Artificial Intelligence

Transcript performed by A.I.
00:00
Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy. And with me is Howard Faran. I don’t know if he really needs introduction. He is a dentist, was a dentist, but more importantly, he’s the founder, the creator of Dental Town. Everybody knows Dental Town. And we’re so happy to have him on the show. And we’re talking about artificial intelligence. There’s a lot going on, artificial intelligence. The time of this recording, there’s something that happened that we’re gonna…

00:28
kind of start our discussion with the markets are not the stock market is not acting favorably towards it at the moment. And here to help us unpack what is happening with this as well as the future of artificial intelligence in general and dentistry is Howard Ferran. Thank you for being on the program. Hey, it is an honor to be on your show. Technically with us to both views is this technically pornography? No, only for the only for the other bald people.

00:56
Well yeah, I mean I think this is a sputnik moment. I was born in a 62, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but five years before that, October 4, 1957, Russia launched a satellite, a little tin can, hardly did anything, but it scared the holy bejesus out of the United States and they literally messed their pants and that is the only reason we ended up standing on the moon. And when we got to the moon,

01:25
and looked around and Russia wasn’t on the moon and wasn’t planning on coming to the moon after 12 guys had walked around on it they were done with the moon mission and if you look at NASA’s launches two out of every three have been military launches, military satellites most of the stuff they launch you don’t even know about things like that and now here is the United States position started with Biden and we’ll see what Trump 2 does where Biden said no this AI is so important.

01:54
we are not selling high technology he even went to other countries and told them they couldn’t sell their laser lithography technology and told them the video you couldn’t sell your GPU chips to them right and a lot of big international companies lost up billions and billions of dollars in sales because we were gonna keep trying you know we always talk about free trade but no we’re not we’re not taking their highway phones we’re not

02:22
their electric vehicle cars and they’re not getting our GPE Chucks chips and then China comes out and says well we took the old chips and it’s kind of that maybe the old chips like a Chevy and maybe Howard let me let me back up because you’re on the I got you started on a roll let’s back up for the listener so they understand because I understand and some of our dedicated researchers so what’s happening now at the time this recording today that

02:51
one of the largest chip manufacturers in the world. It’s also part of the S&P 500, which is one of the indexes that tells us how the economy, but that stock is down like 15, 20%, and it’s bringing the market down. Other semiconductor manufacturers are all up in arms and freaking out because China has an AI, like ChatGBT app that they’re saying is either using old chips,

03:18
or less expensive chips and is producing as good or better that results in chat GBT. And you’re saying nonsense. It’s kind of a farce. And I was talking to some financial advisors that we like and that they were saying like, no, it’s a bit of a scary situation, but you’re comparing this to the same thing that the Spugnik, whatever, that it’s still, even though it may not be true that it is better, it’s still scaring the marketplace.

03:46
Well I think it’s actually much much better because you know open AI started as an open source platform and then they decided we’re not gonna do open we’re gonna make it private and raise money in Microsoft and and Elon Musk wanted to sue them that they couldn’t you know blah blah blah and all this stuff like that and China side oh hell no this is open source. So I’ll give you an example on my dentaltown servers forever we use Microsoft SQL Server.

04:13
and we paid license fees I don’t know what it was I think it was like it was a lot of money of seven eight thousand dollars a month it’s like sixty seventy thousand dollars a year and there came out to be an open source Microsoft SQL server and I think it’s called progress or something like that and well it’s ten times better because every programmer on earth who says you know what for my needs I needed to do this they just keep adding on all these functions. So basically

04:40
what they did is they said okay we don’t get these expensive GPU chips and I’m sure they I’m sure they bought a lot of them on the black market and some people say they had 50,000 GPU chips whatever but he said but we got you know if you take all these think think of like an old an old Chevy well you know it still gets you from point A to B now a Ferrari would be a much better in a video chip but you know if you got a million Chevys all going down the road they’re gonna do the same thing.

05:07
and they’re doing it and they did that whole thing with only 200 employees and a few million dollars and now the open source is free the language model using it is free like when we go crunch dentaltown data in AI I mean you know a small run will cost us five six thousand dollars and now it’s open source you would get to you could tweak it for your own thing. So basically this is an arms race.

05:33
but instead of military what is military implications but it’s AI and that is so if you’re an investor and you have all these reasons why everybody should be paying for these really expensive Nvidia chips and building billion dollar centers they’re starting to think well man you could just build one ten times larger with chips that cost one one hundredth the price and have the same thing and then as far as the software like in the video data center that that’s a closed software.

