Locking the Gates of Dentistry: Bret Speaks with Dr. Mike Mew
Bret Speaks with Dr. Mike Mew for the second time on the Darkhorse podcast. Dr. Mew is working to tackle the problem face, jaw, and teeth alignment from an evolutionary perspective. His approach, known as orthotropics, has been widely successful in those with whom he has worked; he now faces the potential loss of his license to practice dentistry in a tribunal going on as this episode is released. Find Dr. Mew on YouTube: Orthotropics (https://www.youtube.com/@Orthotropics)Find Dr. Mew a...
And they're going to be thinking very differently.
So I think that, by chance, wow, what an amazing piece of luck I had that mewing is something to do with faces, kids are interested in doing it, and it's out there now, and you can't stop that.
There's a chance we can bring this shit round.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, and I have the great honor and pleasure of sitting with my friend Mike Mew this morning.
Mike Mew is an orthodontist from Britain, and I know what you're all thinking, but as I understand it, he is not responsible for the terrible teeth of the British people.
In fact, he's been working very hard to fix the problem at the root cause.
Mike, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thank you very much, Brett.
Pleasure to come on.
So you have been a guest on Dark Horse before.
I got a lot of very positive commentary on that episode.
And we are doing a second episode because you, as I understand it, are engaged in an active struggle as of this week for your license to practice.
Is that accurate?
Very.
Yeah, I was in court.
Well, by saying court, I will define that as it's a General Dental Council Tribunal.
So clearly you need to regulate dentists.
That is important.
And this is the court within the Dentist Council.
And this court is empowered if they want to take your license from you.
Totally.
Yeah, yeah.
They can't put me in prison.
They can't even fine me any money.
They don't have that power.
But they have the power to place sanctions upon me, such as not to do orthodontics or my version orthotropics.
To stop me practicing either for a temporary suspension or complete erasure.
So they stop me from practicing.
It's my career on the line, that's how I earn my money, that's what I've invested my savings into.
And this is not, for you, even just your career.
As I understand from you and from reading about you, your version of orthodontics is an extension of work done by your father, John Mew.
Do I have that right?
I think there's two sides to this.
First of all side is trying to understand the crooked teeth malocclusion, trying to understand the problem that we're treating and then trying to develop a treatment system to correct the problem.
So my father observed that all was not well within orthodontic therapy and he He made many cognitive leaps of reason.
He did a lot of research, a lot of investigation.
He wasn't the only one.
I mean, by any methods, I think that he came up with better clarity about the whole system.
And we've attempted to treat patients on the system following first principles.
And that's a hard thing to do.
And I've got a clinic where I try to... So our thinking is, rather than trying to make the teeth fit the mouth or the face, we're trying to make the face fit the teeth.
So we're trying to change the way facial form, the way your face grows.
So you have better craniofacial structure, good architecture, good function, and naturally straight teeth.
And it follows.
We're trying to follow the science and the biggest dichotomy I've got is, you know, the biggest big bit between me and conventional orthodontics is the cause.
Why are teeth crooked?
That's my biggest.
Yeah, I must say that there's something about the way you've described this that doesn't sit right with me, because it's not really like a competition between two schools of thought, one in which you move the teeth and one in which you reshape the jaw.
You know, you get to it at the last statement you made.
It is a question of why the teeth don't fit in the first place and addressing that issue at best so that the jaw never forms badly and the teeth naturally find the right place is the obvious best remedy.
Yeah.
Particularly having struggled for 10 years to correct people, the message that comes through more and more and more, the more experience I gain, is we've got, this is something that we need to be correcting.
I ran a petition a few years ago, that we're still running, a campaign called Prevent Crooked Teeth.
I'd love if you could put that as link number one.
and I write down links to said prevent crooked teeth.
Because the answer has to be prevention.
And that's the beauty of trying.
That's what science is trying to do when you try to understand a problem, is think about, basically, if you can prevent it.
Well, so let me maybe orient the audience a little bit.
Let me tell people how I encountered you and what my reaction was, because I think it's actually the quick way in here.
Now, I had my teeth moved as a young person.
As an older person, I lost five teeth to what was apparently harm done by the orthodontist who moved my teeth too quickly, caused short roots that then caused the teeth to become unstable.
Effectively, my teeth aged faster than they should have because the orthodontist borrowed from a capacity of teeth to adjust their own position in order to move them across my jaws.
Perfectly placed.
This question, as an evolutionary biologist, this is one of a number of questions that demand an answer, right?
So as a, you know, if I see fat people, I think as an evolutionary biologist, that's not how selection built them.
What is the cause?
And I can see that there is a cause in the fact that all of our ancestors were stressed for resources for a very obvious reason.
That they, if their population had too much food resource, then the population rapidly grew until it didn't have too much.
And so virtually every ancestor we had was resource stressed virtually all of the time.
And so I know that at least part of the problem with obesity Is that we have a situation in which we have food in abundance, that situation is stable, and so we don't have the self-limiting capacity that selection would otherwise have built into us.
So that's a case that most people will know the answer, or at least understand it when it's described.
But then there are lots of other cases where something has gone wrong in human beings that demand an answer.
Why do so many human beings need eyeglasses?
Why do so many young people have acne?
Right?
Why are these defects apparent in us in a way that we don't typically see defects in wild animals?
So, in any case, having been through intense orthodontia as a young person, and then suffered the consequences later, this was a question on my mind.
Why are our teeth so crooked?
And I had various hypotheses floating around in my mind as to what might be causing it, whether or not, you know, Getting your genes for your jaw shape from a different place than you got your genes for your teeth could potentially do it.
Of course, that doesn't make a lot of sense when you think about the fact that, you know, dogs apparently have a developmental program that results in, you know, you can breed a Chihuahua and a Great Dane and it doesn't have a problem with, you know, the teeth fitting in its jaws.
So that's not a great explanation.
I wondered if it was something about The way we were sleeping and the pressure of pillows and other novel phenomena pushing on the face or something like this.
But then I heard you speak on this issue.
And, you know, anytime I hear somebody from a discipline that's not evolutionary talk about evolutionary dynamics, there's a part of me that, you know, has to – I have to be seated because the leaps in logic tend to be so large that, you know, it just leaves me ranting at the screen.
But I heard you speak.
And frankly, I didn't hear you make a serious error.
In fact, the case you made was spectacularly coherent, drew on exactly the kinds of evidence that I would hope the case would be based on, and it made a great deal of sense.
And so, I knew from hearing that, I was hearing somebody who had the expertise that I lack completely, which is what's going on with teeth, how do they work.
Who was also able to step out of their discipline into my discipline and not sound like a fool.
And so, A, well done.
B, the discovery that this case that you have made and the program of orthotropics, is that the term you use for it?
Yeah, that's the term we try and use for the correction of this problem.
You know, the orthodontics to correct crooked teeth, orthotropics is what we're Come on.
So that program is obviously a threat to an entire industry.
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Right?
To the extent that there is a better mechanism for addressing malocclusion, that's a threat.
But even worse, Because your argument is so powerful and so well grounded with respect to what the ultimate cause is, in effect, if people were to take seriously your proposal and they were to chase down the details and the effect of remedying the root cause, which is
That we are now eating things as, you know, developing infants and children that do not cause the right feedbacks to shape our faces correctly, that that is the root cause.
It's not that our teeth don't know where to go, it's that by the time our teeth are trying to figure out where to go, our jaws don't have enough room in many cases, they aren't shaped correctly for the teeth to meet.
So, were we to take that seriously, Orthodontics would become a very rarely needed specialty only in cases where there was something like a congenital abnormality that was not responsive to proper diet.
Which is usually below a percent.
Yeah.
So, it is not surprising to me, having confronted power a number of times in my career, To discover that you are now on the wrong end of a board adjudicating the question of whether or not you are qualified to practice your profession.
Right?
In essence, people who threaten an industry often find themselves faced with some exercise of power that will shut them up.
Um, and I, you know, I must say it's not, it's not surprising in light of what I believe you have discovered, but it is extremely disturbing.
Yes.
It's disturbing me at the moment.
Well, yes, you are facing, is it a tribunal?
Is that a fair term?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, so let's, You know, I've now ranted quite a bit here about power and evolution and medicine.
Yeah, I mean, for me, life's really tough at the moment.
You know?
Because it's... If you were...
Coming up with new ideas, you're ahead of the game.
Almost by definition, there isn't the objective evidence to validate what you're saying.
One thing they don't want in these types of tribunals are ideas, logical trains of thoughts.
I don't know why, but it seems that in medical tribunals this is almost a disavowed argument.
They always want objective evidence.
And I think that's, I almost think that's a symptom of the wider problem that we've got in medicine.
That, you know, it's almost as if the, the power, the structure within medicine is almost, you know, it looks to the top to come down with ideas.
And if you come in with, you know, the bright guy, the maverick guy coming in from the edge of medicine, this is the classic example, you know, the maverick that comes in with some great idea and medicine tries to stop him.
This has been repeated within medicine time and time immemorial.
And it's almost interesting the way that In this tribunal, they're not going to allow me just to give a coherent argument.
I could say from a scientific basis that unless you can invalidate, unless you can falsify my argument, then I ipso facto, QED, here I stand, please go away.
Yes, and this is extremely troubling.
There are a number of angles we could come at this from.
One is that there is a problem in any discipline in which there is both a clinical aspect, there's clinical dentistry where we treat
Problems that people have with their teeth, but there is also a theoretical question Surrounding teeth and jaws and you know you have used this theoretical realm in order to come up with a very practical and I believe from what I've seen very effective program It is effective, but changing people is many man hours.
Many man hours is unprofitability.
So however effective the methods I have, they're not profitable.
They're not profitable.
