer now than i did at 25 years old.

And so far in the past ~5 years… I have not seen any evidence or even a trace that there is some programmed aging cycle that I cannot avoid.

Rather to me… it has felt the way I describe it. That there are physics to the skeleton and aging is the decline of those physics while leveraging these biomechanics is the improvement of them.

And so I look at it statistically… what is the probability of something radically changing from what has been extremely consistent for almost five years?

From a math perspective… I put those odds as being small.

Thus you might consider me crazy… but I consider that the math predicts I have a very high chance of being right!

Closing thoughts

The aging gracefully crowd is making peace with a process I think is optional.

But I understand their reasons why they are doing it.

Because the anti-aging industry is selling expensive Band-Aids on top of a structural problem they’ve never identified.

Neither of them is asking the right question.

The right question isn’t how do I slow aging — it’s why am I aging at all?

And if the answer to that is “simple physics” then the next question should be — ok then why not just reverse the physics?

Ryan Reynolds has been one of the most charismatic guys to ever come out of Hollywood. Genuinely funny, self-deprecating, great timing. One of those people you just root for.

But someone in our community recently pointed out that they have been a long-term Mint Mobile customer (where Ryan has been part owner) and saw a picture of Ryan in one of their recent ads and was surprised by what she saw.

His head was much narrower.

He was far less attractive.

Having been a Reviv customer for awhile she suspected it might be veneers so she googled.

And voila!! He had in fact done veneers (plus other dental work).

So i decided to investigate…. because I’ve always honestly been a fan of Ryan.

Not just for what he’s done on screen but also for what he’s done in business.

Let’s dive in.

Who Ryan Reynolds is

Ryan Reynolds was born in Vancouver in 1976 and spent his early career doing exactly what most Canadian actors do — grinding through TV work, waiting for his break.

He got it in Van Wilder in 2002, where his natural comedic timing made him impossible to ignore. From there he built steadily: Blade: Trinity, The Proposal, Buried, Free Guy. Likeable in everything, genuinely funny in most of it.

But the role that defined him was Deadpool. He’d been trying to get that film made for over a decade, and when it finally came out in 2016 it broke records for an R-rated film and made him one of the biggest stars on the planet.

Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024 went even further, becoming the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.

He’s one of those rare actors who actually got better as he got older — sharper, more confident, more willing to be weird. The internet loved him for it.

His business empire

The acting success is only half the story. What Reynolds built off-screen is arguably more impressive.

He acquired Aviation Gin and turned it into a cultural phenomenon through relentlessly clever marketing — then sold it for over $600 million.

He co-purchased Wrexham AFC, a fifth-tier Welsh football club nobody outside Wales had heard of, and through sheer force of storytelling turned it into a global brand with its own hit documentary series.

He then launched Maximum Effort, a marketing and production company that became famous for producing some of the most creative, fast-moving ad content in the business.

The guy understood branding at a level most Hollywood actors never approach. He was selling himself and everything around him with a wit and precision that felt genuinely rare.

At his peak — commercially, creatively, physically — Ryan Reynolds was one of the most complete packages in the entertainment industry.

His teeth — what actually happened

In the early 2000s, Reynolds’ teeth looked fairly natural — decent alignment, slightly uneven canines, some small gaps, and a normal shade of white. Charming and real, not yet the glossy movie-star grin.

Then, somewhere in the late 2000s to mid-2010s, things started changing. And based on everything dental professionals who’ve analyzed his photos can piece together, it appears to have happened in layers — which is actually the most biomechanically destructive way it can happen, because each intervention sets the stage for the next.

The improvement in the alignment of his teeth strongly indicates orthodontic treatment of some kind. Early in his career his teeth had minor misalignments, and later they appeared much straighter — which typically doesn’t happen without intervention.

It’s possible Reynolds used clear aligners like Invisalign rather than traditional metal braces, which would explain why fans and paparazzi never caught him in treatment, since aligners can be removed for red carpet events or filming.

Here is a pretty in-depth analysis by Europe Dental Clinic.

Dental experts note it is highly probable that Reynolds used braces or clear aligners during his early 30s. The correction of his lower crowding is described as “too perfect to have happened naturally.” (source: Karat Dental Clinic)

Then came the veneers. By the early 2020s, Reynolds had a fully Hollywood-caliber smile — impeccably aligned, pearly white, and notably uniform in size and shape. Any previously seen gaps or rough edges were completely gone, with speculation that he may have also had gum contouring to reshape the gum line.

So to summarize what most likely happened: first aligners or clear braces to move the teeth, then veneers applied on top to finish the look. Two separate interventions, both capable of disrupting his biomechanics on their own — combined, they’re a double hit to his structure.

What people are now noticing

The internet has caught on that something is happening to Ryan Reynolds’ face — they just don’t know what to call it or why.

Fans have been commenting on what they describe as a more “sunken” facial appearance. Side-by-side comparisons of his earlier films against recent appearances show a more sculpted and hollow look, with more pronounced cheekbones (source: Inquisitr)

At a public appearance in January 2025, social media was flooded with concern. Comments included “He’s aged 20 years in 2 weeks,” “Why does he look very skinny and very old?” and “Deadpool looking stressed out.” (source: Amomama)

The media’s explanation?

• Stress from Blake Lively’s legal drama.

• Ozempic face.

• Buccal fat removal.

The usual Hollywood suspects.

I think they’re all wrong.

