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

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

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

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

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

Some context setting

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

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

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

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

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

The body is smarter than we give it credit for

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

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

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

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

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

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

I particularly see this in how the body recovers

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

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

• My senses are normalizing.

• The shape of my skull is normalizing over time.

• I feel like my lungs are being cleaned.

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

• My mind and neurological system are bouncing back.

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

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

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

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

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

Medication overrides the intelligence

Here’s where I think the danger comes in.

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

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

Pain gets numbed instead of fixed at its root cause.

Anxiety gets sedated instead of addressed.

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

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

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

Let’s examine Bruce Lee’s death

Bruce Lee died in 1973 at 32 years old.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until the compensation capacity runs out.

He’s not the only case that fits this pattern

Bruce Lee isn’t an isolated example to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My own experience with this

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What neuromuscular dentistry actually is

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

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

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

That becomes the target “neuromuscular bite.”

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

How big is it?

This isn’t a fringe idea.

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

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

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

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

I actually tried this myself back in 2014-2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why they don’t understand the skeleton

Here’s the fundamental issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The million dolla question

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

No lingering issues, no return of symptoms, etc.

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

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

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

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

This is the part that I disagree with completely.

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

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

So who is right and who is wrong?

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

Then you decide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is “First Principles Thinking”?

I’ve taken this from Chatgpt:

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

Think of it as asking:

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

An example: Building a battery

Most people might think:

• Batteries are expensive.

• Therefore, making electric cars will always be expensive.

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

A first-principles thinker would instead ask:

• What is a battery made of?

  • Lithium

  • Nickel

  • Cobalt

  • Graphite

  • Manufacturing materials

• What do those raw materials actually cost?

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

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

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

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

In 2014 I was in a dilemma.

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

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

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

And a lot more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I applied First Principles Thinking

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

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

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

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

And then I started asking questions and challenging assumptions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on that here:

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

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

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

Why is this important to keep in mind?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You don’t win em all :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’ll see why.

Let’s talk a bit about kickboxing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now let’s talk about this biomechanical process

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

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

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

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

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

So they give up.

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

Some folks will be successful, others will not

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

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

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

I get all of that.

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

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

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

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

I logically conclude that this process works on everyone

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

Because we are talking about the structure of the skeleton.

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

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

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

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

That is just logic in my view.

What predicts who will be successful?

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

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

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

Let me explain.

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

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

That can happen quite a bit with this process.

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

That’s just now how this process works unfortunately.

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Otherwise you will probably give up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not someone strong enough for the rigors of upper management.

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

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

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

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

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

Many of us started as biomechanically disadvantaged

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

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

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

Or even later than that.

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

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

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

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

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

The biomechanically advantaged rule over the disadvantaged

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

Almost whatever they did success seemed to come easily.

They attracted people to them and were popular by default.

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

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

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

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

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

When you improve your biomechanics, you change the playing board

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

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

Rather it was biomechanics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually you trade places

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

Not just physically but mentally.

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

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

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

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

You will operate as a different person effortlessly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they are becoming more like the people we were.

We’re trading places.

Closing thoughts

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

And the relationships are very clear.

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

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

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

And so now we are democratizing it.

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

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

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

One that is far more equitable.

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

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

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

I don’t think that’s true.

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

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

What does a healthy gumline look like?

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

What do you notice about the picture above? Well:

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

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

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

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

The teeth don’t fully extrude with malocclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arches never develop to their correct width either

The second half of the problem is arch width.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the mouthguard process does

This is where the flat mouthguard process comes in.

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

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

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

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

But it takes time and you need to be patient.

How that impacts the gumline

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does overeruption truly exist?

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

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

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

Why do I make this point?

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

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

Sometimes cavities ‘appear’ with this process

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve written about this before here:

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

This biomechanical process removes the cap.

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

But can that be a bit scary at times?

Yeah it honestly can.