06:03
they program that thing from A to Z it’s an open and close one-stop-shop solution well that’s not open source and you know like your iPhone is a closed source you know you don’t get to see what’s going on there but Google and Android is open source well guess which one’s bigger guess which ones has more people look at dental software you know you can’t do anything with Dentrix or Eagle Soft or any of them but open dental what’s the name

06:32
And when I and I started learning I started learning about open dental because I’d go to these countries that spoke different languages start off just Montreal. I say well what what French software to use and they go oh we just got a copy of open dental and then we translate all the French and we’re using that then we had a couple hundred clients and after ten years we kind of wanted an update and we called open dental and they looked at how many users we had and they said okay for X dollars we’ll update the open dental. Same thing I saw in Vietnam and Cambodia.

07:01
Cambodia and Myanmar and you know countries all around the world they’re their only practice manager was open dental and the reason they liked it is because they could get one computer programmer to go in there and change all the language and then if there was a something about insurance that didn’t apply to them they don’t have the insurance they would just delete that section you know when I when I check into the Marriott you know they don’t they only have nine questions and since there’s nine questions they

07:28
they do all nine and you have to go on a flow you can’t do question seven until you’ve done six and five and four when I bring in a Hertz rental car he just walks out there a little Palm pilot and just check he just needs to know three or four things and then you hire someone to be a dental receptionist and she opens up Dentrix and 40,000 buttons pop up and and it’s just mind-numbing and she doesn’t know what to do and then the one or two things that you really wanted her to do.

07:54
get down like how did she get here you know or referral dollars I’m paying $300 a head for a new patient where did you come in from and get some dialogue or did they see it and oh they forgot that deal and you can’t go into you know if I could do anything with open dental it would be to set up a bunch of little red squares where if you’re never going to use that you could just close them out. My fan is to be like if you were a big you know all-star dental fan and the Academy had their.

08:23
open dental version so you just click that and whatever Alex is talking about that’s the only thing you’re gonna see on open dental. So the fact that this is open source and it’s gonna it’s gonna democratize AI because now I mean I’m I got big money and I got my own I built the world’s first dental chatbot I started it a year ago September 5th and my son graduated with a degree in computer programming.

08:51
working with these other big companies and after two or three projects and companies that were ten times bigger than mine I said come on back come on back to your dad’s and help my software you know it’s old and everything and I got the rudest awake in my life. I mean this has been a this has been the most beautiful amazing 18 months of my life and it’s been the worst and basically what I learned is you and me Alex are very lucky because you’re a lawyer and I’m a dentist.

09:18
And if you’re a lawyer, a dentist, a carpenter, electrician, a plumber, you do it for 10 years. You increase your value after 10 years of law and dentistry. We’re better lawyers and dentists than when we started.

09:32
Nobody knows this but in electrical engineering and programming it’s the opposite. So let’s say I went to college at Creighton in 1980 let’s say I went to college in 1980 and the vinyl records were starting to die because of new technology the CD-ROM and I graduated in college and I know the CD-ROM and Alex is 20 years older and he’s on this vinyl record and he’s losing his job and his pension and the factories and they’re all crumbling down with that creative destructionism and I’m the baller and I’m like making six figures

10:02
and I’m all that in a bag of chips and then about ten years later son walks up to me says hey Howie you the CD-ROM now is with the vinyl record now it’s all mp3 or it’s streaming video it’s this and that and what I did not realize what was going on with Dentaltown I mean we started that thing in 1999 five years before Facebook and all my programmers still here they’re as old as I am and and they were all C++, SQL Server and all that

10:31
And my son came up here and he said, oh my God, dad, this code is dated. It’s, oh, he said, he said it was so bad that even with the updates, they didn’t even update the shit that was so old. You know, we could go, you know, you’re going on a whole topic about just how to, to stay with innovation and change. Like everything’s changing so fast. And certainly, yes, as a dentist or lawyer,

10:57
There’s still laws that change industry technology changes, but you have that basic fundamentals You get better as long as you keep an open mind But if you’re an engineer or in computer software or all that and you’re not continuously on the up-and-up What’s happening your you’re dated six months ago. So you have to continue to go So so with this kind of staying with this AI situation. What what do you? What do you see? Because we have we have open source concepts of four. I know

11:26
we have open source OSes like Linux and Unix and so on and Ubuntu and others, they have not taken off the way that Microsoft and others. And I believe even, I don’t know about Google, but I think their Android, they have some of this stuff is open source, some of it isn’t, it’s the stuff that they want, right? And even with Apple, they have some open source projects, but the point is monetization is always gonna happen. This is my take on it.

11:51
you’re gonna start open source with good intentions, but then you have to monetize it, or in some cases, you’re gonna weaponize it, you know, whether it’s TikTok or others. There’s a lot of stuff going on, but I like what you said, it is an arms race, both for intellectual capital, GPUs, whatever that might be. What do you, do you think that, I mean, you also, I looked some of your podcasts, you have some great podcasts about investing, and like the S&P 500 is very heavily weighted in tech.