What’s I think is actually happening

What I think people are seeing in 2026 is a face and body that has been in collapse for years.

This is what happens when you stack orthodontic treatment on top of veneers — or vice versa — without any understanding of what that combination does to the skull over the following decade.

Aligners move the teeth with zero respect to the natural occlusion and curve of spee.

Veneers can alter the natural jaw positions that need to be supported by the teeth, something i talk about here:

The soft tissue surrounding the skull starts to ‘deflate’ as i like to say. The face narrows. The cheeks hollow. The lower third of the face loses the volume it had when the structure was intact.

This is not Ozempic. This is not stress. This is textbook biomechanical collapse — the same pattern I’ve documented in Maradona, Anna Nicole Smith, Celine Dion, Tom Cruise, and lots of others.

The timeline always follows roughly the same arc: dental work done in the 30s or 40s, face starts visibly changing a decade later, everyone scratches their head about why.

Closing thoughts

Ryan Reynolds at 35 had one of the most structurally sound faces in Hollywood.

Wide, symmetrical, full.

Ryan Reynolds approaching 50 has a face that is visibly narrowing and hollowing at a pace that I view goes well beyond normal aging.

And I view that since i’m only a year younger than him… i have a right to say that.

Because… if aging were mandatory then somehow i’m improving while he is getting a lot worse.

And i’m pretty sure the culprit for his decline is his dental work.

Turns out that Ryan was just as succeptible to the cosmetic pressures of Hollywood as most others in his position.

The Deadpool franchise made him a legend. The aligners and veneers may quietly be undoing the rest.

A family member recently hurt their hip by falling off their bike.

I was talking to them and they were telling me how they were temporarily taking Oxycodone (aka ‘Oxy’).

I was like…. what? Man get off that shit and just wear your mouthguard (that I’d given them awhile back).

I could feel their eyes roll in the tone of their voice as they said something like “Ken… you and your mouthguard. I’m going to see a doctor tomorrow about the injury to my hip.”

To which my eyes rolled.

My head was screaming… “What the hell is a doctor going to do for your hip? NOTHING USEFUL is the answer!!!”

Today i wanna breakdown my logic vs. the logic member of this family member (who probably represents your average Joe Blow) and let you be the judge of who is more logical.

We were brainwashed to think a doctor can help us

Ever since we were little children we were brainwashed to think doctors are these amazing saviors.

Especially in the US (where I grew up).

There have been tons of hit TV series glorifying them like House, Grey’s Anatomy, ER, Scrubs, etc.

The doctor comes in time and again and saves the day.

But is that the reality?

I can see how they are useful against accidents, but how about chronic conditions? What is their actual success rate against chronic conditions?

I will tell you… it is PITIFUL.

They ‘manage’ these conditions rather than cure them. Because the reality is they never cure anything as you see in the chart below.

What tools does the doctor actually have at their dispoal?

Well let’s see…

A doctor’s “toolkit” can be broadly grouped into a handful of intervention categories. Each one works on a different layer of biology (chemical, structural, electrical, behavioral, etc.):

1. 💊 Pharmaceuticals (Chemical Interventions)

• Drugs that alter biochemistry in the body

• Examples: antibiotics, statins, chemotherapy, antidepressants

👉 Best for:

• Infections

• Hormonal imbalances

• Symptom control

👉 Limitation:

• Often manage symptoms rather than fix root structural issues

2. 🔪 Surgery (Structural Interventions)

• Physically removing, repairing, or replacing tissue

👉 Examples:

• Tumor removal

• Joint replacement

• Heart bypass

👉 Best for:

• Clear, localized problems

👉 Limitation:

• Invasive, and doesn’t always address underlying causes

3. ⚡ Device-Based Therapies

• Machines or implants that modify body function

👉 Examples:

• Pacemakers

• Insulin pumps

• Deep brain stimulators

👉 Best for:

• Electrical or mechanical dysfunction

👉 Limitation:

• Often lifelong dependency

4. 🧬 Biological / Advanced Therapies

• Using living systems or genetic material

👉 Includes:

• Immunotherapy for Cancer

• Stem cell therapy

• Gene therapy

👉 Best for:

• Targeting disease at a deeper biological level

👉 Limitation:

• Still early-stage, expensive, not universally effective

5. 🧠 Behavioral & Lifestyle Interventions

• Changing inputs into the system

👉 Examples:

• Diet, exercise, sleep

• Stress management

👉 Best for:

• Type 2 diabetes

• Cardiovascular disease

👉 Limitation:

• Requires patient compliance (biggest bottleneck in medicine)

6. 🧑‍⚕️ Physical & Rehabilitative Therapies

• Restoring function through movement or training

👉 Examples:

• Physical therapy

• Occupational therapy

• Speech therapy

👉 Best for:

• Injury recovery

• Neurological rehab

7. 🧠 Psychological / Psychiatric Interventions

• Treating cognition, emotion, and behavior

👉 Examples:

• Therapy (CBT, etc.)

• Psychiatric medications

👉 Best for:

• Mental health conditions

• Chronic illness coping

8. 🛡️ Preventive Medicine

• Reducing risk before disease occurs

👉 Examples:

• Vaccines

• Screenings (colonoscopies, mammograms)

• Risk factor management

👉 Best for:

• Catching diseases early or avoiding them entirely

They don’t understand the underlying physics that are at the root cause

Have a good look at this list above.