And so you need to be mentally prepared for it.

I never said this process was easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Dennis Quaid is

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing about his lifestyle explains it

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there’s the cocaine

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

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

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

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

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

My read: solid biomechanics + no major dental work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

He wasn’t disciplined about food.

His workouts were ordinary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the bite relates to the skeleton

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s like a two-way mirror

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your bite is changing your entire life

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

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

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

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

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

How I learned about this connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I repeated this experiment numerous times to make sure.

You can validate this connection yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem is what happens next.

What this connection actually means

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

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

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

So whatever the exercise achieved, the body undoes it.

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

Why osteopathy gives relief that fades within a week.

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

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

A flat mouthguard solves this problem

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

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

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

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

A flat mouthguard is the bucket with the hole sealed.

Closing thoughts

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

I asked them… “hmm. Do you exercise?”

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

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

This sounds like heresy today I know.

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

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

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

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

But the reality is… I think Shaq was right.

And he was probably unwittingly listening to his body.

Athletes are typically respected for playing hard in practice

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

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

For example Micheal Jordan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smart coaches will run lazy practices

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t think practicing makes you much better

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

I’ll give you an example.

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wouldn’t that be cool?

I think so.

There is almost always a pecking order

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biomechanics are almost always behind this pecking order

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

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

• how good you look

• the confidence you exude

• the resonance of your voice

• how quick you think

• how well you can analyze complex problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I am very competitive by nature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

With that I gave him four mouthguards.

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

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

So the rest is up to him now.

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

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

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

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

Some of them have a lot of legitimate change.

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

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

There are two dimensions to remodelling in my experience

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

And so these two dimensions are:

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

Makes sense no?

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

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

One dimension is a lever, the other is chance

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

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

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

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

My experience tells me that they are wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For me that was my ‘fast method’.

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

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

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

And this is my right ear.

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

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

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

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

There is direct cause & effect.

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

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

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

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

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

Dimension 1 is where the true kings are crowned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And remember that there is a soft tissue ‘end’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it is a race to the ‘end’.

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

Because you ain’t done yet.

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe someone will beat me there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First let’s see Timothée in action

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

Like he’s just naturally passionate and fearless.

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

Not many is the answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least for many years.

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

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

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

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

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

He pulls it off.

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

Clav is also an example to a lesser extent

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

And I didn’t hesitate to answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My ‘authenticity’ has improved consistently the last few years

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

Simple. I experienced them myself.

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

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

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

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

So conversations feel more natural and interesting.

Biomechanics is more than just aesthetics

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

And to me it’s obvious.

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

Authenticity is considered this natural talent in society today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dad sent me this video below over the weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am very confident it is biomechanics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I also think times have changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

The generational slide

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

Particularly if they come from places like the US.

Why is that?

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

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

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

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

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

• They focus and retain information worse

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

• They have poorer attention to detail

• etc.

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

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

My own little ‘experiment’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

Closing thoughts

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

Today’s article is just another example.

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

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

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

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

Same thing… biomechanics.

How will I be proven correct one day?

Simple.

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

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

And i’d honestly never thought about it before.

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

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

First, some statistics on coffee

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

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

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

And then there’s the cafe explosion.

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

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

Independent specialty cafes are multiplying in every city neighborhood.

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

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

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

The caffeine debate

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m a coffee lover

I’ve been drinking coffee my entire adult life.

Actually, it started even earlier than that.

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I genuinely love coffee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least that’s my interpretation.

Now I only drink about a cup a day

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

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

The dependency is gone.

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

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

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

It’s a noticeable shift.

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The body is extremely smart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you tamper with it, things go wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Young Tom Hardy is a good example

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

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

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

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

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

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

When he changed his teeth, his body changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is Tom falling apart fast now?

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

When it goes downhill it’s not just physical

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

Leave the body alone and it compensates brilliantly.

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

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

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

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

Respect the intelligence of your body.

