Social Media Reacts to an Attempted Assassination + Tech Elites for Trump + TikTok's Jawmaxxing Trend
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Support for this podcast comes from Box, the intelligent content cloud. Today, 90% of data is unstructured, which means it's hard to find and manage. We're talking about product designs, customer contracts, financial reports, critical data filled with untapped insights that's disconnected from important business processes. We help make that data useful.

Box is the AI-powered content platform that lets you structure your unstructured data so you can harness the full value of your content, automate everyday processes, and keep your business secure. Visit box.com slash smarter content to learn more. Oh, happy Prime Day. Thank you. Happy Prime Day to you as well. I imagine you'll be getting together with your family later for the annual Prime Day feast. Yes. What does your family cook on Prime Day? Yeah.

Deals. Oh, deals. Yeah. So actually, you know, I am such a good company man, a good employee of the New York Times company that I bought some stuff on Prime Day this year because I am like a, you know, shameless capitalist. You're always looking out for a deal.

And so I bought a robot vacuum because our old one is broken and just, it was time. And I placed the order. And then I realized to my horror that I had not used the wire cutter affiliate link to purchase said robot vacuum. Starving the New York times of revenue. And I actually canceled the order and went back and ordered it using the affiliate link. And that is why, uh,

I'm a good company man. That is amazing. Well, hopefully they will take that into account during your performance review this year. I'll certainly be putting in a good word with your bosses. Yeah. Yeah. Now, tell me about this robot vacuum. Does it have any new features compared to your last robot vacuum? Does it have...

in it, Kevin? It sure does. Does it talk? Can you talk to it? I hope so. I hope so. I've been saying for years. Well, so my old Roomba, which has to be retired, unfortunately, was named Bruce. Bruce Roos. And,

And so I would often get these little alerts on my phone that said, like, Bruce has gotten stuck. And I did develop, honestly, like a kind of empathy for this pathetic excuse for a housecleaning robot. Well, certainly it did more to clean your house than you ever did. Yeah.

It's true. So I don't know what I'm going to name the new one, but it's probably just going to be Bruce 2. If I ever get one of these, I want to have voice commands so that whenever I need to clean the house, I can just say, robot, it's time to suck. And then it just immediately starts. That would just bring me happiness. Wait, you don't have a robot vacuum? I don't have a robot vacuum. I believe in cleaning the old-fashioned way by asking a person to do it.

I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, an assassination attempt for the social media age. Then, The New York Times' Teddy Schleifer on the wave of Silicon Valley billionaires stepping up to back Trump. And finally, the TikTok trend that is inspiring teenage boys to work out their jaws. ♪

So, Casey, obviously the biggest news that happened while we were on break is the attempted assassination of former President Trump. The assassination attempt sort of dominated the news coverage over the weekend and into the early parts of this week. And you had an interesting take on this. You wrote a newsletter this week titled...

An assassination attempt for the social media age. And you basically tried to sort of connect the dots between what happened at this rally in Pennsylvania and the shifting role of social media in civic life, in news consumption. And I thought it was a really interesting take, and I wanted to just sort of ask you about it today and have us sort of unpack it a little bit. Because I think this was...

You know, in some ways it felt very new, right? Like this was the first shooting of a U.S. president or a former U.S. president in the age of social media. But in a lot of ways to me, it did feel sort of familiar, at least in the way that the world kind of tried to make sense of and digest the news. So talk me through your argument a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the first thing to say is this was a grim and horrible event, like deeply unsettling, and it makes me worry for our country for so many ways. As I sat down to think through, you know, what it meant for folks like me and you who think about the world of tech and new media in particular, I was struck by a couple of things.

One was it feels like the 2024 internet is just different than the internet we lived on four years ago during the last presidential campaign. And the biggest way is that platforms which once raced to prevent misinformation from spreading tried to make sure there was sort of a high-quality news source and all the obvious places that their users would look.

They took a much less aggressive approach, and they essentially just let the theories fly on social media. And the place where this was most obvious, of course, was X, the former Twitter. When Twitter existed, Twitter actually put a label on one of the former President Trump's tweets. This was back during the 2020 campaign. The president had tweeted something misleading about mail-in ballots, and Twitter put a label on it.

and said, essentially, you know, you may be being misled here. Those were a really big deal at the time. Now, Twitter is no more. X exists. Elon Musk runs it. And people were sharing all manner of conspiracy theories. And we might want to talk about what some of those were. Yeah.

Almost immediately, it seemed to me, there was sort of this mad dash for conspiracy theories. And on the right, you know, I saw people saying basically that this had been a Democratic plot to sort of try to stop Trump from winning the election, that it was the FBI or the CIA or an inside job by the Secret Service, that President Biden was somehow behind it, which obviously there's no evidence of that.

So that was one set of reactions that I saw primarily on X, where I think it's fair to say those voices have become more prominent following Elon Musk's transformation of that platform. But I also started to see plenty of conspiracy theories from the left as the sort of iconic now photo of former President Trump, you know, pumping his fist in defiance of

sort of went around. There were conspiracy theories. I saw that this had been a plot by the Trump campaign to make him, you know, more electable, to make him look brave, that this had been deliberately staged. Obviously, none of this has any evidence behind it either, but it just seemed like there was sort of this

this information vacuum and void that people of all partisan stripes were rushing in to fill. Is that how it seemed to you? Yes, and I will say, you know, some of that does not actually strike me as new or novel. I think that basically, you know,

For most of the lifetime of Twitter, whenever there would be some calamity in the world that had any kind of political valence to it at all, folks from all sides would leap in and try to get the advantage in setting the narrative, right? It's like, oh, how can we make this good for our side? That is just sort of an impulse now that I think is baked into basically every major social media platform. It's so true. And it's so depressing. Like the sort of reaction to it felt in some ways very familiar.

right? It was like, let's try to figure out who the shooter was, comb through all of his like social media pages to figure out whether he was a Democrat or a Republican, and then use that to sort of try to place him on a side of the political debate. You know, I was reminded of some of the mass shootings that I covered several years ago, where you had these, this sort of same kind of mad dash to, you know,

comb through the shooter's social media profile, figure out which team he was on, and make sense of it that way. - Yeah, where I think my take is a little spicier though, Kevin, is I think that the fact that there were so many theories flying in the immediate aftermath of the shooting is basically fine, and here's why.

In so many of these previous calamities, much of what we have learned has come from citizen reports on social media, right? People who are on the ground, they see things. They're going on Twitter and maybe now a Threads or a Blue Sky or a YouTube, and they are just saying what they saw. And it takes time to figure out who's right, who's wrong. Some of those people will be lying. Some of those people will be telling the truth.

But I think when you look back at the whole era that you and I have spent so much time covering misinformation, what are we going to do about misinformation? I think this was a moment where, at least for me, I thought there really is not much of a point in the platforms trying to intervene in real time to correct things because the truth was nobody knew what had happened. Even as we record this podcast right now, Kevin, there is still so much about this assassination attempt that we do not know.

