Whenever i’m on Youtube recently i’m barraged by ads by a company, Riseguide (screenshot of their site below), that provides articulation training.

The standard ad sounds something like this:

Guy walking into an elevator and sees a colleague. He says to the person “How are you today?” And then the narrator goes on to explain how you never want to ask this question because it makes you look weak. And all high powered executives don’t say this, but rather say some other thing.

It always makes me want to bust out laughing when i see these ads because I think it is so BS based on my experience.

What actually matters is neurology in my view, and not this articulation stuff.

And today I want to explain why I view it that way.

First some context on the old me

Up until my mid-30’s I was a self-improvement freak.

I would have absolutely loved this course I mention above and I probably would have invested tons of hours into it, thinking it was going to change my effect on people.

You see back then I read lots of self-help books and took numerous courses to try to help me move up the career ladder.

My problem, I realized, was that my communication and its effect on people was one of my biggest weaknesses. In part because my voice often felt weak/thin, but also I think I just came off relatively weak/boring.

As a result my career didn’t move as fast as I’d hoped it would. And this despite the fact that I do think i had the intelligence, structure/organization, and work ethic to outperform most of the people I saw above me.

So back then I tried anything and everything to get past what felt like a glass ceiling.

All of this effort did nothing for me

I remember being in a corporate job in Visa Inc. back around 2009 and being extremely frustrated.

It was my first corporate job after seven years in strategy consulting and I was hoping that I’d rocket up.

So I worked really hard, prepped for all my meetings, worked on as many projects as I could, and still… many of my colleagues seemed like they didn’t take me seriously.

They’d show up to meetings late. Forget to do the things they’d promised they’d do for me. etc etc.

I just didn’t seem to be made of leadership material to them.

For awhile I made myself the excuse that I was an expat in a Moscow office and so it was because I was a foreigner and operating in a second language.

But then later on an American lady came who spoke almost no Russian at all and yet seemed to have a very powerful effect on everybody.

But it wasn’t her intelligence… as she didn’t seem very smart to me at all.

Rather it was her personality. She had a commanding way that naturally got people to take her very seriously.

You see it was never about what I was saying…. it was about the person they perceived me to be. And that perception came mostly from my neurology/personality and not from the words I used.

At the time I kind of considered this some God-given ‘aura’ that I just didn’t have and could not train for.

Now I don’t think that at all.

It was neurology, plain and simple.

And neurology is, in my view, a direct function of biomechanics.

Neurology is what allows you to communicate effectively

What i’ve learned the past decade is just how tightly intertwined neurology is with communication.

You see it is not the words you speak, rather it is the person that is saying it.

• How confident they look

• The tone and voice quality they have

• Their non-verbal communication (eg. posture, energy, etc)

And note that there is absolutely nothing new to what i’m saying here. Communication experts were talking about this stuff back when i was graduating college thirty years ago.

But what they didn’t teach you is how this stuff is (at least in my view) ~90% a function of biomechanics.

And therefore it is not training and courses on ‘articulation’ that make you better at this stuff. Nor is it some genetic God-given ability.

Rather it is improving your biomechanics, and thus neurology, that truly moves the needle in my experience.

These days I pay no attention to my articulation

These days I almost never get frustrated when communicating with others.

Whether it be my team, my friends, my family, etc.

And it is not because I am saying exactly the right words. Or because i practiced.

Actually it is the opposite. I generally have the view that I never prepare for any meeting or call anymore.

Even if I think it will be viewed by many people my mantra is pretty much always “let’s wing it!” haha

And typically it comes off smooth. The fact that i never practiced for it makes it feel even more natural and less scripted.

Why this change?

Well because I know that my neurology is pretty healthy these days and so I will come off just fine:

• I’ll think of the right words to use.

• I’ll use the appropriate tone and emotion without thinking about it.

• I’ll listen to the person so I can also digest what they are saying and react to it in a natural way.

So in essence…. I do exactly what I was wishing I could do many years earlier in my career. The thing that I was jealous of the lady at Visa that I referred to above.

And the change happened with no special effort.

I notice the same thing in others for a long time already

I’ve understood how this works for some years already and so I like to test my hypothesis while observing others around me.

Based on these observations I can honestly say that what I am talking about above almost always holds true.

The best business people, actors, comedians, etc. They all have solid neurology.

They’re not spending lots of hours taking courses on articulation. They’re almost always winging it!

For example I love watching a young Dave Chappelle.

The guy is probably one of the best standup comics ever and yet he never seemed to have any list or notes or anything.

Nothing was ever tightly scripted and his delivery always felt very natural. Plus when something unplanned happened, he always seemed to have a gift for responding in a funny, natural way.

The foundation to this was very solid neurology.

He wasn’t in his head stressed about what words to use. He was probably just enjoying himself and staying in the moment. Which ends up sounding so much better.

Closing thoughts

Gone are the days when I read all of the self help books. That was almost a complete waste of time and money.

Now I view things like ‘articulation’ training to be a complete facade.

Frustrated people are going to invest in it and despite all of their practice, they are barely going to move the needle on the impact they’re having on others.

Rather what they should be doing is improving their neurology by improving their biomechanics.

And if they do that I think they will perhaps come to the same conclusion I have one day.

That the true power of these biomechanics is not the fact that it will improve your health and how you look (though it should do those things too).

Rather the true power is in using this stuff to achieve what you want in life. And slowly becoming the person that can make that happen.

A little while back I was chatting with a friend that I know for a little over a decade.

He’s probably about 10 yrs younger than me and has been playing it safe with a corporate job that has been stable for about the last 9 years.

However he’s a bit frustrated as he’s been passed over for promotion multiple times and the company always has him reporting to people that seem more ‘senior’ to him.

And so every few months for years he calls and asks me my advice.

I always tell him to try and get something to work on the side, but that he probably shouldn’t leave his stable job. Because quite honestly his biomechanics are mediocre at best.

Plus I tell him to wear a flat mouthguard and do this biomechanical process. Something that he hasn’t taken serious till just recently.

Today I want to break down this situation because I think it’s a relatively common one that a lot of folks out there might be thinking about.

First, why was he stuck?

I first met this friend in 2014 when I was going through some of my worst health struggles.

He was one of the few people that seemed empathetic and interested to get to know me as a person. Despite the fact that I probably came off as a loser to most folks (because I couldn’t concentrate, felt like a hermit, etc).

He would visit Vietnam (where I lived at the time) and we’d often catch up. He had a smile and a warm spirit that always cheered me up.

Then as the years went on we stayed in touch and we both changed to different companies. He joined a company that took him to a different region.

At first he was really happy and seemed to be performing very well. There seemed to be a dearth of experienced people in the company and so he had a wide remit.

But some years later as the company scaled they brought in more experienced and ‘polished’ people and my friend just kind of stayed where he was for years.

He was a very hard worker who was very good at getting lots of difficult projects completed so why were they passing over him?

In my view (from what I understood from my friend) it was a classic case of biomechanics. The people they were putting above him seemed more confident, were better communicators, and just seemed to gravitate to being a ‘boss’ better.

And despite years of my friend trying to develop these “boss-like” qualities he just didn’t seem to be able to. In part because his voice didn’t have the commanding resonance that got people to focus and listen to what he was saying.

I knew his situation all too well as i’d felt the same thing numerous times during my health roller coaster ride from 2014 - 2021.

He thought running his own company would be the answer

My friend’s solution to the predicament he was in was to consider leaving his job and starting something of his own.

In years past he was always interviewing for various jobs around the world and asking me my view on them. But this past year the focus seems to be more on creating his own company.

In part because the employment situation in tech has gotten a lot worse. And in part because I guess he feels like he’s never gonna be good at the whole ‘corporate ladder’ thing.

So theoretically running your own successful company is the perfect solution.

• No corporate ladder to deal with.

• You get to do things the way you want to do them.

• etc.

But is it really the right answer?

A risky move is not a good move with bad biomechanics

I told him straight up that I think starting a business is a great idea, but not in the condition he is in.

I could just tell from our conversations that he did not have the energy nor the mental game to make it in the entrepreneur game at the moment.

Because it’s hard as hell.

I started numerous companies before Reviv and they almost all either failed or didn’t scale.

And while Reviv is doing well… it is a daily grind that is very tough.

I think I would have had no chance being successful at doing what I’m doing now at any earlier point in my adult life. Because it’s a ton of work and it is very stressful.

I think I average about two high stress events per day. These events can take many forms, eg. screwup in operations, burnt too much money on something and so I have a cashflow issue, dealing with a stressful customer, etc.

Ten years ago just a single high stress event would have probably rendered me inefficient for hours due to the stress it creates. Now that stress just bounces off me like a ball because my neurological system is so much stronger.

My learning is that to do this entrepreneur game and make it… you need a neurological system like teflon.

Because you’re constantly getting punched in the face and then getting back up.

And I just don’t think this friend of mine has the structure to handle it yet.

Fix the biomechanics, then increase your risk

Am I saying he is screwed for life and he should relegate himself to a life of answering to others?

Also no.

I absolutely think his true happiness will be found running his own company. But first he needs to fix his biomechanics.

That means wearing a mouthguard regularly, stretching, and playing this biomechanical game for the long-term.

It will probably take a few years of hard work before he is ready to start his own company and have a decent shot of it.

But regardless of that it will probably be worth it anyway. Because he’ll be getting healthier and stronger.

And that will also make him more successful in his current job.

So perhaps in the end his improvement in biomechanics will result in the promotion he wanted and he won’t want to start a company anyway.

Either way… the order needs to be:

step 1: Fix the biomechanics
step 2: Increase your risk profile when you are much healthier

I am a good example of this

My past five years is a very good example of what I am saying above.

I figured out the rules to these biomechanics in late 2021 when i was still in very bad shape.

So all throughout 2021-2024 I was just improving my health and playing it relatively low key career-wise. Meaning I was doing various contracting jobs and running my own little side hustles on the side (none of which became successful).

It wasn’t until late 2024, after a full three years of recovering, that I took the leap to start Reviv. And quite honestly i never expected it to be more than a side hustle.

This whole thing started with this Substack and then purchasing a couple hundred mouthguards to see if I could sell them using my writing.

When that worked I started thinking about the business more seriously and also understood that I now had the health to go hard at it.