12:20
and AI and so is the NASDAQ for sure I mean even more so. What’s that like for investors you know they’re 401k’s they’re putting in S&P and NASDAQ and so on what’s the future of that should people be concerned or is are these companies going to kind of rally back and find a way to make this go? Howard Glassman Well two questions you’ve asked of our number one is back to the open source that you need

12:49
if you buy anything in the world for a dollar about 55% of it went to the people you know the owners the employees right investor people and less than half went to others so with DeepSeat being open source they’re gonna have literally 10 million Python programmers around the world building all their code.

13:14
and it’s not so much that they get monetized to make money it’s that they’re taking money from like Microsoft you know who wanted to come up with sequel server and then just milk it like a cow for the next 50 years but as far as investing goes when I was a freshman in college in 1980 and by no chance of my own you know I went to Creighton because I was Catholic and they had a dental school I’m from Kansas they didn’t have any dental schools my…

13:37
two older sisters were nuns and they’re like oh Creighton’s a Jesuit and they have a do so I went up there and Warren Buffett comes over and lectures and our freshman 101 business class and to be all honest and fair I thought he was the dumbest son of a gun I’d ever met my life. I kept asking him well you talk about the nifty fifty I mean talk about Kodak and Polaroid and Xerox.

13:58
like son if I can’t explain this on a five by seven business card and what your business does and how it makes money it’s not in my circle of competence and I have no interest in it and it took me till about I don’t know when exactly it was it two or three years after graduation I realized oh my god that was the smartest guy in all of investing but the thing is when I was a freshman the average company in the S&P 500 was 65 years old.

14:24
now I’m 62 and the average age of that company is 10. Another thing is back then there were like 6,000 of them and now it’s under 3,000 because private equity and you know Black Rocks controlling three trillion dollars and we don’t even get to see what their daily what they’re doing. So the markets gotten very very it’s cut down in half the size

14:53
you know if it was my favorite team is the Green Bay Packers because that’s owned by the city. If it wasn’t owned by the city you would have no data on the NFL you wouldn’t know their annual sales lawsuits you would know nothing like how much do you know about so many of these private companies you know nothing about them you drive by them every day at work and you have no idea who they are what they do and they do billions of dollars a year. So but I look at dentistry.

15:23
I mean it’s gonna be like I just give examples here and some of these are too personal I can’t believe I’m sharing them but I’m kind of like that but like I had a four-person accounting department now add up all those wages. I hired one guy with an accounting degree who had a master’s in accounting degree who was in Python programmer and he automated basically three out of four of those positions.

15:45
I go I keep I’ll go into a department and there’ll be two people and this one makes fifty thousand and she’s a proofreader and this one makes eighty thousand and she lays out this so I’ll take 1580 I got 130 I’ll hire a Python programmer for 115 he automates both of their jobs in like three months and then has four days a week to program on other projects. I mean I started this project.

16:12
with 32 employees to put out dentaltown website and magazine I’m down to 22 and that includes 10 of them who are Python programmers the oldest one is 25. They’re all brand new they’re stressful but I go into dental offices and I’ll see like four people up front in a dental office and she’s doing insurance and she’s verifying insurance and this person’s doing this or that and it’s like okay they both make 60,000 a year.

16:41
that’s 120. If you consolidated those two people and got a Python programmer all that insurance there. What happens a lot is dental offices they know Howard it’s been a long time so we hide on the program we gotta have you you’re so much fun oh I miss Howard you’re the best guest you’re so much fun. Often I was talking to Dennis recently we did a leadership retreat in Fort Lauderdale was a lot of fun and

17:07
one of our dentists was saying, well, this person isn’t working out and I’m going to make this position for them. And I’m like, no, step back. What does my practice need to find the roles, then see who fits in them? If it doesn’t fit, you don’t need that person. And often there’s so much unnecessary redundancy. And you’re right, especially with technology and stuff, whether it’s outsourcing insurance or having programming to make it more efficient, there’s ways to do that. But

17:36
Howard, not many people have your mind. I mean, you got blessed with both, being a dentist and great business mind. Doesn’t usually come both ways with respect to that. And as you know, dentists, you know the story of my father, right, they don’t, you know, confrontation and it’s a people thing and they confuse those with running a business. Doesn’t mean you have to be heartless. It’s just like, does it compute? Does it make sense? Step back.

18:02
how does the business work? And if somebody isn’t appropriate for that position, it doesn’t, then they go. So that’s a whole other side of it. I agree with you. It’s just, you know, executing on that and realizing. So I guess the advice is, understand what you’re trying to do. You step back and said, when I look at my company, whether it’s Dental Town or dental business, I say, this is what I actually need to run it profitably. And whoever is like, you know, what do I think about?