And when you have something that immediately became the biggest story in the world, you cannot ask people not to speculate what happened. That is what they are going to do. Like, that is just human nature. And so, you know, if I have one kind of big takeaway from this, it is that when you are trying to stop the spread of misinformation, while there can be good reasons to do it, and I think there are actually, you know, many cases where platforms should, this was one where you were truly just going against human nature and you're going to lose that fight every time.

Right. And I think especially when it comes to the topic of presidential assassinations, there is a long history of conspiracy theorizing about those. I mean, the grassy knoll theory of the JFK assassination. And so it's not surprising on one level that people immediately turned to conspiracy theories to try to make sense of this.

I think as you noted in your newsletter, like what felt different this time is just how reluctant the platforms were to sort of wade in at all to try to tamp down any sort of narratives or to sort of put a lid on any kind of conspiracy theorizing, no matter how seemingly crazy it was. Yeah, I think they've just realized there is not a lot of upside for them here, particularly in the moment.

If I'm taking a lesson away from this, I do think that it is just sort of in the immediate aftermath of these calamities, like maybe platforms actually should relax a little bit. We know that people are going to say crazy things. We know that people are going to be wrong. And that part of media literacy in 2024 is just accepting that. And that knowing that after something bad happens, if you're looking on social media, you're going to see a mix of truth and fiction, and it's going to take a while for it to settle. Yeah. Yeah.

I think there's something to that. I guess I worry about the sort of laissez-faire approach that the platforms, especially X, have taken in part because they are doing a kind of curation, whether it's through these trending topics that some of them are now being sort of fleshed out by AI.

or whether it's just by sort of ranking feeds for people. Like there is a kind of information hierarchy being presented to people. And I just found it incredibly, not that it was like dangerous, but it was just very confusing to try to make sense of what was happening on Saturday through social media. I ended up just like refreshing the New York Times app, the Wall Street Journal app, like local media sources that were present on the scene just to try to figure out the basics of what had happened and when.

It still feels like social media can be useful for that kind of initial burst of fact-finding, but then 10 minutes later when everyone has sort of slotted things into their predetermined narratives, it just becomes much less useful as a tool for understanding what's happening. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's true. But, you know, again, this was just a case where you had an information vacuum and people were racing to fill it. And they were racing to fill it with a lot of stuff that was interesting. Even if we didn't know exactly what happened, people were offering commentary. People were offering analysis. You know, people with dark senses of humor were offering jokes. And it was clearly...

driving just a ton of attention to these platforms because this has just sort of become the way that we make meaning during these moments. And so, you know, even though, yes, eventually like the high quality information did show up in these outlets for journalism, there was a lot on those social networks for people to look at while they were waiting. Yeah. I will just say like one thing that bothered me about what I saw this weekend in the aftermath of the attempted assassination was

was this sort of meme going around, especially among kind of right-wing voices on X, that, you know, if you paid attention to the legacy media, the mainstream media, you were misinformed about what had happened. People were posting these screenshots of news stories that went up in sort of the minutes following the shooting when it wasn't clear yet what had happened at all.

And there were headlines about, you know, President Trump being rushed off stage following, you know, loud bangs or something like that. And this was sort of used—

by these partisans on the right, especially as evidence that the mainstream media was intentionally not telling you what had happened, was downplaying this, was trying to make it seem less like an attempted assassination and more like a kind of, you know, fluke accident. And that in order to sort of learn the truth, you had to not pay attention to the mainstream media and instead go on X to get all your news there. And

A couple of things to say about that. One is I think this is just an incredible misreading of what journalists do, which is that we try very hard to verify what we can as quickly as we can, but not to say that it was an attempted assassination before we know if it was or not. To be very cautious and careful. I think a lot of the media outlets I saw were actually quite responsible in how they covered this, especially in the early initial moments when it wasn't clear yet what was going on.

Yeah. I mean, look, if you believe that the media is not going to tell you when there has been an attempted assassination of the former president, get help. Right. Like, what do you think the media is here to do? Like, that is the biggest story in the world, and they're going to tell you just as soon as they confirm it. So, you know, I think...

The flip side of what those folks are saying is essentially you need to just like mainline an unfiltered series of social media posts if you want to know the truth. And it's like you may learn some things faster than if you like waited for it to show up at NYTimes.com, but you might also be misinformed. And that's just a choice that you have to make for yourself. Well, and the other thing to say about this is that so much of what was going around on X and other social networks helping people make sense of this wasn't.

were media artifacts from the mainstream media, right? It was clips from TV cameras that had been there at the rally capturing this. It was the photographs that were taken by photographers at the AP and the New York Times. My colleague Doug Mills took one of these sort of most iconic photographs that actually showed the bullet whizzing past President Trump's head. Like, these are things that would not have...

existed that would have not been captured in nearly as high fidelity a way had the mainstream media not been in attendance at this rally with cameras pointed at the stage. So I just want to stick up for my colleagues in the legacy media here a little bit and say, yes, it was possible to figure out what was happening on social media, but it was also in large part because there were cameras and reporters and journalists capturing that event who were there to tell people what had happened.

All right. Well, I'm sure we've shocked readers with our spicy take that the mainstream media is good. But let me flip it around on you, Kevin, and ask, what do you think the role of social media should be in situations like this? What do you think the platforms can and should do to help people understand events like this in real time?

I think one of the things that they should attempt to do is just kind of slow things down a little bit. I think that speed is often the enemy of fact-finding, especially in breaking news situations like this. You know, a couple years ago, I wrote a column about conspiracy theorists on YouTube.

and basically there was this genre of YouTube creator who became very popular years ago, basically because after every sort of major news event, every mass shooting, every, you know, horrible thing that happened in America, they would kind of rush to their studios, sit down in front of their cameras, and just start talking, and usually they would start

sort of unspooling conspiracy theories about how the deep state or Antifa or whoever the sort of, you know, boogeyman at the time was of being behind whatever catastrophe had happened.

And what I was writing about at the time was the speed imbalance that existed between those people who could basically immediately start recording and posting their videos and the more authoritative, responsible media outlets who were actually trying to get to the bottom of what had happened but who needed to wait for facts to come in, for the authorities to make their decisions.

announcements for perpetrators to be identified or victims to be identified. Those things took time. And so there was this window where you had basically the most visible commentators on a breaking news story were the least responsible ones.

