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VIDEO - DUwHF #904 - Omid Azami
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AUDIO - DUwHF #904 - Omid Azami
Dr. Omid Azami immigrated to Canada when he was six years old. Grew up in Newmarket, Ontario and attended the University of Western Ontario in London, ON where he received his degree in Kinesiology. In 2013 he moved down to Australia to study dentistry and the University of Melbourne Dental school, graduating in December 2016. He moved back to Toronto in January 2017 and has been working as an associate dentist in several offices since. In October of this year, Dr. Omid Azami started the NoobieDentist Podcast to connect with other new grads and associate dentists from around the world. The podcast has since evolved to include a series called the “Dentists of Instagram” where Dr. Azami hopes to interview dentists who are influencers in the Instagram dental community. Dr. Azami hopes to grow the podcast and eventually build an online continuing education platform for new grads and dental students.
www.noobiedentist.com
Omid: Hello and welcome to a special episode of The Noobie Dentist podcast. I am so thrilled to be here with one of my role models and mentors, Dr. Howard Farran, founder of Dentaltown, founder of Dentistry Uncensored. Thank you so much for agreeing to be on my show. We had a chance to meet a few weeks back while you were in Toronto for a conference and that was a special evening for me to get a chance to meet you and talk to you. As I told you at dinner, you've had such a big role to play in my early dental career. When I was a dental student in Melbourne I found by chance your 30-day dental MBA. Luckily you released that for free, so I really do appreciate that. I would listen to that on my walk every day to school and from there I got introduced to the world of podcasting and started branching out a little bit.
Coming back to Canada now, my main reason for starting the podcast was I missed my dental school buddies basically; had no one to come home and vent to or talk dentistry to. So I decided to start to podcast and reach out to new grads.You've been such an inspiration. So I really appreciate -- I got some goosebumps here getting all ready to talk to you. So thank you so much. I'll let you take the mike if you want to say anything and then we'll sort of jump off from there.
Howard: Well I'm just glad that your podcast is on audio, iTunes only. You got some good hair there so I look -- if they saw this in video they'd be cringing. I look like the before picture and you look like the after picture. But that's so cool, you were telling me that -- you went to school in Melbourne -- that if you go to school in Canada, Australia, Ireland or New Zealand, the diplomas work each way. One of the saddest stories I ever saw, but opportunities -- necessity is the mother of invention --I got out of school in '87, I came to Phoenix and I met this 87-year-old Jewish lady who owned four offices: north, south, east, west Phoenix. I was talking to her and I said, "What's going on?" And she said she fled Nazi Germany and when she got to the United States they wouldn't honor her degree. And I thought, "What do you mean they wouldn't honor her degree?" Germany makes Mercedes and Porsche and Volvo and the United States makes the infamous shitty Chevy and Ford and Chrysler. But anyway, what was cool is since she -- she went and got a lawyer and they said, "No, you have to go back to dental school." And she couldn't; she was married, family. So it forced her to just own dental offices. She still could own a dental office, because you had to be a dentist to own an office. So it forced her, by forcing her not to be able to do the dentistry, she could only work on the business of dentistry and she said, "You know what? If they would have gave me a license to practice I would've had some little office with four chairs and been drilling away and I probably would have retired at 65 for health reasons. But since I didn't need my health to own the businesses, now I own four offices, they do ten million dollars a year." And she drove around in a chauffeur because she was like eighty-five or eighty-six when I met her. And she was having the time of her life! And I thought, "My God, it's funny how some people make lemonade out of lemons."
Omid: Yeah, that's incredible. So the main thing I wanted to get from you today and learn from you is: I look at your work and what you've accomplished throughout your career. And I think you're actually, truly a visionary. I think you don't get enough credit as you deserve. Early internet days you come out with Dentaltown. So what I'm curious is if we can take a step back is just tell your vision. When you come out of school -- I know your story: you bought a practice, you're going door to door, you're getting people to sign up to fill your schedule. You're hustling it out. At what point in your career did you say, “You know what? I want to do something outside of dentistry. I want to venture out, I want to start this side project.” Which became eventually Dentaltown and Orthotown and the podcast eventually. I'm back at the initial stage right now and I've got this side project going. I just want to see your vision, what was that like when you were first starting out and what made you have the idea and how did you execute it?
Howard: Well, first of all just a correction, I didn't buy a practice I started a scratch practice. So I started a scratch practice. But I always knew that your net worth is always going to be equal to your network. And a lot of people say, "Well that guy's lucky because he met this guy and they met at the Stanford Graduate School or whatever." And that's part of college. But when I got out of school I only had a few unique selling propositions. Everybody back then was doing amalgam. Amalgam was superior, it still is superior today but the market wanted composites. I was doing all these composites. They come out with this bleaching, I did -- I think I actually really seriously did the first bleaching case in Arizona in '87 -- only because the guy from Omni International, which sold the first bleach, was made out of Arkansas, he lived across the street from me. His name was David Keel and it was $900 for six bottles and I said, "Dude I'm not going to do this." And he says, "Well I'll just give you a case." So it's because he lived across the street and he gave me a case and then I went in there and I said, "Well we can't do this on our patient, we haven't done it ourselves." So everybody in the office bleached their uppers and didn't bleach their lowers and we were selling it $350 dollars an arch, $500 for a full mouth just because no one else was doing it.
I was in retail space when everybody's in a medical dental building. I had a full-page ad in the yellow pages and it was considered immoral. I was going door to door. I canvassed my whole area. So I thought, "You know what? I'm going to go out and I'm going to lecture because I'm passionate about what I'm doing. It's going to open the doors, it's going to open the floodgates and I'm going to start meeting a bunch of people.” And every time you meet a hundred people, one of them -- you might get 100 new patients in an orthodontic office but only start one or six. But I thought every time I meet a 100 people in dentistry one of them is going to have an opportunity to actually get started.
So just going out there, pressing the flesh, running for mayor, just opens up all these opportunities. I didn't like golfing with dentists because when I was young all these specialists wanted to go golf, but they don't want to talk dentistry. They said, "Look. We don't want to talk about -- we have two rules: we don't talk about our wives or dentistry when we golf.” And I thought, "Well this is a four-hour waste of complete frickin time. I'd rather sit with you four hours in a bar and get you shit faced so you actually tell me what's on your mind." So yeah, I just wanted to go out there and press the flesh, meet people. Like after I lectured at that seminar, we all went out to dinner. That was stimulating conversation and it is just that networking. And I want to tell you that -- how old are you?