18:30
You know when you play, what is that, musical chairs? You pull the chair out, you say, I don’t have that chair anymore. So somebody’s gotta go, it’s not fitting in there. You said with Dental Town, you removed what you don’t need and you put in more efficient. So yeah, and then kind of bring that to AI Howard. I mean, this is the nice way of doing it, but you see, you heard the Nvidia president and the others talk about.

18:58
there’s a lot of automation that’s going to make jobs obsolete and and so that’s something as we’re seeing as well and it happens and it’s going to continue at it as an accelerating pace, virtual assistants and others and so on so something that we have to be mindful of. Howard McLeod It’s an old argument that has no merit I mean they’ve been saying this since they came out with the textile mills I mean remember 200 years ago the King England everybody rioted and said get rid of those textile machines because they’re killing all the jobs.

19:25
And the elders of the king were saying, well, what kind of country are we going to have if everybody is hand-strowing cotton and wool? Are we really going to have a great country if that’s what everybody’s doing? He goes, let’s automate that and they can go on and do better stuff. I remember when Milton Friedman, when I was in college, India got a new prime minister and he canceled all the contracts with Caterpillar.

19:52
and all that big equipment and caterpillar said well what are you doing and he says he goes dude I got a I got a billion 400 million people I got a hundred million men that could do this by hand who want a job why the hell should I bring over some machine that’ll do the job of 50 people and he didn’t know what to do so they hired Milton Friedman said Milton Friedman over there and Milton Friedman went met the Prime Minister.

20:16
he walked out there and he showed him this big old construction site and they’re all doing it by hand he goes why should I buy a hundred thousand dollar caterpillar to do this in a day and he goes oh he goes well if you’re right then let’s take away all their shovels and give them spoons.

20:34
And the prime minister thought, well, that’d be a stupid idea. I mean, it’d take forever. It’s been thinking, when would you like this highway done? When would you like it done? I bet the people wish it was done a year ago. I see. So you’re saying that we can get so much more down.

20:49
you’re gonna you’re gonna you’re gonna number one you’re gonna democratize the world like remember in this episode it was in 74 LA had a earthquake about 6.4 and no one died and then Haiti had one the same size and a quarter million people died. I mean when those people in Haiti are designing an apartment complex they can’t afford an architectural form they can’t do all this stuff if I was gonna do if I was gonna design a 40-story apartment complex.

21:17
I mean you know in the old days I need a firm with a hundred architects and they take six months and charge me a million dollars to do that now a kid can sit down on a computer in Haiti and put in the size the lot verified on satellite already know all about the dirt and the topography and with AI and design that whole building in a day. You know what’s interesting I found with AI when I first saw it especially chat GPT and the questions I asked it was it was scary.

21:47
I was like, oh my goodness. But now, like, I mean, it’s like anything else. I say that, but as you go into history, we were scared of other stuff. And I’m like, it’s helped me do my job better. You can’t just, right now, you can’t just have AI write an article. You can tell it’s kind of, it has got to have your soul in it. But I’ll tell you something pretty interesting. I have the conversations, like I’ll ask it like, okay, for example, I say, here are the parameters of what I want to invest in. What’s good for me?

22:16
or I was upset about this. And it can actually, it could read empathy and it’s actually, there’s a lot of, I don’t know, we kind of adapt to it, right? And it’s amazing, you Howard, how progressive you are with this and open, considering as one gets older, they get more nervous with respect to that. So you’re pretty bullish or optimistic about the benefits to mankind of AI.

22:44
Like your caterpillar example that it’s not going to be people are going to have nothing. It’s like we can then focus because, you know, I look at like, especially for me to have to summarize a meeting and go through a video, remember we go through video, put the highlights of time codes, AI does it in 20 seconds. That’s not a good use of our time. We can be innovating, serving, helping other people doing something else with our brain. It’s not a good use of it.

23:11
So it’s pretty interesting how that goes. So you’re pretty confident. Howard- In dental school the dental students are telling me that they just open up an AI app they record the whole lecture and they say give me the notes and then they say summarize it to 600 words or 10 points or just what were the takeaways of today but in the gym where I work out at EOS there’s three young lawyers at one still in anyway they’re all like you know 25 and under and everything.

23:38
and they’ve been asking me for advice on what to do because they’re working with some old codger like my age and in fact one girl said well he’s old I mean he’s not as old as you but he’s old. Well thank you it was like I heard this comedian say it’s like when you get to a certain age they start saying you look good for your age.

24:00
What’s that supposed to mean? Why don’t you just look good? I have been adding 10 years to my birthday. Someone says, the birthday they say, how old are you? Like when I just turned 62, I said 72. Because if I say 62, they go, ah. If I say 72, they go, damn. You look good for 72. Wow.