What is similar about all of them?

They are not ever actually solving anything. Especially when you apply those tools against chronic conditions.

Rather they are pretty much always managing symptoms.

And why is that?

Well i’d argue that it is because they don’t understand that there are some basic physics at the core of how the human body works. And those physics are tied to the teeth.

The skeleton & skull inflate or deflate based on these physics.

When it deflates everything inside gets crushed and twisted and disease is the result.

When it inflates all of those things reverse…. and you start to CURE disease at its root cause.

Not manage symptoms.

You are fixing the root cause!

Let the body heal itself!

So when a person has a chronic condition or a structural issue with their body my advice is typically as follows “let your body’s own ability to heal take care of it!”

And by that I don’t mean just sit idly by twiddling your thumbs.

Rather apply biomechanics by wearing your mouthguard as much as you can and stretching the body/skull such that it ‘inflates’.

Because it is by inflating that you solve these structural issues at their root cause.

If we relate this back to my family member with the injury to their hip…. lets compare the mouthguard against going to a doctor and what ‘standard of care’ would say to do:

step 1: Diagnose the injury (cost in US ~$5k)

• take X-rays, sometimes CT/MRI

step 2: Surgery (cost in US $20-50k)

• Fixation: screws/plates to hold the bone together

• Partial hip replacement (hemiarthroplasty)

• Total hip replacement

step 3: Medical stabilization (cost in US $10-30k)

• Pain (analgesics)

• Blood clots (anticoagulants)

• Infection risk (antibiotics if needed)

step 4: Rehabilitation (cost in US $2- 15k)

• Physiotherapy, etc

So all in…you’re talking about $50-70k in medical costs! No wonder why medical insurance in the US is so astronomical and Medicare is running out of funds!

It is because they are doing all of this useless shit!

When all you actually need is <$100 for a mouthguard. And some patience to let the body do what it knows how to do better than any doctor in the world….

…heal itself!

Closing thoughts

So to close… I’m trying to get you to question the logic of going to your doctor the next time you have an injury or illness.

What can they really do that helps?

Are they addressing root cause? Or are they charging you a boatload of money to manage some symptoms?

I gave up my medical insurance here in Thailand over three years ago now. I only have accident insurance. I did it as soon as I felt secure that i fully understood these biomechanics.

And note that it’s not that expensive out here… I can easily afford it.

But I don’t pay for it because I consider everything they do in that damn hospital for chronic conditions to be absolutely useless.

When i’ve told a few friends this they thought I was a heretic. And told me how they’d used their insurance just recently to do some scans or get an expensive surgery, etc.

As if this was a proof of the ‘value’ of such insurance.

One guy talked about how he’d just had a big expensive surgery and went on to tell me how he still has some sores/pains and feels tired each day. He was eight years younger than me (ie. 40 yrs old).

I listened to him…and thought to myself:

“hmmm I’m about to turn 49 and i have zero aches/pains, i haven’t been sick in 5+ years, I work 12-14 hour days constantly for over 1.5 yrs like i’m 22 years old again, and i’m pretty much happy 24-7.”

So am I the ‘heretic’ or is he ‘brainwashed’ by a system that was never designed to fix anything?

I guess you’ll have to decide for yourself ;)

The other evening my wife and i spent some time exchanging personal stories as has been our habit for some weeks now.

It basically helps us discuss things that are out of the daily boring routine. And so I use a chatgpt prompt like “give me some good conversation topics for me and my wife to discuss our past.”

This time one of the topics was talking about how we think we’ve changed since we met.

I met my wife in 2011 and we were married in 2013.

During those early years I was having a lot of chronic jaw, neck and back tightness… and saw myself as a ‘nice guy’. Which is also kind of how the world sort of saw me.

But that also meant that the world saw me as being a bit soft. Which I probably wouldn’t have agreed to at the time… but in hindsight I need to honestly admit that i was a bit soft.

And my wife even gave some examples of colleagues we had back then when we worked together in Groupon Ukraine in 2011-12 who kind of took advantage of me a bit. Because they probably also viewed me as being soft.

So it was an interesting reflection to think about how I’d interact with these personalities today because I do think it would be very different.

I don’t think i’m very soft today.

And yes probably everyone wants to think they got stronger in life… but I say that honestly and not in a completely good way.

I’m colder these days in many respects.

And today I wanna talk a bit more about this evolution because I do think a fair number of people doing this process will experience some version of this at some point in their journey.

Was I soft before?

That’s a question I wrestle with in my own head a bit.

Because I hadn’t had a very easy childhood in some respects.

I was a nerd in a public high school where in my early years I was picked on a fair bit. And would even have kids waiting for me after school sometimes to make fun of me and pick fights.

Then in college I went to a very competitive (Cornell) university where I busted my butt against very smart kids and managed to achieve the Dean’s list pretty much every semester.

And after college I also worked in the very competitive field of strategy consulting where I was often putting in 80 hour weeks.

Plus I’d travelled to ~90 countries by my mid-thirties and lived in ~10. Including living in places like Moscow and Kiev, which are a bit rough around the edges.

So my point is… I never liked to look at myself as being soft. I liked to think my varied life experiences had ‘hardened’ me.

But from an outsider’s perspective I think I still was soft to some degree.

Whenever I came up against a ‘strong’ personality I think they intuitively felt like they would get their way with me. And there were numerous examples along my career of that.

