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

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

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

The body is extremely smart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you tamper with it, things go wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Young Tom Hardy is a good example

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

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

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

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

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

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

When he changed his teeth, his body changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is Tom falling apart fast now?

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

When it goes downhill it’s not just physical

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

Leave the body alone and it compensates brilliantly.

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

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

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

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

Respect the intelligence of your body.

That’s my advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I decided I needed to dig in.

About Beverly Hills, 90210

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

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

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

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

Their chemistry on screen made the show.

Their real-life turbulence kept it in the tabloids.

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

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

The Brenda & Dylan love story

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

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

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

They both passed away very young

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

He was just 52 years old.

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

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

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

Then Shannen.

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

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

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

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

Was dental work involved in Luke’s case?

There is no smoking gun here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How about for Shannen’s case?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Two icons of a generation. Gone too soon.

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

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

It’s not luck.

In my view it’s clearly biomechanics.

Who is Travis Pastrana

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

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

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

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

Travis has damaged himself a lot

Here’s where it gets hard to believe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he’s always recovered quickly

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good biomechanics make recovery faster and easier

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

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

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

That’s the baseline from which healing happens.

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

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

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

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

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

The structure wasn’t there to support the recovery.

It’s not willpower. It’s physics.

I’ve experienced this on myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

• A wide, well-developed skull.

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

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

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

Fix the biomechanics. The rest follows.

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

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

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

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

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

They are just living to survive.

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

Today’s article is dedicated to these folks.

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

We all start out thinking life is gonna be good

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

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

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

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

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

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

But for some folks things head downhill quite early

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

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

Often triggered by extractions, orthodontics, etc.

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

They were already on defense.

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

They probably thought there was something wrong with them.

Perhaps it was genetic?

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

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

And it’s rarely things like dental work.

Things just continue to trend down for years

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

Rather they get worse and compound.

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

Some are not able to hold down real jobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead he looked at me like the hero.

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

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

I consider mid-2020 my one yard line stand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted to cry but there were no tears left.

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

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

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

Sometimes you throw a 99-yard touchdown

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

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

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

And it all started to make sense again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

My story today is about hope.

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

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

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

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

Because this journey is not easy…

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

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

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

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

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

I of course do not agree with any of that.

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

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

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

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

First let’s talk a bit about Luka Dončić

So i’m a huge fan of Luka Dončić.

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luka is only 27 years old right now.

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

Lebron on the otherhand is 41.

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

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

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

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

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

So is there any true advantage to being younger?

This is the next question you should be asking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But some interesting things to think about

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

Only biomechanical collapse exists.

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

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

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

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

Everyday I check the comments on our various ads.

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

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

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

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

I don’t view it as being mandatory.

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

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

To me the body is kinda the same.

And today I want to explore this topic a bit.

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

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

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

What’s it being spent on?

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

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

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

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

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

Social media is turbocharging the whole thing.

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

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

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

Society is having a bit of a backlash

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

“Age gracefully.”

“Embrace your wrinkles.”

“Getting older is a privilege.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what if aging is not mandatory?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to make a bet with you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

But I understand their reasons why they are doing it.

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

Neither of them is asking the right question.

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

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

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

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

His head was much narrower.

He was far less attractive.

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

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

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

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

Let’s dive in.

Who Ryan Reynolds is

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

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

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

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

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

His business empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

His teeth — what actually happened

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What people are now noticing

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

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

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

The media’s explanation?

• Stress from Blake Lively’s legal drama.

• Ozempic face.

• Buccal fat removal.

The usual Hollywood suspects.

I think they’re all wrong.

What’s I think is actually happening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

Wide, symmetrical, full.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To which my eyes rolled.

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

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

We were brainwashed to think a doctor can help us

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

Especially in the US (where I grew up).

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

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

But is that the reality?

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

I will tell you… it is PITIFUL.

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

What tools does the doctor actually have at their dispoal?

Well let’s see…

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

1. 💊 Pharmaceuticals (Chemical Interventions)

• Drugs that alter biochemistry in the body

• Examples: antibiotics, statins, chemotherapy, antidepressants

👉 Best for:

• Infections

• Hormonal imbalances

• Symptom control

👉 Limitation:

• Often manage symptoms rather than fix root structural issues

2. 🔪 Surgery (Structural Interventions)

• Physically removing, repairing, or replacing tissue

👉 Examples:

• Tumor removal

• Joint replacement

• Heart bypass

👉 Best for:

• Clear, localized problems

👉 Limitation:

• Invasive, and doesn’t always address underlying causes

3. ⚡ Device-Based Therapies

• Machines or implants that modify body function

👉 Examples:

• Pacemakers

• Insulin pumps

• Deep brain stimulators

👉 Best for:

• Electrical or mechanical dysfunction

👉 Limitation:

• Often lifelong dependency

4. 🧬 Biological / Advanced Therapies

• Using living systems or genetic material

👉 Includes:

• Immunotherapy for Cancer

• Stem cell therapy

• Gene therapy

👉 Best for:

• Targeting disease at a deeper biological level

👉 Limitation:

• Still early-stage, expensive, not universally effective

5. 🧠 Behavioral & Lifestyle Interventions

• Changing inputs into the system

👉 Examples:

• Diet, exercise, sleep

• Stress management

👉 Best for:

• Type 2 diabetes

• Cardiovascular disease

👉 Limitation:

• Requires patient compliance (biggest bottleneck in medicine)

6. 🧑‍⚕️ Physical & Rehabilitative Therapies

• Restoring function through movement or training

👉 Examples:

• Physical therapy

• Occupational therapy

• Speech therapy

👉 Best for:

• Injury recovery

• Neurological rehab

7. 🧠 Psychological / Psychiatric Interventions

• Treating cognition, emotion, and behavior

👉 Examples:

• Therapy (CBT, etc.)

• Psychiatric medications

👉 Best for:

• Mental health conditions

• Chronic illness coping

8. 🛡️ Preventive Medicine

• Reducing risk before disease occurs

👉 Examples:

• Vaccines

• Screenings (colonoscopies, mammograms)

• Risk factor management

👉 Best for:

• Catching diseases early or avoiding them entirely

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

Have a good look at this list above.

What is similar about all of them?

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

Rather they are pretty much always managing symptoms.

And why is that?

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

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

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

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

Not manage symptoms.

You are fixing the root cause!

Let the body heal itself!

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

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

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

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

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

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

• take X-rays, sometimes CT/MRI

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

• Fixation: screws/plates to hold the bone together

• Partial hip replacement (hemiarthroplasty)

• Total hip replacement

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

• Pain (analgesics)

• Blood clots (anticoagulants)

• Infection risk (antibiotics if needed)

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

• Physiotherapy, etc

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

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

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

…heal itself!

Closing thoughts

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

What can they really do that helps?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I listened to him…and thought to myself:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t think i’m very soft today.

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

I’m colder these days in many respects.

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

Was I soft before?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example of where I was soft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My biomechanical “roller coaster” years

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

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

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

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

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

I’d been through a lot during that period.

There were times that were extremely emotionally draining.

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

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

I literally became a different person as I was improving.

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

This all set me up for where I am today.

I’m a different, stronger person today

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

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

But i’m also colder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a way I even enjoy it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My analysis

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

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

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

1. control your emotions easily

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

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

And that’s about it.

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s dive in and investigate what happened.

Who Chuck Norris was

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

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

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

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

The “SmileLift” procedure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the “SmileLift” actually does

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

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

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

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

What happens?

The skull deflates.