24:18
but anyway this lawyer’s telling me that you know a case will come in and she sits in on the console this old man sitting he’s got all these books behind there and he does this half hour our consultation everything and she says when she does the con say she opens up her AI and she’s taking notes and it’s pulling up all the statutes and that in 30 minutes her entire case is done and so it’s the people with AI are gonna do you’re not gonna get rid of accountants.

24:45
like I had a four-person accounting team I only needed one I had four people that program from 25 years ago and they have no idea what Python programming is they don’t understand any of it you just you know everybody on the team went to college and got a degree in it or a master’s degree in it and I go into a lot of big groups you know I’ll go into big groups and I’ll go up front and it’s like man they have like six ladies working up front the front desk.

25:13
14 chairs and it’s like and I start asking the payroll and the salaries it’s like man everybody’s making like 60 to 80 the office managers over 100 and every two of them employees if every two of them employees was condensed into one Python programmer the whole job would be automated they’d rebuild it from scratch I mean oh my god they just look at all these process I cannot tell you like say I’ve gone from 32 employees with no Python programmers.

25:43
to now 22 employees or 10 of them are Python. Howard, let me ask you because you were talking about the, what is he called? The prophet of Omaha? Oracle of Omaha. Oracle. So what was the, you know, you said you met him, you weren’t impressed, but then he said something that did hold true. What was that that you ended up deploying from Buffett?

26:10
I just think it was those annual meetings every year everybody goes to Omaha and it’s be four-hour meeting a six-hour meeting you know is beyond YouTube or TV or whatever and I get the notes of those things back before the internet and it was just it was just always profound just always profound stuff just always profound simplifying the business you know making it simple do you understand it is it in your.

26:34
circle of competence like you’re really good in law I’m really good in business I mean dentistry we’re both good in business but neither of us know shit about Python programming electrical engineering we’re not carpenters you know and you staying in your circle of competence. You’re staying in your lane what are you because I saw on some of your podcasts you talk about investing what what is your advice to dentists and.

27:01
And again, like I said today, considering what happened with the S&P and some of the semiconductor area, you know, what is, I really like a lot of stuff that Buffett talks about. What are you, what do you advise people? Well, like Warren Buffett, you know, when he had, you know, he had his.

27:19
ex-wife thing too and he put all of her money into an index fund I mean the guy you know he thinks that unless you’re a Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger I mean the index funds gonna be 80% all mine are in index funds, they’re all in the P500 index funds. Now I have my play money it’s just fun to bet on a Super Bowl it’s fun to bet on a stock so you got play stuff just because it’s fun to check him and all that kind of stuff just like I retired.

27:46
you know when the pandemic came you know I was on this lecturing ratwheel for you know I was gone three out of four weekends for three decades I mean yeah and I knew I could never get off that thing but I hated the travel it’s fun to go to all those countries the first time the second time the third time but it’s not fun to go to Warsaw Poland for the fifth frickin time you’ve seen it you’ve done it you know you know you’ve seen the Chopin Museum you know you know but it just and it’s just a tough lifestyle.

28:16
and so I got off that thing and then I and then we had to close down the office for covid and I just said you know what I’m 60 I was 59 time I said you know I’m just gonna sell this thing I wouldn’t sell it to a DSO I just don’t believe in that I don’t want my eight grandchildren going into an office where in the morning they’re having a pep rally that every MOD filling is a crown opportunity. You were still doing dentistry all the way to then? Yeah I mean I cut back a lot I’d fill in when people are sick you know.

28:45
yeah and you know you have the patients that you know complain they only want to see me and I’m a really good-looking guy if you’re like 85 year old widow and I’ve noticed that if that woman is 13 years older than you and you are the hottest man in town. She wants a hug and a kiss and I mean she you could tell she’s melting in your arms but um but yeah I did it till the end but the thing is the thing is

29:14
I lost my train I thought I was going to that is. Well you were talking about you were talking about selling the practice you don’t want to go to Warsaw. Oh yeah that I quit lecturing and I sold my practice and I’m retired and it was great it was so great for a while because my mom needed me to go live with her. Weren’t you still running dentaltown?

29:32
Yeah I was still running dentaltown but I could run dentaltown from an iPhone I mean I don’t know. Okay. Yeah I you know it’s not like it’s not like a dentistry where you got to be an appointment or a lecturer you got to be standing somewhere like I lectured Milwaukee Friday the last Friday and I quit lecturing but it was a old friend and named Ross and love him to death and he’s like no you got it anyway you know he talked me into it and then a month ago before that I did mobile van but I swore I’ll never do it again.