Since then i’ve probably averaged around 70 hours of work per week (~12 hrs per weekday, ~5 hrs per weekend) and haven’t taken a day off in two whole years (because almost everything in the company depends on me).

But my point here is not to toot my own horn. My point is… there was no way i could have held that pace even in my 20s and 30s. I am simply a machine now compared to the feeble Ken that i used to be.

I get punched in the face almost daily. And have plenty of energy to pick myself back up, brush myself off, and just keep truckin’ forward.

While knowing that whatever happens… i’m barely going to think about it afterwards because my head just clears stress very efficiently.

Your playbook for gettin’ back in the game

Here’s where I relate this back to you because I’m trying to convey what I consider to be an important point with all of this.

Many of you are probably in a state of recovery right now.

And perhaps reflecting on to what extent biomechanics impacted you negatively throughout your life. How much more could you have done if you knew this stuff earlier?

You’re probably eager to ‘get back in the game’ and prove what a healthy you can do.

And you will.

But you need to be patient.

This process will take years for some of you.

Let yourself heal for awhile. Gain an understanding of where you are in your healing journey and don’t take on too much too fast.

Ease into things that are more stressful and only take your life up a gear when you are ready.

At least that is my take based on my experience.

But one day… when you are good and ready… show them all what the hell you can do.

And have a glance in your rear view mirror from time-to-time…

…at all the people that didn’t believe in you.

As you whisper to yourself… “hasta la vista baby.”

In November 2025, Catherine Zeta-Jones attended a Netflix event in Los Angeles to promote the new season of Wednesday, where she plays Morticia Addams.

A short interview clip from the event racked up over 2.5 million views, but many of the hundreds of comments quickly turned to her age and looks.

Commenters questioned whether she was really only 56 and said she hadn’t aged well.

Here is article about it: https://humenglish.com/latest/women-rally-behind-catherine-zeta-jones-after-age-shaming-backlash/

Then came the backlash to the backlash.

Women rallied behind her, with former Miss Great Britain Classic winner Laura White calling the criticism nonsense and pointing out that men like Tom Cruise or George Clooney don’t face the same sell-by date.

Beauty journalist Sali Hughes argued that women are trapped either way: age naturally and people say you should do more, get work done and you’re accused of not aging gracefully.

I do agree that mocking someone’s face is completely inappropriate.

But I think they’re all missing the main point… Why does someone who once had one of the best biomechanically developed faces in Hollywood look so different at 57?

Who she was

Catherine Zeta-Jones came out of Swansea, Wales, and built a career on stage and television before Hollywood noticed.

Then came The Mask of Zorro in 1998, Entrapment in 1999, and Traffic in 2000.

In 2002 she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Chicago, a role that showed off her singing and dancing as much as her screen presence.

Her marriage to Michael Douglas kept her in the public eye, and a later run in Ocean’s Twelve, Rock of Ages, and Netflix’s Wednesday has kept her popular for decades.

Great structure when she was young

In her late 20s and 30s, Catherine had terrific biomechanics.

Wide-set eyes, high and full cheekbones, a strong, symmetrical jawline, and a broad smile.

I know the look quite well because when I first met my wife in Ukraine in 2010 I thought she looked quite a bit like Zeta Jones (and she used to get that a fair bit at the time).

It was the type of structure that you rarely saw come out of developed countries like America and the UK. And more often saw in places like Eastern Europe.

I would put her in the same category as the Ryan Reynolds and Tom Hardy cases I’ve written about. Elite structure early on, which is what makes the later change so noticeable.

How does she look now?

At 57 her face has changed in a way that goes beyond normal aging in my view.

It’s not that she doesn’t look fine for 57. She does.

It’s that she doesn’t look fine for someone that was in the top 0.1% biomechanically 30 years earlier.

The asymmetry is more visible, with one side of the face seeming to sit differently from the other. The fullness through the midface has thinned. The lines of the jaw don’t look as balanced as they used to.

And she lost the killer ‘cat-like’ eyes a long time ago already.

So what caused it?

Did she do dental work?

The dental question

Catherine Zeta Jones almost definitely did dental work.

And the celebrity dentist, Dr. Larry Rosenthal, was likely one of the ones that was responsible.

Most likely it happened around the early 2000’s because that is when her teeth seem to have changed in photos.

Here in the Wall Street Journal you can see that she’s named as one of the celebrity patients of Dr. Rosenthal along with Mr. Donald Trump :)

Plus I browsed Google images looking for images first from 1998 where she seems naturally thin.

And I compared to 2004 where her structure seems to have already gotten wider and less defined.

Which to me is a very good signal that this person tampered with their biomechanics in a negative way.

What did she do exactly?

Well at least one source mentioned that Rosenthal had given her a “full set of Hollywood veneers.”

And that would have been all it takes to flatten the curve of spee over time and send her structure spiralling downwards.

Her career went south with her biomechanics

We’ve barely heard of Catherine Zeta Jones in the past decade.

She has done some things, but nothing big and not a lot. As you can see from the list above.

It seems like she has been taking herself out of the limelight unlike many actors that are older than her like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and George Clooney (all in their 60s).

Or even Stallone who was very active in Hollywood all throughout his 70’s (now he is 80).

Honestly, I think in the late 90’s she had better structure than all of them. And now I think she has declined faster than all of them.

Also note that this is not an attack on gender as I think there are plenty of female actresses that have held their biomechanics well and are pretty active in Hollywood (eg. Demi Moore, Jodie Foster, etc.) despite being in their 60’s and above.

Rather this is simply a biomechanical point of view on what I think happened to her.

Closing thoughts

I feel particularly bad for Catherine Zeta Jones as I think she is the type of person that wanted to remain very authentic and natural.

In 2016 she stated publicly that she’d never done plastic surgery despite the fact that there would have been strong pressure on her to do it.

Because she would have been collapsing for over a decade already at that point and it was probably having a pretty negative impact on her career.

But she didn’t do it.

In a way she gave up the stardom and decided to play it low key.

She also seems to have focused on her family during that time (they have two kids that are now in their 20’s).

In a way she did what I did around the same time after a dentist filed my teeth down in mid-2014. I put my life in a lower gear, focused on family, and adjusted my values to my new reality.

But now… i’m making up for lost time.

And I hope Catherine Zeta Jones will have that same opportunity too one day.

Something has always bothered me about the way most serious lifters look.

Yes they’re big.

But they often look a bit weird.

And they move a bit weird.

As if the muscle got added onto a frame that wasn’t quite straight to begin with.

When I figured out how these biomechanics worked… it all became clear.

Let me explain

Muscle doesn’t grow in isolation — it grows on top of a skeleton

The standard model of muscle building treats the muscle as the whole story.

Progressive overload, protein synthesis, recovery, repeat. And at a basic level, sure, that’s how muscle tissue supposably gets bigger.

But muscle doesn’t exist independently of the frame it’s attached to. Every muscle in your body has an origin and an insertion point on bone, and it’s only able to sit at its correct length, in its correct position, generating force efficiently, if the skeleton it’s anchored to is actually in the right place.

If the skeleton is twisted, rotated, or collapsed — which is the condition most adult bodies are in — the muscles attached to it are being asked to function from a distorted starting position.

They can still grow. They just grow twisted, along with everything else.

Soft tissue is what allows the skeleton to actually correct

This is where I think the real key to muscle building has been missing from the conversation entirely.

The soft tissue surrounding the skull and skeleton is what holds structural position in place — like the material of a balloon holding its shape under internal pressure.

When that soft tissue is inflating, the skeleton has room to move back toward its correct position. When it’s deflated and collapsed, the skeleton is locked into whatever twisted configuration the compensation pattern demands.

When the skeleton corrects because the soft tissue is inflating properly, the muscles attached to it get to revert back to their actual, natural length and position. And as a result that person will be far stronger.

Whereas a muscle that’s been sitting shortened or pulled at an odd angle for years, because the bone it’s anchored to has been rotated out of place, is not going to build clean, functional mass no matter how much volume you throw at it in the gym.

It’s going to build mass around the distortion.

And while those muscles might look big, the reality is that that person is probably not that strong.

My example

When I was in college I got really into going to the gym my freshman year. I was going 4-5x per week and taking the protein shakes, etc.

My muscles got a little bit bigger but then seemed to plateau.

From that point on it was as if i just got chubbier rather than putting on muscle.

Whereas my workout partner, a guy named Brian with great biomechanics, joined me only perhaps 1-2x per week and completely blew me out.

His body just put on muscle extremely easily and in a few months of work he looked jacked. This despite him not taking any of the protein shakes, etc.

You see the problem with my body was that it was twisted. And so effort did not translate into results.

I also remember that i didn’t feel particularly strong despite all that effort.

I contrast that with these days where I haven’t been to the gym in 5 years but if someone runs into me now they would likely feel as if they just ran into a brick wall. ie. they are the one that stumbles, not me.

I just have solid structural strength and balance now. Despite the fact that I do not have much definition nor particularly big muscles. A bit like a young Charles Barkley or Shaq.

Barkley was one of the best rebounders in the league at a modest height of 6’6” while not being a very good jumper and hating to go to the gym. How?

The guy was naturally wide & structurally solid.

On a compensated body, everything is twisted

This is what all these gym bros don’t account for.

Most adult bodies these days are operating in a state of chronic compensation — the skull has deflated to some degree, the spine has adjusted around it, the pelvis has rotated to manage the imbalance above it, and every joint downstream is sitting slightly off from where it was designed to be.

It’s not a major visible deformity in most cases, rather it’s subtle. The person still looks like a relatively healthy person. Kinda like me in college.

But when you load a body like that with heavy training, you’re not building muscle on a straight frame. You’re building muscle on a compensated one.

And you’re probably twisting the frame further.

You might get a little bigger, sure.

But you get bigger in the shape your compensation pattern dictates, not in the shape your body was actually designed to take.

This is why a lot of serious lifters look a bit strange

I think this explains something a lot of people tend to notice about ‘gym bros’.

Guys who spend years in the gym, lifting seriously and consistently, often end up looking oddly rigid — inflexible, boxy through the torso, with a kind of asymmetry or stiffness to how they carry themselves that doesn’t quite look right.