And so I think one thing that a platform could do in situations like that is just hold off on sort of making any decisions about which voices to elevate until some facts have actually come in. What do you think the platform should do? Well, two things. One, I think that...

in the immediate aftermath of these things, it is generally okay for platforms to not aggressively try to tamp down wild speculation. Like I do think that it is just in the nature of people to want to speculate about events, to offer thoughts and theories. And I think that the moment you go and you try to crack down on that, you're almost certainly going to crack down on true theories just as you are cracking down on false ones, right? So if social platforms are going to exist, you're just going to have to let people run their mouths a bit. Um,

But then there's a kind of second phase, which is when we know what has actually happened. And if there is any particularly dangerous misinformation out there, if there are narratives that are forming that could lead people to commit violence, that is when I think that the platforms have a stronger responsibility to act.

And as they consider acting, they should also figure out how can we highlight high-quality news sources, vetted information, direct people to resources that we know to be true to try to tilt things a little bit more in favor of the truth. Yeah. Can I just ask you, so there's this idea that you and I have both written about and spent time thinking about that there's sort of two sides of the misinformation world.

There's the supply side and the demand side. The supply side is sort of the meme accounts, the sort of partisan activists, the people on social media who are there to sort of fill the void with whatever theory advances their pet cause.

And then there's the demand side, which is the people who are desperate to figure out what has happened, who are going online, who are looking for things that may fit their preexisting views. You know, if they're Republicans, maybe they're looking for evidence that this was Joe Biden's fault. If they're Democrats, maybe they're looking for evidence that this was some kind of, you know, false flag operation staged by the Trump campaign. Right.

So of the two sides, which have you been sort of thinking about more in the wake of this event? I've been thinking a lot more about the demand side. You know, there was this post on X that went semi-viral from a comedian named Josh Gondelman. He wrote, I know people are saying not to spread conspiracy theories right now, but I would like to read them. And he posted that on a Saturday afternoon, you know, after the wake of the attempted assassination.

And I think that post resonated with people because, again, in this information vacuum, people want to believe something. And so it almost doesn't matter how bad the idea is. People just want to get a sense of like the range of possibilities. So, you know, we as journalists and lawmakers and regulators do this probably even more. They put so much pressure.

pressure on platforms to stop the spread of this sort of thing. But the question that almost nobody asks is, why is there so much demand for this? And I think there's a pretty good chance that demand for these theories is just kind of a naturally occurring phenomenon. And like fighting against it is like trying to fight gravity. So I am just someone who's come to believe there are always going to be conspiracy theories about everything. There are ways to sort of manage it and try to, you know, improve people's media literacy.

But you cannot talk about the spread of misinformation without talking about the demand side. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, it's also why some of the most, you know, highly rated shows on TV are basically conspiracy theory shows. You know, things about ancient aliens. If you look at the sci-fi channel, which I do every once in a while when I'm like staying at a hotel, it's basically just like a series of conspiracy theory documentaries. What's the craziest conspiracy theory that you believe?

Oh, man. I have a good one. What is it? This is the Phantom Time Hypothesis. Do you know about this one? No, tell me. So I really like this one because it's very, like, low stakes. And it's not related to anything, you know, current or new. But it's basically this theory that was advanced by some fringe historian that the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope conspired to change the calendar. And they did this because...

The conspiracy theory goes because they both wanted to be in their respective leadership positions in the year 1000. That was important to them for some reason. And so they basically fast forwarded the calendar by 300 years. Yeah.

So that they could say that they were the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope in the year 1000. And so as a result, the theory goes, we are not actually in the year 2024. We are actually in like the 1700s. And like, this has been thoroughly debunked, obviously. But I just think absolutely.

It's an example of something that people can argue about that is not life or death. And so I think that the solution to dangerous conspiracy theories is less dangerous conspiracy theories. And so instead of trying to convince people that QAnon didn't happen or whatever, like we should be trying to convince those people that we are actually in the 1700s. That would be a much, it's sort of the methadone approach to conspiracy theories. I think that's beautiful. Can I offer another? Yeah. I think Ezra Klein is three different people.

And here's why. How can one person read all those books? I'm just asking questions over here. I'm just asking questions. Wow. Yeah. Well, we should ask him about that. All right. We should ask them about it. Now you're talking. The Ezra's. When we come back, speaking of Donald Trump, we'll talk to Teddy Schleifer of The New York Times about why Silicon Valley elites are lining up behind him.

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Well, Casey, we talked about the assassination attempt on President Trump and the response to it online. But there is another big politics and tech story this week that I've been following and dying to talk to you about, which is the number of Silicon Valley and tech leaders who have come out in recent days in support of the Trump campaign.

Yeah, it has been notable. It seemed like in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, some folks who I would say have known to have been conservative, but who have so far not made full-throated endorsements of President Trump, decided this was the moment to come forward and share their feelings. Right. And I think a lot of people, when they think about the tech industry, they think progressives and Democrats and California liberals. But there has been this sort of vanguard of

influential tech leaders who have been quietly and now more loudly coming out in support of the Republican Party. And so I wanted to talk about this because I think there is a sense in the air in Silicon Valley that there is a vibe shift underway, that people who might have been more reluctant to come out in support of Donald Trump

weeks or even months ago, are now feeling like it is safe for them to say their piece. And so to talk about this, I wanted to bring in my colleague, Teddy Schleifer. Teddy covers campaign finance for the New York Times, and he has been especially focused on the way that billionaires in the tech industry are using their influence to try to shape the 2024 election. Let's bring him in here. ♪♪

Teddy Schleifer, welcome to Hard Fork. Thanks for having me. So you are in Milwaukee now at the Republican National Convention. What's it like there? What's the vibe? The optimism is overwhelming, even for a political convention, which is obviously attended by diehards and partisans. It almost reminds you of like a varsity sports team, right, where everyone is raising money. They're all in the same email threads. And there's a lot of

camaraderie, but even for a political presidential campaign, the bonhomie between all these people is overwhelming. And they have a lot of reasons to be confident. You might even say cocky at times here, but obviously the Democratic convention next month will be very different.

Yeah. So the biggest story that I've been following this week in Silicon Valley is what some people have called a realignment of the Valley's politics, especially some notable Silicon Valley elites who have decided to endorse or embrace Donald Trump.

In this fall's election, we saw Elon Musk, who came out on Saturday right after the attempted assassination and said that he fully endorsed President Trump. We've also heard it's been reported this week that he plans to commit around $45 million a month to a new super PAC that is backing Trump's presidential run.

And then just recently this week, we had an announcement from Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the co-founders of the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who announced this week that they both plan to support Donald Trump as well. So you've been covering campaign finance and billionaires and rich people in Silicon Valley for years. You talk to many of these people frequently. How surprised have you been at this so-called realignment?

I've been surprised by the speed over the last six weeks. Not been surprised by the last couple of years, but we had this conversation in mid-April, or even a couple weeks before the fundraiser that Trump held in San Francisco. I think the conversation will be a lot different. But over the last six weeks, you know, since Trump came to SF in early June, the realignment has come hard and fast. You know, I want to talk a little bit later on about ways in which it's overstated, but

I do think that lots of tech leaders are correct where this is becoming a bit infectious. If you see another wealthy person come out and say something nice about Donald Trump and not really see any blowback, which it's not necessarily clear they're at least receiving immediate blowback.