Slowly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The irony of “anti-aging dentistry”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compare that to Sylvester Stallone who at age 79 has been extremely prolific these past 20 years

And arguably did some of his best work just recently with Tulsa King (rated 7.9 on IMDB) which ran from 2022-25.

Closing thoughts

So to conclude… yes I do think Chuck Norris messed with his teeth.

And I do think it very directly led to the health issues that unexpectedly killed him just a short while ago.

For decades in the films he fought all these hardened criminals. Evil, strong looking men.

But he always won in the movies. Despite the odds.

In the end, however, you can almost say that he was done in an innocent looking dentist in a white coat.

There’s a Netflix series that dropped in March 2026 called A Friend, A Murderer.

And as I’m a fan of true crime… i watched it last week.

It’s a three-part Danish true crime documentary about Philip Patrick Westh — a quiet, unremarkable guy from the small town of Korsør who turned out to be one of Denmark’s most disturbing predators in recent memory.

The acts he committed took place between 2016 and 2023 and involved attacks against teenage girls. For nearly a decade, residents lived with the terrifying belief that the perpetrator was still at large.

When they finally caught him, the relief swept through the country — but the most interesting part was who the murderer was.

It wasn’t some menacing looking criminal with a history of crimes.

Rather it was an ordinary looking young guy who was frequently hanging out with normal friends.

The crimes and the investigation

On July 10, 2016, 17-year-old Emilie Meng was last seen at Korsør railway station in the early morning hours after a night out with friends.

Her body was discovered six months later, on Christmas Eve, in a lake near Borup — about 40 kilometers from where she vanished. A post-mortem examination determined she had been strangled.

The unsolved case haunted Denmark for seven years, involving massive searches, 650 interrogations, and over 400,000 vehicle checks.

Philip had actually submitted his DNA voluntarily during the initial investigation in 2016 — one of 1,450 locals tested — and nothing flagged. Degraded evidence meant the match didn’t come through.

The case sat cold until 2023.

In November 2022, a 15-year-old girl in Sorø was walking when a man approached her, threatened her with a knife, punched her, and attempted to drag her toward a vehicle. She screamed and escaped.

Then in April 2023, it unraveled fast. Philip tracked down a 13-year-old girl while she was on her newspaper delivery route, rammed his car into the back of her bicycle, and abducted her.

He took her to his house, where he kept her hostage and assaulted her. Police found her alive after approximately 27 hours and immediately arrested Philip. DNA from packaging tape connected him directly to the Emilie Meng murder from 2016.

In June 2024, Philip was found guilty on multiple charges and sentenced to life in prison — Denmark’s most severe punishment.

Philip was your average nerd

Philip Patrick Westh was born in the early 1990s and raised in coastal Danish towns.

By every account of people who knew him, he was the definition of a nerd. Introverted. Awkward. Got made fun of. Kept to himself. His closest friends describe a socially invisible guy — the type that fades into the background.

In his social life, Philip never dated and showed zero interest in pursuing a romantic life. His friends genuinely believed him to be asexual. Nobody suspected anything.

There was nothing to suspect. Just a quiet, forgettable nerd from a quiet, forgettable town.

And also take note of his long, healthy neck as it will be relevant later.

Philip’s smile transformation

Then something changed.

One of his best friends — Nichlas, who had known Philip for 15 years — makes an offhand comment in the documentary that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

He mentions that at some point, the city paid for Philip’s teeth to get done. A dental intervention, covered by public funds. And he described it as a complete dental transformation

.

And then, almost immediately after, Philip’s personality underwent a massive shift.

Philip describes that he became more confident. More assertive. Like a switch had flipped. The friends describe a different version of Philip emerging — bolder, more engaged, operating with an energy he’d never had before.

The obvious surface-level read is: teeth got fixed, confidence went up, guy came out of his shell. Maybe. But I think something else was happening underneath

Did the smile transformation make him a murderer?

I’m not saying the dental work directly caused him to kill. That’s not the argument.

But here’s what I notice.

By the time Philip appeared in court, his physical deterioration was stark.

His neck was gone. Remember his long neck from the photo above? Now compare that to this courtroom drawing where his neck is non-existent.

The kind of structural decline usually takes decades… but with Philip it seems to have happened very quickly. In less than a decade.

I’ve written about this many times. When artificial dental work is done — crowns, veneers, orthodontic intervention — it often doesn’t respect the fact that the jaw is supposed to be supported by the teeth in several positions. As I wrote here:

And so it begins collapsing the skull. The soft tissue deflates inward. The brain gets compressed.

I played around with these mechanics for years between 2015-2021 and I can tell you that they screw with your brain and how you think MASSIVELY.

Luckily i had a wife and a kid to keep me grounded when I was doing bad…. but I can tell you from experience that it gave me some very negative thoughts sometimes. And aggression.

So my read on Philip: the dental work almost definitely impacted the way he was thinking. It would have literally been impossible not to based on my experience.

You don’t ‘disappear’ your neck and not have it massively change how you think. The two are tightly intertwined based on my 6-year roller coaster experience.

Closing thoughts

How did what seemed like your average nerdy guy convert into a sexual predator and murderer in such a short span of time?

If you look at most killers and sexual predators they demonstrate some clear signs of it from the time they were young.

And it becomes an evolution of progressively worse acts.

With Philip this doesn’t seem to have been the case. He was your average wimpy nerd in school who then out of nowhere became this vicious murderer.

And right before he started killing people he just happened to have a massive dental transformation that coincided with a major change in his personality.

That just all seems a bit too coincidental to me.

Especially having experienced the things I did in the years when I was collapsing.

Someone recently asked if I can investigate eye spacing and write an article.

To be honest it’s not something I paid much attention to during my ~11 year journey. Mainly because this game was primarily always about function to me.

In the early days it felt like it was about survival.

But I recognize that a lot of people are doing this not just for functional benefits but also aesthetic ones. And eye spacing is a critical component of the aesthetics of your face.

So I decided i’d double click on this topic and write about it.

So here we go…

The Importance of Eye Spacing

Go look at a photo of the most beautiful people on earth — supermodels, actors at their peak, elite athletes in their prime. One thing you’ll almost always notice is well-spaced, symmetric eyes. Not too close together, not too wide apart. Just... right.

Eye spacing is something people intuitively recognize as beautiful even if they can’t articulate why. It signals facial width, skeletal development, and symmetry — all things the human eye is hardwired to interpret as signs of health and vitality.

Model scouts know this better than anyone. The positioning of the midface and the shape of the eyes are often what separates a girl who’s pretty from a girl who’s on every magazine cover.

But it’s not just aesthetic. The eyes sit at an intersection of multiple cranial bones.

How those bones are positioned affects not just how far apart your eyes are, but the depth of your eye sockets, the tilt of the eyes, whether you have that lifted, cat-like eye shape that everyone in the beauty world obsesses over, and even how your vision functions.

I’ve written before about how my own eyesight got dramatically worse during my biomechanical collapse of 2014 — and noticeably improved as I recovered. That’s not a coincidence in my view… it’s physics.

So yes, eye spacing matters enormously — both for beauty and for function. The question nobody seems to be asking is: what actually controls it?

What Do They Think Determines Eye Spacing?

The conventional view is pretty much locked in genetics. You got the eye spacing your parents gave you, and that’s that.

Beyond genetics, developmental biology gets some airtime. The theory is that during fetal development and early childhood, the skull grows and the orbits — the bony eye sockets — migrate to their final position.

If growth is suboptimal due to nutrition, epigenetics, or developmental abnormalities, you get narrower spacing.