Sure they’re pretty strong. But something about the proportions feels slightly wrong, and they usually move like it too — for example they walk a bit funny.

I think that’s the direct result of building a large amount of muscle on top of a skeleton that was never allowed to correct in the first place.

The muscle mass gets locked in around whatever twist was already present, and the more muscle you add, the more that twisted pattern gets reinforced and harder to unwind later.

What you should instead do

Rather then investing a ton of time in the gym, my experience tells me you first need to focus on straightening out the skeleton.

And the way you do that is by inflating the soft tissue with this biomechanical process. It inflates a bit like a balloon as I wrote here:

When you straighten out the skeleton I think a lot of good muscle mass starts to develop almost effortlessly.

Flexibility improves. Strength improves.

And instead of moving funny.. you’re moving more fluidly.

Your ability to play sports improves rather than getting hindered by inflexible muscles like what happens to a lot of the ‘gym bros’.

My extreme take

I actually don’t think the human body was designed to have to be able to touch weights at all.

Not if you take your biomechanics to the end.

Because it was designed for perfection. Like a brand new Ferrari.

You don’t start changing all the parts on a new Ferrari because the existing parts were designed to work extremely well together.

For example the minute you put bigger tires on you’re going to have tradeoffs in how the car handles. etc.

And so I quite literally never plan on picking up a weight again for the rest of my life. Simply because I think we’re gonna conclude one day that it was just never actually needed.

Closing thoughts

I think the fitness industry has spent decades optimizing the muscle-building side of the equation — sets, reps, protein, recovery windows — while completely ignoring the skeletal and soft tissue side that determines what shape all that muscle actually gets built into.

You can build pretty well around a good frame.

You cannot build very well on top of a bad one; you just build a bigger version of the same distortion.

Inflate the soft tissue, let the skeleton correct, and your body will move towards perfection over time. Because it was designed for it.

That’s the difference between getting bigger and actually getting better.

For most of my adult life, my body felt like something that was happening to me rather than something I understood.

Things would go wrong and I wouldn’t know why.

Sometimes things would seemingly improve and I wouldn’t know why either.

It almost felt random.

I could have been exercising a lot, eating very healthy, and i’d still get sick or get injured.

Now, five years into this process, it doesn’t feel random at all. It feels like something I can actually understand.

Before I understood biomechanics, my body was a mystery

In my 20’s and 30’s many things would happen to my body that seemed a bit unpredictable.

One day i’d wake up tight. Another day I might wake up with a fever. etc.

It felt kind of random sometimes. LIke my body had a mind of it’s own.

The same was true of feeling focused and energized.

Some days I’d have really good focus and stamina. Other days, seemingly at random, I’d feel drained and depleted for no reason I could easily identify.

So back then i’d often make up my own hypotheses since there wasn’t a very tight logic. I’d say to myself things like “oh this must be because I have more stress at work” or “maybe this is related to what I ate last night?”

This is exactly what I see tons of people these days doing. Putting together correlations in their own head that are almost laughable once you understand biomechanics.

And then there was my mouth.

Throughout my early to mid twenties i was often clenching and grinding on my teeth. I put it off to stress and things like that. Because the reality was I had no real clue what was actually going on.

Another dental issue I had was I had a root canal and a couple of upper teeth seemed to be evolving into a worse position.

I would scratch my head and think to myself… “weird. The body is so random.”

Looking back, none of this was actually random. I just didn’t have the biomechanical framework to see the pattern. I was reacting to a body that felt like it was governed by chance, when it was actually governed by structural rules I hadn’t identified yet.

Why the body felt unpredictable in the first place

Once you start to understand these biomechanics — how the skull sits, whether the skeleton is compensating, whether the brain is being crushed by the collapse of the skull — the “randomness” starts making a lot more sense.

A body that is collapsing is fighting an uphill battle constantly, and is figuring out how to compensate in order to keep you alive and functioning as best it can.

It may need to turn down your energy to do that.

Or perhaps it needs to reduce function in a certain organ.

Or perhaps it needs to reduce activity in certain parts of the brain to keep other, more important, parts functioning well.

We really don’t know all the tradeoffs it is making.

But from what I have seen I think it is safe to assume that the body is making very intelligent decisions in the name of our survival.

The body is actually deeply logical when it’s improving

Here’s what I’ve come to appreciate over these five years that i’ve been on my biomechanical recovery.

The body was never actually irrational.

It was never truly random, even back when it felt that way to me.

What I was experiencing as chaos was really just the output of a system responding logically to a structural situation I didn’t understand yet.

Once you understand the inputs, the outputs stop feeling mysterious and start feeling almost mechanical in how consistently they follow from cause to effect.

These past five years very little has surprised me:

• When I feel tired, I can often feel how it’s using more reserves to make harder (positive) structural changes.

• When I cough, I can feel afterwards how much lungs feel clearer.

• When I have a headache, I can feel how it’s putting pressure on my skull to expand and make more room for my brain. And i’ve experienced tons of cognitive and neurological benefits as a result.

• I literally never get sick because it always sends signals to me beforehand of what I need to do to prevent it.

My body just seems to work very predictably as long as I respect it’s boundaries.

Command versus chaos

The best way I can describe the difference is that I used to feel like a passenger in my own body.

I was reacting to whatever it decided to throw at me, with no ability to anticipate or influence it.

Now I feel like I have command of it. I understand what it’s telling me, I can predict how it’s going to respond to different inputs, and it holds a baseline of function that I can actually rely on day to day.

That shift — from unpredictable to predictable — has given me a ton of confidence.

For example, I know that I can push myself harder and work consistent ~70 hour weeks at age 49 with no retribution.

When I’ve said this to some friends/acquaintances they often tell me that i’m probably building up some kind of “health debt” that I’m going to have to pay one day.

And they typically rant on about how exercise & eating healthy is absolutely key to health. Because after all…. that is ‘proven’ in their view.

This one guy who is about ~7 years younger than me and holds a senior corporate position recently said something like that to me.

He's an avid padel player that ensures he makes it to the gym a few times a week while working 50-60 hour weeks. A year back he had to have a major knee surgery and then a little while back i heard he got pretty sick and had to take almost a week off from work to recover.

Meanwhile I’m older than him, i’m clocking 10-20 hours more of work time per week than he does, I don’t go to the gym ever, i’ve never needed to get any surgeries, I haven’t been sick in over 5 years, i’m in a good mood pretty much 24-7, and I’m able to work at this level for the last two years without having taken a single day off.

So I ask myself… who is actually the one that is running up this ‘health debt’?

Is it me who just seems to perform better and better in a sustainable way, or it is him whose body is giving clear signals that is breaking down?

My money’s on me baby ;)

Plus to be honest… his face is aging and showing more lines whereas mine seems to be doing the exact opposite. I have gotten rid of my wrinkles and my hair is getting thicker.

You see when you take a step back and think logically about the actual evidence… you would probably see that over the last few years literally every signal points to the fact that he is aging a LOT faster than I am.

But try and tell him that… and he’d think you lost your marbles.

I mean… how could someone that is sitting on his ass and eating whatever he wants be aging a lot slower than someone who regularly goes to the gym and goes out of his way to eat a healthy diet?

Point being that most people out there have stopped looking at the signs the body is giving them. Rather they prefer to just maintain their ‘belief system', even if they’re falling apart in the process.

Closing thoughts

I think a lot of people live the way I used to — treating their body as this semi-mysterious black box that occasionally malfunctions for reasons nobody can quite pin down.

Get sick, shrug, blame bad luck or a weak immune system.

Feel drained, shrug, blame stress or age.

Have a dental issue crop up, shrug, blame genetics.

Their great grandfather also had bad teeth… Voila! That must be the source of their problems! :)

Except, I don’t think any of it is actually random.

I think it’s downstream of a biomechanical baseline that’s unstable, producing exactly the kind of erratic output you’d expect from any system under chronic variable stress.

Fix the structure, and the erratic output goes away.

What’s left is a body that behaves consistently, communicates clearly, and follows its own internal logic so reliably that, for the first time in my adult life, it actually makes sense to me.

Muhammad Ali is one of the most studied athletes in history.

He was an amazing athlete when he was young and yet he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s (a neurological disease) at only age 42.

Something went obviously very wrong during those intervening years… so did he change his teeth?

Or was it as many concluded…. that he just got hit in the head too many times?

Or perhaps it was something else?

Let’s explore that question to see if we can shed any light on it.

At the start of his career Ali had elite biomechanics

Before anyone talks about his decline, it’s worth remembering just how physically gifted Ali was at the outset.

He was famous for a combination that almost never exists in heavyweight boxing — blinding hand speed, footwork more associated with lighter divisions, and reflexes good enough that he could lean back from punches other fighters simply couldn’t see coming.

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” is how he liked to describe it.

But no doubt he guy had superb biomechanics. That is the only way that you achieve that type of quickness and dominate a sport like boxing.

And not only that but his mental quickness also exhibited his gifted biomechanics. The guy could talk sh*t with the best of them.

With a famously poetic way of putting words together at times.

The Ali who left boxing was a different person entirely

By the early 1980s, he was a completely different person.

His speech had slowed. His movement had stiffened.

He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s syndrome in 1984, just three years after his final fight.

And the decline from there is well documented — the tremor, the mask-like face, the diminishing mobility that the entire world watched play out over decades, most visibly when he lit the Olympic torch in 1996, visibly shaking in front of a global audience.

The official story has always been Parkinson’s, generally attributed to the cumulative effect of thousands of punches to the head over a twenty-year career.

And I don’t dispute that repeated head trauma played a role in his neurological decline. But I don’t think it’s a complete explanation.

Willie Pep took far more punishment than Ali and aged well

If total blows to the head were the whole story, Willie Pep should have been in far worse shape than Ali.

Pep fought professionally from 1940 to 1966, racking up somewhere around 240 fights over his career — a number that dwarfs Ali’s 61 professional fights by a factor of four.

He fought constantly, sometimes multiple times a month, across more than two and a half decades in the ring. By sheer volume of punches absorbed over a career, Pep is one of the most battle-tested fighters in boxing history.

And yet Pep is remembered, for most of his life after retirement, as sharp, quick-witted, and articulate well into his later decades — doing interviews, telling stories from his career with total clarity, nothing like the visible, rapid neurological decline Ali experienced within just a few years of leaving the sport.