An example of where I was soft

In 2008-10 I was living in Moscow and working for the company Visa Inc.

I was one of the few foreigners in the office and I was brought in to start a new group in the office. Prior to that I’d always been a strategy consultant so this was the first time I was doing a more operational role.

And I remember it feeling very challenging as there were many strong personalities in the office.

When I had meetings with them I often found myself giving ground. Agreeing to the version of the decision that was closer to what the person with the strong personality wanted.

And I also remember that I was not great at handling conflict. I would sometimes take on a tone or demeanor that would result in a few colleagues ganging up on me.

Which at the time i’d put off to cultural differences and office politics… but in reality I think it more related to me.

They kind of saw me as a relatively soft person trying to get his way… and they weren’t havin’ it.

This became more clear when the company sent an American lady to the Moscow office to take a role that was a level above me the year after I left. I’d heard she’d had a lot of success getting everyone to fall into line because she had a very ‘strong’ personality.

And from my brief meetings with her… I indeed considered her to have a ‘strong’ personality, but also relatively mediocre intelligence.

Which frustrated me… as I didn’t want to have to spend my career/life reporting to people with stronger personalities.

I wanted intelligence and logic to reign…. because I always felt like I could hold my own in that department. Even with people far more senior than me.

My biomechanical “roller coaster” years

My roller coaster years came starting in 2014 when a Vietnamese TMJ dentist drilled my teeth down.

I fell apart within months… had thick brain fog such that I couldn’t retain any information in my head and felt like a hermit for close to six months.

I had to demote myself two levels on my job at the time and even then I felt like I was barely staying afloat.

I felt extremely ‘soft’. I basically tried to avoid any kind of conflict at all during that period.

Then I started to feel better a year later as I started dabbling with these biomechanics and was up and down for the next seven years until I figured this stuff out in late 2021.

I’d been through a lot during that period.

There were times that were extremely emotionally draining.

I’d moved my family from Vietnam to Boston to Moscow to Bangkok in order to start a better life… and failed each time because my health was yo-yoing the whole time.

But all of that yo-yoing did teach me one important thing… it taught me the neurological component of how these biomechanics worked.

I literally became a different person as I was improving.

More confident. More outspoken. More willing to engage in conflict and know that I could handle it fine.

This all set me up for where I am today.

I’m a different, stronger person today

Today I think I can honestly say i’m a very different person to the person I was my entire life.

I’m stronger without even thinking about it or making any special effort.

But i’m also colder.

I don’t feel emotion nearly as easy as I used to when I was younger. Perhaps partly because of the roller coaster I went through.. but it just feels more chemical/hormonal to me.

Like my body just stays pretty emotion-less even in stressful and conflict situations.

And I’m not the only one saying this… I literally think almost everyone in my inner circle would tell you the same thing (eg. my wife, my mother, my father, my brother, my friends, etc).

They would tell you that something changed about Ken these past years.

And a lot of what they would tell you probably wouldn’t even be good things… rather they’d probably talk about how i’m colder and more outspoken (in a bad way).

I, for example, have no problem delivering harsh news or disagreeing to someone’s face. Even if they have a strong personality.

In a way I even enjoy it.

Because i know that the way my neurology works now… I don’t feel any real repercussion from it later.

In my early years if i got into an argument it would drain me for hours and sometimes even days.

I’d dwell on the argument.. rehashing what I said and what I should have said.

Now I don’t do any of that shit… i literally know that i’ll be in a good mood and won’t think about it at all about ten minutes later.

And the thing is… my family has even realized this.

This is not some front or facade that they can crack thru… this is a new Ken. This mofo is here to stay! Hahahaha

My analysis

What i’ve kind of concluded from this evolution i’ve been through… is that having a ‘strong’ personality is not about being overly outspoken.

It’s not that you need to blast people with a loud voice and act aggressively.

Rather the key is simple…. you need to be able to:

1. control your emotions easily

2. demonstrate emotion easily when it serves your purpose, but without really feeling this emotion intensely (eg. I can easily shout and show anger strategically these days.. without feeling much emotion behind it)

3. not feel much emotion afterwards (because then you will try to avoid such situations in the future)

And that’s about it.

Do that… and you are gonna be one hard mofo to win an argument against.

Because you’ll just remain logical with a cool head as the other person loses it and succumbs to their emotions. Think about professional negotiators… and you’ll find that they are good at these three things i outlined above.

Also i learned that many people that knew you before won’t like this new you and will not want to accept it at first. They probably liked being able to manipulate you easier before.

But they will accept it with time.. if it is truly ‘natural’ to you. Which if you are diligent with this biomechanical process.. my experience is that it will be.

Closing thoughts

Some of you might be early on your journey and you’re thinking… “huh? Ken, what does this have to do with me?”

Perhaps your goal is widening your palate or straightening your teeth. Or fixing some chronic pains.

But with time… i think some of you will realize what I have.

That the real power is not improving your smile. It is the neurological stuff I’m talking about here. This is the stuff that changes the trajectory of your life for the better.

It it this stuff that allows you to rewrite the unwritten rules of all of your relationships in your favor.

And that is why… I quite honestly love talking about this stuff. Because it’s like a secret weapon for now.

Your average person will think what i’ve spoken about above to be BS for another couple decades… and as a result I plan on using it to sail right past them ;)

Chuck Norris passed away on March 19, 2026 at 86. The cause of death was undisclosed by his family, but it was clear that it came after an unexpected medical emergency.