This is the lens through which medicine views conditions like hypertelorism (too-wide eyes) and hypotelorism (too-close eyes), both of which are formally classified as cranial bone malformations.

Some researchers also point to broader craniofacial syndromes — conditions like Down syndrome or Apert syndrome — where eye spacing is dramatically altered as part of a wider skeletal picture.

The acknowledgment that cranial bone positioning affects eye spacing is right there in the medical literature. But the establishment treats it as a rare, extreme phenomenon rather than a spectrum that affects everyone to varying degrees.

The idea that your eye spacing might subtly shift over the course of your adult life as your skull changes? That’s not even on their radar.. and yet it’s so obviously true in my view.

What Are the Conventional Ways of Treating It?

For extreme cases — genetic conditions, trauma, tumors — surgeons can operate directly on the orbital bones, physically repositioning the eye sockets.

These are brutal, high-risk procedures with long recoveries. They’re reserved for the most severe cases and they’re done purely on a structural basis, carving and repositioning bone.

For cosmetic concerns about eye shape, the options get less invasive but also far less effective at the root level.

• Blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery) can change the appearance of the eyes but does nothing to the underlying bone structure.

• Fillers placed around the orbital rim can create an illusion of wider spacing or more depth.

• Facelifts attempt to lift the midface tissue upward to create a more youthful, open-eyed look — with temporary results that often look strange within a few years because the underlying structure wasn’t actually addressed.

Then there’s the “just live with it” approach, which is what most people get.

“It’s genetic.” “It’s just how you’re built.” The cosmetics industry sells you makeup contouring tutorials to create the illusion of better eye spacing, because apparently that’s the best we can do.

None of these approaches engage with the underlying question of what controls where the orbits sit in the first place, in real time, throughout your adult life.

Why I Think It’s Biomechanical

Here’s my argument…

The eye sockets are not floating independently in your skull.

They are formed by the intersection of multiple cranial bones — including the frontal bone, the maxilla, the zygomatic bone, and the sphenoid. These bones are connected at sutures, and they move.

This is not controversial — even anatomy textbooks acknowledge that the skull is not a single rigid structure but approximately 22-29 bones connected by soft tissue.

And what I’ve observed over nearly a decade of experimenting on my own skull is that as the skull inflates — as the soft tissue surrounding it stretches and allows the cranial bones to space out — the face gets wider and more symmetric.

The eyes change shape. The orbital area opens up. I’ve seen this on myself, and I’m seeing early signs of it on members of our community going through this process.

Conversely, when the skull deflates — which is what braces, dental extractions, retainers, and bad dental work all trigger — the cranial bones compress inward.

The face narrows. Asymmetries appear. And the eyes get closer together and change shape.

Look at before-and-after photos of people who did aggressive orthodontics over a decade and pay attention specifically to the eyes. They shift. Sometimes dramatically.

I like to say that the shape of the eyes is one of the most reliable indicators of whether the maxilla has truly moved. When people post their “mewing results” online, I look immediately at whether the eye shape has changed.

Most of the time, it hasn’t, which tells me nothing structurally significant happened. But when someone has genuinely remodeled their skull — through a proper biomechanical process — the eyes are one of the first places it shows.

Closing thoughts

Think about it logically: if the maxilla moves, the entire surrounding structure moves with it. The floor and sides of the orbital cavity change. The relationship between cheekbones, nasal bones, and frontal bone all shift simultaneously.

It is completely impossible to move the maxilla without also changing where the eyes sit. Yet the aesthetic medicine world talks about these things as though they’re completely separate.

That is absolutely ridiculous from a logical standpoint.

The genetics argument collapses the moment you observe that the same person’s eye spacing can change over time — not because their DNA changed, but because their skull architecture changed in response to dental intervention, trauma, or biomechanical recovery. The bones don’t lie.

Wide, beautifully spaced eyes are a reflection of a properly inflated skull.

Narrow, close-set or asymmetric eyes are a reflection of one that has been compressed. And the mechanism driving that compression, in most modern humans, starts in the mouth.

That’s a wrap!

I saw this post below yesterday on my Facebook feed and it triggered something in me.

I don’t even know if this “James Grant” is a real person to be honest.. as a lot of the photos on the profile look like AI.

But still.. the story he tells is a story that I’m sure resonates with many thousands of couples.

And I felt like I needed to say something based on my own experience because I think I take a slightly different perspective than most given my journey with these biomechanics.

And note that this isn’t about being on the side of father or mothers. I think these types of situations happen on both sides a lot. So I am not taking a side here.

Also, sometimes there are kids involved… sometimes there are not.

But what is often at the root cause in my experience is biomechanics.

Now let me explain.

First let’s dissect what happened here

While there are always two sides of the story… it sounds like James here was trying his best to be a good father and husband.

But his best efforts fell short.

His wife fell out of love with him. Despite him trying to be her ‘ideal partner’.

He’d swallowed his pride and tried to be ‘accomodating’. But rather than this driving his partner to him… it probably drove her away.

It likely made him less attractive in her eyes. While at the same time his declining biomechanics were making him less attractive on a physical level.

She tried to solve for this by making requests of him that she thought would make him a better husband/partner. And he acquiesced because he wanted to make her happy with him.

She thought she was turning him into the man she thought she wanted… but later probably realized that she wasn’t attracted to what she’d created.

I’ve been following patterns like this for years… hell I almost was this pattern.

Reality is this couple probably became ‘Occlivial’

By this I mean that a power imbalance formed. Often because one person biomechanically declined faster than the other.

I explain more what this means here.

Often when couples first form… they typically line up well in terms of the value that each partner brings to the table.

That is not to say that they are both equally attractive.

Rather perhaps one person has a more developed career and earns more money while the other person is more attractive. Or something like this.

It’s not always the case… but I do find that ‘most’ couples tend to line up in value otherwise the partner with clearly higher value will end up questioning the relationship (often before getting married).

It’s just human nature… whether we want to admit it verbally or not.

I experienced a bit of what “James” experienced during the years I was going in circles

I consider that I was going in circles at various times between the years of 2016 - late 2021.

When I was not doing well my natural instinct was to be ‘nice’. In essence because I’d lost a lot of my own sense of value.

When I was more collapsed I felt:

• less attractive

• less smart

• less confident

• less social

• etc.

And so to sort of make up for it… I became more ‘nice’.

I’d be nice to people even if they took advantage of me. People would sometimes treat me disrespectfully and i’d let it slide. Especially at work.

I just felt and acted more like a doormat and others treated me that way.

And the reality is… that that is not attractive at all to your life partner (ie. my wife in my case).

It put strain on our marriage. Even while I felt I was making the most effort i’d made in the history of our relationship to be a ‘good husband’… our relationship seemed to just deteriorate.

If i’d stayed in that state… I have no doubt that this would have ended in divorce at some point.

Probably with my wife saying something similar to what poor James got… ie. that she “loved me but had fallen out of love with me.”

I’m more of an asshole now and our relationship is better for it

These days my biomechanics are on the mend and I pretty naturally feel more confident, smart, etc.

Most of my friends probably still think i’m a nice guy… but if they know me, they think twice about taking advantage of that.

Because I can have a pretty sharp tongue and let them know very quickly if I think they’re coming out of line. I’m not a person that avoids or even fears conflict. In fact I kind of enjoy it these days.

And when someone does come out of line… i know that I can ‘light them up’ very quickly.. and it won’t ruin my day or anything. In fact i’ll probably be laughing and in a good mood five minutes later… because that’s just kinda how my body works these days due to these biomechanics.