If cumulative head trauma alone drove Ali’s collapse, a fighter with four times the fight count and a career nearly ten years longer should have shown it far worse. But that didn’t happen.

So what actually happened?

I don’t think there’s a single clear smoking gun, but rather a number of strong contributing factors.

Ken Norton broke Ali’s jaw in their first fight in 1973. Ali fought on with the broken jaw for the rest of the bout and lost a decision.

A broken jaw is not a minor thing — and likely shows that there were some structural faults beforehand that allowed the jaw to break.

Plus from what I understand fixing a broken jaw will typically change the bite afterwards. So I think you can safely assume that after his jaw was broken Ali was in a faster cycle of collapse as the bite had been unnaturally altered.

But that decline often takes a few years to manifest itself. And so he actually won his next few fights in the following couple years, but by 1976 he was already in clear decline.

So it likely took a few years for the structural deterioration to accumulate to the point of making it very difficult for him to perform at his previous level.

And do you know where this sounds familiar from? From a lot of the stories i hear of folks that did braces.

They rarely see a direct athletic impact in the first couple of years but it is the years after that in which the damage manifests itself the most in their performance/function.

Ali’s changing bite

Then there’s the dental side of the picture.

Public photos of Ali across the decades show a major change in his smile and jaw alignment that go well beyond what you’d expect from simple aging.

When I look at the pics above I see a major flattening of the curve of spee.

But did it come because of some dental work that we don’t know about because it’s not in the public record? Maybe.

Or maybe it was just the ongoing decline after breaking his jaw and continuing to get hit many times on an unstable cranial foundation.

Also what role did the Parkinson’s play in changing his bite? Though in my hypothesis Parkinson’s is more likely a function of flattening the curve of spee rather than a cause.

And i’m confident that you’ll probably find that most folks that suffer Parkinson’s have quite a flat curve of spee.

Closing thoughts

With Ali I just don’t think there’s a single smoking gun that we can point to.

Rather there are a number of clues & questions we can point to:

• Why was his jaw unstable such that Ken Norton broke it in the first place?

• How did fixing the broken jaw change his bite?

• How much damage did getting hit in the head a lot following his broken jaw do?

• Did he have some dental work that we don’t know about?

I’m not sure we’ll ever know the answers to these questions.

But what is clear is that his curve of spee flattened as his teeth changed completely and that took his body and his mind with it.

Ali fell victim to biomechanical collapse pure & simple.

Loneliness in old age gets treated like some unavoidable social byproduct of getting older — kids move away, friends pass, retirement removes the built-in social structure of a workplace.

All of that is true on the surface.

But I think there’s a deeper mechanism running underneath it that isn’t really talked about.

And it explains why more and more folks are finding themselves lonely late in life.

Biomechanics collapse, and neurology follows

I’ve written quite a bit about how the skull deflates over a lifetime — through dental work (eg. orthodontics, extractions, etc), through loss of vertical height (eg. grinding, etc), through the slow soft tissue collapse that most people just call “aging.”

As that structural collapse progresses, I view that the brain sitting inside the skull gets compressed and a growing number of things get impaired.

The nervous system that’s supposed to be operating inside a properly inflated, properly supported skull is instead operating inside a slowly shrinking container.

That has consequences far beyond memory loss or slower reflexes, which are the normal things people associate with cognitive aging.

Neurology isn’t just about remembering where you put your keys. It’s the entire infrastructure behind how you read a room, regulate your own emotions, interpret someone else’s tone, and manage the give-and-take that every relationship requires.

I figured that piece out by rollercoastering on my neurology the past decade and seeing just how my ability to do those things rollercoastered with it.

Neurology is what lets you make and keep friends

Friendship, at a functional level, is a neurological skill.

It requires reading social cues accurately, tolerating minor friction without overreacting, picking up on when to speak and when to listen, managing your own emotional responses so they don’t overwhelm the interaction, and doing all of that consistently over years, sometimes decades.

None of that happens automatically (as I found out the hard way).

It happens because a healthy brain is running the process smoothly in the background.

When that same brain is operating under structural compression, the machinery behind all of that starts to degrade.

Compressed neurology makes people more emotional and reactive

Here’s the part I think explains the loneliness specifically.

As neurological function degrades, people often don’t become quieter or more withdrawn right away.

They also frequently become more emotional, more sensitive, more reactive to things that wouldn’t have bothered them a decade earlier.

• A comment that used to roll off them now stings.

• A minor disagreement that used to resolve itself in five minutes now spirals into something bigger.

• Emotional regulation — the ability to feel something and not let it hijack the whole interaction.

This is exactly what happened to me when I was not doing well.

I would read into things people said rather than let it bounce off me. I would hold grudges. I would show my vulnerabilities by getting sensitive to certain topics.

These days I rarely do any of these things.

You would be hard pressed to find my sensitivities as I just let most things bounce off so much easier now.

Instead of getting sensitive if I deem what was said to have hurtful intentions… I am more likely to smile, laugh and then shoot back a joke that is aimed at something i think the other person is sensitive about.

Just to let them know “I don’t just play defense Jack.”

Then i go about my day and probably think nothing of it again. Because that’s just how a healthy brain works in my experience.

This makes it easy to destroy relationships that took decades to build

So now you have an older person whose emotional regulation is degraded… but has relationships that have accumulated years of history, shared grievances, old wounds, and all the complicated texture that comes with decades of knowing someone.

That combination is dangerous. It doesn’t take much for a heightened emotional reaction to turn a minor disagreement into a permanent rift with a sibling, an old friend, or a spouse.

You see this constantly — an elderly relative who suddenly cuts off a friend of forty years over something that sounds, from the outside, fairly small.

Everyone chalks it up to “getting difficult with age” or being “stuck in their ways.”

I think what’s actually happening is a neurological system that is no longer as healthy as it used to be.

And they can’t build new relationships to replace what’s lost

Here’s the second half of the problem, and it’s the part that turns this into a downward spiral instead of just a loss.

Making a new friend as an adult, and especially as an older adult, is neurologically demanding.

It requires putting your best social self forward, tolerating the awkwardness of a new relationship, reading a stranger’s cues without the years of context you’d have with an old friend, and doing all of that with less emotional reactivity.

So at the exact moment old relationships are becoming fragile and prone to breaking, the capacity to form new ones to replace them is also disappearing.

It’s not that older people don’t want new friends.

It’s that the neurological toolkit required to build one from scratch has been quietly worn down by declining biomechanics.

The result is a compounding spiral

Put those two things together and you get exactly the pattern we see: older relationships breaking down faster than they should, and no new relationships forming to replace them.

Each lost friendship makes the isolation worse, and the isolation itself tends to accelerate neurological decline further, because social engagement is one of the things that keeps the brain active and functioning.

It becomes self-reinforcing. Lonelier leads to more decline, more decline leads to lonelier.

Case study: My dad’s friend

Awhile back my dad told me a sad story.

There was a friend in his town that he’d spent a lot of quality time with the past few years as they enjoyed talking with each other and both had a passion for old cars.

On top of this they were there for each other when they needed one another.

For example this friend picked up my father awhile back after he’d had hip surgery and helped run errands for him as he was recovering.

In turn my father had also returned the favor numerous times and made sure to always ‘show up’ when it was needed.

But for some reason a couple months back this friend reacted very badly to a casual joke that my dad had made during a phone call. According to my dad it was meant in an innocent way without hurtful intent and he would have never imagined that this friend would react in the way he did.

The friend, however, got very upset and went into silent mode. And despite several attempts to apologize my dad was rebuked.

The two haven’t spoken for a couple months already and my father is pretty sure the relationship is over forever.

But actually i warned my father that something like this would happen many months before it happened.

Because this friend had essentially resurfaced all of the teeth in his mouth around a year back. It was a very expensive dental job in which i believe crowns/implants were placed over everything to create a completely new, artificial occlusion.

Doing that is, in my experience, a complete disaster waiting to happen because it violates what I wrote here:

And so i told my dad straight up when he first told me of it… “your friend is likely gonna lose his shit one day.” Because the skull would essentially be caving in on the brain.

This over-reaction was exactly the type of thing I had in mind when I said it.

Because it usually plays out as a slow decline where the person is building up negative internal dialogue about the other person over time… and then finally it boils over and the relationship is damaged.

I did it numerous times during my early years of going in circles. Been there.. done that ;)

Oh well.. sometimes it sucks to be right.

Closing thoughts

I don’t think old-age loneliness is primarily a scheduling problem or a “kids don’t visit enough” problem, even though that’s the explanation everyone reaches for.

I think it’s downstream of the same biomechanical collapse I’ve been writing about — skull deflating, brain compressing, neurological function eroding.

The people who stay socially connected and emotionally steady into their 80s and 90s tend to be the same people who’ve held onto good structure.

The people who isolate and burn through relationships tend to be the ones whose structure collapsed the fastest.

It’s not about being a nicer or more resilient person.

It’s about whether the brain doing the social work is still structurally healthy enough to do its job.

Youtube version

One story that never sat well with me was the death of Bruce Lee.

The guy had amazing biomechanics and was only 32 when he died of cerebral edema, an abnormal swelling of the brain.

It puzzled me… was he a hole in my theory?

But as I mulled that over in the weeks after I wrote the article… i started to realize what i think the culprit might have been.

I think it was all the various presription drugs he was taking.

Some context setting

I want to be upfront about something before I get into this: I’m not saying medication is bad, or that nobody should take it. That’s not my argument.

Rather what I’ve come to conclude is that the body is an extraordinarily smart compensator.

It’s constantly making thousands of tiny adjustments to keep you alive and functioning, even when something underneath is going wrong.

And I think medication, especially when stacked or overused, has a tendency to blunt that intelligence — to override the very signals and responses the body is using to protect itself.

When that happens, I think people die who genuinely didn’t have to.

The body is smarter than we give it credit for

I’ve written about this before in different contexts — the body compensating for a misdeveloped bite/skull, compensating for an injury, finding a way to keep functioning despite a structural problem that is destined to only get worse.

That same compensatory intelligence runs through every system in the body, not just the skeleton.