30:02
but I’ve done it twice since I said I swear I’d never do it again and I’m still sticking to it I swear I’m never gonna do it again because now with the technology I mean we’re about to relaunch Dentaltown we’ve rewritten the entire thing from the ground up but you’ll be able to have like your podcast you’ll be able to film your podcast on Dentaltown but it’ll be on the calendar so it’ll say well Alex is doing his podcast on Monday at 2

30:31
as you said. Howard- I know and thank you so much that but now you be able to film it and a whole closed system on dentaltown. Alan- Oh wow. Howard- It’ll be on the calendar so you’ll be filming it in front of a live audience and then if you want to take someone’s question all they got to do is hit the phone icon. Alan- So let me ask you let me ask this Howard I mean just for curiosity our listeners because we all know Howard what’s life like for Howard now I mean what is your life like I mean what where what do you what do you enjoy tell me about like you and dental you just talked about dentaltown.

31:01
What’s the day in the life of Howard Faran? You know, what, enjoying what you built? Well, basically when I wake up, you know, I have to, the minute I wake up, I put on my shoes and I do six miles of road work.

31:17
the gym and then I do either weightlifting or jiu-jitsu or but there’s an MMA gym and or the weightlifting and it just really makes me I mean at my age of 62 when I wake up my back’s cranky I mean and then people say well do you get up go for a run it’s like dude you’re not 62 when I get up I have to walk a mile just for all my joints quick clicking and popping and cracking and but so sometimes I can sometimes I’m so lazy it’s just a walk

31:47
a six-mile walk to the gym sometimes I run the whole damn thing sometimes I jog sometimes I’ll do a block of lunges and you know leg lunges but I go there and I like the gym and I get there the same time every day so you have a bunch of friends of the gym and then I come home I eat and shower and get dressed and I come here to work now when I retired

32:10
I spent several years and it was really fun I mean I would go live and I got four boys and eight grandkids and I would go live I would just go to one of their houses and live there for like a month and then I go the next one for a month the next one a month and my mom and then you know I and then well it’s kind of weird because a lot of people they retire they go what are you gonna do they say I want to travel the world. Dude I traveled the world for 30 freaking years and getting in an airplane I mean some of those flights you couldn’t even comprehend like.

32:39
Some of them I and three of my boys went with me on my on this one so they can vouch for it Ryan can vouch for it and in fact I used to podcast for him in Cambodia a couple of weeks ago we left our house Phoenix we went to flew to San Francisco and then I think we flew to Tokyo and then we went to Hong Kong and then.

32:59
Kuala Lumpur Malaysia and then a connecting flight to Cambodia and from walking out of our house to walking into our hotel room was 36 hours, 36 hours I think the layover in Tokyo was like nine hours I mean just oh my gosh and now I’ll be able to get on dentaltown and do like Reddit does like it so what we do is we go through the social media sites we got the best of tik-tok and Instagram see like if you did a video on Instagram or tik-tok

33:29
if you went to dentaltown and dropped it where you gonna drop you have to find a thread you drop it in there and then all those old crazy people would say oh you’re self-promotion and now you’re selling all that bullshit work you don’t have self-promotion on tik-tok and Instagram because everything is self-promotion why if you open your mouth you’re promoting the world according to Alex everything is self-promotion but it’s the formats and people are finicky and now we’ll have a tooth watch.

33:57
instead of to talk or tick-tock it’ll be tooth watch and the video but the video you can comment on you can share and then the other thing is like say you drop a video in like if I if I make a little video and I drop it out I got drop in dentaltown LinkedIn Instagram Facebook Twitter and tick-tock sit that takes a long time now you just drop it into dentaltown and then you set your links so where else you want it and it’ll all post there.

34:24
I’ll even post it into iTunes whatever you need. But here’s what’s really cool is what started me on this whole deal.

34:33
was when my son kept you know Ryan he had a masters and in a seat in computer science he kept telling me dad you know this is like two years ago download chat GP and I never did it then my other son Greg he did it he fell in love with it and Ryan all the boys fell in love with it I was the last one and man I finally got religion it reminds me in 94 when Amazon went public I had no idea why everybody was all excited about the stock

35:03
thing ever and then but I can’t watch that Amazon stock go up and and more and more people getting AOL and finally I went to the Barnes and Noble back when they saw that we’re alive and I said do you have any books on this internet thing and they said yeah we have four books on the internet so I bought all four of those books I got through about the third one when I finally realized oh my god if I got I could use here I could I could post an x-ray.

35:30
you know wondering why is this tooth hurt so hurting I could post an x-ray and talk to other dentists I mean I was so professionally lonely and isolated because you couldn’t ask your dental assistant your hygienist and your mom you know everybody that loved you couldn’t help you and then with dentaltown the scale is amazing I mean remember one of the weirdest cases I ever posted thought what would you what would you do with this and it was in some Australian dentists.