That’s my advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I decided I needed to dig in.

About Beverly Hills, 90210

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

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

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

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

Their chemistry on screen made the show.

Their real-life turbulence kept it in the tabloids.

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

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

The Brenda & Dylan love story

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

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

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

They both passed away very young

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

He was just 52 years old.

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

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

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

Then Shannen.

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

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

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

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

Was dental work involved in Luke’s case?

There is no smoking gun here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How about for Shannen’s case?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Two icons of a generation. Gone too soon.

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

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

It’s not luck.

In my view it’s clearly biomechanics.

Who is Travis Pastrana

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

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

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

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

Travis has damaged himself a lot

Here’s where it gets hard to believe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he’s always recovered quickly

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good biomechanics make recovery faster and easier

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

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

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

That’s the baseline from which healing happens.

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

Recovery slows. Injuries linger. Surgeries don’t fully resolve. People end up in rehab for months doing exercises that don’t work because the underlying structural environment is never addressed.

Travis Pastrana has had that structural foundation working in his favor for his entire life. His body isn’t recovering despite the abuse it’s taken — it’s recovering because the platform underneath is solid.

The nervous system can communicate properly. The skeletal alignment means the body isn’t fighting itself. Resources go toward repair instead of compensation.

This is also, in my view, why you see athletes with poor biomechanics — narrow faces, collapsed spines, history of orthodontics — get one serious injury and never come back the same way.

The structure wasn’t there to support the recovery.

It’s not willpower. It’s physics.

I’ve experienced this on myself

Over the past decade i’ve seen this same pattern play out on myself time and again.

Less from major injuries like Pastrana, but more for small injuries and getting sick.

When my biomechanics were getting worse I was just far more susceptible to illness and getting injured.

When it was getting better…. getting ill seemed almost impossible and if I got injured it was typically a very rapid recovery.

In a way you even feel this in your gut. When I was not doing well my body was telling me to protect myself, get more sleep, etc because it knew that it was weak.

Whereas now as i’m improving these past few years my body generally tells me that I am very resilient. It can take damage and bounce back. I just feel it.

Closing thoughts

Travis Pastrana is one of the most injured athletes in the history of sport.

He’s also one of the most resilient. Most people credit the mental side — the toughness, the refusal to quit, the insane pain tolerance. And maybe that’s part of it.

But I think the bigger part of the story is the structure he was born with and has maintained.

• A wide, well-developed skull.

• A spine that, despite everything it’s been through, keeps returning to a functional baseline.

• A body that heals fast because the environment it’s healing in is fundamentally sound.

The lesson here isn’t “be tougher.” The lesson is that if you want your body to recover from anything — injury, illness, surgery, stress — the most important variable is the structural condition you’re operating from.

Fix the biomechanics. The rest follows.

Sometimes folks write me and tell me a bit about their lives.

Some folks are really in a very difficult situation after many years of suffering.

They spent their savings on treatments that they had high hopes for, which let them down.

They were unable to work for stretches of time because of health limitations and when they did it was at a fraction of their capability. Which in turn limited their earning potential.

And so now they are in a position that I like to think of as “life on the one yard line.”

They are just living to survive.

Most of their hope has been crushed by past promises made by dentists and medical practitioners. Promises that always turned out to be false.

Today’s article is dedicated to these folks.

I had a glimpse into what that life looks like… and it honestly scared the hell out of me.

We all start out thinking life is gonna be good

When life first starts out and we’re kids we like to think we all have a pretty good shot in life.

Study hard, work hard, do right by people… and life should work out ok.

We can all potentially be the President one day. Or found a great company. Or at least make a difference and be happy.

That is kind of what we’re brainwashed to think in most developed countries.

So we all start off with this amazing hope and plan for our lives.

We think of the achievements we’re going to have in our career. The amazing family we’re gonna have. etc.

But for some folks things head downhill quite early

For many folks these days things start heading downhill quite early.

