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 called Smile Maker of Texas, run by a cosmetic dentist named Dr. Ritchie Beougher.

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 killed by this innocent looking dentist in a white coat.

But don’t worry…. I have a strong feeling Dr. Beougher will be paying for what he’s done sooner than later.

Because he did the same shit to himself ;)

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

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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 Reviv, 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

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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 our Reviv mouthguards 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. But we tried to make a good one.

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 Reviv 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 ;)

Not long ago a reader wrote to me suggesting i have a look at ‘memory champions’.

It wasn’t a field i’d ever really investigated or even heard about.

But still, I wasn’t surprised that they have competitions for memory.

And so the person’s question was whether I think biomechanics were the key to having a great memory.

Based on my own experience with memory it definitely sounded logical. And so I decided i’d investigate it more and make it a topic for an article.

My experience on memory

Let’s first start out with some context.

In 2014, my memory completely evaporated after a TMJ dentist filed down my teeth. I went from being a normal, functioning executive to essentially a “dimwit hermit” within months.

I was 37, working in a high-pressure role at Lazada (sort of like Amazon) in Vietnam, and my brain just refused to cooperate.

I couldn’t retain anything. I had to bring my laptop to every meeting and type everything as people said it - the only way information would stick. If I presented, I’d write everything out and read it word for word.

My memory seemed GONE.

It was pretty terrifying. My wife was pregnant, we’d just moved to Vietnam, and I was reporting to a tough ex-McKinsey CEO. I eventually requested a demotion - dropping two levels. It was humiliating, but I was in survival mode and I didn’t care.

But then in 2015 as I was dabbling with these biomechanics for the first time… my memory started to improve.

There was a point in 2016 where it felt like my memory was better than at any point in my adult life. I stopped writing things down, whereas a little over a year earlier I was literally writing EVERYTHING down.

Then it all started to drop again and my memory seemed to be worsening in early 2017. It was very frustrating.

This happened several more times over the following four years till I finally figured out how this stuff works in late 2021.

Each biomechanical collapse seemed to deteriorate my memory. Each correction through oral appliances seemed to bring it roaring back.

The connection was clear to me… but the question in my head was… “Does it work like this on everyone?”

So is memory almost a direct function of biomechanics?

I believe memory is largely a direct function of skull structure and brain compression.

When the skull “deflates” due to poor biomechanics - dental extractions, orthodontics, teeth grinding, or dental work that flattens the curve of spee - it compresses the brain inside.

Research shows neurological disease patients consistently have reduced brain volume on MRI scans. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, MS patients all show smaller brains. The medical establishment attributes this to the diseases themselves, but what if it’s backwards? What if the compressed brain is the root cause?

My decade long experience has led me to the hypothesis that the skull operates like a balloon - it can inflate or deflate based on these dental biomechanics I talk about.

When you’re ‘collapsing’, the skull compresses inward, squeezing the brain.

But it inflates with proper biomechanics, for example restoring vertical dental height through something like a mouthguard. And then the brain gets more space and functions better. Memory, focus, processing speed, clarity - all improve as compression reduces.

Let’s look at the leading memory champions

The World Memory Championships test abilities like memorizing shuffled card decks, random number sequences, and pages of names. What’s particularly interesting is the geographic distribution of top performers.

Look at this excerpt from chatgpt below. The current #1 and #2 champions of the world are from Mongolia.

I mean… not to be condescending but when is Mongolia ever #1 in anything? Pretty much never!

And yet Mongolia consistently produces world-class memory athletes despite being a developing nation with limited resources.

This is statistically improbable in my view unless structure plays a major role.

Because one thing that Mongolia does have is well structured people. I saw this myself when I visited Mongolia in 2005.

Mongolia’s population has had far less exposure to orthodontics, dental extractions, and cosmetic dental work compared to developed nations. And they are more or less a ‘Generation 1’ country as i describe here:

But it’s not just Mongolia… as I was browsing I noticed that North Korea dominated the world championships in 2019.

And you know if North Korea is dominating something… then something strange is definitely happening! lol

What is North Korea good at?

Well they are very good at being very undeveloped! Hahaha

Which results in the fact that orthodontic rates are likely in the vicinity of just 1%.

Compare this to developed countries like the US where orthodontic rates among teens is often already up above 60%.

Developed nations dominate most other sports and competitions because technology and training often supercede structure. The NBA is an example of this. Most of the best basketball players are still Americans despite the fact that people in Africa have far better structure.