Heart rate, blood pressure, inflammation, pain signaling — all of it is the body constantly self-correcting in the background, usually without you noticing.

Pain, for example, isn’t a malfunction. It’s a message.

Inflammation isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a targeted repair response.

When the body raises your heart rate or drops your blood pressure or triggers a fever, that’s not random noise — it’s a smart, adaptive system doing what it’s supposed to do in response to a real threat.

I particularly see this in how the body recovers

I am flat out amazed at how smart the body is during this biomechanical process of recovery.

It is changing tons of things all across my body to allow the skeleton to resurrect.

• My senses are normalizing.

• The shape of my skull is normalizing over time.

• I feel like my lungs are being cleaned.

• The skin and complexion are stretching and looking young and younger.

• My mind and neurological system are bouncing back.

And a thousand other things are likely happening… only a small fraction of which I am aware of.

But think about how smart this body needs to be to be able to do all of this. And note that most of this stuff is the type of healing that it has never had any practice doing before.

Because on pretty much all human beings to this point…. biomechanics were a one way journey downhill. People collapsed over time and they never resurrected (ie. aging).

And yet the body still retains this intelligence to undo seemingly all types of damage.

I think that is just crazy given just how complex the human body is.

Medication overrides the intelligence

Here’s where I think the danger comes in.

A lot of medication — especially sedatives, painkillers, muscle relaxants, and combinations of the above — doesn’t fix the underlying problem the body is compensating for.

It mutes the body’s ability to signal that the problem exists at all.

Pain gets numbed instead of fixed at its root cause.

Anxiety gets sedated instead of addressed.

Muscle spasms — gets relaxed away by a muscle relaxant, removing a protective mechanism the body put there on purpose.

The person feels better. But “feeling better” and “the underlying problem being solved” are not the same thing. In a lot of cases, the medication has just turned the volume down on the body’s own alarm system.

And when you stack multiple medications — which happens constantly, especially with people managing chronic pain, anxiety, or insomnia — you’re not just dulling one alarm. You’re dulling several systems at once, often systems that were supposed to be checking and balancing each other.

Let’s examine Bruce Lee’s death

Bruce Lee died in 1973 at 32 years old.

Structurally, the guy was about as biomechanically sound as a human being gets — famous for extraordinary physical control, explosive strength relative to his size, and a body that looked like it was built to last decades beyond what it got.

The official cause of death was cerebral edema — swelling of the brain.

The leading theory, based on the toxicology at the time, pointed to a hypersensitivity reaction to meprobamate, a sedative ingredient in a headache tablet (Equagesic) he’d taken that day.

But aside from that, Lee was already managing a fairly heavy load of supplements and medications in the period leading up to his death, including substances used for pain and inflammation from a back injury he’d suffered years earlier.

A body with Bruce Lee’s structural quality should have been able to compensate for an enormous amount. And yet a reaction to a sedative, on top of whatever else was already circulating in his system, was enough to kill him in a matter of hours.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence of bad luck, rather I think it’s what can happen when you keep adding pharmaceutical inputs on top of a system that was already working hard to compensate for something else.

Until the compensation capacity runs out.

He’s not the only case that fits this pattern

Bruce Lee isn’t an isolated example to me.

It’s a recurring pattern — a person who, structurally, looked like they should have had decades left, whose death gets attributed to “an unfortunate reaction” or “an accidental overdose,” where the actual story is a body that had been compensating quietly for a long time while medication kept piling on top of it.

Anna Nicole Smith died at 39 with multiple prescription drugs identified in her system, including sedatives and sleep aids, at a time when she was also grieving the recent loss of her son.

Whitney Houston, an extraordinary vocal talent with a body built for a level of breath control most people never achieve, drowned in a bathtub at 48 with cocaine and heart disease both cited as contributing factors, on top of a long, documented history of prescription and substance use.

Michael Jackson died at 50 from acute propofol intoxication, administered alongside other sedatives, after years of managing pain and insomnia through an increasingly heavy medication regimen.

In every one of these cases, you have someone who — at their structural peak — represented an extraordinary physical specimen.

And in every one of these cases, the actual cause of death traces back not to the body simply failing on its own, but to a pharmaceutical load that the body’s compensatory systems couldn’t keep up with anymore.

My own experience with this

I’ll add my own small data point here, for what it’s worth.

I have not taken a single prescription drug in well over five years. I actively avoid them like the plague — not out of some rigid ideology, but because of exactly what I’ve laid out above.

I don’t want to mute whatever my body is trying to tell me, and I don’t want to mute its compensatory intelligence.

And in that entire five-plus year stretch, I haven’t been sick once.

I just trust the body’s intelligence and if it sends me a message I wanna hear it. Not block it out.

Closing thoughts

My view is that the deaths I mention above aren’t really about “the body giving out.”

They’re about the body’s warning systems being quieted faster than the underlying problem was being solved.

Pain gets masked. Anxiety gets sedated. Muscles get relaxed. Sleep gets forced instead of restored.

Each of those interventions individually can feel helpful in the moment.

Stacked together over months or years, they add up to a body that’s lost its ability to tell you, clearly, that something is wrong — right up until it’s fatally wrong.

I’m not telling anyone to stop taking something a doctor has them on. That’s not my place, and this isn’t medical advice.

But I do think we’ve built a culture that reaches for pharmaceutical solutions to biomechanical problems. And that is often not going to end well.

I get asked about neuromuscular dentistry (NM) a fair bit.

People find it because it sounds sophisticated — TENS units, EMG readings, the promise of finding your jaw’s “true” resting position using actual measurable data instead of just eyeballing a bite.

But it’s not some scientific version of what I do. It’s not even close.

Because they don’t understand the skeleton. Your bite is always changing — it takes years to unwind the skeleton, and the bite keeps evolving that entire time.

Thinking you can measure one relaxed position and “fix” the bite there permanently is, frankly, absolutely stupid. And I say that having tried it on myself many times in my early years.

What neuromuscular dentistry actually is

The core idea behind neuromuscular dentistry is that most people’s bites are misaligned relative to where their jaw muscles “want” to rest, and that this mismatch is the source of TMJ pain, headaches, and a long list of other symptoms.

To find the “correct” position, practitioners use a TENS unit — a small device that sends electrical pulses to relax and fatigue the jaw muscles — combined with EMG readings that measure muscle activity, and sometimes jaw tracking devices that record how the mandible moves.

Once they’ve used the TENS unit to get the muscles into what they consider a relaxed, neutral state, they measure where the jaw naturally wants to sit in that relaxed condition.

That becomes the target “neuromuscular bite.”

From there, treatment usually involves an orthotic device to hold the jaw in that new position, and eventually — this is the part that concerns me — permanent changes to the teeth themselves, through equilibration (selective grinding), crowns, or full-mouth reconstruction, to lock the bite into that new position long-term.

How big is it?

This isn’t a fringe idea.

Neuromuscular dentistry has its own professional organizations, its own certification pathways, and a whole ecosystem of continuing education courses built around specific technology brands — TENS/EMG systems (eg. the K7x by Myotronics) are the backbone of the entire approach and are marketed heavily to dentists as a way to differentiate their practice and justify premium fees for full-mouth work.

There are well-known practitioners who’ve built entire careers and patient followings around this framework, often branding themselves as TMJ specialists or “neuromuscular dentists” and drawing patients from across the country who’ve struck out with conventional dentistry.

I had a quick look at the Myotronics NM dentist locator (screenshot above) and they have a list of several hundred dentists in the US and abroad.

So it’s a legitimate, established, and pretty well marketed corner of dentistry - which is part of why I think it’s dangerous.

I actually tried this myself back in 2014-2015

Before I go further into why I disagree with the philosophy, let me start by saying that I used to test it’s fundamentals on myself in my early years.

Back in late 2014 and 2015 I was doing Starecta, which is a popular DIY method where you lock a single jaw position with an indexed splint. These days they use polymorph but back then I was using acrylic resin and making + adjusting my own splints.

I also had my own TENS unit that I would sometimes use to relax my jaw muscles. And I was familiar with neuromuscular dentistry because some of their dentists would be frequently posting on the major TMJ Facebook groups of the time.

So naturally, I did what the neuromuscular model tells you to do. I tried to lock that new position in. I would index a splint to capture the bite I got right after using the TENS unit, treating it as the “correct” position I’d finally uncovered.

But I would notice that things would change within a week or two. And my jaw would not fit neatly into the indexed splint i had made. Rather it would hit some kind of interference and then slide into the position set by the splint.

And so i further experimented. I would relax my jaw, index a splint to that position and then further use the TENS unit for another hour or so.

Even after an hour I noticed that my jaw already did not go evenly into the indexed splint i’d made an hour earlier. Rather it would hit an interference and then slide in.

Then I tried re-indexing the splint at periodic intervals, like every couple weeks, thereby mimicking the logic behind the regular adjustments that NM dentists make.

But the problem was I didn’t feel like i was progressing… rather I felt like i was going in circles.

It would take another year or two for me (approx 2017) to figure out why. And the reason was that they didn’t understand that on a locking bite the jaw needs to be supported in multiple positions as I wrote here:

Since they were locking only a single position… you were essentially doomed to go in circles and decline over the longer term.

Which is what i’m pretty sure is happening to all NM patients if they reflected on their situation honestly.

Why they don’t understand the skeleton

Here’s the fundamental issue.

Neuromuscular dentistry treats the bite like a fixed puzzle with one correct solution — find it once with the right equipment, lock it in, done. That’s only possible if the bite is a static thing sitting on top of a static skeleton.

But the skeleton isn’t static. It’s always in motion — either collapsing or resurrecting (if you know the correct biomechanical rules).

And because the bite is downstream of the skeleton, the bite is always changing too.

Unwinding a collapsed skeleton back toward correct structure isn’t a one-day event. It takes years. And the bite keeps evolving the entire time that unwinding is happening, because it’s simply reflecting whatever position the skull, jaw, and spine happen to be in at that moment.

So when a neuromuscular dentist relaxes your muscles with a TENS unit and captures a bite, all they’ve captured is a snapshot of your skeleton on that particular day.

They haven’t found “the” bite. They’ve found “a” bite — one frame out of a multi-year film. Treating that single frame as the final answer and building permanent dental work around it isn’t scientific. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what the bite even is in my view.