35:56
had seen the case ten years later treated with ortho and this and that and showed the whole finished case and I thought God this isn’t a one in a million case this is a one in a country cabbie there’s I mean I mean 22 million people in Australia and I bet that she was the only one that had these upside down bicuspids and I mean just crazy shit and so now what I what I want to do is look at open dental. So here’s what I realized when I start got religion I got religion on social media just.

36:26
with dentaltown.com no dentist would ever have to practice solo again and that was priceless for a solo dentist to go throw up an x-ray and say help what the hell would you do and we learned all through that whole social media that that was 25 years. Well now I realized that got dentaltown I’ve had Ferran Report, Dentaltown, Hygietown, Orthotown, magazines for 25 years gazillion articles. Dentaltown had seven million questions post with answers.

36:56
I did 1600 podcasts with transcripts. I called up PubMed and they had 70,000 articles and you say well can we download all those 70,000 and they say no so we hacked into that and downloaded all 70,000 dental articles and then I have that and then we crunched it in a very expensive large language model big brand name you know where if I did it today I could do it for free.

37:24
on the Chinese deep seek I could do it for free I spent a bunch of money trained all that data and then I start testing it and I start asking questions and it’s like I couldn’t believe it and then I’d ask it on chat GP and it wouldn’t be as good and the reason why is they’re everything so if I say Mary had a little.

37:50
What’s interesting? Maybe in industry, maybe in So check this out, Howard. The next, another step I saw was interesting. And they even have these out now. It’s expensive. Eventually it might be free. The Chinese might’ve started that. Is you, Howard, can program an AI that is you. So one day when you move on, Howard will still exist. All of his stuff will be in that AI model that you program. So all your quirks and excitement, everything. Hey, Howard.

38:20
I could even have you back on the podcast let’s book Howard’s AI under the podcast. Howard- They’re already making a deep fake where when you get the Dentaltown magazine on your app you could have it read to you and you could pick the voice so I mean you could have Howard read it anybody that wants to fill out the the voice who do a deep fake on that but I mean but it’s amazing but back to Mary had a little lamb. Everybody says Mary had a little lamb well maybe in dentistry maybe Mary has a little root tip maybe she has a little fracture.

38:49
maybe she has and when it’s just all dental it appears to me they’re answering I’m like I’m a dentist and I’m asking a question and it feels like an specialist is answering me that’s not and then I go drop that question chat GP and it looks like it’s kind of diluted down to a more like someone writing a paper in school on like root canal so things like that.

39:16
It’s funny. I it was so good. It’s responses. This is how do you How is it that you unknow this stuff? Like for example, I was asking about like an injury and like I couldn’t figure out like there’s so many variables and you go To a specialist and they only know their thing But I put all the parameters and it was able to pull this together in a very creative way that nobody else could do And I was like, how do you know that and it will tell me well, I searched this and I it’s programmed It has certain ways of information it has so it’s only as good as what it’s fed and what it can you know?

39:44
grab into and the logic of how to do it. So makes a lot of sense that you’re building one for dental because it’s gonna you know be much more specific and have what it needs to be able to create. Howard- And I can’t believe when I go to my physicians I don’t even ask the question more I just tease them I say doc I’m not gonna ask you the question because I know you don’t use AI but I asked my physician want to start me on my second prescription medicine he wanted to start me on a statin and I’m on thyroid.

40:10
I said well is there any side effects or anything with thyroid? Mark- Oh no no no no. Howard- I don’t think so but I said well did you ask Chad GP? I asked Chad GP. I was at the urologist and he was doing the 60 year old prostate check and all this kind of stuff and he sent my PSA number and he said he wanted me to do this 4000 X blood tests and tests all you know all these parameters for and everything.

40:35
I said well do you think I should take a x-ray or anything and he said oh you could if you want I don’t really advise this I asked Chad GP I said I’m a 62 year old man here’s my PSA blah blah I told him everything do you think I should have an x-ray and I said well no I wouldn’t take an x-ray a two-dimensional x-ray but I would definitely take an MRI definitely.

41:02
and the MRI could find blah blah blah blah blah and then he’s like okay you want to MRI so he signed an MRI deal and it’s like he wouldn’t even suggest it on dentaltown and dentaltown there was a crazy ass story I think it’s my Stephen Glass a dentist out of Texas and he was he had some illness something going on everything and he asked doctors is there any way this could be related to my index finger because my index finger has been sore blah blah blah.

41:27
And so you asked chat GP and that was absolutely one of the things on the criteria is that your index and you know what’s nice. You know what’s nice about chat GP? I didn’t like in the past. There was always artificial intelligence for years. So that’s the other thing we don’t realize. Artificial intelligence has been around for a while in terms of even Google and the algorithms. And so when you would you would type in, it would find articles that were statistically relevant to that. Unfortunately, those articles are a biased in one dimension.