And as for my relationship with my wife… I don’t think about how to improve our relationship nearly as much as I did years ago when I was struggling. And yet our relationship is far healthier in my view.

Because I’ve levelled up the value equation in my view.

You see… I didn’t move up in her eyes by doing the things she asked and becoming the person she was saying she wanted me to be. Rather I pretty much did the opposite. LOL

I’m now extremely busy with my work and do a small fraction of the chores I used to do. I’m probably a bit less sensitive, “caring”, etc etc

But what I did become was more confident and neurologically healthier. Then all the other things just started to fall into line as a result.

In hindsight this is literally the only way I would have saved my marriage in my opinion.

Closing thoughts

You know in high school when it seemed like the good-looking, asshole guys got the girl?

I was a nerd in school… so I definitely remember. And it always perplexed me.

But now I feel like I fully understand it. And it’s not even about ‘looks’.

Rather it’s more about healthy neurology and ‘value’.

The better looking guys had healthier neurology and so women were instinctively more attracted to them. The same will work in reverse in my view. ie. guys will be attracted to women with healthy neurology (eg. women that act like “divas”).

Once you understand the rules of biomechanics and see how tightly the patterns follow those rules.. you stop getting frustrated in my experience.

You’re just like… “oh yeah… that’s why that happened.” Then you smile and get your mouthguard back on… knowing that with time… the rules are gonna work more and more in your favor.

I was watching Youtube when I came across this video below.

It intrigued me because I’d remembered Lindros when I was in high school in the early 90’s.

I wasn’t a huge hockey fan like my older brother, but I was sort of an Islanders fan and enjoyed watching the occasional game on cable TV.

At that time there was massive hype about Eric Lindros whose rookie year was in 1992. So i’d caught a number of his games and he was an exciting player to watch.

But then there was entire stretch of time starting in 2001 where I basically didn’t watch almost any hockey for nearly two decades. I’d moved to Japan and then Europe and then to Russia, etc. And watching sports just wasn’t a priority at the time.

So I never really followed what happened to Lindros but vaguely remembered hearing about concussions.

So when I saw this video pop up it intrigued me to kind of see what happened to his career as i’d never really followed it.

And it was a bit sad to see how it evolved… but it also immediately made me think of biomechanics and gave me the impetus for this article.

Who Is Eric Lindros?

Eric Lindros was supposed to be the greatest hockey player of all time. Not just a great player — the player.

Before he played a single NHL game, he was already being called “The Next One,” a nod to Wayne Gretzky’s iconic nickname.

At 6’4” and 240 pounds, Lindros combined the size and physicality of a bruiser with the hands and hockey IQ of an elite scorer. He was a physical specimen unlike anything the NHL had seen before.

Born in London, Ontario in 1973, Lindros came up through the OHL with the Oshawa Generals, absolutely dominating at every level. He was so hyped that he famously refused to play for the Quebec Nordiques after they drafted him first overall in 1991 — a bold move that ultimately got him traded to the Philadelphia Flyers in a blockbuster deal that shook the entire league.

By all early accounts, Lindros had the structure to back up the hype. Wide-framed, powerful, athletic. The kind of physical baseline that should translate into a long, dominant career.

His Rise to the Top

Lindros arrived in Philadelphia in 1992 and immediately looked like the real deal. By his third season, he was the best player in the NHL — winning the Hart Trophy as league MVP in 1995, leading the Flyers in scoring year after year, and being named captain at a very young age.

He was the centerpiece of the “Legion of Doom” line alongside John LeClair and Mikael Renberg — arguably one of the most physically imposing and productive lines in hockey history.

Lindros could score, hit, and dominate in all three zones. He played like someone who simply could not be stopped.

He was 23 years old and looked like he had 15 more prime years ahead of him.

Then it all came apart.

His Fall Due to Concussions

The concussions started coming in the late 1990s and simply didn’t stop.

By the time his career was effectively over, Lindros had suffered at least eight diagnosed concussions — a staggering number, even by hockey standards.

His 1998-99 season was wiped out almost entirely. He’d come back, get hit, and go down again. The cycle repeated itself relentlessly.

Doctors and sports medicine experts at the time largely attributed the concussions to the physical style of play Lindros chose — essentially arguing that he played too aggressively, put himself in dangerous positions, and took too many high hits.

The implicit message was that this was a consequence of how he played, not anything deeper going on structurally.

The most infamous incident was a Scott Stevens hit in the 2000 Eastern Conference Finals that sent Lindros crumpling to the ice and essentially signaled the beginning of the end. The medical community focused on helmet safety, hit protocols, and recovery timelines.

His career limped along. He played for the Rangers, the Maple Leafs, and the Stars before retiring in 2007. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2016, a recognition of his peak brilliance — but one tinged with the melancholy of what could have been.

Was It Biomechanical?

That’s the question we are here to ask right?

I’ve tried to look on Google Images of photos of Eric Lindros across his career and while there aren’t a lot of good photos… I do think I saw a pattern.

In his early Flyers years — early-to-mid 1990s — his facial structure looks solid. Good profile, decent symmetry, the kind of wide-framed skull that goes with being an elite athlete (as you see above).

But as you track him across the late 1990s through to the mid-2000s, things start to change.

The lines of his face soften and his profile begins to change as you can see in this photo below.

Note he played for the Dallas Northstars at the end of his career in 2006-7. He officially retired in 2007.

Do I think his bite changed artificially at some point?

Yes. But I don’t think it was from anything cosmetic like veneers, etc.

Rather I have a feeling he cracked/broke some teeth earlier in his career (perhaps even pre-NHL) and had dental work to fix it. Probably it is related to the fact that he didn’t wear a mouthguard in his early career and has been quoted saying numerous times that he regrets that.

Any reconstruction of his bite — even well-intentioned work done after an injury — would likely have screwed up some of his jaw positions that I talk about in this article:

And that would have sent the skull caving in and the skeleton twisting.

When I look at him more recently I see a person that is more collapsed at his age than a star athlete should be.

But I do not see clear signs of artificial dental work. ie. I don’t think Eric was a victim of his own vanity like Brett Favre and some others

.

For example in this photo above his teeth look quite natural and he now has a diastema, which he didn’t have earlier in life.

Which is a sign to me that things are still moving and evolving. Probably more rapidly than they should be.

Closing thoughts

I enjoy reflecting on some of the athletes that never panned out quite like they were expected to.

Because it almost always points to a biomechanical root cause in my view.

What else could it be? Think about it….

Genetics? Obviously not. Concussions are 100% not genetic in my view.
Aggressive style of game? Poor excuse.
Shitty luck? Not logical.

No, in my view it was collapse.

And one day I think Eric is going to understand it correctly…. rather than the BS the doctors have probaby fed him.

Last week I was traveling with my family through Northern Thailand in the Chiang Rai region.

And we were at this one hotel near the end of our trip, which had a very nice restaurant where we ate.

Our waitress was a Thai lady in about her thirties and I noticed right away that she had braces on. Also i could tell she was a bit neurologically impaired.

Despite that… I could also tell from the expression on her face and the way she did her job that she took her job/career very seriously.

Anyway that night I didn’t think anything more of it.

But then the next morning I walked by the restaurant and noticed she was sitting there with a bit of an exhausted look about her.

I got the feeling that she’d arrived before the rest of her colleagues and had done so because she is trying to do well on her job.

I continued to watch her for another minute or so (she didn’t notice I was watching) and there was this clear sort of sadness about her.