You say to yourself, like, hey, you know, this is not 2016. So before we get into what some are calling a realignment, Teddy, I want you to just tell us what has actually happened here. There have been a handful of high profile names who have declared for Trump. Many of those people have long been sympathetic to Republican politics. So when we say that there is maybe some sort of realignment happening here, what do we actually mean?

You're correct. There are a few people who were supporting Joe Biden in 2020 who are now supporting Donald Trump loudly and proudly in 2024. I bet you a ton of the people that we're talking about privately voted for Trump in 2020. They just didn't talk about it. And right, I do agree with you, Casey. There's lots of elements of this that are overstated. I think what people feel or what they say they feel is a sense that there is no –

reason to be just kind of politically mute or to feel that way privately. And also, you know, from what I cover, people can feel like they can act on those feelings too, right? I mean, even if David Sachs thought that Donald Trump was a great president in 2020, which, you know, he says he didn't, but like, even if he did, like, it would have been shocking to do a Trump fundraiser. I mean, Peter Thiel didn't do a Trump fundraiser in 2016 for Donald Trump. I mean, like, there weren't that many people acting on these beliefs at the time. And

Now, we're seeing a lot of these people actually do things, right? David Sacks spoke at the RNC last night. He sort of put himself in the inner circle. Elon Musk, you know, could give tens of millions of dollars to a Trump super PAC. So that's what I think the core realignment is we're talking about, or I think what people would argue the realignment is, is that a small number of people who do have a lot of cultural power and do define the industry, and whether that's fair or not is another conversation, like those people are

it feels like at least driving the narrative, right? At least driving the conversation. Also, the exact same time this is happening, which is unrelated, we've seen sort of the

wilting of Joe Biden's support among Democrats. Well, then do we want to talk about what some of the frustrations have been with the Biden administration? Is there a sense in the tech industry that Biden didn't deliver something he was supposed to, that he betrayed the industry some way? Or what are folks so mad about?

You mentioned that this week Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen said they were endorsing Trump. And to take them at face value, what their explanation was, was that they're defending, quote unquote, little tech against big tech. And they really talk about the Biden administration as almost if it's the Lena Khan administration. That like this is all, you know, that she is like the real president and that Biden is ultimately –

not really in charge, which is a kind of a broader right-wing talking point, but also that like Khan specifically comes up in literally every conversation you have with Silicon Valley conservatives. And it makes you wonder, you know, if he had a different FTC chair, would they be fine with the other Biden stuff? I doubt it. But, you know, they talk about, Mark and Van talk about her a lot. You know, there's this broader sense of aggrievement, I guess you can put it, that

I think is rooted partially in COVID, which was sort of, I think, the beginning of this era of red pilling of Silicon Valley was the sense that still even 2024, June 2024, July 2024, we're still talking about why did Gavin Newsom do those lockdowns? Did the DEI initiatives after George Floyd go too far? I feel like that stuff still comes up a lot.

Maybe not explicitly, but that when you listen to someone like Marc Andreessen, he talks about COVID as an event that catalyzed him to get more involved in politics and more involved in civic life because he sort of feels like the quote-unquote experts were wrong, right? That's not really the answer, Casey, though, on a specific policy. I feel like that's the mindset they bring to everything. And then it's not that hard to go from there to something that Robert F. Kennedy says about COVID.

you know, maybe the scientists are wrong on vaccines or Tucker Carlson says about maybe the media, you know, really is corrupt. Once you're sort of in that sort of paradigm, it's easy to end up speaking at the Republican National Convention. Yeah. At the same time, like, I feel like

I do not want to overcomplicate this because everything that this one particular cohort has said, and by the cohort, I'm talking about Andreessen, Horowitz, Elon Musk, David Sachs. All of these guys are entrepreneurs and investors, and they are trying to achieve the highest returns that they can get for their portfolio.

And because Lena Kahn is in the FTC and she's trying to block a lot of mergers, that is bad for their portfolio. Because the Biden administration has declared war on crypto and says that, no, actually, you can't have a separate money system that operates outside of all regulation, that is bad for their portfolio. Because the Biden administration has said, we want to potentially tax unrealized capital gains, that is bad for their personal wealth.

So every time I look at this and try to find some really novel, surprising way that this, you know, so-called realignment has been triggered, I just see a lot of very rich people acting in their self-interest. I guess the response would be, of course, like, you know, when Ben Horowitz and Mark Hendrickson's podcast this week when they were defending their decision, you know, they sort of were talking about,

their political engagement in much more like traditional corporate lobbying terms where you are a company, you know, you produce microphones and someone's trying to put a tax on microphones and you are fighting that tax on microphones because you are, it's your job. You're in charge of the microphone industry. I don't think they would really disagree with a lot of what you said, Casey, that their job is to defend people.

And their job is to defend crypto or, you know, AI is obviously a huge part of the Andreessen portfolio. And they also think Biden's waging war with artificial intelligence regulation. I think what you're getting at, though, that's you think it's not just defending the firm and defending Silicon Valley. You also think there's an element of like personal attack on rich people that is behind this, too.

Well, and they talked about this this week. So Andreessen and Horowitz put out a podcast where they defended their views. And one of the things that Andreessen brings up is he was really upset when Mark Zuckerberg donated a lot of his personal wealth to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which does a lot of work in healthcare and other science. And Zuckerberg took a ton of criticism for that.

And what Andreessen said about the criticism was essentially that the bargain had been broken, that the old bargain was, hey, you let us go and do our business and get rich and we will sort of do our philanthropy and then that is kind of the society we will have. But now Democrats have come along and broken that and say, no, we don't want you to get rich, period. Like we don't accept philanthropy as a substitute for funding government programs. Right.

And, you know, I'm sure he really did get his feelings hurt by that. But again, to me, the much larger issue just seems to be that Biden has threatened Andreessen Horowitz's economic prospects and that they believe that if they get Trump in there, they will be able to get the economic results they want.

Yeah. Though, why was that not true in like 2016 or 2012, right? Or 2008? Like, was it was there something like, like, like Democrats were calling for higher taxes then too. And like, you know, Mark Andreessen. Well, I guess Andreessen actually, frankly, Andreessen was like, you know, a supporter of Romney in 12, for instance. Like, is there something about Trump that sort of like changed, made people think less self-interestedly at least for like four years or eight years? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, the other thing about the Andreessen Horowitz in particular is they have long flirted with these fringe ideas on the right that maybe what American needs is less of an elected president and more of a monarch, right? Someone who can come in, smash the system, and

in the chaos that is wrought by the breaking of the system, they think they will be able to scramble up that ladder and claim what they want. And I just see a lot of that in the way that they're acting with Trump. Yeah.