But these developed nations most likely do not dominate memory competitions because the key differentiating factor is likely structure, and not training techniques.

I don’t think memory is ONLY biomechanics however

I do also wanna play devil’s advocate here a bit though.

I don’t think memory is ‘only’ biomechanics. Because if that was the case then you should consistently see the best structured people winning the memory championships.

And that is not what you see.

For example with this North Korean team above the two ladies to the right are far from having perfect structure. And yet they probably beat many hundreds of other women who have far better structure than they do.

So i do think that things like genetics and training play a role.

And I don’t wanna come off like a ‘crazy’ who just thinks structure dictates absolutely everything.

Closing thoughts

I think we can safely assume memory is highly correlated with biomechanics and skull structure.

The physical space and health of your brain directly impacts memory formation, storage, and recall.

And so as you improve your structure through the biomechanics of a mouthguard, I would expect a lot of you to experience improved memory. I know I have.

Also, I feel like sometimes I will remember things that I’d forgotten about for a long time. As if improving my structure had opened a pathway to a memory that had been blocked for a long time. This has happened a number of times when dreaming.

Anyway those are my thoughts. I’m very keen on hearing from others that go through this process to see if they concur.

In my twenties and thirties tightness in my back, neck and arm were like a way of life for me.

I’d constantly be rubbing my shoulder or my neck trying to loosen it up.

Going to massages.

Taking powerful muscle relaxants during various periods.

And it was all just temporary relief. The same tightness would return the next day. Particularly if I felt any stress.

I was literally tight every single day for probably a solid 15 years or so.

Now I can honestly say I haven’t felt tight or sore in at least 4-5 years.

And it’s like I even forgot what that feels like it has been so long.

Today I want to talk about this a bit more as it’s been a game changer for me personally.

Tightness was a torment in my 20’s

As I alluded to above… muscle tightness was a constant battle for me.

I tried everything.

One of my favorite ways of battling it in my 20’s was alcohol. Because it would allow the muscles to relax and also free up my voice, which also always felt very tight.

And also this tightness would often impact my mood as i’d feel less patient, less social, more stressed.

So i’d drink pretty much every night. Not because I was a partying 20 yr old (that would have been great!). Rather only because it took some of the tightness away and let me focus on other things.

Otherwise i’d constantly be looking for ways to relax.

I had a really nice Japanese girlfriend when I lived in Japan back in 2001-2 and one of my favorite activities together was her walking on my back for at least 20 minutes. At the time… it even seemed preferrable to sex hahahaha.

Why was I tight?

This was the mystery I tried to figure out for many years back then.

And why me?

In my twenties I was a relatively young, healthy guy… why was I having these muscular issues whereas the others my age didn’t seem to have these types of problems.

Was I eating the wrong diet? Not doing enough exercise?

Those were my common assumptions so i became a diet and exercise nut. Typically going to the gym at least 3-4x per week in addition to 30-45 minute daily aerobic routines i did on my own.

Plus I ate extremely healthy. Tons of salads and fruit.

But it didn’t make a difference. I was still always tight.

Now many years later I think i understand why I was tight. It started around the time i graduated college when two things happened:

1 - I had been hit in the face while playing intramural hockey in college and had let a dentist convince me to do four crowns on my upper incisors instead of leaving them a bit chipped.

2- I’d had all four of my wisdom teeth pulled.

It was one or potentially both of these that led to a change in my bite, which let me to constantly grinding my teeth in my mid-20’s and a ton of muscle tightness.

Basically… it was a form of biomechanical collapse triggered by the change in my occlusion from the dental work.

Now i’m never tight

These days I am literally never tight.

Even when i’m stressed… my muscles don’t tighten up. Rather i just start doing some of my ‘fast method’ stretches and things feel very loose.

I don’t go to massages or do any of the other things that I was constantly doing to address the tightness before.

And i’m very sure that it is related to having figured out these biomechanics.

With the mouthguard and stretches I do I feel like the body is stretching… not being compressed.

And so muscles are able to stretch to their correct length.

It feels great. It allows me to be so much more focused in working and the other things i’m doing.

I’m ‘present’ as I like to say.

Whereas years back I might be at a party but i was still almost constantly thinking about the tightness I was feeling.

I think biomechanical collapse is the root cause of tightness for everyone

So this sounds a bit aggressive but I have a feeling i’m going to be right.