That’s exactly why I went in circles with Starecta during those early years. Something i wrote about here:

I wasn’t failing to find the right position. I was correctly capturing a different, real position every time — because my skeleton was constantly changing.

Even worse… my skeleton was probably collapsing most of the time since I was locking only a single bite and so I was adjusting my splint to my evolving bite as my skeleton was in freefall.

The million dolla question

Here’s a simple test I like to put to anyone who’s a believer in neuromuscular dentistry: find me someone who did full neuromuscular treatment five-plus years ago and is genuinely still happy with it.

No lingering issues, no return of symptoms, etc.

I was on TMJ-related Facebook groups a ton between 2014-2018 and I don’t remember ever having found one.

I ran into lots of people that had done NM, but the story always seemed to be the same. It sometimes felt good, sometimes felt like they were getting worse, but it did not feel stable.

And the reason for that most likely was that their skeletons were constantly evolving (probably for the worse).

Why the tooth-grinding part is genuinely dangerous (in my view)

This is the part that I disagree with completely.

Once a neuromuscular dentist has identified their target bite position, the standard path to “finishing” treatment often involves permanently altering the teeth to match it — grinding down enamel through equilibration, or placing crowns and doing full-mouth reconstruction to lock the new position in place.

So they are permanently altering your teeth for this bite that they think they have found.

But the ‘bite’ was just a snapshot, and an incorrect one at that.

So they charge your lots of money for essentially permanently reshaping your teeth based on their ‘philosophy’.

Closing thoughts

The heart of the matter is that neuromuscular dentistry looks at the problem completely wrong in my view.

To resurrect someone’s skeleton you need to add vertical and unlock the current occlusion…. and then their bite needs to be allowed to constantly evolve for years as they recover.

Locking a single bite is the opposite of what you want to do.

And it is not about relaxing muscles in my view… rather this whole biomechanical game is about stretching. You need to inflate the skull and skeleton little-by-little over time. Over years.

So who is right and who is wrong?

Well get onto our Skool community and read through thousands of user posts and then get onto some of the Facebook TMJ groups related to Neuromuscular Dentistry and read those posts.

Then you decide.

I’m pretty confident I know what you’ll conclude ;)

Youtube version

A family member went to doctor recently because they felt a bit ill.

This same family member has been using a flat mouthguard on and off for a couple years but never really takes it seriously.

I have asked them many times if they were wearing it every night and I could never get a straight answer. But I can see clearly they haven’t unlocked their bite so it’s clear they are not wearing it nearly as much a they should.

When I mentioned that I don’t think they’d be getting ill like this if they wore the mouthguard more regularly they interpreted it as if i’m joking.

To them doctors are the experts. And i’m the guy talking shit because I don’t have the MD diploma on the wall.

But the thing is…. this person was never a good first principles thinker. They always put ‘experts’ on a pedestal and accepted what they said as true their entire life. So it doesn’t really surprise me that this is their attitude.

I was the opposite. I always thought to myself what I considered to be logical and true based on the evidence and logic at hand. Regardless of what the ‘expert’ in front of me said.

People typically need to earn their credibility with me because i give very little at face value. And I generally found that that attitude served me best in life..

And today I want to talk about this because I’m sure many of you will have similar frustrations trying to get loved ones (eg. parents, grandparents, etc) to start this process.

Because they just won’t take it seriously and the root cause of that is typically that they are poor first principle thinkers.

What is “First Principles Thinking”?

I’ve taken this from Chatgpt:

First principles thinking is a way of solving problems by breaking them down into their most fundamental truths and reasoning up from there, instead of relying on assumptions, analogies, or conventional wisdom.

Think of it as asking:

“What do I know is actually true?”
“If I started from scratch, what solution would I build?”

An example: Building a battery

Most people might think:

• Batteries are expensive.

• Therefore, making electric cars will always be expensive.

That’s reasoning by analogy—assuming the future will resemble the past.

A first-principles thinker would instead ask:

• What is a battery made of?

  • Lithium

  • Nickel

  • Cobalt

  • Graphite

  • Manufacturing materials

• What do those raw materials actually cost?

• Is the high price due to the materials, the manufacturing process, or something else?

By questioning each assumption, you might discover that batteries could be made much more cheaply through better manufacturing or different chemistries.

This is the type of reasoning often associated with entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, though the concept dates back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

I was forced to apply “First Principles Thinking” to survive

In 2014 I was in a dilemma.

A TMJ dentist had drilled my teeth and flattened them considerably sending my health into a tailspin.

Within about a month of that happening I had severe brain fog to the extent of having almost no short term memory. I felt like a hermit.

My neck and body were changing for the worse rapidly as if i was accelerated aging.

And a lot more.

It didn’t add up based on everything I’d understood about dentistry and how the body works.

And each time I went to a different dentist at that time it either made me feel worse or at best did nothing.

It was clear that there were some rules/logic that was not understood by the so called ‘experts’. And so I realized I would need to wipe the slate clean and learn them by myself.

Otherwise if I stayed in that condition I would be unable to take care of my family and live a normal life.

So after a few years of going in circles with dentists i said to myself “Screw it. I’m gonna assume these dentists are a bunch of idiots who learned all the wrong thing and i’m gonna figure out the rules to this game myself.”

Actually correction… i didn’t quite learn them by myself. I had a very talented partner in solving this problem, Marcello, who I have mentioned in the past several times.

How I applied First Principles Thinking

Similar to the example earlier in the article I started thinking about what I considered to be ‘existing truths’ back in 2014:

• I was age 37 and my health had been pretty consistent to this point. I had made no major changes to diet or exercise

• The only major change seems to have been this dentist who flattened the cusps on numerous teeth.

• Therefore I can safely assume that somehow the flattening of dental cusps led to this massive set of health issues.

And then I started asking questions and challenging assumptions:

Question: Ok so why would flattening of cusps lead to such massive problems?

» Logical answer: Well logically it would either relate to the height of teeth playing an important role to how the skull works. Or how the teeth come together was disrupted by this because my bite had changed.

Assumption: Some TMJ dentists consider it fine to drill down your teeth in this way but reality is that they only understand teeth.

» Challenge to assumption: What if there are major negative consequences to this that they don’t understand? How would I test this hypothesis? Can I find others in FB groups who have a similar story?

And then I began running numerous tests in the ensuing years. For example I would:

• test wearing a splint that locked my jaw forward. Locked my jaw back. Locked my jaw to the side.

• test wearing a spint that was flat and did not lock the jaw at all.

• test wearing a splint that allowed the jaw to move between two different positions: retrusion and protrusion

And for each test I needed to somehow figure out a way of measuring if i was progressing or regressing:

• Relying on how I ‘felt’ could sometimes trick you i learned over time.

• Using a tracking splint to measure changes to the curve of spee ended up being a reliable way of doing this. And over longer periods it seemed to align with how i felt (ie. improved curve of spee = I felt better).

More on that here:

So you see… by challenging assumptions and asking logical questions I eventually deduced a set of rules about how these ‘biomechanics’ worked. And those were:

• You would improve if you added dental height and kept a flat occlusion. You would get worse if you took away height from your natural teeth (as that is the plane that was required by your skull),

• If you locked a single position of the jaw you would get worse over time whereas if you locked both retrusion + protrusion on the same splint you could maintain and even improve slowly.

Why is this important to keep in mind?

This whole point about first principles thinking is important to keep in mind when talking to others.

Because people who have a similar mindset to me and do not just accept what the ‘experts’ say will have a far easier time accepting what I am saying as potentially true.

Not because I said it. But rather because they understand the logic by which i got there and so they have a pathway to re-test and see if my conclusions were correct.

This ability to logically follow along and make their own conclusions is more important than what is ‘widely accepted’.

Whereas a person who is a poor first principles thinker will generally go through life accepting what the ‘experts’ say. Often assuming those experts to have tons of evidence when in reality that evidence might be quite thin or perhaps flawed.

Or perhaps it only measures the impact in the first year but not what happens to the patient a decade down the road, which is a major problem for things like orthodontics where the collapsing impact draws on over years.

I also find so much of the health evidence I see out there to confuse causation and correlation.

And so a poor first principles thinker will often be nearly impossible to convince of this stuff unless they see ‘experts’ start to accept it. A single data point of a family member saying they are improving will often be insufficient.

Closing thoughts

My point today about first principles thinking is geared around two main goals:

• for people that question whether this works I encourage them to follow a first principles process to conclude whether or not it does. And not just blindly assume it works because i say it does.

• for people that see the positive benefits and want to convince loved ones you need to first understand the mindset of the person you are trying to convince. If they are not a first principles thinker you are likely gonna spin your wheels. They will probably need more time for this process to be more accepted out there.

I find that once you take this frame it removes a lot of frustration.

For example, in the old days I would go into a big shpeal trying to convince people of these biomechanics… explaining the logic and the various tests I did in the past.

But typically I realized later it had all fallen on deaf ears. Because the person was a poor first principles thinker.

So now i first probe to understand them better. Are they a confident first principles thinker or do they just accept what society tells them to do?

And if they are the type who needs to wait for the ‘experts’ to say it… then I save my energy. They will most likely not be an early adopter and that is fine.

You don’t win em all :)

I wanna talk today a bit about the mindset needed to be successful on this journey.

Because in my experience mindset plays a massive role in who gets great results vs. ok results vs. who drops out.

I see how this plays out each day in the community posts, DM’s and emails we get.

With certain folks you can detect a mindset where you just know that they are probably going to give up.

Whereas with others you get that competitive, “I don’t give up”, type of mindset where you know that this person is gonna go very far.

And so I want to talk about this today and relate it to kickboxing.

You’ll see why.

Let’s talk a bit about kickboxing

I’ve done kickboxing several times in my life, but haven’t done it for years.

It’s very popular here in Thailand (where I live) so i meet folks that do it all of the time. And my son even did it for a little while.

Some folks try it and love it. They get addicted to it.

Whereas some folks try it and decide it is not for them.

But even the people that decide not to continue do not conclude that “kickboxing does not work.” Because it is clear that it obviously does work if you put in the time and effort. The problem is that it is difficult.

And some people don’t have the desire nor the discipline to get through the difficult early stage.