Omid: 28.
Howard: Okay so I'm -- My oldest boy Eric is 28. So I'm 55. I mean, I'm telling you that you have no idea what's around the corner in five or ten years. No one in my dental school saw the personal computer coming, the laptop coming, the cell phone, the smartphone, the internet. Nobody sees all these things. And when you've gone around the sun 55 times, you never know what's going around the corner. Even political. Nobody saw the Berlin Wall coming down. Nobody saw the Arab uprising. All these experts and pundits never gave me a heads up one time what was around the corner, because nobody knows.
And what I would say that with technology, especially for you for dentistry, if you study the stock market from like 1880 to today, the booms were all technology driven. At first it was the steam engine in the 1880s and then as things get -- new technology comes out, it's faster, easier, lower costs and more miniature. When that steam engine got smaller it went to shipbuilding. When the ships got to America that turned into canal building and then it turned into the railroad deal. Then the Telegraph turned into the telephone, the telephone line was the same wire turned into the Internet. You notice that same copper wire was the telegraph, the telephone and the Internet, right? Now you look at the thing. The thing is Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google and I would add Microsoft to that. But '93 to '94 it was Dell, Cisco, Intel, Windows. When I was a freshman in dental school it was the nifty 50 led by Xerox and Kodak. So as hot as you think thing is now, it's always something.
So what you have to do is you have to train your mind to jump on new technologies. Look at some of these big technologies that came out that launched some huge careers. Like CAD/CAM came out. So Sameer Puri was a huge guy on Dentaltown. He had 10, 15, 20,000 posts and he saw that that was the next big thing in dentistry, and it's always going to be technology. So he dove on the technology, became the number one expert to this day in CAD/CAM and he lectures and has an institute. Other people did it with lasers. So if you want to be an expert in something and you're only 28 years old, is it going to be CBCT? Look at the people that got big on that. Now we have, instead of CAD/CAM we have the printed stuff called --
Omid: Like [00:09:43] 4M2 [0.1] 3D printing?
Howard: Yeah 3D printing. You've seen some big moves in that and a lot of these guys, a lot of these young dentists went to the big powerhouse companies, like they'll go to Ivoclar -- made Bill Dickerson and all of LVI, it was a new technology again. That new technology started with Bob Gibson, who just passed away, the founder of DenMat, which was dental materials. He was out there in Santa Maria, California and he wrote the first book. And back then it was called Adhesive Dentistry. And then Ivoclar took adhesive dentistry to a whole new level.
So you join ranks with a billion dollar a year company on a new technology and you're going to -- and it's fun, because when I started lecturing I never hooked up with a company. Never have to this day. I hooked up with my own media company; magazine in '94 which we called The Farran Report, just a one-way magazine going to you at $10 a month subscription. I had 4000 dentists giving me $10 dollars a month for about a 30-page black and white magazine.
Omid: So how did you build that up though? I'm curious. Like, starting from: you're a practicing dentist. How did you get the credibility -- and that's my question that I'm thinking about now is, if I want to enter into the lecture circuit, I see like a split in the road. I think for yourself you've built your lecturing series on the business side of dentistry and that's where you excel, whereas other people they're more clinicians and they get famous off a certain bonding system or like you said CEREC or CAT/CAM.
So how did you, early on in your career, decide this is the road that you want to take and you want to explore the -- be a famous lecturer or influencer in the business side of dentistry? Because that's something I'm struggling with right now is, in dental school my main focus was more of the business side of things. I do a lot of clinical dentistry. But listening to yourself, from Mark Costes with his Dentalpreneur podcast.
So I'm sort of in this fork in the road where I’m not sure if I should dedicate myself more so to the business side and try and become an influencer and a lecturer and that side of things, or do I want to be an excellent clinician and lecture on a certain emerging technology like you just mentioned. So what made you decide that fork and which way you want to go on that?
Howard: Okay, so you go to eight years of college and instead of a dental degree you get a lawn mowing degree and when you graduate they hand you a lawn mower. Okay, well, if you're going to push that lawn mower from 25 to 65, there's a lot of problems to that. Number one: what if there is a health problem? I never owned disability insurance in my life. I thought it was a joke even though I had four kids. I thought if I lost an eye or a hand or whatever, I can't sit down 12 hours a day and do nothing, I'm going to do something and I'm going to win at it.
But pushing a lawnmower is not scalable. I have five different patients who were born in Mexico, came up here, illegally I might add, and pushing a lawn mower. And within five years they had five trucks. They had five teams doing these houses and then they tried to get out of residential and go to commercial. But anyway, they all make as much money as I do and I live in a pretty rocking hot neighborhood. And there's a guy around the corner born in Mexico, snuck in here and owns the biggest Mexican restaurant downtown. About three doors down from him is a guy that owns five trucks.
But you got to be scalable. What I thought is, sitting there working on one tooth, it's not scalable. Furthermore, theoretically, wouldn't dentistry be better, instead of fixing one tooth, to try to get 100 people to fix their one tooth five percent better a year or three per cent better a year? Or the rule of 72: if I can make it three percent better, what's 72 divided by three? That's how long it would take to double. What is that 72 divided by three? That means every 24 years their fillings would be twice as good. The rule of 72. That's how you figure your return. If you're making an eight percent on your money, you take 72, divide it by eight and every nine years you've doubled your money.
So I thought it's scalable. So then what is scalable? I would say if you're in the business of dentistry, you've got your dental degree, no one would go to a dental lecture and listen to a dental assistant even though my dental assistant who has been with me 30 years, Jan, could do a filling better than anybody in any dental school in America.