And let’s be honest… i’ve said other far more aggressive things in the past lol.

But my hypothesis is that these biomechanics are literally the reason why pretty much any person in the entire world is ever feeling tightness in their body.

Sure stress and other things will contribute… but it is the collapse of the body that is at the true root cause.

Because with biomechanical collapse the entire skeleton is twisting and collapsing. Muscles are being forced to compensate and twist as that happens.

And so to combat it.. you need to start inside the mouth. With something like a mouthguard.

To get the soft tissue covering the skull and body to inflate like a full body wetsuit. And thus allow muscles to revert to their correct length and uncompensate.

How would one prove if I’m right?

Simple… find me the person that has chronic muscle tightness that does this mouthguard process (plus the stretches I recommend) for a solid year in a disciplined way… and if that person is still tight… i will have been proven wrong.

But i have a feeling that won’t happen ;)

Closing thoughts

Today’s article was a bit of a reflective one.

You seen I was just visiting my mother in New York over the Christmas holiday and one of the things she used to do in my twenties was stand on my back while we had a good chat to catch up.

It always felt great since I was always tight… and I always appreciated that time with my mom. As i’d feel like a kid again.

But in the past years… we haven’t done that because i’m never tight.

And I kind of miss it.

Though my mother’s now 80 years old and probably could no longer stay balanced standing on my back even if she tried.

But it was that nostalgia for those good old days catching up with my mom… that reminded me i’d defeated that old enemy - tightness.

There’s been a couple of big “Youtuber” fights lately and one of them was the recent fight of Andrew Tate vs. Chase DeMoor.

Tate lost pretty badly and it was surprising.

Yes, Tate was 10 years older at 39 yrs old (DeMoor was 29).

But still he was the profighter. Whereas DeMoor had no pro fighting experience.

So what happened?

Let’s have a look.

Who is Andrew Tate?

Andrew Tate rose to internet fame as one of the most polarizing figures on social media, building a massive following through controversial takes on masculinity, wealth, and success.

The former four-time kickboxing world champion parlayed his fighting career into a multi-million dollar online empire, selling courses on “escaping the matrix” and achieving financial freedom.

His kickboxing record was impressive—he held multiple ISKA world championships and maintained an aura of physical dominance that became central to his brand identity.

When you watch his fights in this video above (taken from 2011-14), you see a fast, agile and powerful fighter.

Someone with a killer instinct.

His fight against Chase DeMoor

When Tate announced his comeback fight against Chase DeMoor in October 2025, it seemed like a guaranteed victory lap.

The exhibition match was set up largely for entertainment—Chase DeMoor had zero professional fighting experience and came from a YouTube/social media background.

He was best known as a Misfits Boxing competitor — a crossover boxing league featuring influencers, reality stars, and athletes rather than traditional pro boxers. And he had a total of 5 fights.

On paper, this was supposed to be an easy showcase for Tate to remind everyone of his fighting prowess.

A four-time world champion versus a complete amateur?

Tate should have dominated every second of that ring time.

Tate lost badly and looked slow

Instead, Tate lost badly.

As you can see in the video above he just looked slow and amateur-ish.

Chase was just faster and just in far better biomechanical shape.

He closed the gap in years of training with his body’s natural abilities to react and deliver power

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Tate on the otherhand looked weak, sluggish, and fundamentally compromised.

His movements lacked the explosive power and speed that defined his championship years.

It wasn’t ring rust or poor conditioning in my view as he prepped for the fight quite a bit—rather this was biomechanics at play.

The internet exploded with questions: how does a world champion lose to someone with no fighting experience?

And rightfully so as Tate often comes off quite arrogant in much of his social media posts.

It was nice to see the guy humbled.

And in a pretty embarrassing way.

Tate’s dental ‘transformation’

It is very clear that Tate did indeed go through a dental transformation.

And according to the dentist in the video below it was likely aligners. But there are others that think it could have been veneers.

I tend to agree with the video… that it was more likely aligners.

And he probably did it in 2023.

Because in March 2023 Tate was granted permission during Romanian house arrest to visit a dentist. This appointment reportedly took several hours, which is consistent with doing something like aligners or veneers.

And it is very clear that when he finished house arrest in August 2023 his teeth were already ‘fixed’.

So somewhere in mid-2023 his collapse likely started and for me that is when the clock starts ticking.