Now there are probably tons of things about her life that I do not know and do not assume to know… but it did give me the impetus to write today’s article.

Which is that many people that are in a more evolved state of collapse will struggle to do things that healthier people will find easy.

Struggle becomes a way of life for them. When in fact it doesn’t have to be that way.

Today I want to talk more about this.

Struggling against collapse

Many millions of people are collapsing earlier than they should in life. Or faster than they should.

Some did orthodontics or had teeth extracted and that was the impetus.

Others were simply born that way (most likely compressed while still in their mother’s womb) and thus struggled more than others from a very young age.

They look around them at people who seem to be going thru life easier. And for awhile they think that the gap is closeable through hard work and effort.

So that is what they do.

That is what I did for many years.

You come up with tricks to try to compete against people that have structural advantages to you.

And occasionally you might even come out on top.

But it’s not sustainable.

The gap seems to widen despite some of your best efforts.

And you start losing.

At some point most people will just accept it

I hit this point in my mid-thirties. The phase of acceptance.

It’s during this phase that you start to accept that you’re not built as strong or as competitive as some other people (with better structure than you).

You start to justify it in your head. They must have better genetics. They must have had more advantages than you growing up.

And it is at this point that you start recalibrating your expectations in life. For example:

• “Ok I don’t have what it takes to become a CEO, but perhaps I can at least be a senior manager.”

• ”Ok, i’m not great at relationships… so I need to find a manager/leader who accepts me for who I am.”

• “Ok my body just isn’t going to ever have the right shape..but let me at least try not to get fat.”

• “Ok my brain feels fried after about 8 hours of work so let me develop habits that keep me as focused as possible for those 8 hours.”

• etc.

These are all examples of the series of adjustments that a person will have to make in their life as they come to accept the way their body and mind works at their level of collapse.

I know it all too well. Because I was that person in my twenties and thirties.

Started out with massive expectations for myself coming out of college… and then just kept readjusting downwards.

It wasn’t meant to be this way

I used to think that that was just part of life.

Some people were just born better looking, better communicators, and more inclined to be successful.

And that I needed to just accept my station in life and be happy with what I had. Because it could have been a lot worse.

It was with this mindset that my health disaster of 2014 happened. When a Vietnamese TMJ dentist filed down my back teeth and I spiraled down quickly after.

Within a few months I couldn’t retain information, I felt like a hermit that couldn’t communicate, my face and body started ‘aging’ very quickly, etc.

What was the lowest point in my life at that time later became the strength that would change my mindset on everything.

It took me about 7 years (from 2014-2021) to figure out how this stuff worked and my life bobbed up and down during those years with zero stability.

But I came out the other end of the tunnel with a completely different mindset.

We were designed to not have to struggle

That is what I concluded after over ten years of dabbling with these biomechanics and seeing their power.

My mindset now is that there is nothing that I cannot close the gap on with someone.

It’ll take time and work… and i’m not saying I’m going to be perfect on everything.

But I just know from what i’ve experienced that there are pretty much zero true structural hurdles that cannot be overcome with the help of biomechanics. Even at my ripe age of 48.

When I work with people half my age I go in thinking… “i’m gonna think and operate circles around you.”

When I meet old friends or people that I know who are more “successful”… I just think to myself… “I’m coming baby…”

It’s a completely different mindset.

Not a brainwashed one that some ‘guru’ instilled in me during some course.

Rather a realistic one that comes from stringing together lots of small successes while your body and brain feel healthier and more capable by the day.

You start to see a very direct correlation between inputs (your effort) and outputs (your achievements). A correlation that had been fuzzy for many years before that.

Closing thoughts

I hope today’s article serves as some inspiration for folks that are still early in their journey. And had gotten used to the ‘struggle.’

Years of struggling can take the confidence and self esteem right out of a person.

It can leave them lonely and feeling despair.

It can leave them thinking that this is their station in life.

But my experience is that that is not how it has to be. And getting out of it is easier than you probably thought.

This is still a long and sometimes hard process… but one in which your wins start to stack and give you more confidence over time.

That is what I wanted to say to this Thai waitress the other day… who looked so sad. But I knew it would get lost in translation and she’d probably just think i was a weirdo.

So I didn’t say anything.

But hopefully this message will one day reach her and the many many others who are struggling out there.

Skin complexion and wrinkles are a topic that are kind of close to my heart.

Part of the reason is my family.

My brother and his wife both work in the cosmetics company, Estee Lauder, in their R&D lab on Long Island.

And so starting almost 20 years ago I used to get free ‘Creme de la Mer’ sample bottles from them for Christmas, etc.

And honestly I loved it.

It was a great cream and I used it several times daily from the time I was in my mid-20’s.

I continued to use it into the years that I was going up and down with these biomechanics, which started in 2014.

And there were some years where I really looked like i’d aged a lot. For example in mid-2020.

I’d developed some wrinkles and sort of creases in my face… and my cream didn’t save me from it.

Then I figured out how this works in late 2021 and have been on an upward trajectory since.

I also stopped using the cream around that time. For no other reason than I literally hadn’t gone back to New York to visit my brother between the years 2020 - 2024.

And so i’d run out of stock by early 2022.

Despite this… my skin complexion rocketed up during those years. Even without the cream.

And i realized… “I don’t need this damn cream.” LOL

So now even though i have it again.. I literally never use it.

Anyway let’s talk a bit more about wrinkles, shall we?

What Are Wrinkles?

Everyone knows what wrinkles look like—those fine lines and deep creases that start appearing on your face, neck, and hands as you get older.

They’re typically fine lines around the eyes, deeper folds around the mouth, and broader sagging across the cheeks and jawline.

And actually they classify them.

Wrinkles are usually classified based on what causes them and how they look. Here are the main types:

1. Dynamic wrinkles (movement wrinkles)

👉 Caused by repeated facial expressions.

Examples:

• Forehead lines (raising eyebrows)

• Crow’s feet (smiling)

• Frown lines between eyebrows (“11 lines”)

Key traits:

• Appear mainly when you move your face

• Become permanent over time

2. Static wrinkles (resting wrinkles)

👉 Present even when your face is relaxed.

Cause:

• Collagen loss

• Skin aging

• Long-term sun damage

Examples:

• Deep nasolabial folds

• Permanent forehead line

  

  s

3. Fine lines (superficial wrinkles)

👉 Early stage wrinkles.

Cause:

• Dehydration

• Early collagen breakdown

• Mild sun damage

Examples:

• Tiny lines around eyes

• Lip lines

These can sometimes improve with skincare.

4. Gravitational wrinkles

👉 Caused by sagging due to aging and gravity.

Cause:

• Loss of skin elasticity

• Fat pad shifting

• Bone structure changes

Examples:

• Jowls

• Drooping cheeks

• Neck sagging

  

  
  

5. Sleep wrinkles

👉 Caused by repeated compression during sleep.

Examples:

• Vertical chest lines

• Side-of-face creases

Unlike dynamic wrinkles, these are from pressure, not muscle movement.

6. Elastotic wrinkles (sun damage wrinkles)

👉 Caused by UV exposure.

Features:

• Thick, leathery skin

• Deep, rough lines

Often seen in:

• Sun-exposed areas (face, neck, hands)

7. Expression-related structural wrinkles

👉 From long-term muscle tension + tissue remodeling.

Examples:

• Mouth downturn lines

• Chin dimpling

Quite a lot to take in no? Till I started researching them just now I had no idea they had so many different types?

Why Do They Think People Get Wrinkles?