And now they're having the -- look at it the other way, with dental therapists -- I'm going to come back to dental therapists -- but I would say dental therapists and DSOs. So what happens is the dentists, they are all complaining about dental therapists. Well, there's never been a dentist president of the United States, there has never been a dentist in the Senate, there's never been a dentist in the supreme court, but we have four dentists today in the United States Congress. And I tell you, they won't come on my show. I've talked to them, I've reached out. It's political weirdness in the United States right now, as I'm sure you're aware of the politics in the United States. And that's another thing I don't ever talk about really is politics, sex, religion, or violence. But they'll probably all come on the show when they're trying to raise money for their next two-year term, I'm sure of that. I'm sure three months before next 2018, November election they will all come on the show.
But the bottom line is: dental therapist: this is the same damn argument when they came out with the damn dental hygienist. And the smart ones said, "Number one, this is coming at us. The schools are going to make dental hygienists.” Would you rather do the cleaning or would you have the dental hygienist do your cleaning? I can't believe dentists are fighting dental therapists Because I already have been -- and that's another thing, you get really smart going around. I never knew, when I gave my first lecture, that just last year Ryan and I were in five continents. I mean we've had dinner, like you did in Toronto, we've had dinner like that in Cambodia and Indonesia and Tokyo and China and Hong Kong and London, Paris, France. When you see the whole globe from 36,000 feet it all starts making sense. I want dental therapists. Who the hell wants to go to work and do an MOD composite? If you go to work and you just can't wait to do an MOD composite, what are you going to do next, the cleaning? After you do the cleaning what do you do? Do you get excited when you go do the autoclave? Then what are you going to do? Buy a lawnmower and start mowing your lawn?
Omid: So what do you think --
Howard: So I would -- if your passion is business, go online, get your MBA, you don't have to sit in a bricks and mortar building to get an MBA. And I would start doing the business. DSO is huge. Right now 12 out of every 100 dentists in America right now works for DSO and they're doing 19 percent of the dentistry. If you measure it by the amount of supplies they're buying. The size of the market for just explaining DSOs, or the next new thing, dental therapists.
If your passion is business, what I like about business, it's scalable. What I like about teaching is that if you ever do lose your eye or your hand or -- one of my great friends here in the valley just got disabled and so he immediately went back to teaching at one of the dental schools. It's nice to have something else in your [00:17:44] will fly. [0.9]. But back to those four dentists in Congress. It's real clear that the average dentist makes $175,000 a year. And if you're a specialist, whether that be an oral surgeon, orthodontist, pediatric dentist or endodontist, all four of those are making over $300,000. Well Congress has zero sympathy for someone making $175,000 a year. So these dentists that are on Dentaltown all day long, "Oh my God. I used to make $300,000 a year and last year I barely made $200,000.” What percent of Canadians would kill to make $200,000 a year?
Omid: I think the stats say if you earn over $178,000 in a year you're in the top one percent. 99 percent of the population --
Howard: Dentists are delusional. They're completely delusional because they think, "Well I went to school for years." Yeah, well are you digging coal? Are you in a mine. Are you falling off a cell phone tower wiring some damn Verizon box up there so your cell phone works when you're driving down the highway? Dentists say they have the highest suicide rate. Are you out of your mind? The soldiers, the army, navy, air force -- the army: 26 suicides a day. And dentists will still look you in the eye and say, "We have the highest suicide rate." That's what all the police officers say. That's what all the firemen say. Everybody has their little violin and they're all -- like police officers said, "Well we put our life in the line of duty." Every time a police officer dies, seven Americans die. Fishing for crabs in the ocean: it's seven times more dangerous to be a fisherman. So if you're so, "My life is, I risk my life every day." Well then trade in your pistol for a fishing pole. You know what I mean? And the guy with the fishing pole doesn't have the police pension, the guy who's a fisherman, oh he'll get his Social Security. But the policeman will get Social Security and a pension. So nobody wants to look at reality. They all want to whine that they're a victim and they're a loser and poor pitiful me. And it's all crazy.
Omid: Perspective is key. I want to ask you about that actually. You mentioned the hygienist situation. Obviously I went to school in Australia, so I know the Australian model quite well as well. And it's not a thing there. So most dentists I know, most new guys, even more experienced dentists, they're doing their own cleanings in Australia. So where did that separation come with like North America and places like Australia do you think?
Howard: Well there's a lot of historical context. Only about 20 countries out of 220 countries even have hygiene schools, and basically America was unique in the fact that -- so after World War Two, everybody that exported stuff: like cars, refrigerators, all the stuff, was basically Germany and Japan. And they were levelled. America, in that world war, nothing really came here other than Pearl Harbor. So after World War Two, if you wanted to buy a car or refrigerator or anything like that it was America. So America had this massive economic boom and everybody thinks that we can get back to there someday. You could. You could get back there. Instead of going to war with Iraq and Afghanistan, you need to go back to war with not only Japan and Germany, but now you've got to add South Korea and Italy and all. So if McDonald's went out and blew up all the In and Out burgers and Burger King and Wendy's they'd have massive boom. So during that massive boom America was so wealthy they started this dental insurance company, Delta Dental. It was actually the -- what was the name of that Union? It was the Shipperman's Union? It was the ship builder's union And so they started Delta Dental. And they started at $1000, and they covered cleanings at 100 percent, and it was bank. So dental schools saw that, that all we do is graduate somebody that can do this cleaning and there's a third party is going to pay for that. Well that was a thousand dollars back in 1948. Now it's 2017.
So that thousand dollars to be true, constant dollars would be in the neighborhood of like $6000. Ryan go on an inflation calculator. $1000 in 1948 would be worth how much in 2017? So that's what fueled -- money is the answer, what's the question? So all the dental schools started dumping out all these hygienists -- and by the way dentists always say they want to do the right thing, what's best for their patients. My God, Roentgen invented the X-ray machine a century ago and not any dentist touched it. And then Delta started covering X-rays at 100 percent. It was the fastest domino effect across the country. Within about five years every damn dental office had an X-ray machine and a hygienist because it was covered at 100 percent. So that's why it happened. So then what happened to other countries that have hygienists, like Singapore? Well, the dentists -- go back to Australia where you're from. There's only three publicly traded dental companies in the world. Two of them are in Australia, one is 300 Smiles, one is Pacific Smiles.