I mean, to me, that sounds like it's downstream quite a ways because... Yeah, I mean, clearly, you know, Brett, I've got, I would say at least a third of my patients, the facial changes I gain are just unbelievable.
You know, it's crazy.
Did you really change that person?
And to meet the person, it's crazy.
You know, I often say, if I could take 10% of the increased earnings that these kids get, that's all I would ever need.
You know, a third of my patients, well, we match up quite well to what you've got with orthodontics, I think possibly better.
And a third of them, you know, we make some improvements, but, you know, we don't get a significant headway, you know.
And It's been a huge effort.
Actually, I think those are old statistics.
I think I've improved.
That's my last decade trying to improve that.
But what it's taught me, it's just still not profitable.
Just it's not profitable to do this.
Well, you know, yes, not profitable, but they're two steps removed from the real problem.
Even if it was profitable, you're talking about an industry of professionals that effectively need to retrain completely in terms of their approach, right?
So that's implausible on its face.
But even worse than that, From the perspective of the industry itself, there would be very little need for this specialty if people's faces were shaped correctly in the first place.
Downstream of diet.
No doubt, but I think that we forget, because, you know, to take it beyond, the reason I published this, the concept craniofacial dystrophy, so I need, you know, everyone was talking about the people have crooked teeth, we've got this, you know, rapid rise in crooked teeth, and we've got this rapid rise in sleep apnea, we've got a rapid rise in forward head posture, jaw joint problems, most otolaryngology, you know, ENT problems, so something generally is going wrong with this structure.
There seem to be relationships, you know, all of these rapid curves going up and what's going on.
As far as I'm concerned, people come to me because they want straight teeth.
That's what they want.
Now, when I talk about faces and your alignment, you know, they buy into that.
And I guess now that's why a lot of people come to see me.
But I think the value I add outside the crooked teeth is enormous.
And I think we're only just scratching the surface of that.
But I still, you know, when people coming to see me are still like, how much would it cost to have my teeth straightened this way?
How much does it cost to see Dr. Mu?
And they're willing to take two or three, maybe even four times the cost, you know, because they now know some of the value of what they're getting back.
However, it's costing me ten times the cost to put that on, but I still think that as a fraction of the cost, if they do well, of the value they get out of it in their lifetime.
Because, you know, what more do you want in a life?
Right, and you know, one of the things that I've learned in following you is that we're really, you know, teeth are the place that this shows, right?
It's the obvious sign.
But the number of health consequences we are potentially talking about, things that people care about, like sleep apnea, for example, has everything to do with the shape of your skull.
And so the fact that we have put in, you know, we have disrupted a normal feedback That that is causing health issues.
The one that we have a, it's not even a remedy, it's a kluge moving the teeth around after the jaws formed incorrectly.
is not a proper remedy.
It's a, you know, it's a, it's a cosmetic fix.
And yes, it has some benefits, right?
You know, the teeth meeting removed some of the pathologies, but it certainly doesn't address the majority of them.
And if I can just add one more thing here, which I think we need to straighten out in order for the audience to understand what we're really talking about.
There is a fundamental disagreement between You and your father and Weston Price, I guess, on the one hand, and your field and its authorities on the other.
And that is about whether or not the Epidemic of malocclusion, that is the failure of the teeth to meet correctly, is the result of bad genes that have spread through the population and are now causing a pathology that must be addressed in the now traditional way.
Or whether there is some other, what I would argue is a developmental cause that has nothing to do with genes.
Right?
Why you're on the defensive here is mysterious to me.
I mean, it's not really because I know how power works, and I know how industries work, and I know that people do not surrender their role in the world.
They come up with reasons to preserve it.
But the fact is, this isn't even a difficult question.
When did malocclusion start to spread as an epidemic?
Well, I mean, you know, we can look in the fossil records and you go back 12,000 years ago plus, we don't have a lot of skulls.
I'm not saying we've got a lot of skulls, but the evidence is 10 to 12,000 years ago, virtually nothing.
Sure.
And then it progressively increases.
What you do have is a As soon as we started picking up a flint tool and cutting meat, then we didn't have to do as much of this.
Because before you incise food with your incisors, you cut food with your incisors.
So as soon as you had a stone tool, you were doing less.
And that was probably the first change.
Our incisors, you had to wear them so much that you developed a gap between them from wear.
And that gap, having teeth overlapping, was the first clue, the first change.
But then we had a long period with more or less straight teeth, with the majority of people having straight teeth.
I would say to the end of the medieval period, mostly everyone's got all 32 teeth in their mouth.
OK.
So that's up to about 1400.
This is in Britain.
We've got to take some locality.
So, you know, developing Europe, most people have got all their teeth in, working in function, including the wisdom teeth, up to about the 1400s.
It clearly becomes more prolific, particularly in cities and in the wealthier groups, whereas if you go out into the farms and onto the fields, there's less crookedness, less disruption in the way faces grow and the crookedness of the teeth.
And then, of course, you hit the Industrial Revolution and it just starts to spiral up.
And it really got prolific at the turn of the 1900s.
And this is when orthodontics started, because orthodontics, you know, we had a method, there were several methods, but the one we seem to have followed was a guy called Edward Angle in the US, who made mechanical systems that could make the teeth straight.
There you had people that were willing to pay for it, you had a method that could do it, and then basically an industry started.
So, we see a spectacular rise starting at the beginning of the 20th century, is that right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So, let's take your field's perspective at face value, okay?
Let's say that in order for your field to be correct about the cause here, some new bad genes have to have emerged at that moment and spread.
Now, if I do a back of the envelope calculation, if I say, okay, let's say that a new gene for malocclusion shows up in 1900 because people are modern and they're not going to starve almost no matter what, it doesn't have the negative selective pressure that it would ordinarily have.
Now let me give that gene the benefit of every doubt, right?
Let's make it a dominant gene so that everybody who has a single copy has malocclusion with this new form, right?
And so it shows up in one person.
And then let's say that I set the parameters for maximum rate of speed that makes, I mean, just even beyond anything that makes sense.
Let's say it's a dominant gene.
That the person who had it first, the person in which the mutation occurred, has six children.
Well, half of them will get it.
Alright?
Three of those children will have this new kind of malocclusion.
And then let's have each of those three children have six children of their own, three of whom will get it.
Right?
So this is like a ridiculous rate of spread.
This is, you know, this is winning the lottery as far as some new gene is concerned, spreading across the population.
Well, at that rate, in a hundred years, the total number of people that would have had that new kind of malocclusion, if I'm doing the calculation correctly, is under 125.
It hasn't spread like wildfire across continents.
It's not effective.
Apparently this week we're hitting 8 billion people on the planet.
Yeah.
And that's a lot of people compared to what you said, 125.
Right.
So the point is, I don't even know what argument is being made.
If you really, if we all agree that malocclusion has spread like wildfire since 1900, Then bad genes ain't even on the list.
I'm not saying nobody has malocclusion because they have a bad gene.
I'm sure that happens.
But the idea that this thing, the point is, it's spread like a contagion.
The list of things that can do that is small.
One thing that can do it is a pathogen, for which there's no indication here as I understand it.
Another thing that can do it is a cultural change that spreads horizontally across a population, like a change in the diet of children.
And so, you know, to me, this is open and shut.
You at least have a viable hypothesis for what's going on, in addition to clinical evidence of positive effect on your patients.
Right?
Your field has a nonsense story that should take any evolutionists, you know, a few minutes with a single envelope to falsify.
So, why are you on the defensive at all?
That's the question.
I mean, if it isn't power, that's the obvious answer, that it's power defending itself.
It's this crazy situation where, you know, I sit down with the lawyers and I say, well, look, I didn't mention that between 2009 and 2015, I wrote to every government body, every everything, just saying that we need to debate on the utility of malocclusion because I wanted to work within the parameters of my field.
I guess naively, but I tried that.
And, you know, so I've demonstrated that, you know, this goal of trying to have, you know, the scientific process.
Well, this is, you know, how can a profession be treating, you know, at least 30 percent, if not 50, 60?
I had one girl I treated who said every other child in her class had fixed braces.
Clearly, I was treating her.
So that's 100 percent of the class.
Now, It's openly admitted within the profession that we don't know the cause or they don't know the cause of the problem.
It's clearly discussed briefly.
So we don't know the cause.
We're treating a huge number of the population, often at the public expense, like in the UK, and they refuse to engage in debate with me of any description of any form on any level.
And then Wine for forward wine today or yesterday I go into court where they're saying it's genetic and that's the main stamp on this case is it's genetic and I'm saying to my legal team well surely all we have to do is prove that it's environmental say thank you very much well let's all we go home now and they're saying it's not like that
You know, we've got to we've got to argue all the other points, you know, every single little bit that, you know, clearly there's reams of allegations.
That's what they always do.
And I sometimes I despair, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, you know.
I increasingly find myself in this spot where, having seen enough of these cases, I can't really be surprised.
But then, you know, the part of me that's just a regular human being is shocked, right?
Like, you know.
You've actually made progress on this puzzle, not only theoretical progress, which would be great enough on its own, but clinical progress, right?
You should be commended for that.
Even if your colleagues want to keep doing what they're doing, the fact is you are at least a new school of thought that has tremendous promise for ultimately addressing this problem.
And, you know, it's a classic case of no good deed goes unpunished.
Yeah, I think somehow being able to improve people's facial appearance and general health, there must be some money in there somewhere.
I'm sure somehow I'll come good on this.
What's really surprised me though, Brett, was that me putting some of this information online Went crazy amongst the, you know, what we call adolescents, the youth, the, you know, I guess now the under 30s.
You know, I made a presentation.
I gave one of those presentations, you know, had I done my research, I probably wouldn't have done, but I made the presentation.
And at the end of the presentation, I was just swamped with these young guys, mainly, and some girls just wanted to know how they could improve their facial form.