Because he would have been in collapse from that point and all his additional exercise and time in the gym would have probably accelerated that collapse to some extent.

Because his teeth were probably wanting to move back to their old positions, but he likely had a permanent retainer holding them there.

Thus handcuffing the body’s own survival mechanism to save itself by putting teeth back to positions where they would support and stabilize the skull.

Because as I wrote in the article above the teeth need to support multiple jaw positions (retrusion and protrusion) and when dentists do things like aligners they never account for this.

Thus the skull collapses in and the skeleton twists. Sapping a person of flexibility, power, endurance and speed.

Closing thoughts

Tate seems to have seen all the fun and money Jake Paul was making by fighting and so seemingly wanted to imitate him.

He probably figured he’d start with a relatively easy fight and then move onto more difficult ones. Racking up bigger bags of money as he goes.

But he was rocked on his very first fight.

It very clearly surprised him as well. It’s a fight he should have easily won.

If he’d not fallen victim to biomechanical collapse from his dental work.

His fight wasn’t lost in the ring. It was lost a few years earlier in a dentist’s chair.

And despite Tate acting like he knows everything about everything when being interviewed… he didn’t know about these simple physics ;)

What I’ve realized over the past decade is that almost everything you experience is relative to your level of biomechanics (or how collapsed you are).

For example… there was this guy I thought was an arrogant prick 3-4 years back. And I met him a little while ago and didn’t understand why I thought that before.

Working 7 days a week felt like an unbearable nightmare in early 2020 when I was employed by a company and collapsing. Now I do it every week without thinking about it.

New Yorkers felt a bit cold and uncaring when I was younger. Now mostly I see people that are collapsing and suffering… who if I approach them are generally quite receptive and warm.

You just experience almost everything about this world in a different way depending on which side of the pendulum you are on…. collapsing vs. inflating.

Some context on the real theory of relativity

The theory of relativity is one of the pillars of modern physics. Developed by Albert Einstein in the early 1900s, it radically changed how we understand space, time, motion, and gravity.

At a high level, relativity says: space and time are not absolute—they depend on how fast you’re moving and how gravity is affecting you.

Imagine two people texting each other.

One person is standing still outside.
The other is on a fast train moving close to the speed of light.

Now here’s the key idea from relativity, first described by Albert Einstein:

Both people experience time normally for themselves — but they disagree about each other’s clocks

.

What each person sees

• The person standing outside sees the person on the train moving very fast, so their clock appears to tick more slowly.

• The person on the train sees the person outside (and the entire Earth) moving fast in the opposite direction, so Earth’s clocks appear to tick more slowly.

Neither person is “wrong.”

Time itself is behaving differently for each observer.

That’s relativity.

How this relates to my theory of ‘Experience Relativity’

You see we’re used to thinking:

• Time = universal

• One second = one second for everyone

Relativity says:

• Time depends on motion

• The faster you move, the slower time passes relative to someone else

And for me biomechanics works in a similar way. We all think that we experience things in a consistent way during life.

For example if I meet a mean person today, I would generally assume that I would have the same impression of him five years ago.

But this would absolutely not be the case because we experience people relative to our level of collapse.

I might have thought he was a complete asshole five years ago, but now i’m a more confident and healthy person and so I see him as a good person worthy of being a friend.

Is that me being untrue to myself? No! It is me experiencing this person differently because my biomechanics are in a very different place.

How we see this impact society

Examples of this are all around us. For example college fraternities.

You’ll have a jock frat and a frat with nerds on the same campus.

A nerd visiting the jock frat’s party will think “damn these guys are all arrogant buttheads!” And he would not feel comfortable at all.

Whereas the ‘jocks’ who probably all consistently have decent biomechanics do not experience each other as being arrogant buttheads at all.

Rather those ‘arrogant’ characteristics seem ‘normal’ to them and so they judge the character of their fellow frat brothers on very different standards.

If, however, one of these frat brothers filed his teeth down and collapsed very hard in a year… he would begin to experience his fellow frat brothers more like the nerds do.

And same with the nerds… if one of them was to do this biomechanical process very intensively during a year studying abroad… he would probably come back looking at his fellow nerds very differently. Almost the way a jock would look at them.

This does not make him a worse person. Rather my point is that this is absolutely NORMAL.

What i’m saying is by far not rocket science.

We all intuitively understand this.

But till now…. you viewed these relationships as being relatively stagnant.