The conventional narrative about wrinkles is straightforward. They say it is caused by things like:

• sun exposure that damages the skin

• repeated facial expressions that create grooves

• collagen and elastin, which break down over time

• gravity pulling everything downward

The skincare industry has built a trillion-dollar empire around this framework—serums, retinoids, lasers, injectables, facelifts.

All designed to address wrinkles as if they’re primarily a skin problem.

Dermatologists talk about photoaging, oxidative stress, and cellular senescence. It’s all very scientific-sounding, and it all misses the actual root cause.

The problem with this approach is that it treats wrinkles like they exist in isolation—as if your face is an independent entity separate from the rest of your body and skull.

But your face isn’t sitting on top of a static structure. It’s stretched across a living, dynamic system that’s constantly changing. Kind of like a rug that is sitting on top of a bunch of rocks, which are shifting over time.

Why I Think People Get Wrinkles

Here’s what I think is happening: your wrinkles are a direct result of your skull deflating.

Think of your skull like a balloon. When the soft tissue surrounding your skull loses volume—when the “balloon” deflates—everything collapses inward. Your face caves in on itself.

The skin that was once stretched taut across a full, inflated structure now has too much fabric for the space beneath it. What happens to fabric when there’s less underneath? It wrinkles. It sags. It creases.

This deflation happens because of biomechanical collapse.

But it’s a bit nuanced, which i think is interesting. In that people that have pretty good facial structure that age tend to have more wrinkles. For example this native.

Whereas you’ll see people that have worse skeletal structure as they age and yet have less wrinkles.

For example compare this lady below to the native man above. I’d bet they’re about the same age.

The guy above will clearly have better structure and yet has more wrinkles than the lady below

.

Which brings me to my second part of this theory, which is that people with more skeletal collapse will show less ‘traditional’ wrinkles on their face than someone with less collapse.

However their cranial bones will have become more assymetric and deranged. Like is the case with this lady. Her face is far more assymetric than the native man.

I have a feeling this is because the slack in the skin is used to cover more surface area due to the twisting of the skeleton.

So as you can see it is a bit nuanced.

I Am a Case Study For This

Over the past 4 to 5 years, I’ve essentially erased almost all wrinkles I had while also improving my symmetry.

And I didn’t do it with serums, laser treatments, or filler injections. I did it by reversing the skull deflation that was causing them in the first place.

By stretching the soft tissue that covers the body like a wetsuit my face literally inflated back out. The wrinkles flattened. The sagging tightened. My skin developed that youthful fullness I had in my twenties.

I still have (biomechanical) work to do as i’m not done… but I have no doubts that in the coming years my skin is only going to improve. Despite using zero skincare products and eating whatever I want.

All at age 48.

Which basically throws conventional wisdom on it’s head.

Closing thoughts

My point today is that I don’t think they are right at all about what causes wrinkles.

They have all these names based on what they think causes wrinkles and how they look… when in fact I think there’s only really one main root cause. And that is biomechanics.

Or perhaps more accurately i’d guess that wrinkles are like 98% biomechanical and than 2% the rest.

Even damage from the sun I believe can mainly be reversed with biomechanics. Because this process continually stretches the skin to the point of it breaking and shedding.

And so I, for example, am constantly going through layers of skin on my face with this process. Just stretching right through one and bringing up the next.

Getting less wrinkly and more youthful as i do it.

Just don’t tell my brother… he still has to work at Estee Lauder hahahaha.

Some folks have asked me why they feel like old symptoms resurface for periods of time as they do this process.

And in some cases it can worry them. As it might be an old pain in the knee or the lower back or something.

But usually it’s gone within a week or so.

And my view is that this is because the body compensates and uncompensates like an onion.

When you are compensating (ie. getting worse) you are putting on layers. And when you’re uncompensating, as you should be when you’re doing this biomechanical process, you will be removing layers.

And be ready for lots and lots of layers!

Let me now explain.

The onion of compensations

I’d heard this onion metaphor before many years ago and i’m forgetting where exactly… but it has definitely held true in my experience.

As i’d unwind with this mouthguard biomechanical process some old injuries & tightnesses would resurface.

For example i’d always felt tight in my left shoulderblade like 20 yrs ago and for a short while this tightness came back like a year ago.

Or my knee would feel a bit tight the way it did many years ago. Then it would go away after a week or so.

It gave me the sense that these compensations were like layers that the body had wrapped on for its own protection when it was collapsing.

And so the body is kind of trained to just keep compensating to survive. Till one day these compensations lead to a serious illness, which in turn results in death.

This explains many things people have experienced

When I hear people describe their own health history I often get reminded of this onion metaphor.

They will say things like…

• “I had a lot of tightness in my left shoulder but then I did this XYZ treatment and it miraculously went away.”

• Or “I had pain in my lower back for years but then finally it just went away.”

• Or “I started seeing this great doctor who got rid of my XYZ tightness.”

The reality in the vast majority of these cases was that they never actually got rid of them. In fact they did not even get better. Rather they were covered over.

The body had just continued compensating in order to turn the signals off to that old problem. And so the person thinks they got rid of it when in fact it was covered by another compensation layer.

The logic in this becomes evident as you unravel

As you do this process and these old issues reappear you will typically also experience things that finally ‘let go’.

For example my left calf is sore for a few days now. The calf muscle had probably been shortened for many many years and finally my skeleton has unwound in a way that is allowing it to stretch a bit.

And I bet that it’s not done. My skeleton will continue to unwind and perhaps in 6 months the muscle will be sore again.

I’ve seen this logic play out many many times with my body during this process.

It’s often not a “one and done.” Rather you might go thru mini-releases in the same area many times over a several year period.

The body unwinds relatively slowly.

And trust me that is a good thing!

Slow is good

Many people doing this process want to be done quickly. The reality is that it will take the vast majority of folks many years to finish.

Because their skeleton has probably tacked on LOTS of compensation layers.

It took many years to go thru all of those compensations. And it will take a very long time to take them off.

Imagine if it really was quick. Imagine that you could have a horribly compensated skeleton and unwind it all to perfection in just a year.

What would that mean?

Well that would likely mean that you could also damage your body just as quickly. Physics works both ways after all!

And that would be a very bad thing.

So it seems to me that the body has found a way to compensate very slowly… which is why your average human will live to at least 70 or 80 years old. The body just smartly keeps compenating to survive.

And if that were not the case…. then theoretically you could have some bad orthodontics or extractions done… and boom you’re dead in a year.

That is what I think would happen if the body did not work like an onion but rather worked in a more direct collapse like a building collapsing.

And the flipside to that is… it’s going to take a long time to keep rolling back all of these compensation layers.

Closing thoughts

I consider that i fully understood the rules to this biomechanical process in late 2021 and have been on a pretty straight line trajectory since.

It has therefore been about 4.5 years.

Which is a long time and i’m not even done. I hope to finish this year, but we’ll see. I’ve stopped making predictions about it.

Whereas when I did this process the first time around 2016 I feel like I got to the ‘soft tissue end’ a lot faster.

The difference?

Well… i think i’d tacked on a lot more compensation layers in some of those intervening years. Especially in parts of 2019-20 when i was in hard collapse from having left a posterior open bite unsupported.

My neck, for example, was in far worse shape in 2021 than it was in 2016.

And so i’ve learned about these compensation layers the hard way.

But it has also intuitively taught me that you can just keep taking these layers off… till you are pretty much perfect again (health, aesthetics, function, etc).

And that is my positive message to you.