There are so many people i’ve met through our community and various DM’s who were already experiencing major health issues in their teens.

Often triggered by extractions, orthodontics, etc.

And all of a sudden they had to stop thinking about the future because they were having too many problems right now.

They were already on defense.

Going to doctors, taking various pharmaceuticals (eg. antidepressants, etc), and making excuses for why they weren’t able to push ahead.

They probably thought there was something wrong with them.

Perhaps it was genetic?

Perhaps they attribute it to some bad event or stress that happened in their lives.

Usually everyone comes up with some type of strategy to attribute their problems to logical reasons that make sense to them.

And it’s rarely things like dental work.

Things just continue to trend down for years

The problems for a lot of these folks i’m talking about don’t seem to go away.

Rather they get worse and compound.

They never get out of the blocks and perhaps need to continue living with their parents.

Some are not able to hold down real jobs.

Inside they perhaps feel like they’ve let their parents down. Like it’s their fault. They tried their best but it wasn’t good enough.

I honestly did not know what that felt like in the first couple of decades of my life. As I worked hard, got good grades, got a good job and generally got out of the blocks in life pretty well.

It wasn’t until 2014 when I was 37 years old that my big problems started because a TMJ dentist in Vietnam had filed down my back teeth and everything started to spiral down.

After awhile i was in the thick of it. My health was going up and down for the next 7 years and it was impacting all aspects of my life.

I needed to start coming up with excuses to justify why I’d all of a sudden seemingly turned into a loser who couldn’t hold down a job.

That was the situation I was in when this pic above was taken around 2018.

After moving my family to Boston in 2017 I already needed to move again in mid 2018. Because my health made it very difficult to sustain a relatively senior position in a political, US company.

And then I found myself struggling soon after I arrived in Moscow in 2018. Turns out dealing with politics and high pressure bosses in a foreign language isn’t any easier than doing it in your own language lol.

Each night I came home and looked at my son. And thought to myself how I was glad he wasn’t yet old enough to understand how his father had essentially become a loser.

Instead he looked at me like the hero.

And that gave me hope on those dark days to keep pushing forward.

Finally you’re at your own one yard line making your last stand

I consider mid-2020 my one yard line stand.

My health had been going up and down since 2014 (7 whole years).

My parents were tired of hearing me talk about teeth. My mother’s husband literally banned from talking about it in their house.

My marriage had a lot of issues as my wife was frustrated at what was happening with me and our lives as a result.

My now 6-year old son still wasn’t developing correctly and had major sleep issues despite ~5 years of trying lots of things.

And it was with this backdrop that I found myself in Bangkok, Thailand in a job that was completely the wrong fit for me (at least for the state I was in).

I’d done it again… moved my family into a situation that was not going to work out.

I’d already leveraged pretty much all of the contacts and goodwill I had left the past seven years to keep my career going. And now there was nowhere to turn.

And with all this happening I was probably in the worst shape i’d been healthwise since 2014 (the year all of this stuff had kicked off.)

I wanted to cry but there were no tears left.

There was no empathy to turn to. Nobody who understood that I’d just expended more effort the past 7 years than i had my entire life to essentially just go downhill anyway. And I was exhausted from it all.

When I left my job in Thailand in late 2020 I decided I was going to figure this “teeth thing” out once and for all and wasn’t going to take another job till I had.

So that’s what I did. I reviewed all my journals and writings from the past and started retesting everything.

Sometimes you throw a 99-yard touchdown

From late 2020 to late 2021 I iterated on all of the stuff I’d done in the past.

I got out my old tools like the ‘tracking splint’, the clipons, my trusty dental drill, articulating paper, etc.

I reviewed all my old notes about the curve of spee, a lingual bite, etc.

And it all started to make sense again.

It’s like i’d been in a haze for years since 2017 or so. Because everything I was concluding from my experiments were things i’d concluded before (back around 2016).