And then you go over to Singapore and it's Q&M, and none of them have a hygienist. Why? Because if insurance is going to pay you $50 for a cleaning and the hygienist is $40, and you got 65 percent overhead, anybody in the first grade would say, "Hey Mom, Dad why don't you do your own cleanings?" And the smart dentists realize, well hell, if you pay the dentist 25 percent of production and it's a $50 cleaning, they're going to do it for $12, $12.50. Nobody who's in the profit zone pays a hygienist $40 an hour to do a $55-dollar cleaning. So the hygienists are dead. They're dead And so now the dentists that do figure it out, then they show their lazy card. They're lazy because they're already making $175,000 a year. They don't want to do the cleaning, they don't want to deal with the autoclave. And then they say, "Well, yeah, but when she does the cleaning I could be doing a crown or a root canal." And I said, "Dude, you're back here surfing the Internet for an hour. You've been on Facebook for an hour while you're $40 hygienist just did a $55 cleaning.”
So you're seeing a lot of dentists start to get mean and lean, where a lot of them say, "You know what? I'll come in the morning and I'll do all my root canals, fillings and crowns and I'll go to lunch. I'll come back and I'll do my hygiene in two chairs with -- instead of a $40 an hour hygienist I'll get a $20 an hour assistant. She'll seat the patient, takes the X-rays, and then I'll come in and probe, she'll record. And then when I start scaling she'll go to the next room and she'll clean up that room and get all that ready, she'll seat the next patient while I'm scaling and polishing and all that”. So they'll just work two rooms. So in the afternoon they'll see two hygiene an hour and they'll come back at 1, 1 to 5. And in that four hours see their hygiene production. So getting into the profit zone is huge.
So when I was in Singapore -- Ryan and I did a couple of podcasts there -- we met a lot of dentists that used to have hygienists. But due to the reimbursement, nobody -- we didn't meet anybody that had a hygienist. There wasn't a hygienist at my seminar: "Is there any hygienists here?" I said, "How many of you have a hygienist working for you?" No hands went up. I said, "How many of you used to have a hygienist?" A bunch of hands went up and they said the third-party reimbursement is -- now what's going to be better than a hygienist is a dental therapist. But the dentists, they're not economically minded enough to know it, because they're getting a $50 cleaning, about $55 dollars in Arizona, and the wage for a hygienist out here is $40. But the dental therapist, they might be getting $150 for a filling and probably paying that dental therapist the same as a hygienist. So if you're paying a dental therapist $40 to do $100 or $150 filling, and maybe she can do two an hour, you're going to make bank offer and I've already -- that's the advantage of traveling around the United States -- I've already had dinner with dentists who are absolutely infatuated and in love with dental therapists, because now they're not doing any composites because you can work faster on an extraction. But it's hard to work faster when you sat down and you got to do four MOD composites on two, three, four and five, I mean that's just an hour, anyway you're going to look at it. It's like when mom says, "Mow the yard." What are you going to do? Run with the lawn mower in your hand.? So I think dental therapists are going to be a godsend over dental hygienists.
So if your passion is business, I’d get your online MBA, I'd start focusing on DSOs. A lot of them want consultants too. A lot of these DSOs, these venture capitalists will go buy 15 dental offices thinking it's lucrative, then they find out, they're pulling their hair out and they have a nightmare.
Omid: So my question is though, how do you -- and then when you started out as well -- how do I right now have the social capital to be like: I know what I'm talking about, come listen to me. Versus everyone else out there right now
Howard: Marketing is everything. Experts are all self-declared. So let me show you how I started lecturing. So I got a zip code map of the United States and the zip codes all start with nine up in New York and Maine, and then by Kansas it's six -- no it's zero up there in the northeast, then it's one, and then I think it's four in Florida. It's six in Kansas, nine out in Arizona. So I get the zip code map and then I said, "Okay, there's 50 weekends in the year. What are the 50 largest cities?" So I got that map and I put a pin in the 50 largest cities. But it was on a zip code map. And then I realized -- so then what I did is I mailed six weeks and two weeks before each one of those cities and I got the lowest cost airport Holiday Inn. So if I flew in I could just take a shuttle to the hotel. And so after work on Friday I'd fly to one of those 50 cities, I'd wake up the next morning -- and so I'd mail to all the dentists in that area, six weeks before, two weeks before. I'd go in there and I'd lecture. I got out of school at 24 years old, I was born in August 29th, '62. So I graduated May 11, '87. Do the math. And I started lecturing. So I was this 27-year-old punk ass kid. But you know --
Omid: So what was the progression? How many people turned up to your first ever lecture if you remember.
Howard: I think the first 50 largest city weekend, I think the first year was 12 average, total body. [00:29:00] Dentists wife staff. [0.7] Then the next year I think it was 24, and then the next year is probably like 35 and then the fourth year I quit because I started getting invitationals. Who is this guy? So I stopped promoting myself because the way humans work, if I walked up to you and say, "Hey Omid, I'm all that and a bag of chips." You’d think, well that's an arrogant idiot. But if Ryan talked to you, said, "My God, my dad is all that and a bag of chips." You'd say, "Really, tell me why." So third person endorsement is huge. So the fourth year I stopped because I started getting invitationals and I thought, "You know what? I just have a lot more credibility if you're a local study club or a state meeting brings me in."
And then the other thing I'm most proud of, is I was always true to myself. I never worked a day in my life -- I worked for my dad for 10 years installing drive-ins and he was my idol, my role model. He was my main thang. He died in 1999. And then I worked for myself for 30 years.The only way anybody could ever understand me ever is they'd have to watch that Howard Stern movie. 'Private Parts.’ And Howard knew that the people listening to talk radio all day long were in construction, roofers, had a boom box and he knew that they like fart jokes and women jokes and all that kind of stuff like that. And every radio station, you work out the ratings would go up and then they'd fire him. You know, the ratings would go up, they'd get a complaint and they'd fire him and Howard Stern said, “Are you an idiot?” So him and his wife just kept going from city to city to city to city. The guy got fired in a dozen markets and then finally these two boys in New York City said, "You know what? He's rude and crude and we don't personally like him or his show but look at his ratings."