Now let’s talk about this biomechanical process

Sometimes people write me and say things like “this process doesn’t work for me.”

And I usually try to encourage them a bit but I know that some folks are just not gonna make it through the early stages of this process. Because it is often tough.

Sometimes your teeth will hurt, your gums might get sore, you might get headaches, the teeth will start to move, your upper and lower teeth will start to come together differently, you might start to see small gaps in your teeth, etc etc

And while we generally view these things as positive signs of progress… for a new person that can be a hard pill to swallow.

Sometimes they just aren’t sold on whether it is worth all that struggle.

So they give up.

And some of them might even conclude it doesn’t work.

Some folks will be successful, others will not

I have no issues if folks do decide to stop. It’s a personal choice.

Some folks are relatively happy with how their teeth sit today and don’t want to chance changing things.

Some have perhaps been through too many things in the past that have failed and just don’t believe in the process enough to push through.

I get all of that.

And there are probably tons of other reasons why some people stop this process.

But concluding that it ‘doesn’t work’ is illogical in my view. Because thousands of people are getting success with this process.

There are thousands of posts on our community, hundreds of reviews you can read on our site, plus we have lots of folks that are tracking their progress in the diaries that are part of our support package.

To me it is like concluding that kickboxing doesn’t work. It obviously does. Otherwise some people wouldn’t be whoopin’ asses with it.

I logically conclude that this process works on everyone

In my understanding of the the body it is impossible that a biomechanical process works on some people and doesn’t work on others.

Because we are talking about the structure of the skeleton.

According to Chatgpt “biomechanics” is the study of how living bodies move and how forces act on them.

And the fact is…. all of our human bodies were engineered the same. Sure some of us are taller vs. shorter, petite vs. full figured, etc

But the same basic rules govern how our bodies and skeletons work.

So if something changes the skeleton on one group of people consistently, you can logically assume that those set of rules apply to ALL people.

That is just logic in my view.

What predicts who will be successful?

So if the process works on everyone but some folks get much better results than others then you should examine what tends to be consistently true of the successful group that is not true of the unsuccessful group.

And as the person that has directly interacted with thousands of folks going through this process the past couple of years I can tell you what pattern has clearly emerged.

Mindset is key. And pre-existing paradigm is second.

Let me explain.

With mindset… you need to not only be strong but it helps a lot to have what I like to call a “test & iterate” mindset. Which means that you are a person who wants to understand the logic behind something, test it, observe what happens, draw some conclusions and then potentially iterate.

Why is this important? Well because sometimes you will get stuck or you will get a sign that you’re not sure about… and you need to problem solve on how to push past it.

That can happen quite a bit with this process.

And with some folks i just know by their nature that they will push through all of those hurdles. While with others i get the feeling that they will not because they are not accustomed to iterating. For example they just want everything laid out for them and they expect everything to follow a predictable path.

That’s just now how this process works unfortunately.

Pre-existing paradigm feeds into this. Because it determines how open your mind is to this new way of thinking.

I mean… we are basically saying that most of the medical/health industry is flat out wrong. That is a very difficult thing to just accept unless you have an open mind and are willing to start applying your own logic as you go through the process.

And for some folks their pre-existing paradigm will just be too strong. Maybe they followed the diet and exercise mantra closely for decades and they just can’t accept that their previous understanding is potentially missing something at its core.

Closing thoughts

For many people this biomechanical process is going to be one of the hardest things they have done in their entire lives.

Especially the folks who have struggled a lot with their health and have a lower starting point.

But in my experience it will also be one of the most rewarding things you’ve ever done. Especially if you stick with it.

And honestly this process will takes years for most folks. So you need to strap in.

To make it years on a process that is hard, non-linear, and violates the current health paradigm… you need to have a strong mindset.

Otherwise you will probably give up.

Not long ago I was looking at a Linkedin update from an exec of a company I used to work at over a decade ago.

He’d raised a bunch of money for a new venture.

And he was leaving a previous company where he’d spent a solid 4-5 years.

While I don’t know all the details…. I don’t think his time there can be deemed as a success.

I had numerous ex-colleagues that had worked there and almost all of them had been laid off for some time already because the company was struggling.

This person, who was among the biomechanically elite when I knew him over a decade ago, seemed to be struggling a bit now. Whereas the initial decade of his career seemed like a meteoric rise with a string of nothing but successes.

I’d also heard rumors that he had softened a fair bit, whereas back then he was known for how strong and intimidating he was. Note that he’s also quite a tall and well built person, though less now than back then.

At the same time I remembered how I felt at that time when I knew him as I was struggling with my health. He only met me a handful of times but if asked honestly i’m sure he would probably recollect me as being a sort of wuss.

Not someone strong enough for the rigors of upper management.

Because I was on a neurological roller coaster back then. Most of the time I was thinking more about survival than trying to move up.

And so I smiled as I reflected on how we were now on two very different trajectories in my view.

He was on his way down… and i’m on my way up baby!

And today I’m gonna talk a bit about this because if you stick this out over the longer term, I think it is something that you might experience too.

And in my experience…. it’s like a drug.

Many of us started as biomechanically disadvantaged

A lot of the folks doing this biomechanical process now have probably felt disadvantaged at some point in their past.

Perhaps they did braces or extractions as a teen and were struggling from an early age.

Perhaps their struggles started later in life in their 30’s or 40’s like me.

Or even later than that.

Regardless of when it started, many of you have probably experienced what it was like to struggle. Because those are the people that tend to find me the most often in these early days of biomechanics.

The people that struggled, tried many of the things the traditional medical system recommends, and never found answers with it.

Folks like us know what it’s like to feel like we’re putting in a lot more effort for a lot less result.

We know what it’s like to feel like some others just seem to find success so much easier than us.

We made up excuses in the past like “oh it must be genetics” or “his/her parents are wealthy and paved their path.” And in doing so we got accustomed to a world where we needed to settle for being somewhere in the middle of the pack.

The biomechanically advantaged rule over the disadvantaged

At the same time there was this elite group of biomechanically advantaged to whom life just seemed to come easy.

Almost whatever they did success seemed to come easily.

They attracted people to them and were popular by default.

They had more attractive girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, etc.

They moved up in their careers easier than us. Almost as if some invisible force was pushing them up while the same invisible force was pushing us down.

We learned to accept these people as being our natural leaders. They simply had something we did not.

And we knew that if we challenged them we’d typically lose.

So rather than be embarrassed, we stopped challenging them and accepted the pecking order that life seemed to organize us into.

When you improve your biomechanics, you change the playing board

But then I came upon these biomechanics and as I learned to harness its power I realized that not all is as it once seemed.

It wasn’t genetics or a wealthy family that was the true driving force behind these ‘elite’.

Rather it was biomechanics.

And biomechanics has a set of rules that if you follow in a disciplined way, you should steadily progress.

It will take time and you will need to be patient.

But as the years pass you will notice something strange happening.

These biomechanically ‘elite’ will slowly start to slide down back to earth and you will start to ascend. Thus closing the gap.

These ‘elite’ will seem less and less untouchable. And more and more human.

With flaws and weaknesses that seem to get bigger as time goes on.

You will start to mentally challenge their status above you and think to yourself “screw them… they’re not any better than me!”

And in saying this you’ll know that you now have the tools to close the gap. Time is on your side… not their’s.

Eventually you trade places

As time passes on and you continue waging your biomechanical war…. you will change for the better.

Not just physically but mentally.

You’ll probably get more confident. You’ll think quicker. You’ll be less emotional and more logical.

You’ll stop putting these former ‘elite’ on a pedestal because you now understand their secret weapon and are using it against them.

I look at myself today and i’m still very much work in progress. But i’m a very different person than I was in late 2021 when I started my ascent.

I have an internal confidence that comes from five solid years of only getting better across almost everything. I have more energy, i think faster and deeper, my memory is better, I talk faster/clearer, etc

You will operate as a different person effortlessly

Let’s take an example to show you what I mean in a bit more detail.

These days it’s a lot harder to win an argument against me.

Unlike the past i’m unlikely to raise my voice or get frustrated.

Rather i’m more likely to stay calm and logical. And think strategically about what my end goal is and the best path to get there.

And perhaps i’m going to conclude that I don’t even need to be in that argument as it is not worth my time.

Unlike the past, it won’t matter to me that I didn’t get the last word in because I know that it is to my advantage to simply disengage.

And I also know that I will often not even think about that argument/person again because that’s just how my system works these days. Which is a far cry from how I used to dwell on such things for a long time after the fact in the past.

This is how I don’t trip on my own feet the way I used to in the past when I was collapsing.

This is part of how the biomechanically ‘elite’ always beat people like me and you in the past. But now we’re using their own playbook against them.

And they are becoming more like the people we were.

We’re trading places.

Closing thoughts

I’ve been observing the impacts of biomechanics on society since about 2015. It has been over a decade.

And the relationships are very clear.

Across pretty much any industry or profession it is the same pattern over and over again. The biomechanically advantaged rule over the biomechanically disadvantaged.

It is the ‘secret sauce’ that you will find more consistent in successful people than anything else (eg. education, money, etc).

Star business people, star athletes, star actors…. they pretty much all had solid biomechanics during their rise or they would not have risen. The number of exceptions you find to that rule will be very small.

And so now we are democratizing it.

This elite group that thought they were given some special, almost God-given, right to rule over the rest of us will now come under attack.

We will rip them from their places and toss them overboard like some weak captain during a mutiny.

And in a way I almost think a new world order will be created over the longer term.

One that is far more equitable.

One that will be driven by hard work far more than the current system.

And i gotta say… I think i’m gonna love it.

Most people assume the amount of tooth they show above the gumline is just genetics. Some people have “long teeth,” some people have “short teeth,” end of story.

I don’t think that’s true.

I think most people are walking around with teeth that never fully erupted to their correct height — and most people also have arches that never widened to their correct shape.

Both of those things are connected, and both of them start correcting once you go through this biomechanical process in my experience.

What does a healthy gumline look like?

If you Google search for what a healthy gumline looks like you will probably land on something like this picture above.

What do you notice about the picture above? Well:

• The gumline is quite even on both the upper and lower teeth

• The exposed part of the teeth are quite long. Especially when you compare to the image at the top of this article.