It will take a long time… but there is almost no truly ‘permanent’ damage to the body in my experience. It’s all just tucked away in a deeper layer that you haven’t yet gotten to.

Paddy Pimblett’s recent loss to Justin Gaethje on January 24, 2026 was to me a testament not just to his toughness, but also to the power of biomechanics.

Because I think Paddy is full of heart.

He was being touted as one of the key faces of today’s UFC. A very big personality with a sharp sense of humor like his predecessor, Conor McGregor.

And an “entertaining” fighter.

So I think a lot of people were a bit surprised and disappointed to see his latest loss.

But having known about his ‘smile transformation’ a few years ago… I always figured it was just a matter of time.

The Fight: Paddy Pimblett vs. Justin Gaethje

It was a good fight but wasn’t that close.

Gaethje won by unanimous decision with judges scoring it 48-47, 49-46, 49-46 in his favor.

Gaethje, a seasoned striker with a reputation for ruthless efficiency, put on a clinic against Pimblett.

But it wasn’t just that Paddy lost—it was how he lost and what his body was telling us in the process.

Pimblett came into the fight as the betting favorite. He’d been climbing the ranks with impressive victories, building momentum that suggested he was ready to compete at the highest levels of the UFC’s lightweight division.

Gaethje, while respected, wasn’t considered to be on a dominant streak. By most measures, this was supposed to be competitive, maybe even favorable for the younger, supposedly hungrier fighter.

Instead, Gaethje controlled the fight with a level of ease that suggested a pretty big gap in skill/ability between the two.

He wasn’t particularly impressed by Pimblett’s power—in fact, he was openly dismissive of it during the fight.

The Aftermath is Very Telling

Then there’s the aftermath of the fight. Paddy had to be hospitalized and his face looked pretty messed up. It wasn’t normal fight damage, it was something more.

And that to me was a very telling sign.

Because people with very solid biomechanics will not look very damaged from a fight in my experience. Khabig Nurmagomedov was a good example.

The guy never even bled in the Octagon once.

Because his skull was built like a tank.

In Paddy’s case I have a feeling the reason his skull looked so messed up was because it had already been destabilized by the ‘smile transformation’ that we will talk about later on

.

For example this photo above was taken in 2018 following his fight with Søren Bak, which he lost by decision.

He’d taken a fair few punches during that fight too. But notice how his face does not look beaten up the way it was vs. Gaethje.

Paddy’s “Smile Transformation”

In 2022, Paddy underwent a major smile transformation.

The internet loves documenting these things, and he seemed to play up to it as you can see in the above video.

He went from having a natural, if somewhat unrefined, smile to what looked like a brand new set of teeth. Straight, white, and Hollywood-ready.

He got veneers and bonding work, which most likely altered his occlusion a bit. Which would have messed up the bite positions I talk about here.

And when you alter the support for your retrusion and protrusion jaw positions… my experience is that your biomechanics will suffer the consequences.

I Think He’s Now Fighting Biomechanical Collapse

When you change your bite, your skull structure destabilizes in my view.

The dental arch is like the foundation of a building. When you artificially move teeth or add material that changes how your upper and lower teeth come together, you’re setting off a sequence of events that end up collapsing the skull in and twisting the skeleton.

For a fighter like Paddy, this can be catastrophic.

You lose explosive power. As well as quickness and hand speed.

The harder Paddy trains and works out, the more he’s likely twisting his skeleton further into collapse. He’s fighting physics, and physics always wins

.

This pic above is from 2021 when he was 26 years old. A year before his ‘smile transformation’.

I can just tell by the way he looks now that something bad has been happening to his biomechanics. The shape of his skull and neck have changed for the worse and between the ages of 26 to 31 that type of change should not have happened that quickly

I Think We’re Going to Continue to See Paddy Slide Downhill From Here

Biomechanics trump everything in my experience.

They trump heart.

They trump work ethic.

They trump training camps and nutritionists.

I’ve watched this play out many times now.

A fighter can be the most dedicated, most disciplined athlete on the planet, but if their skeletal structure is collapsing, they’re fighting a losing battle.

Paddy has all the heart in the world. But that doesn’t matter when your body is literally deflating like a balloon that’s been punctured.

I’m willing to bet that the way he looks continues to evolve pretty quickly from here.

And his performance will continue to decline. The decline won’t be linear—he might still have good moments—but I have a strong feeling the trajectory is set.

Closing thoughts

I’m a big fan of the UFC and think it’s a great tool for measuring biomechanics.

Because you are applying all of the tools that biomechanics enable: power, speed, agility.

And out of all the different fighting sports… the UFC is probably one of the most flexible in just how many different movements you are allowed to do.

So it ends up being a pretty good reflection of biomechanics because all of the top fighters have access to world class training and so that pretty much cancels itself out in fights.

This latest fight by Paddy is a classic case (in my view) of how biomechanics rules the day.

When those biomechanics start dropping, as they did for McGregor, it’s probably time to start thinking about your next career.

Don’t forget to check out our latest Youtube video!

Tons of people ask me why this mouthguard works.

And the metaphor I like to use is a doorjam.

That essentially a mouthguard acts like a doorjam that prevents the teeth from coming fully together and that in turn holds the jaw a bit open.

But why does that ‘inflate’ the skull and have so many positive effects on the human body?

Today i’ll explain.

What is the “Doorjam theory”?

The theory goes something like this:

• The mouthguard sits between the jaw and the rest of the skull acting like a sort of doorjam that prevents the jaw from closing

• As a result the tissue inside the mouth as well as around the skull stretches. Just open your mouth wide and you should feel a stretch of the tissue.

• When this tissue stretches the skull kind of inflates like a balloon in my experience (ie. my “balloon theory” that the skull and skeleton inflate and deflate).

• As that happens the cranial bones now have room to move outwards and into better alignment. The jaw also can begin to return to where it should be.

• The palate widens as the bones move outwards and the teeth are connected to the bones/jaw so they now have room to align better.

• The soft tissue of the skull is connected to the soft tissue throughout the body and so that stretches too.. which allows the skeleton to then unwind/

• As the skeleton unwinds the organs revert back to their normal position and any compression on them begins to reduce. Overall health begins to improve.

There you have it.. like a cascading set of domino effects.

How did I arrive at this theory?

I feel like I can confidently say that I’ve arrived at the above conclusions through logic and trial & error as opposed to some deep research or knowledge of anatomy.

Over the past ~11 years I have screwed myself up and then fixed it many times as I was trying to figure out how these biomechanics worked.

The first time was in 2014 when a TMJ dentist in Vietnam told me he wanted to ‘fix my dental contacts’ and ended up filing down my back teeth considerably. Which sent me into an expedited ‘collapse’ process.

During that collapse process I saw firsthand what being on the wrong side of this “doorjam theory” is like. Because I’d essentially lost ‘vertical’ in my mouth as opposed to increasing it.

And very quickly my face aged, my skeleton/posture worsened, i had severe brain fog, my vision worsened, other health issues popped up, etc.

Then I started using a dental splint in late 2014 and started reversing those effects. And was amazed at how quickly the body was able to heal itself.

Unfortunately it took another 7 years until late 2021 till I was convinced i’d fully figured out how it works. And during that time I’d inflated and deflated my skull and skeleton many times.

Which has a massive impact on your actual life. Trust me on that one. lol

What proof do I have that it actually works this way?

The ‘proof’ lies in what I experienced…

Everytime I put either a mouthguard or flat plane splint… this positive cascading set of events seemed to be triggered.

I would start to look and function better. I seemed to ‘de-age’.