I honestly didn’t think anything of it when my father told me.

Because I never really took Chuck to be a guy to make cosmetic dental changes. And I honestly hadn’t really followed him or any of his work in like 20 years (turns out he hadn’t done much).

However I was a big Chuck Norris fan when I was a little kid. Back then I’d walk up to the neighborhood video rental shop and sift through the VHS tapes.

This was in like 1988…. even before BlockBuster Video got popular.

And these old school video shops were full of movies by Chuck Norris, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson. They were prolific and they rocked… even if the acting was far from Oscar material.

Anyway… I only looked into Chuck because someone from the community mentioned it. They said that he had a glowing white smile in the years before his death… the kind that a guy in his mid-80’s only gets when he does something like veneers.

So let’s dive in and investigate what happened.

Who Chuck Norris was

Chuck Norris was a triple threat — black belts in Tang Soo Do, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and judo, a United States Air Force veteran, and a world martial arts champion who eventually created his own discipline called Chun Kuk Do.

He made his film debut facing Bruce Lee in The Way of the Dragon in 1972, before becoming a genuine box office force through the 80s with Missing in Action, Delta Force, and The Octagon.

His most iconic role was Cordell Walker in Walker, Texas Ranger, which ran for eight seasons on CBS

Structurally, Chuck was gifted. Wide face, strong jaw, solid posture. The kind of foundation that should age well. And for a long time, it did.

The “SmileLift” procedure

Here’s the part most people don’t know. There’s a dental practice in Plano, Texas run by a cosmetic dentist.

Chuck and Gena Norris are listed as celebrity clients, used to promote the practice’s signature SmileLift procedure.

The SmileLift is described as combining “the art and science of anti-aging dentistry with the advanced application of porcelain veneers.” The practice claims Chuck’s SmileLift was done over 20 years ago.

So that puts the procedure somewhere around the early 2000s — right in the middle of his Walker, Texas Ranger run and just after it ended.

The pitch for the procedure is that it makes patients “look 10 years younger in one day.” The dentist’s own explanation: “As we age, the lower half of the face tends to sag. The lower half of the face muscles lose their muscle tone and we develop wrinkles, which makes the face look aged.”

So the whole idea is to use veneers to add volume back to the lower face and reduce wrinkles. Anti-aging dentistry, they call it.

I call it the exact mechanism by which you collapse a skull :)

What the “SmileLift” actually does

Here’s the problem with this kind of procedure, and it’s the same problem with virtually every cosmetic dental intervention I’ve ever analyzed.

When you bond porcelain veneers to every tooth to rebuild the lower face, you are fundamentally altering the lingual bite — the way the upper and lower teeth support each other from behind.

Dentists doing this work are focused entirely on what the smile looks like from the front.

They are not thinking about the curve of spee, they are not thinking about whether the bite is supported in both retrusion and protrusion, and they are absolutely not thinking about what happens to the skull over the next ten to twenty years as the soft tissue responds to the new geometry.

What happens?

The skull deflates.

Slowly.

The soft tissue that surrounds and supports the skull begins to cave inward because the underlying bite structure is no longer doing its job correctly.

The brain gets compressed. The spine starts to compensate. The face that was briefly made to look fuller and younger starts to collapse in ways that go well beyond normal aging

Look at photos of Chuck from the early 2000s (see above). His face looked healthy and he looked great for 61 years old.

Now compare against how much things changed as compared to his later years.

The facial structure is hollowing out. The lines of his skull have changed in a way that isn’t just time.

My father is an example of how this does not need to be the case. He’s 80 years old now and his face is still relatively full as it was twenty years ago when he was 60.

Meanwhile he did none of the exercise that Chuck did and was never in very good shape to start with (as Chuck was).

The difference, however, is that my father never did cosmetic dentistry and wears my mouthguard for the last couple of years.

The irony of “anti-aging dentistry”

This is what I find so ironic about procedures like the SmileLift.

The marketing is built around the idea that the dentist is reversing aging by rebuilding worn-down teeth. And there’s a grain of truth in there — lost vertical height is indeed at the root of facial aging.

But the way they’re doing it is wrong. Stacking porcelain veneers on top of every tooth without understanding the biomechanics of how the bite needs to function is like inflating a balloon in the wrong shape.

You get a short-term result that looks good in the ads. Then over the following decade or two, the structure pays the price.

Chuck Norris was used in those ads. His “before and after” smile was the sell.

And yet in 2017 (pic above) you can already see that his skull was assuming a strange shape and the face starts to look unnatural. If you look at skulls for as long as I have you notice these things easily.

He died at 86, which is a respectable age. But in my view he should have lived far longer… and been much healthier along the way.

If that were the case I think we would have seen a lot more of him these past twenty years. But instead he never really did any significant roles since Walker, Texas Ranger ended in the early 2000s.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason we didn’t see much of him during that ~25 year stretch was because he knew his health and neurology felt off.

Compare that to Sylvester Stallone who at age 79 has been extremely prolific these past 20 years

And arguably did some of his best work just recently with Tulsa King (rated 7.9 on IMDB) which ran from 2022-25.

Closing thoughts

So to conclude… yes I do think Chuck Norris messed with his teeth.

And I do think it very directly led to the health issues that unexpectedly killed him just a short while ago.

For decades in the films he fought all these hardened criminals. Evil, strong looking men.