And clearly it's not What I had in mind, I wasn't thinking like this, and I kind of thought to them, you know, you'd be crazy to try, because change is difficult.
You know, changing your posture is changing you.
It's a difficult thing to do.
Anyway, I already had some exercises up for my patients, and then we had some alerts out on my name.
You know, people didn't Google my name that often back then, or put my name on places.
We kept track, and I started to gain questions.
I was answering questions on strange forums.
And then, all of a sudden, this mewing thing kicks off.
I checked the other day, because you want to check how these things are doing.
and on TikTok, the hashtag mewing had been seen 1.7 billion times.
1.7 billion times.
I mean, so, people are interested.
I often say, okay, the only people who are really interested in what I'm saying are people with faces.
If you happen to have a face, oh, this is going to interest you.
Yeah.
I think one of the things that held it back is this emotive issue of being good-looking or not.
Of course.
Because I make good-looking people, and I take kids that aren't good-looking and I make them good-looking.
I remember mentioning to someone that's what I did, and they were utterly horrified.
And they were saying, oh, you know, we've got enough girls with anorexia without you jumping in and saying your face could be beautiful.
I mean, well, they've got a point.
No, no, they don't.
No, they don't.
And this is.
Let's just sketch this out here.
OK.
You make people, so one of the things that you said in one of the first videos I saw of you discussing this question was that now that you understand this process, you look at people and you see like people who have been in a car accident, that our faces are distorted by this developmental failure and that you now can't help but see it, right?
Which Yeah, yeah, yeah.
in effect, whatever it is, and you know, I fully believe that the root is an innocent error.
People did not know that in changing the diet, they were going to marry people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The world is littered with innocent errors.
It's littered with innocent errors, and it is not all that unusual, frankly, to make an innocent error that has, you know, millions or billions of victims, right?
We do this all the time with toxins and various things.
Yeah, lead in petrol sounded like a great idea.
Sounded like, oh man, it just really deals with that knocking problem.
But nonetheless, okay, so you've got an innocent error that is maiming people.
A, people who have been maimed, in general, do not want to look this problem in the eye, right?
Because the point is, wait a minute, you know, I could have been handsomer?
I lived my entire life downstream of this error?
You know, it's too late, so people don't want to face stuff like that.
That's one thing.
But the point is, at some level, we adults have to face that, and we have to face it even if there's nothing to be done for us, because there are an indefinitely large number of generations to come who have yet to be maimed in this way.
The point is, look, are you the kind of person who would maim children?
No, I am not.
Well, then you have a responsibility to look at this question, because if Mike Mew is right, we are going to maim people who haven't had it happen yet.
And in the same way that we need to protect people from child molesters and dangerous painting acts, we have to protect them from being maimed by this initially innocent snake that is no longer innocent because we're capable of seeing it.
We're so focused on education, so focused on that, and yet so unfocused on the development of our structure.
Right.
Unfocused.
And, you know, we become increasingly Unfortunately, we've become increasingly divorced from the physical world, right?
People, the younger you are, the more your life has been internet focused, the more easily you fall into this sort of sense that life is an abstraction or it takes place on screens and your body is an inconvenience.
But the point is, of course, no, the body is fundamental and to the extent that you're neglecting it or that you've been maimed by a mistake like You were fed foods that were too soft and didn't give the right feedbacks to your jaw in a developmental process.
That's tragic, but the real tragedy is all of the people that this hasn't happened to yet, who it's going to happen to if we don't look at it.
Prevention.
It's the obvious thing to do, even for those of us for whom it's too late.
This is just such a clear moral obligation for us to protect those who have yet to suffer from it.
It's not surprising that you're hearing an incoherent argument from people who don't want to put that together.
I never get an argument, you know, but I've never had a decent argument with any orthodontist ever.
I mean, they just, we started, you know, the classic thing is I'm at a conference, someone points to me and goes, I can't believe you're over here, wanders over, has a gruff road with me and I go, terribly sorry.
I say, well, have we ever thought about so-and-so or so-and-so?
And they look at me and go, you're impossible to talk to and walk off.
And I'm thinking, Yeah.
No, I mean, you know, and look, the fact is human progress is downstream of disagreeable people.
You know what, Mike?
You're disagreeable, right?
That does not mean the way it sounds, but you're disagreeable.
No, no, no, I know, I get you, I get you.
You know what I mean, right?
Yeah, I know what you mean.
But winding back to what you said, winding back a second, because you're talking about, I can recognize these car crashes and accidents.
Yeah.
So, clearly, I work obscenely hard.
I rarely get the time off to go and pick the kids up.
Last Monday, I just took the afternoon off because it's my paperwork day and a lot of crumbs.
Decided I'll take the great pleasure of picking the kids up.
They'd moved class since I last picked them up.
That's how long ago, you know, since I picked them up.
And it was Christmas coming up.
And so I found out where they were being picked up, I picked them up and I'm standing there outside the classroom and I can spot, so they're in primary school and I'm looking at five, six, seven, eight year olds and I can spot which ones aren't growing well.
And I know that literally not that much hard work and effort right now Well-designed, well-implemented, over a significant period of time, could massively help prevent these problems.
You know, really cheap things.
Chewing gum, you know, with lackmasticatory effort, just from when your child gets home in the evening to when they go to bed, chew gum.
You know, it's not complex.
I've got a video called the Five Point Prevention Strategies.
Really simple video to prevention.
But it's blowing my mind.
I can spot these kids.
I can see them in front of me.
Well, you know, look, there's a reason that Cassandra is what she is, right?
I feel Cassandra.
I feel for Cassandra.
Yeah, of course you do.
The point is, that was a warning.
It was a warning to people like you and, frankly, me.
I don't remember if we talked about this in our last discussion.
But, you know, the thing that woke me up more than anything else Was when I discovered a flaw in the system that we use to test drugs.
When I discovered that the mice had been broken in a very particular way that made those mice prone to tell us that drugs were safe when they really weren't.
What I thought was going to happen next was I was going to publish my paper, which turned out to be a struggle.
And the scientific community was going to say, "Oh shit, what have we done?" There was going to be, yes, some ass covering and all of that, but we were going to do everything in our power to solve the problem so that going forward, we would not continue to compound You know what happened?
I don't know where this is going at the moment.
Carry on.
What happened is nothing.
I tried for 10 years to alert people to this problem.
As far as I know, nothing was ever done.
What's more, the panels that were put together to discover what the problem was systematically avoided it.
Right?
So, that told me something.
We were willing to leave our scientific mechanism broken so that it would continue to blind scientists generation after generation.
What's more, this thing has now come roaring back into my life because As far as I know, the very same mice that were broken in the very same way that I recognized back in, you know, 1998 and 99, right?
This is more than 20 years ago now.
Those same mice are now being used to test the safety of COVID vaccines for authorization for use in children who don't need them.
So, you know, the point is that story told me, look, okay, you're Cassandra, and there ain't just one.
It happens to everybody who discovers something really important that upends an entire field or discipline or whatever.
You see, Brett, if this was in the computing world, You know, you come out with your widget.
The widget demonstrates work because computing either works or it doesn't work.
It's a gadget.
You'd have made billions of pounds and you'd have your mini Silicon Valley empire that you'd gently start branching out on and you'd affect the same attitude that you affected in this into other areas and you'd probably be, you know, your finger in 20 companies by now.
Right.
If this were the kind of discipline where you could just simply say, well, I don't care that you don't believe me.
My widget's going to be 30% faster than yours because I understand something you don't.
You're right.
This would just simply, it would spit out a profit and it would be much easier.
You wouldn't have to defend yourself on logical grounds against people who are... No, no, no.
Because the widget worked and you'd made money on it.
Right.
Instead, somehow, you and I are living in an era where you are seriously actually having your credential jeopardized in a formal trial in the same era where doctors are being empowered, encouraged, and maybe even required to disrupt the reproductive capacity of children who decide that they are born in the wrong body.
Like, this system does not make sense, right?
This is an era where we have essentially medicine disrupting normal functional organs because of something that a child thinks.
You know, it's more interesting than that, Brad, because you see, Take my case.
Let me just think about what I can say about this case and what can't I say about this case.
Because it's been in the newspaper, they divulged quite a lot of the information about the case.
So now, all of a sudden, I can take a little bit more freely.
One of the allegations against me is that this child was normal.
She didn't need treatment.
Well, I mean, this is the metric that they're validating that on is the teeth and the position of the teeth and how the teeth were.
And of course, the position of her teeth was the same as everyone else in a modern society.
OK, in fact, you know, I won't go on.
I won't go into more detail on that.
Now I'm saying that I can change the way faces develop and I can make the face look better.
OK, and I How can I talk about the conversation any further?
That's okay.
I won't take any more.
That's what I'm saying.
That's what they're challenging that I can't change facial form.
However, if I can demonstrate that there's a significant environmental etiology into the way faces grow, then at least there's a possibility that I could have done that.
Now, they're saying it's a genetic etiology.
I'm saying it's an environmental etiology.
Clearly, as we discussed, I feel if I win that argument, they don't have an argument anymore.
I'm still saying it's completely environmental.
There's a significant environmental etiology.
But if I can, if it is a significant environmental etiology, and maybe there's a chance that I can influence the way their face grows, then why can't I try to do that?
People have breast augmentation, they have nose jobs, they have these other things.
Are they clinically necessary?
You know, and it's, you know, You know, you're telling people what and what they can't do without a full understanding of the whole problem in the first place.
So you say that if you can win the argument about this having an environmental cause rather than a genetic cause, that it's all over.
And my concern is that that almost suggests A venue in which such a thing is conceivable.
And what the real question is not, can you win that argument?
Because of course, you've already won that argument.