In your mind you kind of relegated yourself to experiencing life from your current level of biomechanics.

Leveraging the theory of ‘Experience relativity’

Some of you might be thinking.. “ok Ken what you’re saying makes sense, but so what? How is this actionable?”

So let me explain why I think this is an important theory to be firmly aware of as it impacts decisionmaking.

Lets take an example… when I was going up and down from 2014-17 I had a bunch of guys I worked with at Lazada that all knew me.

Some of them were more senior to me and probably assumed they were smarter or more capable. And the assumption generally is that if they were more capable back then, then they are probably more capable now.

But this, in my experience, would absolutely not be the case anymore.

These days I’m able to think far clearer and clock 12-14 hour days of hard focus with ease. When I saw some of these old colleagues the past few years they seemed slow to me. Slow in how they execute, slow in how they think, etc

.

And if they were to compete against me now… i’d put money down that they would experience what Jake Paul experienced when he fought Anthony Joshua the other day.

This would most likely leave them confused. They’d be like… “did Ken get better or did I get worse?”

And the reality would be that a bit of both happened, but mainly I got better.

The exact opposite happened in early 2014 when I had my teeth filed down by a dentist and I rapidly collapsed.

I still had it in my head that I was this Ivy league grad, ex-BCG consultant who’d run a 100+ person company at Groupon Ukraine… but the reality biomechanically was that i was at the capability level of a new grad who was mediocre at best.

And at some point that reality was shoved down my throat back then and i voluntarily demoted myself two levels at the time.

Putting relativity into action

It is very important to understand this relativity because if you don’t and you’re doing this biomechanical process… it is easy to assume that people that were better than you in the past are still better than you.

However with many of them that would no longer be the case.

So you need to be aware of this relativity and how it influences your decisions, etc.

For example:

• I might see a guy that I knew a decade back who had good biomechanics and was very good at his job. But in the interim he’s had braces and has experienced a fair bit of collapse. It would be a mistake for me to hire him thinking his value is what it was. It has sank considerably most likely.

• Someone might take a job at a far lower level than what they are capable of.

• Someone might choose a career that is far more conservative than what they would enjoy now that they are healthy.

• etc

Closing thoughts

This relativity stuff is something that you notice more and more the longer you’re in this journey in my experience.

You start to expect more from yourself and realize that you’re improving.

You’ll start to close the gap with people you thought were better than you. And then perhaps even pass them.

And it’s a bit confusing sometimes to be honest. Because oftentimes you’ll be encountering people who still have you mentally placed where you were.

It’ll be their instinct to treat you that way.

But you’ll realize that you’re effortlessly breaking out of what they consider your ‘norm’.

And so my message to you with this article is that “that is ok!” We do not need to fit into their perception of who we used to be.

We can redefine that shit even as they sit there complaining that “we have changed”.

And they’ll just have to deal with it… because in this game of life neurology rules.

Meaning you get away with pretty much whatever comes natural to you. And they’ll just realize that “this is the new you.”

A number of folks have asked me how I sleep.

And so I think it’s an interesting topic that is worth an article as it has evolved and led me to some interesting hypotheses.

In general I never had a major sleep problem

From the time I was young I always slept pretty decently. I had plenty of things going wrong at various times but sleep never seemed to be the main issue.

Even as a young adult I seemed to fall asleep pretty easily. For example when I was living in Tokyo in 2001 I’d get on the crowded subway to go to work in my suit.

And there was always this perception that there’d be Japanese businessmen falling asleep all over the place in crowded subways. But i seemed to master that much better than them! haha

I’d be standing there hanging onto the handle above my head and conk right out while leaning on the person next to me. Both in the morning on my way to work and on the way back.

But in hindsight I think I was tired a bit too much during the day. I’d only sleep about 6 hrs at night, but then i’d often find myself having to take these little naps.

Even at lunchtime i’d often sneak away to a quiet spot and take a powernap.

With this biomechanical process my need to sleep has evolved

In the past ten years as I iterated on this process my sleep has always been relatively ok but I noticed that sometimes I need a lot more sleep than others.

For example about a year back I remember feeling like I could operate amazing off of just 6 hrs of sleep. And I wouldn’t even really nap during the day.

Each morning i’d hop up around 7am, take my son to school, and then go right to work. And work with some breaks for meals, time with the family, etc. till about 11pm or so. A solid 14 hrs or so each weekday.