But he always won in the movies. Despite the odds.

In the end, however, you can almost say that he was done in an innocent looking dentist in a white coat.

There’s a Netflix series that dropped in March 2026 called A Friend, A Murderer.

And as I’m a fan of true crime… i watched it last week.

It’s a three-part Danish true crime documentary about Philip Patrick Westh — a quiet, unremarkable guy from the small town of Korsør who turned out to be one of Denmark’s most disturbing predators in recent memory.

The acts he committed took place between 2016 and 2023 and involved attacks against teenage girls. For nearly a decade, residents lived with the terrifying belief that the perpetrator was still at large.

When they finally caught him, the relief swept through the country — but the most interesting part was who the murderer was.

It wasn’t some menacing looking criminal with a history of crimes.

Rather it was an ordinary looking young guy who was frequently hanging out with normal friends.

The crimes and the investigation

On July 10, 2016, 17-year-old Emilie Meng was last seen at Korsør railway station in the early morning hours after a night out with friends.

Her body was discovered six months later, on Christmas Eve, in a lake near Borup — about 40 kilometers from where she vanished. A post-mortem examination determined she had been strangled.

The unsolved case haunted Denmark for seven years, involving massive searches, 650 interrogations, and over 400,000 vehicle checks.

Philip had actually submitted his DNA voluntarily during the initial investigation in 2016 — one of 1,450 locals tested — and nothing flagged. Degraded evidence meant the match didn’t come through.

The case sat cold until 2023.

In November 2022, a 15-year-old girl in Sorø was walking when a man approached her, threatened her with a knife, punched her, and attempted to drag her toward a vehicle. She screamed and escaped.

Then in April 2023, it unraveled fast. Philip tracked down a 13-year-old girl while she was on her newspaper delivery route, rammed his car into the back of her bicycle, and abducted her.

He took her to his house, where he kept her hostage and assaulted her. Police found her alive after approximately 27 hours and immediately arrested Philip. DNA from packaging tape connected him directly to the Emilie Meng murder from 2016.

In June 2024, Philip was found guilty on multiple charges and sentenced to life in prison — Denmark’s most severe punishment.

Philip was your average nerd

Philip Patrick Westh was born in the early 1990s and raised in coastal Danish towns.

By every account of people who knew him, he was the definition of a nerd. Introverted. Awkward. Got made fun of. Kept to himself. His closest friends describe a socially invisible guy — the type that fades into the background.

In his social life, Philip never dated and showed zero interest in pursuing a romantic life. His friends genuinely believed him to be asexual. Nobody suspected anything.

There was nothing to suspect. Just a quiet, forgettable nerd from a quiet, forgettable town.

And also take note of his long, healthy neck as it will be relevant later.

Philip’s smile transformation

Then something changed.

One of his best friends — Nichlas, who had known Philip for 15 years — makes an offhand comment in the documentary that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

He mentions that at some point, the city paid for Philip’s teeth to get done. A dental intervention, covered by public funds. And he described it as a complete dental transformation

.

And then, almost immediately after, Philip’s personality underwent a massive shift.

Philip describes that he became more confident. More assertive. Like a switch had flipped. The friends describe a different version of Philip emerging — bolder, more engaged, operating with an energy he’d never had before.

The obvious surface-level read is: teeth got fixed, confidence went up, guy came out of his shell. Maybe. But I think something else was happening underneath

Did the smile transformation make him a murderer?

I’m not saying the dental work directly caused him to kill. That’s not the argument.

But here’s what I notice.

By the time Philip appeared in court, his physical deterioration was stark.

His neck was gone. Remember his long neck from the photo above? Now compare that to this courtroom drawing where his neck is non-existent.

The kind of structural decline usually takes decades… but with Philip it seems to have happened very quickly. In less than a decade.

I’ve written about this many times. When artificial dental work is done — crowns, veneers, orthodontic intervention — it often doesn’t respect the fact that the jaw is supposed to be supported by the teeth in several positions. As I wrote here:

And so it begins collapsing the skull. The soft tissue deflates inward. The brain gets compressed.

I played around with these mechanics for years between 2015-2021 and I can tell you that they screw with your brain and how you think MASSIVELY.

Luckily i had a wife and a kid to keep me grounded when I was doing bad…. but I can tell you from experience that it gave me some very negative thoughts sometimes. And aggression.

So my read on Philip: the dental work almost definitely impacted the way he was thinking. It would have literally been impossible not to based on my experience.

You don’t ‘disappear’ your neck and not have it massively change how you think. The two are tightly intertwined based on my 6-year roller coaster experience.

Closing thoughts

How did what seemed like your average nerdy guy convert into a sexual predator and murderer in such a short span of time?

If you look at most killers and sexual predators they demonstrate some clear signs of it from the time they were young.

And it becomes an evolution of progressively worse acts.

With Philip this doesn’t seem to have been the case. He was your average wimpy nerd in school who then out of nowhere became this vicious murderer.

And right before he started killing people he just happened to have a massive dental transformation that coincided with a major change in his personality.

That just all seems a bit too coincidental to me.

Especially having experienced the things I did in the years when I was collapsing.

Someone recently asked if I can investigate eye spacing and write an article.

To be honest it’s not something I paid much attention to during my ~11 year journey. Mainly because this game was primarily always about function to me.

In the early days it felt like it was about survival.