What you are saying is at least logical and what they are saying is completely implausible.
It cannot be a genetic cause because it has spread too fast for that to make any sense.
Um, the problem is, it's not, are you right?
It's can you convince the people who are wrong that they are wrong, even given the massive consequence that would have on their own career prospects?
No.
Okay.
This is where I think it really gets very interesting because after America, Britain is probably the next respected scientific country in the world.
Now, Britain has quite a regimented system by how it appropriates money, or distributes money.
So we have things like the NICE Committee, nicely named, Institute of Clinical Excellence, something like that.
Clinical Excellence and I somewhere, I can't remember.
What they'll do is they, in theory, should look at the evidence relatively freshly.
So if I can gain traction in the UK.
There are systems in place, because money is, because we pay for the orthodontics for so many people's orthodontics, that you might actually get this changing and you don't have a sort of central organisation, a power structure in the UK.
You know, you don't have the drug companies.
Companies that make orthodontic appliances tend to make other things as well.
Most clinics are conglomerates of clinics, but they never get that big.
I mean, the only major player in all of this would be things like Invisalign.
And I could say happily to Invisalign, I've got some great ideas.
We could work together.
You know, Invisalign, give me a shout.
So this is this is unique.
And I think I remember in the film.
Working Girl, where they finally come to the big round table, and the guy who owns the company or radio station, he talks about how they couldn't get the bus, the lorry, down under the tunnel, and the little boy said, let the air out the tyres.
They let the air out the tyres, and that was just enough for the lorry to go through the tunnel.
And the idea with the analogy is that this guy, by taking on a radio station rather than a television channel, he gets the same protection.
So he's taking the air out of his tires a little bit.
And in a way, everyone's been looking for change in medicine in these big areas, these areas like drug companies, these areas like, you know, as you have fought, and they will fight back.
Because these are big items, these are big pharmaceutical companies who are prepared, they're organized, this isn't the first time, you're not the first person they've had to hold back.
They're practiced.
In orthodontics, we don't have that.
Yeah, you know, my concern is that I think, and I don't know, you tell me if this sounds plausible to you.
But I think your mind is constructed in an unusual way, which is why you've landed where you have.
And so I think you're looking at these folks and you are imagining that they are more like you than they actually are.
And the problem is that what they're doing does not involve probably, does not involve them gathering and saying, you know, Mike Mews got a point and maybe we can shut him down.
That's not what's taking place.
What's happening is they intuit where their interests lie and they reverse engineer arguments that advocate for those interests.
Without question.
The problem is, they actually, in their own minds, are heroes who are shutting down a rogue orthodontist who is in danger of hurting people.
He's not doing what he should do.
He's out of control.
You know, he's out of control.
And you know, okay, who are you talking to?
Well, you're talking to an evolutionary biologist who says, whoa, wait a minute.
I've never heard anything reasonable from orthodontists about where this problem comes from.
But I did hear Mike Mu say a bunch of things that, frankly, make perfect sense.
He couldn't be making it up.
The story adds up completely, right?
The anthropological evidence, the evidence from wild creatures.
The evidence from clinical practice, all of these things tell the same story.
This is a developmental problem.
It's a developmental problem with an environmental cause that can be remedied at the root, and that could not possibly be more frightening to people who make their living correcting this very problem.
They do not want it cured.
That's the problem.
And they know they don't want it cured.
In their minds, they probably believe it can't be and that you are just simply, you've lost the plot.
That's what they think.
I think that's a very, very fair analogy of the situation.
It's surprising how much time I spend theorizing on these areas, on why people don't want to change.
Because, you know, I've tried.
There's endless conversation where you... I meet a dentist at an event, a social event,
I have a chat with the dentist and they follow my argument to a certain point and then they'll always break at some point and it then becomes awkward because, you know, we can't go carry on, you know, they don't want to talk about it or they disagree with me and then you can't go back to talking about, you know, the weather and then you park company and, you know, all you're going to do for the rest of the night is nod politely, you know, hi mate, you know.
Afterwards, you go through the conversation and you try and work out what you said or what happened.
I've got to the point now where most dentists, I won't even, I'll just say I've got some interesting different ideas.
If it's a lay person, if they're not already indoctrinated, that's a rude word to say, They're fertile ground.
This is why mewing has spread so rapidly.
These kids make intuitive sense.
They weren't indoctrinated, again, in that sort of mould.
With dentists, I just don't bother anymore.
Life's not long enough.
I'm not going to try and convert people one at a time.
They're welcome to believe whatever they want to believe.
I have a question I'm hesitant to ask you.
I really don't like that it's a question at all.
Go on.
I like what you're doing.
Is it possible that actually shoving you out of this broken discipline is Ultimately, a good thing from the point of view of your perspective, that you will be freer to reveal to the world the harm that is being needlessly done and the remedy for it outside your insight.
Clearly, I've had to sit down and consider everything.
What am I going to do if I lose my license?
Well, I can't do, you know, I've lost money doing this.
You know, this clinic here, I've worked for the decade, you know, from my early 40s to my, I mean, my early 50s now.
So that decade when you're supposed to be earning the bread, you know, big bread, I mean, you know, your 40s and your 50s, the two decades you fill the family coffers up with.
I sold my house, burnt the proceeds, capital down.
Luckily, my sister and her partner have been a silent partner in their development company.
So, that's the only reason I can carry on going because I'm drawing money and capital out of that.
And now I'm on the point where I've damaged my health massively and my psychology to get to this point right now.
My Crohn's is just flying.
I've only got a limited diet I can do.
My weight's right down.
So this juncture comes when I'm maxed out on everything.
I'm maxed out on my finances.
I'm maxed out on my health.
And I'm not really making money anyway.
So if I did lose my license, what then?
You know, you've got to think of those realities.
And my, my right hand woman, who is brilliant, she is brilliant.
And she says to me, she goes, Mike, you could probably help the world and make more money, not actually practicing on patients.
Yep.
No, I look, uh, And also that I'm not stuck.
I cannot move from an area like the edge of London.
This is as close as I can go because you need to be in a big demography to attract the limited number of patients who would want to come and see me, who can work that hard and pay that money to get change.
I couldn't be on an island somewhere.
That wouldn't work.
I haven't had more than two two-week holidays in the last decade.
Second one a honeymoon.
I'm tied to the job.
I'm on call 24 hours a day.
My mobile is, you know, every patient has my mobile.
I'm there for everyone.
I mean, you know, The stress, the hassle, the effort it goes to to try and develop this is just immense.
And yes, to your question, it may be better for me not to work, but I get the martyr factor.
But then, of course, I also get the fact that on the surface value, many people will assume that I was wrong.
Now, first of all, it's not the martyr factor.
It's that you are functioning inside a set of constraints.
You're playing a rigged game.
And you're also playing a rigged game where the biggest obstacle you face is you're one guy and so you can't work at scale.
Right?
You cannot personally work at scale.
What you could do is I mean, it's not like they haven't had a chance to write their own ship.
You could defeat them from the outside.
And, you know, I'm very hesitant to say this because as somebody who has taken up going around my field in order to reveal what's wrong with it, it is possible for me to over interpret I'm very hesitant to say this because as somebody who has taken up going around my And I've watched your existence, Brett.
Right.
And so the question is, look, you know, you and I do different things, but they obviously overlap.
Again, your description of the evolutionary context of malocclusion was spot on.
So, you know, we've got analogous stuff going on.
I'm in the lion's den, there's no question.
that maybe maybe the answer is you need to scale up and that i do think you need to fight tooth and nail and you need to win this case but i also have uh doubts that you can because you're in a venue that belongs to the people that you're in there i'm in the lion's den there's no question yeah and so i'm being judged by people who think that not having wisdom teeth is some evolutionary development yes
and i must tell you this is one everyone including the guy who sweeps the floor thinks that right Right.
I have known since college that this story didn't make any sense, right?
The wisdom teeth story is a glaring error in thinking, right?
The idea that selection hasn't fixed the fact that it produces teeth you've got no room for?
Come now.
Selection, which can build an eye, it can make a dragon fly, right?
It can, you know, get a butterfly to migrate over multiple generations.
It can't solve the problem that you've got too many teeth for your jaw.
Come now.
That just doesn't make any sense.
So, obviously, we are looking for another kind of explanation.
And, frankly, you've come up with the only one that makes any sense.
There are lots of things that could cause this, but they all run into logical problems.
What you've come up with is a coherent, global, I'm sure it's imprecise, there are probably imperfections in it, but overarchingly, this story is so many orders of magnitude better than the next nearest competitor, that there's no way anybody is in a position to tell you, don't do this, don't talk about it, especially in an era
Where we are, you know, literally, literally doctors are empowered to maim children, to wreck their reproductive capacity based on what may be temporary aspects of their self-assessment.
So, nobody's telling anybody what you can and can't do if you're having a positive effect.
Right?
We're empowering people to have negative effects.
We're in a world where you're allowed to go and get breast augmentation.
Or have them removed.
That's not a necessary treatment.
There's no way.
Breast augmentation, I don't know very much about it.
I'm sure it's destructive.
Removing breasts is inherently destructive.
We have medicine removing people's functional breasts.
Right.
Or, you know, having a nose job for aesthetic reasons.
Right.
You know, there are inherent risks from doing this.
You know, you do that too often.
I mean, the Michael Jackson scenario where you get issues from doing that.
And yet no one thinks twice about doing it.
But I'm being accused of providing unnecessary treatment.
Right.
No, and all I'm saying to you is, look, I am of course rooting for you in the strongest possible terms, because I do see you as a Cassandra-like figure.
I think if your message reaches the people it needs to reach, that you are actually literally in a position to prevent the maiming of Hundreds of millions of people at a minimum.
That is an amazing amount of good.
So, look, I'm rooting for you.