One other factor that we haven't mentioned yet is Donald Trump's pick of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential candidate. J.D. Vance obviously is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, the senator from Ohio, but he's also spent time in the tech industry. He worked for Peter Thiel early in his career. He's also been an investor in various startups.

And I think it's fair to say that the tech elites that are coming out in support of Trump were thrilled by the pick of J.D. Vance for VP. Teddy, you and our colleague Ryan Mack had a great story this week about the tech elites who actually pushed Donald Trump to make J.D. Vance his vice presidential pick. So I'm curious if you could just tell us what the reaction has been to the news this week that J.D. Vance will actually be on the ticket. Sure. You know, I think

Part of this was personal experience, though not a lot. I think JD's years in Silicon Valley have been overstated. I mean, he was here for five minutes, five years, but for some people it felt like five minutes. You know, he had a couple of junior jobs and a lot of his Silicon Valley experience was

what even what the term of sulcan valley even really means i don't know but a lot of his time in quote unquote silicon valley was not actually even in the bay area so part of it is is personal experience part of it is vibes and the sense that oh this guy is not even 40 years old you know he went to yale law school i mean you you all know how those facts on a page can you know make a series a up here uh jd was able to kind of

I think position himself during the Veep Sticks as like the tech whisperer, fairly or not. I mean, the event he did with David Sachs in San Francisco, I think cultivated this image for himself and for the party that like we can be more pro-tech. This is a place we can play offense, especially with donors.

And, you know, I think to just normal Republican operatives out there, they are fascinated. I'll tell you, fascinated by this trend because they think that, you know, for competitive reasons, like we have a chance to win over the richest people in the world and they see dollar signs and they see –

Even someone like Elon, who doesn't only have dollar signs, but clearly has cultural influence with lots of young men across the country, especially. They're captivated by this trend. And J.D. can be the emissary from Trump world to this community. And I don't know. I'd be very interested if Trump advance were to win. Do any of these people want to get senior jobs in government? I think everything's on the table. So they have access, and they're excited about them.

Well, that raises my next question, Teddy, which is about how much this so-called realignment feels like just...

picking winners, right? If President Trump were down 10 points in the polls and it appeared that he was headed for a drubbing, do you think these tech elites would still be lining up to donate to his campaign and to support him? Or is this really just kind of a bet by some of these people that he is going to win the election and that they and their companies and their portfolio companies will be better positioned if they cozy up to him now? Yeah.

That is a great point. And you got to ask yourself, why did Mark and Ben do this now? Right? Why did Elon Musk, who I've reported in the past, has been thinking about doing a Trump endorsement for months? Why did he choose at like 6.45 p.m. on Saturday to do this? It's not just Trump getting support from other tech people, but I do think the Biden age questions, which I think have been often advanced by the leading Silicon Valley people, those came up at the exact same time.

Yeah. Another theory that I've heard floated around in the past few days is that part of this emergence of support for Trump, at least among tech elites, is about Trump's willingness to be flexible in some of his positions about tech.

He has not only flip-flopped on the TikTok ban, which he used to promote and support and has now signaled that he is against banning TikTok. He's also flip-flopped on crypto. He used to think Bitcoin was a scam, and now he's much more open to the idea of crypto. Are there other issues on which Trump may have softened his position or even changed it completely in response to Bitcoin?

maybe pressure or feedback from people in the tech community? Those are the main ones I was going to think of. If someone, you guys think of another one, holler. But I mean, I feel like on a couple of those, I'm thinking about crypto and TikTok. You didn't get the sense that

Trump strongly felt the way he did, you know, on TikTok, even during the administration, you know, when they tried to ban it the first time, like it was wheeling and dealing like, ah, Larry Ellison wants to do this. On crypto, you know, Trump wasn't really talking about the issue, at least during the primary, ever. And really Vivek Ramaswamy is the guy who kind of got him to start talking about it a lot more. I guess I'm not necessarily convinced that it's like a total flip-flop, or if it is, it's mostly on paper. But, you know, some of the tech people clearly have

Yeah, I do think there is an element here that goes beyond just naked economic self-interest. And Teddy, I'm curious to compare notes with you on this because you talk to more of these people than I do. But when I talk to people who are influential in the tech industry who may be, you know, more centrist or more skeptical of Democrats or even pro-Trump, I'm curious to compare notes with you on this because you talk to more of these people than I do.

They'll talk about some of the issues we've raised, the regulation piece, the Lena Kahn piece, the tax stuff on which these candidates differ greatly. But there's also just an element of, well, I like the people who are nice to me and

And I think a lot of tech elites feel fairly or unfairly like they have come under attack from the left. You know, they feel like they are job creators. They are innovators. They are building important companies and institutions and funding the growth of American innovation. And I think a lot of them feel like the thanks they've gotten for that is to be vilified, to be called fat cats. I mean, there's sort of echoes of what you heard about

Obama in 2008, which is from Wall Street people, which was, you know, we feel like we're the good guys, but all of a sudden we're being made out to be the villains. So when you talk to these people in the highest ranks of Silicon Valley, do they talk more about the economic pieces or do they talk about this sense that they feel hurt emotionally by the kind of way that they've been portrayed by the left? Yeah.

The latter only comes out, you know, after a couple of drinks, so to speak. But, you know, like take take take let's take Elon Musk, for instance. Right. You know, in doing some reporting with with Ryan Mack, I mean, it's it's very clear that part of why Elon got to where he is today has to do with Biden not like inviting him to a White House meeting. The White House did with electric car manufacturers. Now is like take that take that example. Is that right?

Kevin, the first thing or the second thing? Is that an economic argument or is that a feeling of hurt? For a lot of these founders, I guess this is a sympathetic view or sympathetic rejoinder to what you're saying, Kevin. The company is them. If you're Mark Zuckerberg or

When someone is mean to Facebook, you feel it personally. I'm sure they genuinely, at least the founders, feel that that's a thin line between going after big tech and being bullied on a playground. So I find it hard to distinguish between those two things.

Also, we have to say that the right has demonized big tech just as much. Like, go look and see how tech is covered. J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance. Yeah. Go look and see how tech is covered on Fox News, right? I mean, it's daily stories about the evils of Google and of Meta and of Mark Zuckerberg.

Right. So, you know, there's been this idea that's been floated by some more right leaning commentators in tech this week that none of this would have happened if Democrats hadn't started being mean to big tech. But it's so important to remember the right started being mean to big tech at the exact same time, often in much more apocalyptic terms. So that story just does not hold water with me.

Yeah. So you feel like if Elon Musk was upset about Tesla not being invited to the White House meeting, he should also be upset that some Republicans think, you know, the climate change and the need for electric vehicles is a big hoax and, you know, yada, yada, yada.