These days I need at least 8 hrs of sleep. Plus i often take at least one nap of at least 30 minutes… usually around 7pm or so.

When I wake up in the morning to take my son to school (around 7am) i still feel a ton of pressure in my skull and neck. And so I drive him to school feeling like a zombie, come back home, and fall right asleep again for another couple of hours. Often not waking up till 10 or 11am.

But then working till 1am or 2am. So I work somewhere between 12-14hrs these days.

I think i’ve gone through these types of cycles several times the past decade. Meaning that sometimes I needed just 6 hrs or so whereas sometimes my body needed 8+ hrs.

I sleep whenever i’m tired as I do this process

My general rule with this process is that I never try to overpower my body. If my body tells me these days that i need 8hrs, I give it 8 hrs.

If i get tired in the middle of the day, I just put my head down and try to nap.

I’ll often just lay down on the floor in my coworking office here in Bangkok and conk out for 20-30 minutes.

I never try to ‘force’ myself to stay awake if I am tired because I generally view that if I do that then i’m not gonna be very productive. I’m not thinking nearly as quickly or clearly.

Much better to take a nap and then be at a 100% again because I can just see that there is a massive difference between these two states.

Also note that I work for myself, which makes this type of flexible schedule very easy to follow. Whereas folks that need to go to an office are going to find it more challenging.

Sleep to me is the time when the body remodels the best

Before I go to bed everynight I am usually doing at least an hour of my fast method stretches and this is putting a lot of pressure into the skull and neck.

As soon as I lay down to sleep I can feel this pressure start to dissipate. But it takes time.

Even after sleeping 8 hours I can often feel that it is not fully dissipated.

Also when I wake up I will almost always see lines on my body. Often on my arms, my torso or my back. These lines indicate to me that the body is remodeling (untwisting, etc).

I do not see these lines much if I have not slept.

So I’ve kind of concluded that the model generally remodels the best when sleeping.

Perhaps it has something to do with all the muscles relaxing and therefore things can move the easiest.

Do I have any special tips for sleeping?

I often start out on my back for the first 10-15 minutes but then almost always switch to my side before I fall asleep.

And I find that the lines appear a bit easier when i’m laying on my side.

Does that mean I think it’s a bad thing to sleep on your back? No. I just personally find it a bit harder to sleep that way.

I don’t really agree with these folks that make sleeping on your back out to be some kind of evil thing. I just think our bodies were engineered too intelligently for that to be the case.

Closing thoughts

Sleep is a critical part of this biomechanical healing process in my experience.

Because it is when the body is absorbing the stretch that you put on it during the day. And by absorbing the stretch it also remodels a bit (in a positive way).

So you’re essentially untwisting the skeleton and inflating the skull during sleep.

Which should be evident through clues like lines on your body, face, etc.

Also your sleep is likely to evolve a bit. Sometimes you will need a lot more sleep. And during those times I encourage you to just give your body as much sleep as it needs.

Remember that the body is, in my view, much smarter than us about what it needs. And this is particularly relevant to sleep.

Some of you may have noticed that the R3 went up on presale on our website a few days ago. And we should be able to ship it by December 12.

So I figured i’d talk a bit about it and how it stacks up against our other appliances as I’m already getting this question a fair bit.

And I want to start out by making some clarifications that with our mouthguards there is no real sequencing. You can start with any of them and there is no real order you should follow.

Which is a bit different to Myobrace where they do have you follow a specific order.

Anyway, let’s dive in.

Introducing the R3

So first let’s start out with the question.. “Why did we make an R3?”

Is it just to squeeze more money out of people and convince them to buy another mouthguard? Hahaha

No, in my view it is not.

Rather we took a lot of feedback into account when creating the R3 and the folks that have been in the community have probably seen this in action.

First it’s important to note that the inspiration for the look of the R3 came from our community member “New Era” who actually cut a bunch of holes into his R2 and called it his “Rambo Reviv”.

I thought that that was very badass…. and plus he said that saliva flow worked much better as a result.

So bells went off in my head that said “Ken… we need our mouthguards to look a bit badass!” hahaha

And thus we started creating designs that built upon that inspiration.

We then shared those designs with the community and iterated on them with feedback from the community.

We even decided whether or not to include a tongue tab on it by taking a community vote (having a tongue tab won by a large margin).

And finally we got input on what sizes to offer, which is what led us to decision to offer an XL size for the very first time.