By the way, Brett, there was a paper I wanted to bring up because I thought it would be interesting just to give some people some tag on the seriousness of this level here, the seriousness of this issue.
We're talking about sleep apnea, and we're talking about people whose faces don't grow well can get sleep apnea.
There may be many causes of sleep apnea, but I deal with the structural element, the structural cause of sleep apnea.
A lot of people say that is the predominant cause of sleep apnea.
This is a paper in Australia.
I'll send you the paper.
I can't even pronounce the guy's surname, the main author.
Anyway, they looked at kids in the 3 to 12 years old who had sleep disordered breathing So they defined these guys who were on a waiting list for adenoidectomies, who snored.
That was the criteria of where they classed them against normal kids.
And these guys had a 12 point IQ difference.
Sorry, 10 point IQ difference.
And David Gazelle has done other research similarly showing where he took people, I think, in L.A. who had sleep disorder breathing out of class, offered them all corrective tonsils and adolytes, I believe, taken out, and then watched how they improved in school.
And these are really massive changes.
I mean, these aren't the difference between whether you send your kid to a state school or a private school.
These are in the region of whether you send your kid to school at all.
I mean, these are really big differences.
And then I went to talk to an otolaryngologist, an ENT surgeon, and I said to him that I thought that I could argue that people with sleep apnea It was damaging their health.
And seriously, and 10% of the adult population in the developed world was going to die a decade early from sleep apnea and its consequences.
And he says to me, oh, my, it's more like 20%.
That's a one in five.
And then I'm looking at these two ends of the spectrum.
And I'm thinking that from a structural perspective, if you've got good architecture from a young age, what we're talking about is something in the region of a 10 point difference in IQ points.
Something like a decade more life expectancy.
And during that life, you have that longer, healthier, more intelligent life, you have a face that looks great.
And all the benefits that brings you.
I know when I walk into rooms, because I've got an okay face, better than average because of the treatment I gained from my father, that I'm more socially acceptable.
I get more responses.
You know that's not fair, but that's the way it is.
No, let's flip this one on its head.
Yeah.
There is a reason that human beings are so very sensitive to beauty.
Okay?
It has to do with the connection between that beauty and function.
So it is not surprising that people are obsessed when they discover that you have a secret.
Maybe it's a partial secret for people who have already suffered the consequences of a mal-shaped skull.
But there's a reason that people are very focused on being more beautiful.
That reason is downstream of the underlying ultimate evolutionary explanation for why we give a damn about this, that, and the other, right?
We are selected to pay attention to this characteristic because it matters.
And so, in some sense, what you have just described is the capacity of a human being to use proxies of facial structure to detect underlying health.
Right?
Underlying health, likely mental capacity.
And so, there's nothing about the story you've just told that I think is far-fetched in any way.
The idea that your sleep and your intelligence are connected, that your sleep and your breathing are connected, all of these things make perfect sense.
And so, the amount of good that potentially comes from your fixing our understanding of this is incalculable.
So, too, is the power that you're up against because of the narrow, short-term interests of the people involved in dictating whether or not you have a strong case.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, here we go again, you know.
First time, it won't be the last time.
By the way, the quote I say and what you've just said is, I think, to a greater extent, your face is the CV of your health.
Beautiful.
It's a, you know, you're displaying, I'm displaying to the outward world that not only did I have the right genes, I'm not saying genes aren't important, I had the right genes, but also I was able to elicit the right lifestyle, the right grit and determination, grit your teeth and carry on, to develop a good face.
Yep.
And that's me.
So it was not only just genetics, but it's I've manipulated my environment in such a way that I'm demonstrating here for you that I did that.
And because of that, I make a good partner, X, Y, and Z. Totally.
And the fact is, this is how sexual selection works.
We select characteristics that are good proxies for underlying features that matter, right?
You know, why are women so sensitive to whether a guy is funny?
Right?
Funny is a proxy for a kind of insight, right?
It's a kind of insight that allows a person to get farther in the world, to discover opportunities, you know, that exist and can't be seen by others.
And so, none of these things are idle.
It's not, you know, it's aesthetic as a proxy for something deeper.
Yes.
What does good looking mean?
Right.
Good looking means that all of the things that, you know, yes, the genes have to be right in order to be good looking.
It's not sufficient, right?
If you take good genes and you put them in a bad developmental environment, it doesn't work out.
If you starve them, it doesn't work out.
I remember going to a party and someone goes, Mike, you're looking healthy.
And I go, you mean I'm looking good looking today?
Right.
Totally.
Same thing.
Different sides of the same coin.
Facial health.
You know when you meet someone and they look that sort of dour, white shade, having a terrible time.
You see it in their face.
Absolutely.
Why wouldn't we?
This is the great way you convey how you are.
And that's important within a group.
You need to know, we're not taking Bob Hunting today.
He doesn't look well.
Doesn't look well.
Right.
Totally.
Stay at home!
We are hypersensitive to these things for a reason.
And we have, because it is possible to be superficial about this, and also because it is possible to cheat, you know, to the extent...
Oh, what has the makeup industry been doing today?
Right.
Well, exactly.
So you can cheat.
And so we've lost the sense of these things as a proxy because it's become a kind of idle competition.
But nonetheless, these were good proxies and you have tapped into I don't know, the mother load of good proxies, right?
Because, you know, your physical health is one thing, but your face is a concentrated location of focus.
Yeah, it is.
Your whole perceptual apparatus is tied up in this.
It is the indication.
And as you point out, the face is the key to how far you get in the world, how persuasive you are.
It's shocking, you know, that research on how much more you earn, That prison sentence, you know, they did this wonderful study where they took trial lawyers, you know, judges who were deciding the sentence.
So you've been found guilty, the judge has to decide the sentence.
So they got all of these papers and each one had the photograph clipped to it.
And then they just changed the photographs around.
Same papers, they changed the photographs and they rated these people, you know, what's this guy like this, you know, you know, how long were you going to give this guy, you know?
And then you had this, you know, this, you know, really, you know, either ways, the facial appearance and how beautiful they were ranked made a massive difference to the sentence these judges gave them.
Right.
Presumably without changing the facts of the case, and therefore the guilt or innocence.
Yeah, absolutely.
I want to go back and defend a term that I used, because I realize it covers two things, both of which are relevant here.
Yeah, okay.
I argued that people are being maimed, and I mean two things by that.
You tell me if I've got it right.
One, there is the maiming that comes from a misunderstanding of malocclusion and therefore a extrinsic modification comparatively late in life.
So in my case, the moving of my teeth through my jaws.
So the treatment.
The treatment, right?
The treatment is an active case.
But there is also, and the one that I'm really referring to, is the maiming that we do to our children by not recognizing that the resistance of their food is what dictates whether their jaws will form correctly, whether they won't.
Yeah, but don't, don't.
Don't forget posture as well, you know, Brett, because a lot of people are getting blocked noses, they're hanging their mouths open, the tongue isn't on the roof of the mouth.
You know, Harvold did some brilliant research in Caltech.
All he did was put an uncomfortable piece of plastic Uh, a bit of plastic, a sharp bit of plastic on the roof of these monkeys, you know, and the experimental ones, massive facial changes.
The, um, controls, beautiful development, as you would expect of most little primates.
And so, you know, where the tongue is the secondary factor, we think.
And the two of them are the most important factors.
You know, we go on to breastfeeding and early nutrition as well.
Those are all, in fact, important factors, we think.
But clearly, we need the spotlight of modern medical research to shine on these areas.
But the diet, we do think, is the most important.
Right.
And, you know, we're not going to be able to get into all of the things that are potentially Connected, but because every system, you know, because the way you interact with your food, because of the interaction of breathing, the potential implications this has for allergies and things are significant.
And then a blocked noses and allergies are going to have on facial development, because you can't breathe out your nose, you have to mouth breathe.
Right.
And that can become such a habit.
And if you have this mix with these soft muscles and where's your face growing?
Right, right.
And I look in schools and...
Yeah.
I mean, it's a, you know, it's a, it's a classic.
So we're going back to what you were saying.
We've got the harm from orthodontics that does.
I mean, I don't want to cover that too much because that's where I get the most resistance from my colleagues.
And you know, there are many great colleagues out there who are doing fantastic work, but we all know within the profession, there's some people sometimes causing significant problems.
And we talk about retractive orthodontics and we know it happens.
No, I think, you know, power-wise, it's a loser, right?
The idea of people doing active harm, the pushback you will get is of course monumental, but the amount of good that you will do If you can modify the approach of parents to their children early enough in life that they prevent their children from needing intervention, that's really where the lion's share comes in.
That's the kind of direction I want to go in now, because, you know, again, I've watched you.
My ability to earn money with my chosen subject is not as transportable, is not as mobile, particularly the systems I use.
If I wanted to build my dream clinic, I would have physiotherapists, I would have behavioral psychologists, a multitude of different people.
Because what I'm saying, you can effectively say I'm telling people to stand up straight and shut their mouths and build their muscles up.
So using oral appliances, yeah, that can help.
But, you know, I'm trying to change kids from this to this, you know, standing up straight.
So an oral appliance is one element in this broader change I need to do.
But it's, you know, you can't just, I can't just say, I can't go on a plane tomorrow, fly somewhere else and work in a van.
Well, no, that's not where I see you.
Win or lose, frankly, Mike, win or lose, what I'd like to see is you to write a book How not to maim your children to increase their earning potential and their IQs without even trying, right?
That book where you alter the diet of the child, the child sleeps better, ends up smarter, marries better because they're handsomer and that tells a potential mate that they're a higher quality partner, right?
That's a slam dunk.
And you know, you and I are both parents, you know, How far out of your way you would go to improve your child's position in life, even just a little.
And we're talking about a lot, right?