Well, I mean, just look at the rest of the Republican platform for tech, which involves things like, you know, making content moderation illegal, which I think would create enormous challenges in Elon Musk's X business, for example. So, you know, I think people are sort of being very selective in which arguments they choose to defend their positions here. Yeah. Teddy, I'm curious how much the tech elites that you're talking to have changed.

about what it would actually be like to do business during a second Trump administration. Like, I remember very clearly during the first Trump administration, a lot of tech leaders saying that Trump was bad in part because he was violating all these kinds of democratic norms that were making it very hard to predict

what the economy, the country, the law would look like a year or two down the road made it very hard for them to plan. They also objected to his sort of strong stance on immigration restriction because a lot of them employ a lot of immigrants at their companies and want it to be easier for people to come over, say, as engineers and work at their companies. So

How much of this are they thinking about in terms of what it would be like to actually run or invest in tech businesses during a second Trump administration?

You could easily argue that things could be worse in a second Trump administration than the first time, at least in regards to ways that the rule of law is carried out from a business standpoint. Look, I mean, that's the argument that Ruth Hoffman has been making. You know, the co-founder of LinkedIn, one of the Democratic Party's single biggest donors, he's argued that, look, Trump might be better on crypto or

or on AI or is he going to tax billionaires to smithereens or yada, yada, yada. But his argument is that you basically need rules of the road that allow for capitalism to work.

So, Teddy, we have some big names declared for Trump and maybe fewer for Biden this time around. I'm curious, what are you looking for next? Are there any names out there that are undeclared or is there anything that could happen in the next few weeks that would make you feel like momentum was really building here for one candidate or the other?

So the unknown here, I still think, at least as of this recording, is whether Joe Biden remains Democratic nominee, which has sort of been a

parlor game or a pipe dream, depending on your perspective, for much of this year, much of the cycle. Like I reported, my last gig at Sam Altman in 2022 was like trying to inquire about a way to force Biden out even back then. But you know, that that is no longer a billionaire passion project. It is obviously a very real conversation that Democrats are having and we'll know more at the Democratic Convention next month in Chicago. I think the task for

tax Democrats, not that they need my advice, is, you know, they're really going to try to recenter everything that people don't like about Donald Trump. So in summary, do you think what we've seen so far is most of the realignment already happening or is there more to come? Are we closer to the beginning or the end of a Trump boom in Silicon Valley?

Great question. I think we're closer to the end. I'm going to eat these words. Someone should play these back. I mean, I do not think this is going to be a phenomenon that we will be discussing in 2026 or 27. You know, I do think if Trump were elected, lots of people in Silicon Valley would remember what they did not like about him in 2017, 18 and 19. That's my prediction. Okay.

Well, we'll keep following the story and checking in with you about the state of politics in Silicon Valley. I think a lot of people in tech were hoping to not pay much attention to the election this time around. And I think in the past couple of weeks, they have started to realize that they cannot sit on the sidelines, whether or not they want to. It seems like politics is coming for Silicon Valley. Yeah. Teddy, thanks so much for catching us up on this story. Appreciate you making time. Thanks, Teddy. That was fun.

When we cut back, can we podcast and chew gum at the same time? We'll find out. Support for this podcast comes from Box, the intelligent content cloud. Today, 90% of data is unstructured, which means it's hard to find and manage. We're talking about product designs, customer contracts, financial reports, critical data filled with untapped insights that's disconnected from important business processes. We help make that data useful.

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Kevin, you were a teenage boy once. What's the most effort you ever put into your personal appearance back then? Well, I was, uh, I, I went to a school where for a brief period in high school, it was considered cool to pop the collars of your polo shirts. And so regrettably for several months, uh, late in my high school career, there are photos of me, uh, with,

Popped collars. With one polo or two? I never did the double pop. That was a bridge too far for me, but I did pop the collars of my shirts for a couple regrettable months. What about you? That's very wise. Well, you know, for me, look, I don't know. I went to Nordstrom a couple of times, I would say. I got braces. Like, that was about the extent of it for me. And, you know, I paid the consequences. But, Kevin...

Would you believe it that there are some teenage boys now who, thanks to the power of social media, are finding ever more inventive ways to make themselves look better? I would, because the insecurity of teenagers knows no bounds. Teenagers always want to look better than they do, and they're always insecure and looking for ways to fit in. It really does. And this came to our attention this week because Callie Holterman, who is a style reporter for your newspaper and who covers a lot of niche internet trends,

has a story this week about why so many teen and tween boys are becoming interested in a product called facial fitness gum. Or FFG. No one's calling it that. No one is, but they could. I had never heard of facial fitness gum. Had you?

I had not devoted any time to trying to understand the phenomenon, so I was very glad for Callie's story. Yeah, so once we heard about this, we thought we've got to get Callie in here because we need to know what this trend is and if we need to protect our families from it. Yes. I also feel like this is part of a trend of just...

us becoming older and sort of understanding less and less of what's going on on the internet. Like I do feel like every year I just like lose the thread a little bit more. And so as a desperate attempt to cling to our youth and to relevance, let's bring in Callie to educate us about what teenage boys are doing online. Let's bring her in.

Callie Holterman, welcome to Heart Fork. Thank you for having me. Now, Callie, do you identify as Generation Z yourself? Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of the upper end of Gen Z. I think I'm a geriatric Gen Z-er, if that's a thing. And is there anything that you feel like is stereotypically Gen Z about you?

Okay, I didn't think that this was stereotypically Gen Z, but I said recently that I had never seen Titanic, and someone was like, that's so Gen Z. Yeah, that was a very millennial-coded movie. Most of us saw it at least once in theaters. And it holds up, and we recommend you check it out. Yeah. All right, Callie, what the heck is facial fitness gum? I'm so sorry to have to tell you guys about this, but...

Facial fitness gum or hard gum is a ultra hard and kind of tacky chewing gum that a lot of young men, Gen Z men in their teens and 20s are chewing for hours on end in hopes of building up their jaw muscles and sharpening their jaw lines. Okay. I have so many questions about this. So how did this start? Like who came up with the idea that chewing hard gum could improve your jaw line?

It's interesting. It's actually been floating around online for quite a while, since like 2021. But in the past year, I would say it has kind of achieved escape velocity from these sort of tighter looks maxing circles online of young men trying to kind of amp up their appearances and into kind of the broader TikTok mainstream where influencers are sort of starting to do it.

and starting to do it in videos that have really convenient affiliate links at the bottom so that their followers can go buy those products too. And more and more companies are sort of selling those products as well. Now, let's talk a little bit about what looks maxing is. I don't know much about it. I can only guess that just Kevin isn't doing it, I guess, is the main thing that I feel like I know about it. But what would you say looks maxing is, Callie?