But I’d forgotten it because of all of the dentists i’d gone to in those intervening years (I particularly consider that I went in circles with ALF from about 2017-2020).

This time I was gonna leave all dentists out of it. I was gonna leave the thoughts of my old friend, Marcello, out of it. I was gonna do this purely based on logic. The Ken way.

And I was gonna derive the true rules to this game once and for all… or honestly I was done for.

And that’s exactly what i’d done by Fall 2021.

I threw a touchdown from the one yard line after having taken a lot of hard hits for about seven years.

Closing thoughts

My story today is about hope.

Because I know there are a lot of people out there that have either started this process or are about to start this process and probably feel like their lives are at the one yard line.

Many of them have probably even been through a lot more than I have.

Some of them never even had a chance to get out of the blocks in life and rather feel like they’ve been treading water since their teenage years.

I want you folks on that one yard line to look up and look downfield one last time. And throw for that end zone with everything you got.

Because this journey is not easy…

…but at least in my experience it is so very worth it.

The NBA fans out there are probably aware that the playoffs are in full swing.

And as a Lakers (and particularly Luka) fan I’ve been watching all of their games.

Today before the game started the commentator mentioned something interesting. He said that the Lakers head coach, JJ Redick, said that Lebron has the lowest body fat ratio in the team at 41 years old.

And of course he then went on to attribute that to the discipline and intensive workout routines that Lebron has maintained over the years.

I of course do not agree with any of that.

I think he would have had more or less the same body fat if he’d done no special workout routine and wasn’t even a professional athlete.

In fact… he’d probably even have a better body because he wouldn’t have worn down his teeth as much.

And the reason he has the lowest bodyfat in the team is very simple… he, by far, had better biomechanics than anyone in that Lakers team. The guy was an absolute beast in his prime.

But the point I want to make is a bit different today…. I want to discuss why Luka Dončić is considered the younger ‘future of the franchise’ despite being more collapsed than Lebron.

First let’s talk a bit about Luka Dončić

So i’m a huge fan of Luka Dončić.

Why?

Because he’s such an amazing scorer (probably the best in the NBA) despite being a pretty shitty athlete.

The guy has the biomechanics of perhaps a college player but definitely not someone on the All-NBA first team.

What is amazing about the guy is how he has taken an almost analytical approach to playing basketball. More so then anyone i’ve ever seen in my ~40 years of watching basketball.

He gets his defender with their weight on the wrong foot and creates just enough space to get his shot off.

Or he changes speed on his drive to the basket to get his defender to drop off him just enough to lay it in.

The guy pretty much never gets blocked despite being slow and not jumping very well. And this despite the fact that he shoots A LOT and teams are often throwing double teams with their best defenders at him.

I just find him so unique. Kind of an “anti-Michael Jordan” haha.

Luka is considered the future of the Lakers because he is younger than Lebron

Luka is only 27 years old right now.

Which is considered to be in your ‘prime’ in the NBA.

Lebron on the otherhand is 41.

So everyone refers to Luka as the future and Lebron as getting ready to retire.

This despite the fact that Lebron is in my view far more athletic than Luka still.

And athletic ability tends to correlate very strongly with biomechanical structure in my experience.

So in a way… Lebron is actually YOUNGER than Luka from a biomechanical perspective.

Which is something that is further supported by his better stamina, jumping ability, flexibility, strength, etc.

So is there any true advantage to being younger?

This is the next question you should be asking.

Does Luka have any true advantage over Lebron due to the fact that from an age perspective he is younger?

And the answer is yes, but not in the way you would think.

You see…. Lebron’s game very much depended on his athletic ability. His ability to jump out of the gym and go right around or even through people with his quickness and strength.

So the fact that he has declined biomechanically means that he is now playing at only a shadow of the level that he was playing at in his prime. And this despite the fact that he’s still biomechanically ‘superior’ to Luka.