Make your child smarter.
Oh man, that's a winner.
Yeah.
There was a book called Why Raise Ugly Kids.
I'm trying to think, this must be 50 to 100 years ago.
You know, this really isn't new, this whole stuff.
There's a huge volume of information already out there.
Yeah, you're right, I should write a book.
I mean, you know, yes, I don't relish, as a dyslexic, I don't relish the idea of writing books.
It's an anathema to me, but I love reading them.
Right, exactly.
Well, you know, it's funny, I did not know that you were dyslexic.
Personally, I'm not a believer that dyslexia is actually a disorder, and actually, I think you'll like... No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It's a different way of thinking.
Well, it's a different way of thinking, and I'm fairly convinced that it is actually an artifact of the expense of ink and paper.
The expense of ink and paper caused us to choose a size, effectively a font size, that made good use of these things and conveyed information to a majority of people.
Basically, my sense is, if you increase the font size, My dyslexia goes away.
You know, it doesn't mean that I don't have all of the consequences of having been a dyslexic my whole life.
Those things aren't going anywhere.
But from the point of view of, you know, how good is my mind at telling me what symbols are on the page and in what order, right?
That's a question of, oh, it's too damn small.
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no.
I know.
I kind of know.
It's fascinating because my sister's oldest is Asperger's.
So, she then learnt about it, and she's suddenly then going, she's reading the books and just going, that's my father!
That's my brother!
And my sister's going, no, you're not dyslexic, you're clearly aspergic.
He says, the reason people don't notice that is because your chosen thing, you know, all the people, we have gifts, you know, one of my gifts is interacting with people.
So, I love people.
I just love engaging with people.
I love conversations.
I love being out.
It's my element.
And because of that, she argues, people don't realize how weird I am.
Yeah, well, you know, this is a risky conversation to have, Mike, but my sense is, you know, I read very well, as I'm sure you do, but I read very slowly, and it is not... Yes, exactly.
But I get it.
I say, we discuss the topic afterwards, and I'm thinking, didn't you see this, this, and this, and this?
Okay, it took me five times longer to read it.
Right, that's it.
It's expensive, it's exhausting, but one gets a lot out of it when you put in the time.
But it causes you to change your threshold of what's actually worth engaging in that way, because it's so costly, right?
And one of the crazy things about it is, especially in an era where a lot of garbage flows through that channel, there's certainly no shortage of amazing things that are written from which you would benefit.
But the problem is the signal to noise ratio ain't all that great.
And having a relationship with the written word that is, you know, where you don't treat it as just as candy, right?
Where you treat it as like, you know, well, it's got to be worth my time to sit down with that thing and puzzle through it, right?
That actually has a benefit because it, A, causes you to do more of your own thinking rather than effectively Import people's worldview.
Yeah.
Yeah, good and the bad in one fell swoop and I you know, I wonder how much this results in a guy like you departing from their field because You know, yes, there are some a lot of true things I'm sure in your field and there's a lot of untrue things clearly in your field and And, you know, working from first principles, you're in a much better position to say, actually, this, this, and this makes sense, but that and the other thing don't, and they have important consequences.
You know, this again, this is something that fascinates me all the time, and I think that we've kind of got the concept of science research back to front.
What people are doing is they're having leaps of reason, intuitive leaps of reason, and then you do the science to back it up.
People have this idea that science is like evolution, you're just trying lots of random things and seeing what you can lift yourself up on.
The great science is, people like Einstein, The science he presented was to back up that leap of imagination that he had.
Well, I come at this from a slightly different perspective.
I think what you're saying is correct, but I would argue that it works like this.
The thing that pays huge dividends is a quality model, right?
If you have a quality model of the universe that tells you, it trains your intuition, right?
People have the sense that intuition is like some mystical process.
It's not.
Your intuition, its quality is based on how well trained your model is.
If your model is high quality, you can have excellent intuitions about where to look for something.
Now the problem is, there's been this inversion.
I think it's the thing that you're pointing at here when you say it's backwards.
There's been an inversion of priorities in the academy.
And the reason actually has to do with this very mundane feature of the funding.
To the extent that universities are funded based on grant overhead, they actually prefer expensive work, because expensive work gets big grants.
Those big grants build the buildings and, you know, fuel the university, which means that there's been this coup by the empiricists against the theoreticians.
And there's, you know, the theoretician, like, you know, you need the library, you need, you know, sharp pencils in modern times, you need a computer with a really good word processor, but these things don't really cost almost anything, right?
Maybe the library does, but everybody needs that, so it's there anyway.
So the point is, we have gotten in this mindset where we have become convinced that, you know, theory is suspect and what really, you know, data-driven, right?
Data-driven science itself is so high-powered.
And in fact, it's completely feeble.
It spends most of its time searching for right answers in places where a theoretician can say you're not going to find them there.
It's simply out of the question.
That's an empty spot you're looking at.
And so, that thing has put those of us who actually do work well in this theoretical mode on the defensive, when in fact, if civilization was We have what game theorists would call a collective action problem, right?
Where the system functions better if it invests in something like theory, but from the point of view of the individuals each trying to do their job, whether they're university administrators or scientists trying to get grants, the pressure is all in the direction of if you do this, you get paid more and you have a better chance of keeping your job and getting promoted, and if you do this other thing,
Like, theory, well then your chances of being shown the door go up, your chances of, you know, remaining stagnant in your position go up, and that thing is driving us crazy.
Because, basically, theory, at least in my area, theory is treated as something that you earn the right to do if your empirical work is high quality.
Then you get to muse about- Exactly.
Then you get to write the introduction The results and conclusion In your own gist, that's what it is.
You know, you see these people, you see that I got a Nobel Prize, so I've got this fantastic piece of research and now I'm just going to go crazy on the introduction, particularly the introduction, because it's the introduction where you pontificate and kind of set up your conclusion.
So if A, B and C is possibly correct, then that would be validated by what I've already found out down the conclusion.
Right, exactly.
And it results in this even worse catastrophe, where because the people who are doing this supposedly high-powered empirical work to earn the right to do the theory have, at best, a very distant relationship with the philosophy of science that makes the whole thing work.
Often with patience.
Say that again?
Or often with patients.
You know, these guys, they put their fingers at a patient, you know, during undergraduate and have runaway since.
Right.
But that's degenerating, you know, that's...
I'm sure they put their fingers in more patients' mouths.
But there's this disconnect between the people who are actually treating patients and seeing the outcome and seeing the results with these people who are at the top end, you know, processing the research and the figurehead behind the research.
Oh, well, we certainly saw that with COVID, where the doctors who were actually figuring out what to do with these patients were sidelined by some top-down It's an absurdity that the clinicians who had the actual experience in that case were sidelined by basically official pronouncements.
But the thing I was getting at was science only works if the hypothesis precedes the test.
Yeah.
Right?
If you came up with a hypothesis after you collected a bunch of data that did not get collected in light of a hypothesis, then you haven't done science.
All you've done is actually observation, right?
And by pretending that the hypothesis preceded, once you've seen the pattern in the data, You pretend that the hypothesis that you came up with after you saw the pattern really existed before.
You say, ah-ha, I've tested this thing.
You've violated the central principle that makes science more powerful than other ways of thinking.
And almost impossible to detect it in the literature because you don't know who came up with what when.
We don't even know how much of our literature is polluted by the fact that even the things that look theoretical aren't because they're, you know, they're a posteriori.
And what I really like sometimes is looking at things like astrophysics, where you've got this whole branch of theoretical astrophysicists and experimental astrophysicists and how they have these interesting overlapping ecosystems. systems.
And of course, it doesn't really matter to Joe Bloggs, or to anyone in the industry, whether a star is a supernova at this point, because all of astrobiology is very abstract.
And I guess until we start mining asteroids, it's going to be very abstract.
That is not polluted.
Well, I'm sure there's storms and teacups that you wouldn't want to hear about.
However, as a general perspective, these two ecosystems, how can this little speck in the middle of goddamn nowhere have understood just, you know, when we're talking about they've found a new spiral cluster of galaxies, you think, wow.
You know?
And that's been done by this really good example of the experimental and the philosophical ecosystems working fine.
Because, you know, who's making money?
Who makes money out of the fact that a supernova explodes and a certain weight of star goes into a supernova or doesn't?
No, it's exactly right.
The science is most intact there because there's nothing riding on it like money.
And, you know, frankly, this is what I discovered in the episode I alluded to earlier when, as a graduate student, I found this problem in our drug safety testing.
Which, what I had done, you know, I'm an animal behaviorist, right?
It's a little bit like supernovas.
There's not a whole lot riding on, you know, why the bat makes a tent, you know, and where it does it, right?
It's not a monetary question.
But that's what I was supposed to be working on, and when I stumbled, following my evolutionary instinct, When I stumbled into an area that was involving medicine, suddenly I was now in a realm where there was nothing but money at stake, right?
Money and career and Nobel Prizes and all of that stuff, and the point is, oh my God, the science doesn't work in this area because something has overridden it.
Science is this very powerful process, but like many powerful processes, it's a delicate process, and I swear to you, it does not survive the encounter with the market.
It can't, right?
The market overwhelms it.
And unfortunately, I kind of think that's where you are.
Look, you've got a great evolutionary understanding of malocclusion and the problem is this interfaces with dental appliances and an industry of people who depend on it happening.
Yes, I mean, I do.
I mean, I think I'm in a lot of thinking.
Whether or not I win this case, I'm actually going to do less dentistry.
Yes, orthodontics.
Yes, orthotropics.
Because I want to free up other days because I think that I could help more people have a happier, less stressed life and make more money.
Doing other things.
Like, you know, for example, we're going to release a Mewing app.
I mean, clearly, delay, delay, delay, delay, delay, delay.
It will be out at some point.