And I would go in there and it was rated G. I never showed nudity, I never said the F word, no violence, but I would sit there and talk like you and me at dinner. No punches pulled. It was irreverent and it's like you couldn't go into church -- but you can't say a fart joke in church -- but as soon as you walk into the parking lot you can say a fart joke. But the dentists in their anally retentive, weird psycho mind: they're poor, they're underpaid, they're abused, and if you say fart -- so what would happen is, I'm the only person in the audience seeing the faces of the audience. So I'm saying this stuff and they're busting up laughing. Then there's always some anally retentive, psycho dentist in the back would write this mean nasty letter. And then they would -- but it's funny, whenever they send me the letter, I'd take a big magic marker and I just wrote on their letter, "Get help." And then I'd fold it up and I'd mail it back.
So stay true to yourself. Because if I would have tamed down my lectures so that the mental midgets would be happy -- and it's really a form of abuse, because the people that are always offended, you have to listen to all their religious stuff, but if you say a word that starts with F and ends with you U.C.K and isn't fire truck, then they're are all offended and they're all running off a cliff and jumping. It's called tolerance. You don't have to like me or be me or agree with me but you can listen to the information. And why aren't you aware of your surroundings enough to know that everyone else in the room is laughing. So everybody in the room is laughing their ass off and you're having a heart attack. Maybe you're psycho. Maybe you're crazy. So I did the Howard Stern deal, just stay true to yourself. And it worked out great.
Omid: That's amazing, I love that. Because I think with millennials especially, like my generation, we want things to come quickly. That's why I asked you specifically how many people do you have first year, second year. Because I think with podcasting, I started a podcast, it takes very minimal effort. There's no barrier to entry, right? Anyone can just start a podcast. But I think it's the perseverance over time, sticking with it, producing good content, that over time the cream rises to the top and that's when you can make it.
Howard: I want to say one thing. That's so right. The technology today, I didn't have that when I started lecturing.
Omid: It's crazy.
Howard: I only had direct mail. That was the only thing I had and it's expensive. You have lower frictional costs to get you -- you could build a brand faster today than ever before. And I'll tell you another thing. I'll tell you one other thing. You remember when I started my office I went door to door? If you want something go and ask for it. You know who gets the most invitationals? They'll be on Dentaltown. And they'll sit there and they're posting away. Every time they're posting. The people who post a thousand times a year and they'll say, "By the way, I got this really great presentation." They'll be answering your question and they'll be saying, "By the way Doctor Omid, I got a really good all day presentation on this, and if you want me come up and lecture your study class, I'd be glad to, here's my number.” If you want something ask for it. Don't sit there and beat around the bush and say, "Well I'm going to wait --
Omid: I think that the important thing is what you mentioned. They're the ones that provide a lot of value as well, right? They're not just asking, they're giving and giving and giving. And then when the time is right, when they think they're ready, they're asking. And that's when they've built up that sort of capital with people that people listen. So that's the next thing I want to get into with you actually, is the role of social media in dentistry today. Because just even in my journey, like I started my podcast less than a month ago and I'm already -- and without even trying to make anything up or anything -- when I first started my podcast I was like, "My goal is to talk to Howard Farran." Because you're one of the people I’ve looked up to. I couldn't believe it, in the space of one month it happened. And I think, like you mentioned yourself, the social media and how connected people are and how easily accessible role models and mentors are. It's crazy how quickly things can escalate for you if you just stick with it, if you know what you're asking for and not asking for too much.
So what do you think? I respect that at this stage of your career, you are so active. You are on LinkedIn, you’re on Instagram, you're on Twitter, you're on Facebook. How do you stay current and how do you see it changing? How do people jump on the curve and stay ahead of the curve? Because you seem to be a visionary because you got on the internet early with Dentaltown, you got into podcasting really early with Dentistry Uncensored. So how do you catch these trends and how do you go from there
Howard: Let me ask you -- 19, how old were you in 1995?
Omid: I was six.
Howard: Okay. So I want to give all you young millennials a tour. So how social media really started was the telegraph. And then that turned into the telephone. Now, I'm so old, when we got our phone we had a party line. Do you know what a party line is?
Omid: No.
Howard: A party line was: your block had one phone that was going all the time. So you would pick it up and if you were talking to your cousin Eddie, I could hear the conversation. I'd hang back up. But then I'd get back on and say, "Hey could you guys break it up because I need to make a call." You know what I mean? And then it turned into the private phone. And then it turned into the Internet. And Amazon started in about '94, it was about '95 where I saw the first social media in dentistry and they were e-mail groups. And it was like dentist@yahoo or dentist@compuserve. And one of the ones I loved the first was Rootzx, which was on endo. And then the Internet Dental Forum right here in Phoenix with Dave Dodell. Which by the way just closed shop yesterday. They finally closed down.
But what it was is it was just e-mail. And by the way, yesterday was the 25-year anniversary of the first text. And so you would open up your e-mail box and at first it was so exciting because all these e-mails from all these dentists around the world were coming and talking about root canals on Rootzx, or whatever on IDF. But the problem was instantly clear to me that, "Oh my god. I can't find the e-mails I need to answer. I've got 1000 e-mails."
Another one was Generation X with Mike Maroon. Don't want to miss him out. All three of those guys were great inners. Ken Serota with Rootzx. Dave Dodell, Internet Dental Forum. Mike Maroon of Generation X. But the next generation of social media was: we got to get all this shit out of our e-mail box. So they started going to websites. And so that's all that Friendster was, that's all that Myspace was. In fact, when I started Dentaltown in '98, Facebook was 2004. I beat Facebook by six years. But Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, to this day is just this endless news feed. And I looked at it and said, "Well you know, that's exciting." But what would happen in the endless news feed is you would get on there and ask, "How do you remove a broken file in a tooth?" And everybody would passionately explain it. And then a month later someone comes back and asks the same damn question. So now only half as many kind of explained it. And then you join three months later, you ask the same question, everybody's just like, "I'm not going to do all this again." So then you think, "Well god this group is crap. I mean, I asked a question no one even replied." So I was the first one with the message board forum, separating 50 categories: root canals, fillings, crowns. Because if you look at the search behavior of Dentaltown, most people go to Dentaltown they'll search like CAD/CAM or broken file, they'll go to endo, they'll find a thread and it's already like an FAQ, there's already 20, 30 pages on this. Very seldom do they get through the end of that thread and still have an additional question. I mean, the problem is so limited, there's so many dentists, they work all themselves out. So it's organized.