Luka, on the otherhand, developed his game being biomechanically inferior. And so he’s able to operate at his peak level despite being ‘more collapsed’ than Lebron.

Therefore in a way Luka has the advantage that he can continue to play at around his peak level for another 10-15 years whereas Lebron would probably have become too much of a shadow of his former self in a year or two to not retire.

And so pride and media pressure will probably push Lebron to retire in a year or two.

But some interesting things to think about

Basically what i’m saying is that Lebron will probably retire in a year or two despite being biomechnically younger than Luka who is in his prime.

But the only reason for that is the type of game they play. Lebron depended a lot on his athletic prowess whereas Luka never did.

Now if Lebron were to able to develop the type of game that Luka has (ie. using his body very smartly and changing speeds to create shots) than in my view Lebron probably still has more years left in him in the NBA than Luka does.

And that is even without a mouthguard or any knowledge of biomechanics.

Because I don’t think ‘aging’ actually exists in reality. Which is something I explained here:

What we call ‘aging’ is just biomechanical collapse. And if someone is less collapsed than someone else then the reality (in my view) is that if all other things were equal… they have more years of playing pro ball ahead of them than the more collapsed person.

Closing thoughts

Today i’m trying to draw your attention to a different way of looking at athletes’ careers.

It’s not about age because age doesn’t exist.

Only biomechanical collapse exists.

But you’ll still see athletes (eg. Lebron) retire ahead of more collaped ones (eg. Luka) because typically their peak performance depended on athleticism far more.

If, however, that person understood all of this then hypothetically all they would have to do is successfully adopt a different style of game that works for their level of biomechanics.

Which is actually exactly what a lot of pro athletes do in the twilight of their career.

Or of course they could just wear a flat mouthguard to sleep and hypothetically extend their career forever. Hahaha

Everyday I check the comments on our various ads.

And there’s a particular ad that talks about anti-aging, which seems to gather at least one comment a day to the effect of “what is wrong with aging gracefully?”

And it happens so consistently that I’ve come to conclude that it is a sign of a trend. Kind of a backlash against trying to cheat the aging process.

Which when you see how crazy the anti-aging industry has gotten… I can kind of understand.

But I view aging a bit differently because of these biomechanics.

I don’t view it as being mandatory.

To me aging is kind of like saying that you need to just accept that your Macbook will get slower and slower till you get rid of it.

When that is factually not true. You could in fact wipe the hard drive completely clean and it should operate about as fast as the day you purchased it.

To me the body is kinda the same.

And today I want to explore this topic a bit.

There are tons of “anti-aging” products out there

The anti-aging industry is absolutely massive. The global anti-aging market was estimated at nearly $80 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $137 billion by 2035. Towards Healthcare In the US alone, the market is expected to grow from $21.6 billion in 2025 to nearly $40 billion by 2034. (source: Towards Healthcare)

That is a staggering amount of money being thrown at the problem of getting old.

What’s it being spent on?

• Anti-wrinkle creams hold the largest single share of consumer spending, while injectables like Botox and fillers are the fastest-growing segment.

• Hair colorants, UV filters, collagen supplements, and nutricosmetic capsules.

• Retinol serums. NMN capsules. NAD+ infusions. Red light therapy panels. Peptide creams. Cryotherapy.

• The longevity influencers pushing Bryan Johnson’s $2 million-a-year protocol.

All of it aimed at the same basic goal: slow the clock.

Social media is turbocharging the whole thing.

74% of consumers aged 25 and under say skincare content on social media affects their behavior, and 83% of Gen Z women report purchasing beauty products after seeing creator content. (source: Grand View Research)

This isn’t just a middle-aged vanity market anymore. Twenty-year-olds are buying anti-aging serums because an influencer told them to start early.

The industry has correctly identified that people don’t want to get old. It has completely failed to identify why they’re getting old or what to actually do about it.

Society is having a bit of a backlash

At the same time, there’s a counter-movement.