And then, you know, if it should do reasonably well, given how popular Mewing's been, then I can earn some money, not every day with my hands.
Yep.
Then hopefully I can start I don't quite know.
I've got some ideas, but I just want to, you know, I kind of naively want to make the world a better place.
You know, yeah, let's put it differently.
You selfishly want to stop us from maiming children, right?
But, you know, yeah, the amount of good here is immense, potentially.
Yeah, you know, with really simple public health messages, you know, sit up straight, eat with your mouth shut, elbows off the table, eat hard foods, you know, chew your food properly, chew gum, you know, as I said, with the five-point prevention plan.
You know, these are not complex things and we need to try and engage with parents of young children.
We need to set up measurement strategies.
I want to do research on these areas but have enough funding to be able to do that.
Have enough And not, you know, the problem is at the moment when I phone someone up, try and contact someone, the first thing they'll do is they'll contact an established dental authority that says I'm a charlatan.
Yeah.
Where do you go with that?
I mean, how can I achieve anything?
You know, when I, you know, it's about building with people.
Oh my, you've got to build partnerships.
You've got to build.
Oh, really?
Well, they don't, they don't get back to me.
No one gets back to me.
I have had that exact experience in the following situation.
Okay.
I tried to alert people to this drug safety issue, right?
I had many journalists respond to me and say, what?
That's remarkable.
And then they make a phone call, and they call somebody up, somebody who they think is well positioned to say whether this is true, and then what happens is they go radio silent.
Right?
It happened to me at least a dozen times.
Yeah, yeah.
Damned to us for 40 years.
Right.
I don't know.
These people do not understand how progress is actually made.
That the idea was, if somebody else was in a position to say, oh yeah, Mike Mew is making perfect sense, right?
If that person was in orthodontics, then there wouldn't be anything to do.
Because the point is, you're actually trying to call your field's attention to this massive error in its thinking.
Of course, you're singular.
And that's how, you know, if you're going to say, well, look, I'm just, I'm not going to risk my career reporting on anything that's singular.
Well, okay.
Then you've decided to take yourself out of the running journalistically of dealing with anything truly important because, you know, all, all great ideas start as a minority of one.
Basically, the journalistic system is structured not to be able to understand what you're saying.
Your field is structured to be able to resist it no matter how strong your case is.
I'm going to stop harping on this, but I do think at some level you are on a collision course with a book that will allow you to make your case without your colleagues having veto power.
Yeah, yeah, no, no, and I definitely need to put a book out, you know, but again, you know, this can take me, I think, you know, okay, so, but good to catch up.
So, I was in the press today.
I've read half of them.
I know they've taken the standard line from the General Dental Council.
They've looked at the charge sheet.
Clearly, I must be guilty of something.
But, and there, you know, it's me that's now portrayed as the one that's dangerous without science.
Hopefully they hang around till the end of the case.
What's happened is that they delayed the case.
We were late in getting all our stuff in.
It's just not easy getting an expert that will defend me.
As we said, same system.
How do I find experts to defend me?
And you know the situation.
I know they even contacted you for your advice.
Now our experts have put forward the defense argument and I'm guessing they were a little bit taken back because I think we put together a really good argument and now they want more time for the prosecution expert to read through this stuff and look at it.
So There's been a delay.
I hopefully it will get going this year, but it looks like it might get kicked into the long grass.
It's just such a hassle to run a clinic when all this press is going on.
Either way, I'll probably cut back my clinical hours because What it's showing me is that I need time to think, time not to be stressed, time to do something like write a book, you know?
But there's something about slogging your health for a decade that's left me just drained, you know?
And this court case has left me drained.
Oh, of course.
No, it's absolutely exhausting to be up against.
Your colleagues trying to make a point that, frankly, as you said at the beginning of our conversation, is effectively self-evident once you've put in the hard work to get yourself there, right?
And so to have your colleagues avoiding eye contact with what should now be obvious to them is perfectly exhausting, right?
I mean, it's effectively I've made a point of calling out sophistry, and this is sophistry, right?
If you're, you know, okay, your colleagues should have figured this out.
Having not figured it out, they should be able to understand it when it's placed in front of them, and if they can't, that really calls into question how deeply they could actually understand what they're even doing.
It's somewhat inflammatory to my profession at the moment, Brad.
Yeah, well, you know, look, I mean, I guess I'm in the fortunate position of not having to be kind to these people.
But damn it.
I still have this vision of trying to encourage my profession down the right way, you know, engaging with proper debate, you know.
You're going to have to defeat them.
I hope that I get as much press interest even when I win the case.
Yeah.
You're going to disappoint me again, I can tell.
Look, I am hoping that this happens and that you are the unusual case of the person who manages to stare down their discipline and your discipline realizes how much trouble it's in if it actually continues to go after you.
I really, really hope that you succeed in that, but I have had a lot of encounters with power and power is very powerful.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, again, you know, it will be interesting.
It will be interesting to see how this goes because I'm hoping that because this is this, you know, we're out in orthodontics is this strange profession that's fairly dislocated from the rest of modern medicine.
So I'm hoping that it's I can make headway in this profession and I can use that headway to then come swing left and help people like yourself or younger versions of yourself.
Yeah.
Where you were when you first came to those conclusions.
Yeah, I mean, I would recommend that you check out a podcast I did with Steve Patterson.
Steve Patterson is an unknown guy, but he's effectively a self-made historian and philosopher of science who, he and I converged from very different places on the idea that we are living in something like a dark age, and that that's not an exaggeration, that something has gone off the rails with respect to this process of thinking scientifically.
that got us this far.
And in any case, the upshot is, I think the system is ejecting people who remember how to do this work.
And that is having two consequences.
It's wrecking field after field.
They just get stuck and they don't know what to do.
The consequences can be anything from just sidelining, for example, physics for decade after decade to doing active harm, as you're seeing in your field, as I believe I saw with respect to drug safety.
But the other consequence, on the positive side, It's forcing out the people who remember how to do the work, and those people are finding each other.
that the internet has actually allowed that to happen. - Yes, it is.
But when I sit through your work, when I hear, I mean, there's quite a number of people who I watch on the internet, and I'm just shocked how much I agree with them, how they're thinking and I'm just shocked how much I agree with them, how they're thinking along the same lines as me, and how they've suffered from similar Right, yeah.
You know, and it just seems like Yeah, there must be.
There's clearly going to be a convergence here.
Yeah.
It's conver... well, the way I see it is, um, Goliath is very powerful, um, and he's also kind of a moron.
And what he's doing is he is taking all of the best players and he is forcing them together.
And in the end, he's not going to know what hit him.
Yeah.
You know, an interesting article I read in The Economist recently.
I love The Economist.
My bets are really, I need to get out of science.
I read economics.
I read The Economist and they have a nice science section and they had an article pointing out that Einstein probably wouldn't get published today.
Or certainly wouldn't get published today.
And if he threw that theory in, it would be lost somewhere.
And I sometimes wonder that the next Einstein is probably out there right now.
You know, he went from a job in the patent office to working in, you know, in McDonald's.
And he's still there in McDonald's because, you know, no one published that paper.
He didn't get picked up.
And he's going to die some point, you know, because, you know, we forget everyone talks.
Einstein's such a genius.
The man back in the pre-war, between war periods, he had a university degree and he couldn't get a job teaching maths.
At a high school!
I mean, how, you know, you must be literally in the end pile of no, we're not even going to consider that, Blake.
No, and this is happening, and I can tell you from my own field that the people who did the most important work in the mid-20th century would not be allowed to work in that manner anymore.
It was too theoretical, right?
And so the point is, you know, where's your giant grant?
That's true, and it is also true, both my advisor and Heather's advisor took us aside late in our graduate careers and said, you know, I, this is the advisor speaking, don't think I could do what I ended up doing if I had to do it now, right?
They told us this, and they said, the fields just don't function.
They hadn't talked to each other.
This was two people who independently came to that conclusion.
So anyway, I think, you know, we are in some place where this Basically, there is some analogy between generation after generation of humans developing malocclusion because something fundamental is wrong with the way they're being raised and something fundamental having gone wrong in the way we train scientists that has now caused that system to have the equivalent of malocclusion.
Okay, Brett, wait a minute.
I'm just thinking because you, you, you, you, you know, I'm going to add some light here because I think you've been quite dark, you know, on your dark, Mr. Dark Horse.
You've been a little bit dark on that one.
Pretty dark, okay.
Okay, pretty dark.
So we've got a thing here is that this, I'm going to say two things that one of them, I guess, is a little bit dark as well.
OK, I'll say that one first, I guess.
So when I qualified as a dentist, I did my undergraduate in the Royal London Hospital, East End of London.
It was a great hospital at the time because it was a very poor area.
So you had a line of patients every morning like this outside the hospital.
No better hospital to train and work on because you got the experience.
At the time, sleep apnea wasn't in the syllabus.
I know it wasn't because you had, you know, left-sided congestive failure.
You sit by guys up in bed and you call that parazocmal nocturnal sleep apnea.
You know, it's got the word sleep apnea in it.
So, I remembered learning the word sleep apnea and I remember that was uni, one place I learned that, you know, and you're cramming for your exams.
So I know that Sleep At Meal definitively was not in the syllabus in dentistry when I qualified in 1993.
Now, as I said when I talked to Vic Veer, he's saying it's killing 20% of the adults a decade early in the West Nice countries.
That means that's a 1 in 5.
It's gone from nowhere to shortening your life by 1 in 5 by a decade.
That's a crazy increase.
So that increase, I think, what we're hitting a bit of a brick wall.
So I don't think we're going to be able to... craniofacial dystrophy, this thing I think I've defined, is up that curve and I think fairly soon we cannot not observe it.
We can't say it's not happening because it's just going to be craziness.