And that's the way Twitter is to this day, Instagram, LinkedIn, it's an endless unorganized news feed. Now Facebook is the first one that I say seriously messed everything up because instead of -- if you have a hundred friends and you make a Facebook post it doesn't go to your 100 friends. Facebook's added algorithms, and they'll tell you only six percent of your post -- I mean, your posts will only go to six percent of your followers. Because they did this big bait and switch thing where they said, "Oh build up your community, build up your community. Buy ads, tell all your friends." And then as soon as you built up a community they say, "Oh well if you want your community to see it, you have to boost your posts and give us money.”
Omid: Yeah, they monetized it pretty well.
Howard: Yeah, they monetized it real well, but they messed it up because of algorithms. YouTube did the same thing. If I go to YouTube and I type in there 'vegan diets.' The next hundred videos they serve up are all vegan diets. If I went in there -- and this is where it can it can radicalize people, because you might be the only guy in your city who has this dark thought about maybe the Holocaust didn't exist, but if you typed that into YouTube, the next hundred videos it would serve you are all these people telling you it didn't exist. And the next thing you know, you're living in a bubble and think the holocaust didn't happen. And that is all because of algorithms which took it to the dark side. And if it wasn't dark side you'd realize, okay I got 100 friends on Facebook and nobody is posting stuff that the Holocaust didn't exist or are all this. So the algorithms have completely messed it up. And I think Facebook -- I've been through this with Myspace and Friendster. And again, I told you earlier, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, shit in '94 it was Dell and Intel and Microsoft and Cisco. And then in 1980 it was Kodak and --
Omid: Yeah, the players change.
Howard: So the players change. But I think that they better correct their algorithm problem because it's making people live in a bubble. Like if you love Trump, they're going to serve you up all these Trump sponsored ads and Trump fake news, and you'll believe everybody loves Trump. But if it was a news feed, you know what -- that's why on Twitter I don't follow anybody but dentists, or people who work in dentistry. Because I don't want to follow certain political, religious, whatever, because I want to know what my homies are following. So I can tell the dental market -- what percent are retweeting Trump versus Obama or this or that. Or what gurus are they retweeting. And that's where I get a lot of my vibes about where the market is going. Just seeing what, on people who don't alter the news feed. But social media, what I do is -- I think people are spending all their time on Facebook and YouTube. That's where the hours are spent. That's why the sound podcasts, you're going to crush it on iTunes. But the reason I do the video is because when I put the video on Facebook and boost it that's a lot of reach. If I put the video on YouTube that's a lot of reach. So right now the podcast market is sound only. It's your smartphone in their pocket, they're driving to work. Whatever.
But there's a lot of -- the screen time really isn't changing with humans for the last 25 years. It's about two hours a day. And so all they've done is -- let me give you an example of watching my boys. If they go to cable television they're just scrolling down. Just like you're scrolling down your page. You got 500 channels and nothing on. So then they'll go to Shark Tank and they'll watch Shark Tank. But it's that interruption advertising. Interruption advertisers, they'll say, "You know what, I'd rather just go to YouTube, type in Shark Tank and watch a Shark Tank video without any advertising.”
Omid: Yeah no one watches live TV unless it's sports I feel like any more.
Howard: Right, for all market. But 50 and over are the only people that watch TV. Fifteen hundred that's left. And that's why Netflix has gone off the charts because it's non-interrupted. And cable's not even reacting. Like, you're watching a movie or you're watching the news, and then I have to watch a one minute commercial on restless leg syndrome, followed by a one minute commercial on [00:43:47] Cialis [0.7] followed by a one minute long -- like if they would make those 15 seconds, if they would run four 15 second ads instead of four one minute ads I actually might watch CNN. But I can’t watch Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning for an hour and watch 20 minutes of -- in the beginning of the commercials it’s all prescription pills, and then the second half is all law firms suing you for side effects from prescription pills. And that's why they'll never do any journalism on why 200,000 Americans die each year from eating these frickin pills. And they won't do any journalism on it because that's who's paying their meal ticket. And that's why when people say fake news there's a lot to it.
So you're saying where is social media going? Well there's B2B for you. And then there's B2 C for me: business to consumer. So business to business, I would add video to your podcasts and put on Facebook and YouTube and then you could buy search words for dentist or whatever and iTunes is still amazing. But then on the B2C, the dentist to the patient, right now the dentist is spending all this money on Facebook ad and YouTube ads. But if you look at the data, especially from Professor Scott Galloway at NYU School of Business, and you look at Stanford School of Business and Harvard School of Business, the number one return is still direct mail and e-mail blast. But millennials, it's so sexy to buy a Facebook ad to boost your Facebook post. When dentists believe that they're going to build their practice on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. First of all, when I do a direct mail piece to people over 55 -- how many of your millennial friends got All on Four last year? Of your millennial friends?
Omid: Zero.
Howard: Zero. So you really think grandma and grandpa are on Facebook and are going to reply to your Facebook ad? I mean, it's laughable. When I see anybody crushing it in dentistry they're still doing direct mail and they're still doing e-mail blasts. But look at Dentaltown. You call Dentaltown a magazine. I don't, I call it direct mail. I'm reminding the homies that of the 300 million websites, one of them is Dentaltown. And every five dentists I mail it to, one of them will log on that month. And then the companies, while you're looking at the magazine, that's direct mail.
And then our e-mail blasts, which pays for Dentaltown: every day we send the townies two e-mails, that sign up for it. And by the way, if you’re on Dentaltown and you opt out of the e-mail blast, come on dude, you're on a free website, just opt in the e-mail blast. It's about a six percent open rate. But that's what pays for the free website is the e-mail blasts, the digital, it ain't the banner ads. And the magazines direct mail.
And especially the millennials -- "Oh no it's got to be Facebook and Instagram." You know who you're going to bring in your office on Instagram? Some 28-year-old yoga instructor who brushes and flosses every day and doesn't eat gluten. Really, how big is that new treatment plan worth? You want the guy in the trailer. You want grandma. You want the construction guy that hasn't been to the dentist in six years and the only reason he is going to the dentist is because his wife won't face him during sex. And that guy needs four quadrants, root planing and curettage. But direct mail and e-mail blast is still number one.