Looks maxing is trying to be hotter. And I think it is, it's sort of this term that

Gen Z is using and Gen Z boys especially are using that kind of put this like video game-y spin, maxing is that video game suffix, on the age-old process of trying to look better when you feel like an awkward adolescent. Got it. And the latest way to look max is to chew hard gum, strengthen those jaw muscles, and harden your jawline. Yes.

I mean, I'm curious how hard the hard gum actually is. In transparency, we tried to get some of this gum sent to us at the studio so that we could try it ourselves, but it did not arrive in time. You can't even get it. That's how popular it is. Neither of us have tried the hard gum, but Callie, I understand that you actually have. So tell us what it feels like to chew.

Yeah, I mean, I put my body on the line for this story. I ordered some of the gum from a couple of brands and it's really tough. Like one young man I talked to compared it to cement. It does have like a little bit of give. There's another, there's a popular video by an influencer, Dylan Latham, where he chews into the gum and it makes this loud like noise.

This sort of like chomping sound and it sounds like he's chewing on a potato chip. But it really like makes your jaw sore after doing it for just like a little bit of time. And the gums have some flavors. Oh, yeah. What flavors of hard gum are there? Flavors of hard gum include chiseled cinnamon, mussel mango, and jacked watermelon. Come on. Chiseled cinnamon is what I call my boyfriend. Yeah.

Now I'm going to have to give him a new nickname. So, okay, it's the consistency of cement with a little more give. It comes in these flavors. Is there anything pleasant about chewing it or does it just feel terrible? It felt a little terrible for me, but, you know, I'm like a woman in my 20s and I'm not actually being served 10, 15, 20 videos a day about how in order to be handsome and successful and attractive, I need to have this really broad jawline. Right.

Right. So, Callie, we've talked about this gum, but I still feel like I'm missing kind of the vibe of the people who are promoting this. Could we take a look at one of these videos together? Yeah, you're totally in luck. This guy, Brett Maverick, who has way over a million subscribers on YouTube posts. And an incredible name. And an incredible name. Posts sort of these workout videos that he says are jaw workout videos with jaw liner gum. All right, let's watch it.

Today I'm showing you a quick five minute jaw workout with gum. So the gum that I will be using is of course my own gum product, Brett's Jawline Chewing Gum. This is a gum that I created in partnership with Jawliner. It is a tablet chewing gum that is 10 to 15 times harder than normal chewing gum. This stuff is really tough, so it's definitely going to work

that jaw muscle, this masseter muscle right here. Now, if you haven't ordered this yet, you don't have it. You can just pick up some normal chewing gum, but you will need to use like four or five pieces at a time to achieve the same level of toughness as something like my chewing gum. Now, if you do have my chewing gum, what you're going to do is first, you're going to chew it as hard and fast as you can on your right side for a minute straight, then immediately chew it on the left side hard and fast for a minute straight.

Then third thing you're going to do is you're going to put it at the front of your teeth and chew it as fast as you can for another minute. I'll show you one round. This is what it looks like starting in three, two, one, go. We're literally watching a video of someone chewing gum while holding up a stopwatch. This is, I feel like I've fallen into an abyss.

Okay. So this is the sort of sphere of jawline influencers who are making these videos promoting this gum. I would assume they have some kind of ad deal with the gum companies. But is this pretty typical, Callie, of the sort of content that you were seeing while you were reporting the story?

Yeah, I mean, influencers are making videos either sort of like going through their jaw workouts. They're doing sort of transformation videos like this was me 30 days ago and this is me now. Sometimes it looks different. Sometimes they're just like sucking in their cheeks really hard. And then there's also these videos where an influencer like Dylan Latham, the one that I mentioned earlier, tried a bunch of different jawline chewing gums and talked about what they all sounded like and felt like on camera. Yeah.

My next question about this is, is it even true that if you have stronger jaw muscles, it makes a visual difference in how your face looks?

There's mixed slash not a ton of evidence for this. I asked some of the companies that sell this gum, like, you know, send me what you got. Let me see it. The studies and stuff. And I got studies in mice, which it's not really clear applied to the jaws of humans. There was one study. They gave the hard gum to mice? There were just these mice walking around. Blowing bubble gum. With, like, incredible jaw lines. Just these really hot mice. Oh, I want to know.

I want to see a mouse blood bubbles. Yeah. Okay, so the evidence is not great, but at least some people think that this has some sort of effect. Yeah, and, you know, dentists did tell me, like, yes, theoretically, if you were to chew on this stuff for hours upon hours upon hours, you could sort of, like, temporarily inflate those masseter jaw muscles. However, doing that kind of comes at a gigantic downside. Anyone who has ever clenched their teeth for any amount of time knows. Wait, what's the downside?

The downside is it can really exacerbate TMJ and any tightness in your jaw joint. You know, if you guys are hearing me say all of this and thinking, you know, I'd really like to sharpen my jawline, I will pass along what these poor sweet dentists who I bothered told to me, which is...

It's not an awesome idea. They really tell young men not to do it, in part because their jawlines aren't totally developed yet and chewing on this gum for a really long time, especially as long as you would need to, to see any effect at all. They told me they've seen cracked fillings or dislodged crowns or headaches or tightness. I ended up reaching out to the ADA, the American Dental Association, and they sent me

several paragraphs of thoughtful text on why they think young people especially should not be chewing this gum. Is this like one of those old commercials where four out of five dentists agree you should not chew the Look's Maxxing gum? Yeah, maybe more than that. Maybe more than that. Maybe more than that. Yeah. I mean, Kelly, how popular is this? Is this an isolated trend that a few people on social media have managed to make popular?

look bigger than it is? Or did you find evidence that like large numbers of teenage boys are going out there and chewing this hard gum? This was like my big question when I heard about this because I was like, oh man, it's one of those things that seems so sensational. Like, could this actually be true? Or is it just like a couple trolly influencers? I was pretty surprised by what I found actually. Jawliner, one company that sells this gum, they told me they'd sold over a million orders and

and that the majority of their customers were between 18 and 25. But some are definitely even younger. Like I talked to one 17-year-old who had ordered the gum. His mom made him throw it out. A 15-year-old said a lot of his classmates chewed it. One parent even told me that her sort of 12-year-old son had said that he wanted to try the gum too. And then there were all those dentists who actually said, you know, multiple young men per month are coming into our offices with TMJ issues or jaw pain and

saying that they are also chewing this gum or asking questions about this gum. I'm curious if there's any relationship between this sort of looks maxing community of young men on social media and what I think of as sort of an earlier era of kind of the manosphere, like several years ago, maybe five or six years ago, there was this sort of

meninist community of people on the internet who were reacting to, I think, what they saw as like a more feminized ideal of masculinity that was popular among people in their age cohort. They would call these people things like "soyboys"

and they would sort of try to themselves get very jacked in order to sort of embody the masculine ideal. There was this meme of the kind of Giga Chad, which was like a guy with a very sharp jawline. So is this connected to that at all? It's a really good question. And I think it is like in...