And so I think it is safe to assume that if you have correctly biomechanically developed then that is what your gumline would look like.

You would have what looks like pretty long, well extruded teeth and an even gumline.

The teeth don’t fully extrude with malocclusion

Teeth don’t just erupt once in childhood and then stay locked in place forever.

Eruption is a continuous, lifelong process — teeth are always making small adjustments in position to try to maintain contact with their opposing tooth.

This is well established in dentistry. It’s called continuous or passive eruption, and it’s the same mechanism responsible for why teeth appear to “grow” slightly as people age.

Here’s the problem. When someone has a malocclusion — a narrow arch, a deep bite, teeth that are crowded or rotated or that meet each other in a compromised way — that abnormal contact pattern interferes with the tooth’s ability to fully extrude to its natural, correct height.

The tooth essentially stops moving once it makes contact with whatever it’s meeting, even if that contact point is not where the tooth was actually designed to end up. It settles for “good enough” instead of “correct.”

This is why so many people have a gumline that looks bunched up, uneven, or like it’s swallowing a large portion of the tooth. It’s not that their teeth are naturally short. It’s that the teeth never finished the job of erupting into the position they were supposed to reach.

Arches never develop to their correct width either

The second half of the problem is arch width.

In a lot of modern mouths — and this is something orthodontic literature on arch development has documented for decades — the upper and lower arches never expand out to the wide, U-shaped form that represents the biomechanically correct target.

Instead they stay narrow and sometimes V-shaped. Crowding, narrow smiles, and the “collapsed” look to the lower third of the face are downstream of this.

Narrow arches and under-erupted teeth are not two separate problems in my view.

They’re the same problem, showing up in two places.

A narrow arch changes how the opposing teeth meet, which changes the path of eruption, which stops the tooth short of its full height.

Fix the arch width and you remove the obstacle that was preventing full eruption in the first place.

What the mouthguard process does

This is where the flat mouthguard process comes in.

By removing the person’s habitual malocclusion — the old, narrow, restrictive bite pattern — and replacing it with a neutral surface, you take away the thing that was capping eruption short.

The teeth are no longer meeting each other in the old compromised position. They’re free to keep doing what teeth naturally do: erupt toward a stable, functional contact point. Also they tend to untwist and upright with this process as well.

And because the mouthguard ‘inflates’ the skull through the doorjam effect… your arches widen (proportionally to the changes in your skull).

So with this process, you get both corrections happening simultaneously: the arches widen out toward their proper shape, and the teeth extrude further out of the gums to reach the height they were always supposed to reach.

But it takes time and you need to be patient.

How that impacts the gumline

The visible result of this is a gumline that becomes noticeably more even over time.

Instead of teeth looking short, stubby, or buried under a ridge of gum tissue, you start to see a longer, more proportional tooth crown.

This isn’t cosmetic gum surgery. Nothing is being cut away. The tooth is simply doing what it was always trying to do, now that the obstacle has been removed.

It’s worth saying clearly: a healthy, correctly developed gumline is not one that hides most of the tooth. It’s one that exposes a good amount of tooth length, with a smooth, scalloped, even contour across the whole arch.

Sometimes folks that are early in this process interpret that as the gums receding. But typically the part that ‘receded’ (ie. newly exposed) was the part of the tooth that should have been exposed upon proper extrusion anyway.

In my view ‘true gum recession’ is defined by the part of the tooth that should not be exposed (eg. the roots) being exposed. Which typically doesn’t happen with this process if the person didn’t have underlying issues beforehand.

Does overeruption truly exist?

By the same token I kind of question whether ‘overeruption’ truly exists. Most of the pictures I see online of overruption are essentially:

• some teeth did not fully erupt (eg. the front teeth in this pic above)

• some teeth did come closer to fully erupting and they also tend to have a little bit of gum recession (which adds to the appearance of overerupting)

Why do I make this point?

This gets back to my point about the body being very ‘smart’. If we assume the body is very smart then it is not going to erupt a tooth beyond its normal length.

Rather the tooth is going to erupt to its genetically predisposed length and the teeth in front of them are going to look a bit short in comparison (because they didn’t fully erupt).

Sometimes cavities ‘appear’ with this process

I’ve had a couple of people tell me they noticed cavities with this process.

And it always seems to be at the location of what is called a ‘root cavity’ in the picture above (ie. it was slightly below the gumline).

And so if you think about what i’m saying with this process… and a tooth that is a bit short (with a root cavity) erupts… then it is logical that now that root cavity will be visible.

But it is likely not the mouthguard that put that root cavity there. Rather it was likely there the entire time but undetected as it was under the gumline.

In general my own personal experience with the mouthguard and that of many folks who have provided feedback is that your teeth stay cleaner naturally as the structure of your mouth improves with this process.

I’ve written about this before here:

Closing thoughts

People don’t usually think about their gumline as an unfinished process.

Most people think it’s just how their smile is. And how it should say.

But eruption is dynamic, arch width is dynamic, and both of them have likely been artificially capped by a bite that never let them reach their intended endpoint.

This biomechanical process removes the cap.

The arches widen. The teeth extrude. And the gumline becomes a more honest reflection of what your mouth was always supposed to look like — not the compromise it settled for.

But can that be a bit scary at times?

Yeah it honestly can.

And so you need to be mentally prepared for it.

I never said this process was easy.

But if you stick with it… my experience (and that of many others that have written to me) is that it is worth it.

I was browsing my Facebook feed the other day (yes I still do that as a Gen Xer lol).

And i came across a link to this Men’s Health article you see below about Dennis Quaid.

When I saw it I was like.. “damn…. that’s pretty good for 72.” He still looks like a guy in his mid-50s.

And i thought to myself… “I bet his exercise routine is pretty chill… ie. not a lot of extreme exercise.”

Which turned out to be right as the article goes on to say “he’s also adapted to lower-impact exercise to ease the stress on his body.”

The thing is… I bet Dennis would even look better today if he’d done pretty much none of the exercise and just relied on his biomechanics.

Society loves to assume credit to things like exercise but the reality is we’re never able to truly answer the question… “Well what if he did nothing?”

Anyway let’s dig into Dennis’s story a bit more.

Who Dennis Quaid is

Quaid broke through in the late 70s and became a defining leading man of the 80s and 90s — The Right Stuff, Innerspace, Great Balls of Fire!, Wyatt Earp, The Parent Trap.

He’s had one of the longest, steadiest careers in Hollywood, still landing lead roles in his 70s.

He’s not one of those guys who disappeared for a decade and came back unrecognizable. He’s been in front of cameras, consistently, for close to fifty years — which gives us an unusually good photographic record to actually track how he’s aged.

And the record is clear: he’s held up remarkably well. Strong jawline, minimal facial collapse, good posture, still moves like an athlete on screen.

At an age where a lot of his peers look visibly hollowed out and folded in on themselves, Quaid still looks structurally intact.

Nothing about his lifestyle explains it

Here’s what makes Quaid interesting to me as a case study — he’s not someone who did everything “right.”

He’s never been known as a health nut. No rigid diet protocol, no biohacking regimen, no team of longevity doctors.

His exercise routine, by his own accounts over the years, has been fairly normal — stay active, work out reasonably, nothing extreme, nothing extraordinary.

He’s not Bryan Johnson. He’s not out here doing red light therapy and cold plunges and NAD+ drips.

If the mainstream wellness model were correct — that aging well is primarily a function of diet, supplements, and disciplined exercise — Quaid shouldn’t be an outlier. He’s done none of the things that model says you need to do. And yet here he is, at 72, looking better than almost all of his Hollywood peers at his age.

That’s a problem for the standard explanation. It’s not a problem for mine.

And then there’s the cocaine

This is the part of Quaid’s story that really should break people’s assumptions completely.

Quaid has spoken openly about his cocaine addiction in the 1980s, describing it as an all-consuming period where he was using heavily, sometimes daily, at the height of his fame. He’s talked about going through rehab, the difficulty of getting clean, and how close he came to losing everything — his career, his health, his life — during that stretch.

By any conventional model of health and aging, this should have been the thing that wrecked him. Sustained cocaine use puts enormous strain on the cardiovascular system, the nervous system, the skin, the whole body.

It’s about as far from a “clean living” story as you can get. And yet decades later, Quaid doesn’t show the kind of accelerated aging or structural collapse you’d expect from that history.

So we have a guy who wasn’t careful with his diet, wasn’t doing anything special with exercise, and spent a chunk of the 80s heavily addicted to cocaine — and he still looks like this at 72.

My read: solid biomechanics + no major dental work

As you probably could have guessed….I think the answer is structural, not behavioral.

Quaid has always had a wide, well-supported jaw and a face that reads as naturally proportioned — no signs of orthodontic flattening, no veneers reshaping the bite, no history of the kind of dental intervention I’ve documented collapsing so many other actors’ faces over time.

And note that he did not have perfect arches by any means. You can see in the pic above at age 53 that his upper arch is relatively narrow. Thankfully he never tried to artificially widen it.

His skull structure appears to have stayed intact and properly inflated across his entire career.

That, in my view, matters far more than diet. It matters more than a gym routine.

If the skull is structurally sound, the body has a foundation strong enough to absorb an enormous amount of abuse and still recover.

Even a serious drug addiction, brutal as it clearly was, apparently couldn’t undo what a genuinely intact biomechanical foundation was providing underneath it.

This is the same pattern I’ve written about with Travis Pastrana — a guy who’s broken more than 90 bones and still recovers fast, because his structure is solid.

Good biomechanics don’t just make you look better. They make you resilient. They give the body room to take damage — dietary, physical, even chemical — and still come out the other side functioning well.

Closing thoughts

Dennis Quaid didn’t really do any of the things the anti-aging industry says you should do.

He wasn’t disciplined about food.

His workouts were ordinary.

And he spent a period of his life deep in a genuinely dangerous addiction. None of that derailed him long-term.

I don’t think that’s luck, and I don’t think it’s genetics.

I think it’s a skull and bite that were never compromised in the first place — a structural foundation solid enough to absorb decades of imperfect living without collapsing.

Diet and exercise get too much credit. Structure gets almost none.

Dennis Quaid is a pretty good argument for flipping that around.

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 ;)