And I considered it ‘inflating’ the skull because I would see that my skin in various parts of my face and scalp would actually stretch and rip. The skin would often redden and sometimes bits of my scalp would flake off.

Plus my skull was clearly getting larger (eg in circumference) and wrinkles were disappearing.

It was like inflating a deflated ball.

Along with this many functional things would always improve. I would think clearer, have more energy, be in a better mood, etc.

Plus my teeth would start to look cleaner and align better without any special effort.

But then if I removed the mouthguard or flat plane splint for an extended period all of these things I mention above would start to go in reverse.

Does it have to be a mouthguard?

People like to ask me if there is something special about a Reviv mouthguard and I like to be honest that there absolutely is not.

It is a flat mouthguard and it functionally works like all other flat mouthguards.

With that said, you don’t even need a mouthguard to trigger these biomechanics. Literally anything that puts height between the teeth and has a flat surface will work.

The key is that it needs to unlock how the upper and lower teeth come together because these teeth act as sort of anchors to the bones that they are attached to.

In order for the cranial bones and jaw to move you need to allow the teeth (ie. the anchors) to move. Which is easy when they are biting down on a flat surface, but a lot harder when they are fixed into a locking bite with the opposing teeth.

So if you were able to bite on a pencil all day long like the person in the pic above… you would also experience the positive biomechanical effects I am talking about. Though I do think a mouthguard will be faster and far more comfortable.

This is very different from orthodontics

The orthodontic paradigm is about pushing on and moving teeth.

That is how things like braces and aligners work. They strap onto teeth and force them to move.

Sometimes their appliances also try to fix directly onto the bone like certain palate expanders.

I consider all of these things to be completely wrong. Because it is the wrong physics.

You need to start with the soft tissue and stretch it because it is very strong. And if you don’t stretch it then all of your efforts to move things around will work against you.

You’ll just derange the cranial bones further because the soft tissue ‘balloon’ is not inflating. The bones are just rearranging inside the balloon ‘for the worse’.

And you’ll put the teeth in the wrong position to support the skull as braces/aligners do.

Which is why the correct physics is this ‘doorjam’ approach. Where you just stick something between the teeth and then let the skull inflate.

And voila! Over time everything expands and fixes on its own.

And in a way that remains stable and far more aesthetically pleasing (ie. symmetric, etc.) than the orthodontic way.

Closing thoughts

So today I explained my ‘doorjam theory’ on why a simple flat mouthguard works and things like orthodontics do not.

Now I challenge you all to test it from a logical standpoint. Because that is how I arrived at this stuff.

Try to disprove it if you can.

I think you will find it very challenging.

Whereas you will see how the logic behind orthodontics falls flat on its face.

Wearing braces, aligners, palate expanders… will ALL send the skull collapsing in over time until it is allowed to stabilize back into a healthy bite again.

Whereas literally everyone that puts something between their teeth that is flat (eg. like a mouthguard) will improve their health and aesthetics over time.

Find me the person for which that is not true.

Having access to thousands of data points of people doing this biomechanical process now… I can tell you that you will be looking very hard.

The cosmetic implant market is exploding.

What was once considered extreme is now becoming normalized, with jaw implants, cheek implants, chin implants, and under-eye implants rapidly becoming mainstream aesthetic procedures.

But beneath the surface of this trend lies a fundamental misunderstanding of how facial structure actually works.

You see.. in my view the skull works like an inflatable/deflatable balloon.

And unfortunately those physics just do not mesh well with this idea of implants.

Implants are a Massive Trend

The facial implant market has experienced explosive growth over the past five years.

According to recent data, over 200,000 cosmetic facial implant procedures are performed annually in the United States alone, with growth rates estimated between 8 - 15% year-over-year.

This explosive expansion isn’t just happening in back-alley clinics either. Some of the world’s most renowned cosmetic surgeons and PhD-holding maxillofacial specialists are now performing these procedures at premium prices reaching $15,000 to $40,000 per implant.

Celebrity adoption has turbocharged this trend into cultural phenomenon status. Various Hollywood actors, athletes, and influencers have openly discussed getting cheek, chin, and jaw implants as their solution to facial aesthetics.

The social media age has weaponized before-and-after photos, with cosmetic surgeons building entire Instagram followings around implant transformations.

Medical schools and residency programs have responded to market demand by increasing their training in implant procedures.

Top institutions now offer specialized fellowships in implant dentistry and maxillofacial reconstruction.

Board-certified surgeons with international credentials promote these procedures at high-end clinics across major metropolitan areas.

The procedural infrastructure has become so established that what was considered experimental fifteen years ago is now taught in dental school curricula as standard protocol.

What Are the Use Cases for These Implants?

Implant use cases span a growing range of facial aesthetics.

• Under-eye implants aim to address hollowness and supposed “negative canthal tilt.”

• Cheek implants promise enhanced prominence and definition.

• Chin implants target what practitioners call “weak” chins.

• Jaw implants attempt to create lateral width and angular definition.

  

The marketing narrative is seductive: implants offer a shortcut to “forward growth,” to that coveted horizontal facial profile that aesthetic communities obsess over.

The problem is that this narrative is fundamentally flawed.

How Are These Implants Done?

The procedure itself is relatively straightforward from a mechanical standpoint.

Surgeons place incisions, create pockets in soft tissue, insert synthetic materials (usually silicone, gore-tex, or titanium), and suture everything back. The process takes one to three hours depending on complexity.

Maintenance is supposed to be minimal—implants are marketed as permanent solutions.

But reality tells a different story. Many patients report ongoing sensation issues, chronic inflammation, and the need for revision surgeries.

Costs vary wildly: $5,000 to $15,000 for straightforward cheek implants, but $15,000 to $40,000 for comprehensive jaw reconstruction.

Rarely discussed is the revision rate—industry insiders acknowledge that at least 20% of implant patients require corrective surgery within five years. And I have a feeling most of the remaining folks had substantial change, but just didn’t get the revision.

The problem with implants is physics

You see all of these implants would generally be fine if the skull was a relatively static thing.

The problem is that it is not.

The skull is always changing and in my view it has the physics of a balloon as I describe in this article.

As humans age they are typically biomechanically collapsing, which means that their skull is gonna deflate.

As it deflates the ~22 cranial bones are going to move around and derange as the soft tissue balloon covering them gets smaller.

And that is going to push these implants out of position and make the person’s face look weird

For example this pic above is one I saw online that i think is a classic of how a lot of these implants will evolve as the person ages.

Because the skull will deflate and it will just get more and more obvious that you have this artificial thing in your face.

There is only one way to fix the skull

If you take my assumption that the skull has the physics of a balloon to be correct then you should be concluding the same thing I did.

Which is that the only way to improve how it looks in a stable way is to inflate the damn thing.

Because if not then as it deflates… whatever artificial intervention you did (eg. implants, fillers, surgery, etc) will start to look weird.

For the same reasons that you cannot fix a slightly deflated balloon with mechanical interventions. You need to inflate it.

And the way to inflate it is the biomechanics I talk about.

Closing thoughts

There are many thousands of people who are doing these implants right now.

And I almost think it’s like God’s evil trap.

The people that have the most money and are the most superficially-driven will be the ones that do these implants.

In a very similar way to how it used to be only the wealthier and more superficially-driven people that did orthodontics (till the cost came down and it became easily accessible to the masses).

And in both instances (implants + orthodontics) I am very sure that most folks will one day be sorry they made that decision.

Because you don’t beat physics. Regardless of who your surgeon is ;)