Plus it gave us the feedback to make it thicker (ie. put more height between the teeth) to create more stretch.

So as you can see the goal with the R3 was to figure out what people who were using R2 for awhile wanted to change with their appliance. And then create that for them.

While of course taking into account that you’re never going to make everyone happy.

R3 is an improvement on the R2

So what features define the R3?

Well, as mentioned it is thicker and therefore should be a bit more stretch than the R2 or R1.

It is also cut lower on the top and bottom so that it shouldn’t create as many issues with the gums. Which also makes it a bit easier to start with than either R1 or R2, which both ride a lot higher on the gums.

The airholes are another big difference vs R2 (whose airholes are very small). We wanted to make the R3 easy to mouthbreathe in (for those who need to mouthbreathe) while also allowing for good saliva flow (as a number of folks mentioned it was difficult to swallow saliva with the R2 early on).

I’ve also found that the big airhole up front creates a lot more suction for me when I use it. And this suction encourages me to nosebreathe so I don’t think the folks that want to encourage nosebreathing will necessarily be disappointed with it either.

Things that are similar to the R2 include:

• The material (foodgrade silicone) is the same and about the same level of hardness as the R2 yellow

• The durability should be about the same (1 year)

• There is a tongue tab

• The color is only available in yellow like R2, but in about a month we will have the clear version as we have for R2

Sizing

The R3 is offered in 3 sizes: M, L and XL

The medium and large sizes of R3 are the same dimensions as the R2.

Plus we now have an XL size as you see above. This had come very popular demand from the community, particulary from the veterans who wanted something larger that would feel like more of a stretch.

Also note that the thickness is almost 2x that of the R2, which should put more stretch as it puts more height between the teeth.

Pricing

The pricing is also consistent with the R2.

Meaning that if you purchase the appliance alone then it starts out at $80 and it reduces by $25 for each Reviv appliance that you have purchased from us. With the minimum price being $30.

Some details on how that works:

• Why do we do this? We do this to reward returning customers and it reflects the fact that it typically costs us a lot to acquire a customer (through Meta, Google ads, affiliates, etc.)

• What products count towards this discount? All mouthguards… so R1, R2, R3, RD1. Not RePod or any non-mouthguards.

• What channels count towards the discount? All channels where our products are sold including our site (www.getretreviv.com), Amazon and Tiktokshop.

• What happens if we don’t see previous orders and you use the lower price? We will email you and ask you to show proof of the previous orders (if we missed them) or to pay the difference.

The goal with pricing is to be fair. There are a lot of costs in running an ecom business like this and we try to offer our mouthguards at a democratic / affordable price while still allowing the business to be profitable and grow.

We throw everything we earn back into the business to be able to help more people and change more lives.

And I have personally loaned the company a sizeable amount of my savings… because I believe in what we are doing and I want us to change the world for the better.

We are not some fancy, VC-backed company that can throw money around… I am the only full-time employee and I pinch every penny I can while still trying to be fair to my freelance team.

Availability

For now the R3 is only available for sale on our site and can be purchased as presale already on the links below:

• R3 without support ($80): https://getreviv.com/products/r3-revivthree-without-support?variant=47225721127153

• R3 with 1-year of support ($150): https://getreviv.com/products/r3-revivthree-support-package

We expect to be shipping by December 12th.

We do expect to sell the R3 on both Amazon and Tiktokshop but not for another month or so as we need to put the inventory into their fulfilment centers.

Closing thoughts

There was a time in 2014 when I felt like a broken person.

I’ve told my story many times… a TMJ dentist filed my back teeth down and my health fell apart rapidly after.

When I asked him to fix what he’d done he just shrugged his shoulders at me and essentially inferred I was making up the fact that there was any connection to what he’d done to me.

I was 37 years old.. i had a child and wife to take care of. And no golden spoon to fall back on.

For ten years I iterated trying to figure out how this stuff worked so I could be a good father for my son and husband to my wife.

There were days when my dreams felt very far away. Like i’d never get there.

But I never gave up.

The success of Reviv and this launch of R3 is to me a symbol of that fact. That I never gave up and i’m coming charging back.

Just like Spartacus gathered his army of slaves on his way to Rome… i’m gathering up the folks that were broken and discarded by this shitty dental/medical system that we have.

And we’re gonna make a difference. You’ll see.

Thank you for all your support!

-Ken