It would be so objectively obvious that I don't think they knew any way not to say hey something career serious is going on here.
The other thing is you know when I look at mewing and how well it's done and when I so I gave a lecture and I went I lectured to the Ancestral Health Symposium In, um, UCLA in, um, the beginning of August.
And it's like, I love, you know, wow.
I wish we had campuses like that in the UK.
You know, I mean, just wow.
You know, just so lovely.
You know, the weather's so nice.
You're just on the edge of the hilly bits there, round from Beverly Hills.
And we, I thought I'd do a poll.
So I was stopping the students And maybe I had a good day.
I stopped ten students and six of them really knew what mewing was.
Now that's clearly a completely biased sample, but when you've got such a large body of young people, and as I said, you know, on TikTok as one metric, the mewing hashtag has been seen 1.7 billion times.
We're putting this information out onto fertile ground, and these people, these kids, the next generation coming up, are seeing this as a given fact.
So they're going to start having their children at some point, and they're going to be thinking very differently.
So think that, by chance, wow, what an amazing piece of luck I had, that mewing is something to efface, kids are interested in doing it, and it's out there now, and you can't stop that.
Look, there's a chance we can bring this shit around.
Oh, you know, look, I don't think of it as dark.
I think of it as realism.
But what you're saying is absolutely correct.
I do think if you're willing to look at a multi-generation timescale, That you have gone around your field, and they're not in a position to shut you down, because mewing is a feature of the culture at this point.
It doesn't go through the orthodontists.
There's no pivotal control point.
Right, but I would say that is nature's way of telling you the way to accelerate that process.
Yeah.
Clearly, where do you go?
That's the thing.
You got to pay attention.
That's my thing.
Okay, I've worked for a decade.
I'm struggling to make money here.
I'm just trying to make my license.
Great.
That's a great thanks for trying so hard.
And yet mewing that I've done next to nothing to encourage is just blowing up.
So clearly, where do I go?
Yeah.
Clearly, where do you go?
That's the thing.
You got to pay attention.
But I also think, and I hope that you end up financially successful as a result of this.
But that's going to require a little bit of you looking at this, not so much as a how do I solve the problem that it's going to happen.
It takes too much time to do what I do in the clinic How do you scale up so that as with mewing?
People take this on themselves, they start going into their orthodontists, or maybe they go to their dentist and they say, what should I be feeding my child?
A lot of this is going to be getting that spotlight of modern medical research, even if the majority doesn't.
If I can make enough money off the back of mewing, if I can get some good grants, someone out there, some anthropologist, You've got, you know, if you're in your 60s, you know, you've got a 20% chance of dying a decade earlier from sleep apnea as its consequences.
And I believe that I've got the answers to that extra decade.
You know, start throwing me, you know, lump, million lump sums.
Right.
Because that's what it takes to move the narrative forwards.
And I would know what to do with that.
You know, two generations of my family, we have demonstrated that we have gained your trust already.
Yep.
Yep, and you know, let's put it this way.
If you had a nonsense story about why this was true, but you had a good clinical practice, a good approach, that would be positive enough.
The fact that you've got both sides of this thing nailed, right?
You know how to deal with the issue, you know how to prevent the issue, and a very good handle on why this is happening.
You know, I could see some sort of random card coming out.
You know, I could see the Sultan of Vermont phone me up and go, look, I can see what you want.
I can see what you're doing.
And for the investment of my country, I want my eldest son to look good.
I want him to having a strapping jawline.
I want him to look like a leader because I think that then we can extend the way my government goes for another generation.
That's a plausible scenario.
Yep.
And he says, I don't care how much it costs, Mike.
Literally, you get the best people you know.
We're going to give them an offer they couldn't refuse to come and live in wherever I am.
And we're going to make certain my son and, you know, all of the other aristocracy sons, you know, and I'm going to go as well, as long as I can make them kick ass, I'll take you on.
Yep.
I see that as... that will be unfortunate if that's the way it has to go.
I think it's... It's a shame, but hopefully then I can be less hands-on and I can organize a team to do it and then we can replicate that team and then, you know, reverse engineer that backwards into the UK and other countries that need it.
Yep, what I'd rather happen, rather than this becoming a tool of the aristocracy, is I would like some publisher to realize just how much money they could make, providing you the mechanism to reach the full audience.
Oh yeah, it's really tough knowing what the next step is.
It's, you know, I've tried to build a business on the back of me making people better, and it's It works.
You know, you give me unlimited resources.
I think I could change the facial form of almost any child to be, you know, great.
I could make almost any child have architectural structure that looked good.
Well, that's quite a big statement to make and I'd need them from reasonably young to be able to do that.
No, I think, you know, it's clear that what you need is for people to understand that this problem starts very, very early and for them not to cause it.
Yeah.
Well, looking for my defense, I was digging up lots of old texts written back in the Um, 1890s, 1810, no 1910, 1920s.
And you talk, you listen to these guys and they're saying, you know, um, clearly it's a little bit, um, you know, there's a lot of racism within the language they're using because they're talking about the, um, uh, black farm boys and how they're growing into being fantastic facial form because they eat sugar cane and they're describing their mechanism of how they think.
But I'm thinking you're spot on.
You know, underneath this, you know, take the veneer of clear prejudiced language.
These guys are clearly saying, you know, these guys are chewing tough sugar cane at a very young age, almost before they've got teeth.
Yep.
Right.
And that's what's really causing the development of the dental arches.
Right.
So, yeah.
Yeah, that's actually, that's still a piece of information that circulates.
Heather and I have done a lot of work in the neotropics where sugar cane is grown, and this is a piece of information that we hear somewhat regularly, is that you would think that, you know, the teeth in and around the sugar fields
Would be all messed up and it's actually quite the opposite both because of the abrasive nature of the sugar cane when it's not when the sugar isn't divorced from the cane it actually isn't the hazard to teeth that people would imagine.
I think it's the concentration of the processing that I think is half the problem.
Right.
Well, you know, as with lots of things, right?
Cocoa leaves are utilised in the Andes by people who are working at a high altitude.
It's the concentration of the stuff into cocaine that makes it dangerous.
Yeah, and the way that tobacco was used by the Native American Indians as a healing herb.
Yep, exactly.
And, you know, Food calories preserved in beer is a long-standing mechanism for getting people through the winter months.
There's lots of this stuff where the natural version of something is safe and useful and the concentrated modern version is lethal.
Or taking it to excess.
Right.
It just simply wouldn't have been possible in a society where you didn't have access to excess.
Right.
And in fact, you can tell a very similar story with respect to marijuana.
Which was a comparatively safe, much better than alcohol, in fact, intoxicant.
And the way that the law prosecuted people on the basis of the weight of marijuana that they were caught with caused it to be absurdly concentrated.
And it is that absurd concentration which basically transforms it into a different drug.
No, no, no.
I mean, I think, well, I mean, you know what they say about common sense?
The problem with common sense is it's not very common.
Yes.
Yeah.
Ever less so.
You know, I mean, just behind sight again, you know, I think that again, when we started, I said my definition of knowing someone is knowing them for a long period of time, because that gives you multiple interactions over a significant period, which is how you get to know someone.
I think truth comes out in time, you know, but my father has this interesting phase that, you know, he thinks humans can be amazingly stupid, but they normally get there in the end.
Yeah, they normally get to the right answer in the end.
Yeah, they normally get the right answer in the end.
But I'm really going to have to call it a day because my wife's going to be wondering where I am.
Let's do it.
Mike, it's been a real pleasure.
I wish you all the luck in the world with your hearing.
Thank you very much.
Hang in there.
And irrespective of what happens with your hearing, know that a lot of us have recognized that what you're saying is extremely sensible.
And anyway, whether you're inside or outside of the system or both, we're rooting for you. - Cool, cool.
And I think that one thing, Bradley, if I can shout out on your channel is, you know, to help people share this information.
You know, it's fantastic to come on your program, Brad.
You know what we've been on before.
If anyone else out there who thinks they would like to interview me on this subject, I think I'd love the air time to spread this and propagate this message, because I think it's so important.
You know, when we're talking about preventing crooked teeth, as well as these other things we think, like sleep apnea, are symptoms of incorrect facial growth, it's important.
And it's really simple things we could be doing.
Yeah, I couldn't be more important, really.
Yeah.
So anyway, I hope that many offers of interviews come your way soon.
How much longer do you expect your hearing to take place?
So, it's delayed now.
We're going to meet up next Monday.
So, on Monday, six days time.
They will decide at that point whether it's going to go forward the Monday afterwards.
So, I booked off four weeks.
Three weeks we had booked in at the General Dental Council.
It clearly is not going to go ahead in the first two weeks.
That third week, we're going to find out if it's going to go ahead on that third week in a week's time.
And we are having this conversation on November 15th.
November 15th.
Tuesday, November 15th.
So, if it doesn't go ahead in that third week, then it could be kicked into the long grass and it could be up to a year beyond.
If it's not kicked into the long grass, if we have that, we start it, then we're going to have to finish it relatively quickly.
Yeah.
So that's my hope that we can get this going relatively quickly because it's just, you know, I sit here in limbo, you know, how do I employ staff?
And I've just had a member that's gone and how do I employ?
No, do you want a job with me?
Yeah, I might be struck off.
You know, any patients come in wanting a three year treatment with me?
Oh, I might be struck off.
Right.
Uh, yeah, no, I see the predicament there.
Yeah, and then, you know, and then even if I win this, what's my insurance going to look like?
Right.
You know, and that's how a lot of people, a lot of great ideas in dentistry have been stopped because people couldn't get insurance.
Wow, I did not know that.
You know, so you throw enough crap at people, you just overwhelm them.
You know, this is, you know, big oil companies have been doing this to small people for a generation.