“Age gracefully.”

“Embrace your wrinkles.”

“Getting older is a privilege.”

You see it all over social media — the message that aging is natural and beautiful and we should stop fighting it.

I understand the sentiment. The pushback against $500 face creams and dangerous procedures makes sense. And I’m not here to tell people they need to look young to have value.

But here’s what I’ve noticed about the people who preach aging gracefully most loudly: they’re almost always the ones who aren’t aging that badly to begin with. They have good structure. Wide faces, decent spines, natural teeth. They look at themselves at 55 and think “I’m aging fine, what’s everyone else’s problem?”

That’s not wisdom. That’s luck they’re mistaking for philosophy.

Because on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who are doing everything right — clean diet, regular exercise, good sleep, the whole stack — and they’re still aging rapidly. Their faces are hollowing. Their bodies are declining. Their energy is dropping. And nobody has a good explanation for why. They just get told to try harder or accept it.

I have a different explanation. And it has nothing to do with diet or sleep or cortisol or any of the things the wellness industry fixates on.

But what if aging is not mandatory?

I don’t think aging is inevitable. I think it’s a function of biomechanical collapse — and I think it can be halted and, in many cases, fully reversed.

Here’s the core argument. As we lose dental height — through grinding, orthodontics, extractions, veneers, or just the natural wear that accelerates when the bite geometry is wrong — the skull begins to deflate.

Think of it like a balloon. The soft tissue surrounding the skull loses pressure, caves inward, and starts compressing everything inside. The face narrows. The spine compensates. The brain gets slowly squeezed.

That process is what we call aging. The wrinkles, the hollowed cheeks, the stooped posture, the cognitive fog, the declining energy — it’s all downstream of the same mechanical event. It’s not time doing it to you. It’s physics.

And if it’s physics, it runs in both directions. You can reinflate the balloon. You can restore the vertical height. You can reverse the collapse. I’ve watched it happen in myself and in hundreds of people in my community. The face fills back out. The posture straightens. The brain wakes up.

No cream has ever done that. No supplement will ever come close.

I plan to look younger in 20 years than I look today

I want to make a bet with you.

Come back in 20 years and look at me. I think I will not only look younger than I look today — I will function better. More energy, sharper cognitively, better posture, stronger body. Not “good for my age.” Actually better than I am right now.

Most of you probably think i’ve completely lost it. That I am delusional having listened to myself for too long hahaha.

I see it different. I see it as a logical extension of what I have already seen playout for 4-5 years now since late 2021 when I fully figured out this biomechanical puzzle.

You see it’s not that I’m correcting my health & function while still aging in other respects. I literally think that everything that is associated to aging is going in reverse.

My complexion is getting better. I got rid of my wrinkles. My hair has gotten thicker and I got rid of a bald spot. It has also gotten less grey.

On the function side i’m able to maintain a pace of working 12-14 hour days non-stop without burning out at age almost 49. I’m more efficient and think clearer now than i did at 25 years old.

And so far in the past ~5 years… I have not seen any evidence or even a trace that there is some programmed aging cycle that I cannot avoid.

Rather to me… it has felt the way I describe it. That there are physics to the skeleton and aging is the decline of those physics while leveraging these biomechanics is the improvement of them.

And so I look at it statistically… what is the probability of something radically changing from what has been extremely consistent for almost five years?

From a math perspective… I put those odds as being small.

Thus you might consider me crazy… but I consider that the math predicts I have a very high chance of being right!

Closing thoughts

The aging gracefully crowd is making peace with a process I think is optional.

But I understand their reasons why they are doing it.

Because the anti-aging industry is selling expensive Band-Aids on top of a structural problem they’ve never identified.

Neither of them is asking the right question.

The right question isn’t how do I slow aging — it’s why am I aging at all?

And if the answer to that is “simple physics” then the next question should be — ok then why not just reverse the physics?