41:56
Now, the chat GPT can take multiple articles, multiple research, run it through reasoning, take different perspectives, and give you a more thorough, not one, because you go to one doctor or one specialist, they have one view. You pull it all together, you get a more comprehensive view. So I mean, look, Howard, I mean, this is phenomenal. We’re talking about AI, and we could probably go on.

42:22
I’m gonna give you the last call on this because we’re double our normal podcast so people gonna listen because it’s Howard Ferrand go ahead. Howard- Hey well that’s two bald beauties that they think they’re on a porn hub right now they don’t even know. Check this out check this out.

42:40
So for so you know these big dental companies you know they always invited me over the years with key influencers and things like that I remember going to Dentrix meetings and I remember going to Eagle Soft and Effingham and they always want to present to you you know they’re programming for the year because they want us to go out and push it endorse it use it and I was up in I was up in Provo Utah to Dentrix deal and he starts telling about all the new reports they run and I couldn’t help it I finally raised my hand because I’m looking around the room I know these people and I said they’re like okay guys.

43:10
what percent of the reports when you go into a dental office you go to the report general what percent of the reports have never been ran one time ever in the history of that dental office and everybody agreed is about 85%. So I said every year you program a bunch more reports a bunch more shit I’m telling you that when you check in at Marriott and you return your hurt central car it’s just the core functions.

43:32
and all you do is add all this layers of bullshit and complexity to where nobody knows what they’re doing and they can’t even get the basics done but look at open dental and look it now. So I looked at accounting because some people have so I look at accounting and if you go back to my 30-day dental MBA I’ve been talking about this for 25 years I said well if all your knowledge

43:53
is if half of its in QuickBooks Pro and half of its in Dentrix, Eagle software, Open Dental you’re a bipolar schizophrenic I mean none of this stuff talks and the reports are intuitive. Well our AI right now we’re hooking them together so instead of looking for a report I got a little widget where I just hit that widget and I need my face ID and then chatgp comes up and I say say hi to Alex.

44:21
hi Alex and now you would just open that up and the dentaltown app if you connected it to your open dental and you connected it to your quick foot counting you could say what’s my overhead and it would tell you. Then you could say how many PPO’s do I take it is oh you take 14 PPO’s am I making money off all I mean so that’s the intuitive thing they don’t know how to get into a report generator on Dentrix and run the relevant deal and they

44:50
Is there anything I should do before I leave the office tonight? Yes, make sure that every x-ray taken by the hygienist and dental assistants was entered and billboard you know I know so many practice management consultants say they never even cost their dentist a dime because as a courtesy when they were there they would do an exit interview on the day’s charts and they’d usually find.

45:13
a PA and a bite wing three or four times a set of bite wings sometimes an FMX that weren’t even entered in build and just making sure that everything that could be billed was done paid for their daily wages. Most people say they can get most consultants say they can find $250 guaranteed sometimes a thousand a day if it’s a big group practice but I just think that you know my passion right now you said what I do retirement I did the retirement thing I quit work and I quit lecturing and I spent three or four years.

45:43
hounding my eight grandchildren but I started to get bored and then I found this AI thing and oh my god it’s just like I came right out of retirement I came right back to work and my job is that the dentist has to wear way too many hats and he’s got to be a CEO and accountant business finance law.

46:04
and has to and the specialists are lucky. Could you imagine only having to learn one thing you know how nice it is? I remember my dad’s office he would have an anadontist come in everything set up for you get paid you’re out like all done no overhead nothing. And that’s why I tell every every general dentist please specialize your life is so much easier if you get rid of 90% of everything you need to know and just focus on one damn thing and my general dentist she has to focus on so many things wear so many hats.

46:34
And my job is I’m gonna take AI and make it so ever so she can do everything faster easier higher quality lower cost and scalable and I’m gonna give that girl the tools she needs to run that office and land it on a dime. Howard most importantly most important I’m gonna end with this question how do you have all this energy for decades? It’s the bald head you got it too.

47:01
I have to get in touch with the with the energy. It’s that six mile walk you do every day. But hey, we talked about this in the green room, but you are definitely the, in a good connotation, the Joe Rogan of dentistry. You got the look, you got the muscles, and certainly street cred. It’s such an honor to have you back, Howard, and I hope to have you more on our program.

47:26
And I mean, everybody knows where to find you dentaltown.com and all over social media and all over AI Thank you for being on the program. I really appreciate it. Alex Thank you for all that you’ve done for dentaltown and dentistry and thanks for always loading your podcasts up there And I hope come April that you film a podcast Live on dentaltown in front of a group audience to be able to take questions and their video can pop up and asking videos

47:52
And listen, I do what you tell me. I got to check it out. And of course, for those listening, you’ll follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and of course, Dental Town, we’re there as well. Get the episodes as they release, share with your friends, and until next time, go out there and be an All Star.