But I recognize that a lot of people are doing this not just for functional benefits but also aesthetic ones. And eye spacing is a critical component of the aesthetics of your face.

So I decided i’d double click on this topic and write about it.

So here we go…

The Importance of Eye Spacing

Go look at a photo of the most beautiful people on earth — supermodels, actors at their peak, elite athletes in their prime. One thing you’ll almost always notice is well-spaced, symmetric eyes. Not too close together, not too wide apart. Just... right.

Eye spacing is something people intuitively recognize as beautiful even if they can’t articulate why. It signals facial width, skeletal development, and symmetry — all things the human eye is hardwired to interpret as signs of health and vitality.

Model scouts know this better than anyone. The positioning of the midface and the shape of the eyes are often what separates a girl who’s pretty from a girl who’s on every magazine cover.

But it’s not just aesthetic. The eyes sit at an intersection of multiple cranial bones.

How those bones are positioned affects not just how far apart your eyes are, but the depth of your eye sockets, the tilt of the eyes, whether you have that lifted, cat-like eye shape that everyone in the beauty world obsesses over, and even how your vision functions.

I’ve written before about how my own eyesight got dramatically worse during my biomechanical collapse of 2014 — and noticeably improved as I recovered. That’s not a coincidence in my view… it’s physics.

So yes, eye spacing matters enormously — both for beauty and for function. The question nobody seems to be asking is: what actually controls it?

What Do They Think Determines Eye Spacing?

The conventional view is pretty much locked in genetics. You got the eye spacing your parents gave you, and that’s that.

Beyond genetics, developmental biology gets some airtime. The theory is that during fetal development and early childhood, the skull grows and the orbits — the bony eye sockets — migrate to their final position.

If growth is suboptimal due to nutrition, epigenetics, or developmental abnormalities, you get narrower spacing.

This is the lens through which medicine views conditions like hypertelorism (too-wide eyes) and hypotelorism (too-close eyes), both of which are formally classified as cranial bone malformations.

Some researchers also point to broader craniofacial syndromes — conditions like Down syndrome or Apert syndrome — where eye spacing is dramatically altered as part of a wider skeletal picture.

The acknowledgment that cranial bone positioning affects eye spacing is right there in the medical literature. But the establishment treats it as a rare, extreme phenomenon rather than a spectrum that affects everyone to varying degrees.

The idea that your eye spacing might subtly shift over the course of your adult life as your skull changes? That’s not even on their radar.. and yet it’s so obviously true in my view.

What Are the Conventional Ways of Treating It?

For extreme cases — genetic conditions, trauma, tumors — surgeons can operate directly on the orbital bones, physically repositioning the eye sockets.

These are brutal, high-risk procedures with long recoveries. They’re reserved for the most severe cases and they’re done purely on a structural basis, carving and repositioning bone.

For cosmetic concerns about eye shape, the options get less invasive but also far less effective at the root level.

• Blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery) can change the appearance of the eyes but does nothing to the underlying bone structure.

• Fillers placed around the orbital rim can create an illusion of wider spacing or more depth.

• Facelifts attempt to lift the midface tissue upward to create a more youthful, open-eyed look — with temporary results that often look strange within a few years because the underlying structure wasn’t actually addressed.

Then there’s the “just live with it” approach, which is what most people get.

“It’s genetic.” “It’s just how you’re built.” The cosmetics industry sells you makeup contouring tutorials to create the illusion of better eye spacing, because apparently that’s the best we can do.

None of these approaches engage with the underlying question of what controls where the orbits sit in the first place, in real time, throughout your adult life.

Why I Think It’s Biomechanical

Here’s my argument…

The eye sockets are not floating independently in your skull.

They are formed by the intersection of multiple cranial bones — including the frontal bone, the maxilla, the zygomatic bone, and the sphenoid. These bones are connected at sutures, and they move.

This is not controversial — even anatomy textbooks acknowledge that the skull is not a single rigid structure but approximately 22-29 bones connected by soft tissue.

And what I’ve observed over nearly a decade of experimenting on my own skull is that as the skull inflates — as the soft tissue surrounding it stretches and allows the cranial bones to space out — the face gets wider and more symmetric.

The eyes change shape. The orbital area opens up. I’ve seen this on myself, and I’m seeing early signs of it on members of our community going through this process.

Conversely, when the skull deflates — which is what braces, dental extractions, retainers, and bad dental work all trigger — the cranial bones compress inward.

The face narrows. Asymmetries appear. And the eyes get closer together and change shape.

Look at before-and-after photos of people who did aggressive orthodontics over a decade and pay attention specifically to the eyes. They shift. Sometimes dramatically.

I like to say that the shape of the eyes is one of the most reliable indicators of whether the maxilla has truly moved. When people post their “mewing results” online, I look immediately at whether the eye shape has changed.

Most of the time, it hasn’t, which tells me nothing structurally significant happened. But when someone has genuinely remodeled their skull — through a proper biomechanical process — the eyes are one of the first places it shows.

Closing thoughts

Think about it logically: if the maxilla moves, the entire surrounding structure moves with it. The floor and sides of the orbital cavity change. The relationship between cheekbones, nasal bones, and frontal bone all shift simultaneously.

It is completely impossible to move the maxilla without also changing where the eyes sit. Yet the aesthetic medicine world talks about these things as though they’re completely separate.

That is absolutely ridiculous from a logical standpoint.