And I think the next thing that I'm going to do, and I'm going to do it in about two weeks, is instead of giving Facebook and Google ads for my dental office website, todaysdental.com, I'm actually going to take the Dentaltown, 500,000 lines of code, and instead of calling it Dentaltown -- my city is Ahwatukee I'm going to call it Tukietown. And instead of root canals it'll be schools, churches, doctors, dentists, the whole nine yards. And I want to try to build a community. Instead of social media being sponsored by interruption ads. That's why the death of cable TV. They can't -- and look at cable TV, they say, "Well we have to get our money." Dude, every American that comes in my office bitches about their cable bill. They're already paying you $100 a month and then they got to be interrupted 15 minutes an hour. Netflix has gone off the charts because they're not interrupting anybody. So if I'm already giving you $100, I'm giving you a Benjamin every month -- or at least do things like, we just have the commercials at the beginning and the end. Or we just take, instead of four one minute commercials. But they're not even trying anything, so they'll just die.
And remember when you think you're all that and a bag of chips, the Fortune 500 in 1950, by 2015 88 percent of those companies were gone. So it's an 88 percent mortality rate and half -- what was it? From 2000, we looked it up the other day -- of the S&P 500 that died since 2000. 44 percent of the SMP500 died since the new millennium of 2000, just 17 years ago. So these guys are dead because they're not adjusting.
And I'm going to sit there and I'm going to take my dental office website and turn it into a community sponsored by Today's Dental. So instead of getting on -- it's local social. On Facebook you have friends around the world. This would be local social, just to my 85,000 homies in Ahwatukee, where one in eight of them has seen me as a dentist at some time in their life in the last 30 years. And here's our community, and we're not going to interrupt you with all these frickin commercials and banner ads. It's just going to be sponsored by Today's Dental. So it's going to take local social sponsored by -- so instead of international it's going to be local. Instead of an endless news feed like Twitter and LinkedIn or a sick news feed with algorithms: Facebook Google, YouTube. It's going to be message board just like Dentaltown. And it's not going to interrupt you. We are not going to pervert the distortion reality. We're not going to make you think you live in a bubble where everybody is -- we're going to let you see what your own community is actually talking about uninterrupted, without algorithms, so you can see what your community actually looks like instead of a bubble.
So I think that's my next step with social marketing B2C to my consumers. And as far as B2B, trying to reach dentist to dentist, I would say this: e-mail blast, direct mail blows away anything. And then if you're not going to do that just don't get in bed with people you have to give money to. I mean, would you rather make love for free to your girlfriend or pay some chick $300 to do it? And if you go post on Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and LinkedIn, you're making love for free. When you start playing with Facebook and YouTube, it's pay to play. And you know pay to play ain't good late on a Friday night. In fact, I believe they should pass laws that if you go to an ATM machine on a Friday or Saturday night past midnight and try to withdraw $500, it should say, "Come on man, let me call you a taxi. We're just going to have you picked up and taken home." So no pay to play with women or social media.
Omid: Yeah. So the final couple of things I wanted to touch on before we wrap things up here. A couple of questions that I'm having myself and I'm sure other people are having. So for people who -- obviously, a lot of podcasts and everything is focused on practice ownership and that side of things, and that's certainly something I’m working towards. But like you said, a lot of people are staying as associates and you're staying on as employees of practices. So as an associate, if your practice is not doing a great job marketing, what do you see -- have you seen people or talked to people who are associates and are successfully marketing themselves to attract patients to their offices that they're working at and if so what are they doing to be successful at that?
Howard: You know I would try to -- I know so many associates and they work there two years and I said, "Well did you ever go to lunch with the owner?"
"No."
"How many times do you go to the owner's house for dinner?"
"Never."
"How many times did you invite the owner over to your house for dinner?"
"Never."
And that's a generation of people -- when we were little we had to go outside and play and we only had like balls and sticks. And they're just on Facebook tweeting away all day. I would engage, I would become a leader, I would sit there and say, "Hey let's go to lunch, let's go to subway." And then I would go back to direct mail. Direct mail, direct mail, direct mail, direct mail. "Can we do this? Doc, I see you like to do implants. Let's do a direct mail piece and mail to everybody that's 50 and over. I like to do whatever. Or let's do just a four-page spread that covers the top four things that we make money on. Maybe it's implants, root canals, fillings, crowns, convenient hours. Let's get a staff picture." We don't need a photographer anymore; this iPhone is a thousand times better than any camera they had when I was getting my high school picture and my college picture done.
So I would engage them and I would network with them. If all you do is whine and complain, you're a whiner. Stating a problem without a solution is not the problem. So I would not spend money building up that office, I would just do what dentists never do and start engaging the owner. By the way, you go to these companies, like the big boys. The biggest boy on the block is Harlem with 800, then there's Pacific Dental, with Steve Thorn's got 500 and everything. Well who do you think moves up the corporate ladder? The dentist who sits there and says to the office manager, "Let's go to dinner." And then the next thing you know they're going to dinner with the regional manager, then it's the corporate, and the next thing you know, Rick Workman and Steve Thorn are like, "God dang, I get 100 dentists that have got their head buried in their iPhone and every time they get a break they're on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and they're frickin mental midgets and they don't have any human skills. But there is this one guy. And oh my God. Dr. Azami, he calls me up, talks to me like I'm his brother from the same mother." And I would have said, "Distance yourself."
Here's my deal I posted yesterday. "Distance yourself from people who speak poorly about others; have problems for every solution; think complaining is a strategy; feel entitled and overlooked; blame others for losing; tip poorly; make you feel bad about yourself; resist change at all costs and always brag about themselves." And then the thing I want to tell millennials, because you guys got a new variable with the student loan debt, the easiest dollar earned is a dollar in expenses saved. The second easiest dollar earned is a dollar in taxes saved. The hardest damn dollar you'll ever earn is to work more. Your income is not the problem, it's your spending.