In some way, a watered down and aged down version that is traveling closer into the mainstream, especially on platforms like TikTok, also Reddit, also Discord. I think another sort of avenue along which it has traveled is mewing, which is this thing that I don't know if you've heard of, but. Mewing? Like what cats do?

It is something that young men do, often positioning their tongue on the roofs of their mouths, also with the idea of sharpening their jawlines. It was started by a British orthodontist who lost his license. It became very popular in some communities online, and then it traveled a little bit into the mainstream.

Wait, I have a question about this mewing. Do you do anything more than just touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth? Or is it that simple? No, it's like really that simple. And there's not a lot of evidence. And you do it like in sets? Like, is this like working out? It's like an endurance challenge? You do like 10 and then rest and then do another 10? It's really funny that you say that because one of the things that has been the most interesting to me as I've reported this story, looking at mewing stuff and also looking at this gum is like,

how much the language of fitness is being sort of applied to this gum that's being sold. I mentioned like chiseled cinnamon. They're talking about it as like hitting the gym for your jawline. One company is called Stronger Gum. And when you open its website, it has like an embedded audio player and it plays the song from Rocky IV. The like Hearts on Fire, Strong Desire one. It's kind of awesome. And I watched the music video and it's,

Sylvester Stallone, he's like picking up rocks and then he's like running up a mountain. But it is this really sort of bro-y, hyper-masculine fitness language that companies are swaddling their chewing gum product in. Right. Chewing gum is like throwing rocks with your face is kind of the message that's being sold to these teenagers.

Let me ask, you know, maybe a slightly more serious question here. Are we worried that this, while this is like sort of fun, lighthearted thing, that it speaks to a risk that maybe more teenage boys are at risk of body dysmorphia or their self-esteem issues? Yeah, it's a great question. And like something that I think a lot of us have paid attention to this year is this sort of

freak out over the Sephora tween, the idea that there is this teen or tween girl rushing to Sephora because she really wants a cream, perhaps an anti-aging cream that will smooth her skin, something intended for adults. There's been a ton of coverage of that. And I had been curious for months, like, is there a male equivalent of this? And if companies are really successfully reaching 13-year-old and 12-year-old girls on these platforms, I would be pretty surprised if they were missing out on an opportunity to reach young boys, too.

And they definitely are finding them. I wrote a story a couple months ago, I hope this isn't off topic, about smell maxing or these sort of really expensive colognes that were taking off among really young men because, again, they were getting messaging on social media about how if they wanted to get girls, if they wanted to sort of be attractive at their middle school, it was critical that they wear a $400 Yves Saint Laurent cologne. Right.

And so I do worry some of the boys that I talk to worry, some of their parents worry that they're being exposed to sort of an endless scroll of these algorithmically perfected men. And that especially teens and tweens who just aren't naturally going to look like that yet are going to feel that that is what they need to conform to and are going to be motivated to spend money to try to be that way. Well, now I'm worried Kevin's going to start smell maxing. Yeah.

This is a very small studio we're in. I probably do have some leftover cologne from middle school when I did briefly experiment with what I guess now is being called smell maxing. I thought I detected some Axe body spray on you the other day. Axe body spray is like way too cheap for middle schoolers now. Oh, great. How expensive is a hard gum? Expensive.

Expensive. Jawliner, a package of 60 pieces is around $26. Oh, my goodness. Some others are more. They're way more than regular gum. Wow. Wow. Used to be you could get five pieces of candy for a nickel. Yeah.

Back in Kevin's day. I love that the premise of this segment is just we are old and we want to feel less out of touch. That's not... The premise of this segment is we're trying to save teenage boys, Kevin. Yes. They're at risk of damaging their jaws. You're processing it differently, though. Like, Casey's taking it out on Kevin. Kevin's maybe sort of turning it internally. Well, Casey's externalizing his shame over his own jawline onto me. Actually, a true story about me is...

If you're looking at me right now, you may see I have a beard. The entire reason I grew a beard is it gives me the illusion of a jawline, which I otherwise do not have. I'm just all face and neck. All right. Well, I know what I'm getting you for your birthday. I'm getting some chiseled cinnamon? You're getting some chiseled cinnamon, my friend. That's what I like to hear. That's what I like to hear. So...

Callie, in transparency, we did try to acquire some facial fitness gum here in the studio to try it as part of interviewing you. Unfortunately, the Amazon package was delayed. So the best I could do is a pack of Orbit white gum. But I did see in that video that we watched together that if you want to replicate the feeling of chewing fitness gum, you can just chew four or five

five pieces of regular gum at the same time. So Casey, I want to suggest that we do that right now and each chew five pieces of regular gum. You're telling me any piece of soft gum can become hard gum if you simply put enough of it into your mouth. Exactly. Wonderful. So I'm going to pour you five pieces. I'm going to attempt to pour you five pieces of gum. Is that five? That's six. But you know what? I'll do it. I'm that crazy. You're so brave. Okay, I'm going to do five. So you're going to have a stronger jawline than me. Okay.

And we're going to make poor Callie watch as we try to look smacks here. Okay. Are we really doing this? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. Here we go. It's just so much gum. It's so much gum. Did you ever play the game Chubby Bunny? Mm-hmm. I feel like I'm playing Chubby Bunny. We're having a major Chubby Bunny moment right now. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. My jaw's already tired. It's extremely minty. It's so minty. Mm-hmm. Oh, my gosh. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

How are you feeling? Are you feeling any changes to your self-esteem? I feel like this is taking 20 years off my life. I feel like a new man. How do you feel? Not great. Not great. Yeah. But this is my first jawline looks maxing attempt, so maybe I just need to get over the hump. Okay, let's switch sides. Left side. Left side. Okay.

I think I'm comfortable with sort of like looks minimizing, looks minning. What's the opposite of looks maxing? Looks declining? Looks opting out?

What do they say when you're working out? Pain is weakness leaving the body. Maybe this pain that I'm feeling is just weakness leaving my jaw. The best part of this whole segment so far has just been watching an instructional video about how to chew gum. It's not easy to insult my intelligence, but I actually feel like that man got there. That probably got way more views than our latest YouTube video. Oh, for sure. How do you feel about that?

Well, I mean, he does have the advantage of being a really hot guy. Yeah. You know? Very handsome. And unfortunately, that's what today's shallow consumers are looking for, Kevin. Yeah. Not the sort of, you know, intellectual gravitas that we bring to our conversations. Yeah. We need justice for uggos. Normal faces. Yeah.

We really do proudly serve the normal face community. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to spit this out. Will you spit out your gum, please? I'm fine. It tastes really good. Well, that was a lot for my mouth. Well, Callie, you've really given us a lot to chew on today. Yeah, thanks for gumming on. Thank you so much for having me.

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You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork.

Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Kwee Wing Tam, Kayla Presti, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com.