The genetics argument collapses the moment you observe that the same person’s eye spacing can change over time — not because their DNA changed, but because their skull architecture changed in response to dental intervention, trauma, or biomechanical recovery. The bones don’t lie.

Wide, beautifully spaced eyes are a reflection of a properly inflated skull.

Narrow, close-set or asymmetric eyes are a reflection of one that has been compressed. And the mechanism driving that compression, in most modern humans, starts in the mouth.

That’s a wrap!

I saw this post below yesterday on my Facebook feed and it triggered something in me.

I don’t even know if this “James Grant” is a real person to be honest.. as a lot of the photos on the profile look like AI.

But still.. the story he tells is a story that I’m sure resonates with many thousands of couples.

And I felt like I needed to say something based on my own experience because I think I take a slightly different perspective than most given my journey with these biomechanics.

And note that this isn’t about being on the side of father or mothers. I think these types of situations happen on both sides a lot. So I am not taking a side here.

Also, sometimes there are kids involved… sometimes there are not.

But what is often at the root cause in my experience is biomechanics.

Now let me explain.

First let’s dissect what happened here

While there are always two sides of the story… it sounds like James here was trying his best to be a good father and husband.

But his best efforts fell short.

His wife fell out of love with him. Despite him trying to be her ‘ideal partner’.

He’d swallowed his pride and tried to be ‘accomodating’. But rather than this driving his partner to him… it probably drove her away.

It likely made him less attractive in her eyes. While at the same time his declining biomechanics were making him less attractive on a physical level.

She tried to solve for this by making requests of him that she thought would make him a better husband/partner. And he acquiesced because he wanted to make her happy with him.

She thought she was turning him into the man she thought she wanted… but later probably realized that she wasn’t attracted to what she’d created.

I’ve been following patterns like this for years… hell I almost was this pattern.

Reality is this couple probably became ‘Occlivial’

By this I mean that a power imbalance formed. Often because one person biomechanically declined faster than the other.

I explain more what this means here.

Often when couples first form… they typically line up well in terms of the value that each partner brings to the table.

That is not to say that they are both equally attractive.

Rather perhaps one person has a more developed career and earns more money while the other person is more attractive. Or something like this.

It’s not always the case… but I do find that ‘most’ couples tend to line up in value otherwise the partner with clearly higher value will end up questioning the relationship (often before getting married).

It’s just human nature… whether we want to admit it verbally or not.

I experienced a bit of what “James” experienced during the years I was going in circles

I consider that I was going in circles at various times between the years of 2016 - late 2021.

When I was not doing well my natural instinct was to be ‘nice’. In essence because I’d lost a lot of my own sense of value.

When I was more collapsed I felt:

• less attractive

• less smart

• less confident

• less social

• etc.

And so to sort of make up for it… I became more ‘nice’.

I’d be nice to people even if they took advantage of me. People would sometimes treat me disrespectfully and i’d let it slide. Especially at work.

I just felt and acted more like a doormat and others treated me that way.

And the reality is… that that is not attractive at all to your life partner (ie. my wife in my case).

It put strain on our marriage. Even while I felt I was making the most effort i’d made in the history of our relationship to be a ‘good husband’… our relationship seemed to just deteriorate.

If i’d stayed in that state… I have no doubt that this would have ended in divorce at some point.

Probably with my wife saying something similar to what poor James got… ie. that she “loved me but had fallen out of love with me.”

I’m more of an asshole now and our relationship is better for it

These days my biomechanics are on the mend and I pretty naturally feel more confident, smart, etc.

Most of my friends probably still think i’m a nice guy… but if they know me, they think twice about taking advantage of that.

Because I can have a pretty sharp tongue and let them know very quickly if I think they’re coming out of line. I’m not a person that avoids or even fears conflict. In fact I kind of enjoy it these days.

And when someone does come out of line… i know that I can ‘light them up’ very quickly.. and it won’t ruin my day or anything. In fact i’ll probably be laughing and in a good mood five minutes later… because that’s just kinda how my body works these days due to these biomechanics.

And as for my relationship with my wife… I don’t think about how to improve our relationship nearly as much as I did years ago when I was struggling. And yet our relationship is far healthier in my view.

Because I’ve levelled up the value equation in my view.

You see… I didn’t move up in her eyes by doing the things she asked and becoming the person she was saying she wanted me to be. Rather I pretty much did the opposite. LOL

I’m now extremely busy with my work and do a small fraction of the chores I used to do. I’m probably a bit less sensitive, “caring”, etc etc

But what I did become was more confident and neurologically healthier. Then all the other things just started to fall into line as a result.

In hindsight this is literally the only way I would have saved my marriage in my opinion.

Closing thoughts

You know in high school when it seemed like the good-looking, asshole guys got the girl?

I was a nerd in school… so I definitely remember. And it always perplexed me.

But now I feel like I fully understand it. And it’s not even about ‘looks’.

Rather it’s more about healthy neurology and ‘value’.

The better looking guys had healthier neurology and so women were instinctively more attracted to them. The same will work in reverse in my view. ie. guys will be attracted to women with healthy neurology (eg. women that act like “divas”).

Once you understand the rules of biomechanics and see how tightly the patterns follow those rules.. you stop getting frustrated in my experience.

You’re just like… “oh yeah… that’s why that happened.” Then you smile and get your mouthguard back on… knowing that with time… the rules are gonna work more and more in your favor.