Omid: And that leads me perfectly into the last question I was hoping to talk to you with. And this is something that I've been doing the math a little bit and now thinking back or forth a little bit as well. So in Canada here, obviously, we get student loans. I think in the US, obviously I don't know too much about it, it's more from the government side of things where you get the funding for these massive student loans that we're having. So in Canada we get it from the bank, it's like a student line of credit. And interest is quite low. So I graduated with about $300,000 all in. And the interest I'm paying right now is about four percent. So it's not very high. So it costs me per month for a minimum payment about $1200, in that ballpark.
Howard: Over how many years? That's over how many years? $300,000, $1200 payment, over how many years?
Omid: This is just making minimum payments, you're not even paying it down.
Howard: Oh you mean interest only is $1200 a month.
Omid: Yeah, yeah. So I can just maintain that for now. So my question is: obviously you have the experience and you're a good business mind as well. Say if I have $10,000 per month that I can play around with, either pay off the student loan or invest or take courses or take CE. I've been just making minimum payments for the last six, seven months that I've been working and investing that money. Trying to maximize the 41K equivalent for you guys, like our tax-free saving account. So say, for example if I make a 10 percent interest on that investment for the year, averaged out over five years, is that a good idea do you think? Or is it better to just pay off the loan as soon as possible versus investing and building up equity and assets and then paying down the loan later on once you're more established.
Howard: Well the number one question I got to know is, is that interest rate fixed or is it floating?
Omid: It's floating, so it's prime plus one percent.
Howard: Oh my God. So that's the thing, when you're young you either read -- you're going to live your one life. When people sit there and say something that was so long, it's like, the longest thing you're ever going to experience is your own life. And every time you read a book you can read another guy's life. So let's go back to me. How old were you when I was a freshman in college in 1980?
Omid: I wasn't born yet.
Howard: Okay. And then out of nowhere, just like the Berlin Wall fell, the Arab uprising, out of nowhere prime goes to 21 percent. Unemployment goes to 12 percent. It was an inflation. All three were double digits. There were farmers, there were friends of mine who -- farming is usually a family business, just like dentistry is. Probably 25 percent to a third of all that dentists I've ever met have a dentist somewhere in their family tree. You don't just decide you're going to be a wheat farmer. You were born into wheat farming and dairy farming and cattle farming. And these guys lost their family farms because they went and got a big old loan with floating interest to buy some $350,000 John Deere tractor. And next thing you know there was a bankruptcy and they lost a family farm and they literally walked into the barn with a 12-gauge shotgun and pulled the trigger with their toe and blew their head off. I know three of those. And so floating interest rate is like holding a grenade, pulling the pin and just holding and saying, "We're good." Because you're not going to see someone run up behind you and actually knock you over and you drop that grenade and you're dead. Floating interest needs fixed. If floating interest can't get fixed it needs to be paid out.
Dude, I'm telling you, did anybody see the 2008 meltdown? I mean, out of nowhere -- the economy's great and we're booming, we're booming. And I'll tell you something at 55 that makes sense to me a little bit more now. The reason you have cycles is because all the seven and a half billion humans making all the decisions are animals. They're homosapiens. So they make imperfect decisions and they make irrational -- so I come out of school and I see Omid put $1000 in Bitcoin, now he's got $5000. "Oh shit, I want to get in on that." So your three drinking buddies put in $1000 and then those guys go to $3000. So then all your friends jump in and the next thing you know --the reason bitcoin is going up so high is because everybody's buying and there's no sellers. The minute everybody tries to get their money out it'll go to zero. I mean, it's the craziest damn thing I've ever seen in my life. It's just another -- it's like the tulip bulb thing. 1600s.
So what I've noticed in my lifetime is about every decade, all this irrational decision making by -- when you go to the zoo, you're the only animal with clothes on. All the other animals are naked in cages, and you know who else should be naked in that cage? Probably the humans. If the humans were naked in the cages and all the animals roam the outside it'd probably be a much healthier planet. So when humans put their clothes on and they say they're not animals and they got a degree and they got some initials behind their name and then they start getting leveraged. It doesn't matter if it's stocks or real estate or bitcoin. And then the better you do; all your friends will pile on until it's so irrational. Once a decade your mom will come in the room and say, "We're going to pull the plug in this toilet and drain all this dirty water and start over." So if you got $300,000 of floating debt and your minimum monthly payment is 12 percent. Let me tell you, in 1980 -- you said it's at four percent -- 1980 it was 21 percent. When I got to school in 1987, when I bought my first house the interest rate was 14 percent. So I would say the first thing I would do if I was you is get the debt fixed, the interest rate fixed. And then I would get it to zero. And then --
Omid: Everything else afterwards. So it's a first priority.
Howard: Yeah, but do you think anybody saw the outbreak of World War One?
Omid: No.
Howard: World War Two? Was there one person in America who knew that the next morning Japan was going to level Pearl Harbor and in the following six months six million boys were going to be sent overseas? You don't see any of this shit happen. You just don't see these financial -- there's a lot of crazy people out there, a lot of extenuating circumstances, but leverage is the kiss of death. Leverage is death. Now leverage on fixed rate is manageable. I wouldn't want to come out of high school and work for 10 years at McDonald's and save up enough money to go to dental school. I'd rather borrow other people's money, go through dental school, and then instead of saving for it at McDonald's for $10 an hour I'm now paying of debt at $50 an hour. That's good leverage, but it's not quite that simple. I don't want to graduate $300,000 of student loans and then have interest rates go to 21 percent and I can't bankrupt my student loans but my twin brother is still working at McDonald's and he's got a nice little condo, he's got a hot little wife and he's got two kids. And you're sitting there pulling your hair out.
Omid: That's a great tip. Thank you for that. I'm meeting up with the bank actually next week so I'll talk to them about that.
Howard: If you're talking about newbies, there's a couple of guys on Dentaltown that all they do is refinance student loans. Have you seen some of those guys?
Omid: I haven't, no. Do you know their usernames? I'll look them up.
Howard: What's that guy we did, the student loan. Travis Hornsby. Optimize student loan payment with Travis Hornsby. It's episode 700. He's a smart man. He's already refinanced like a hundred million dollar’s worth of student loans. Because he has nothing to do with dentistry, he's just --
Omid: I've heard that episode actually, now that you mention it.
Howard: He's just like, "Dude you can't have $300,000 dollars of floating money because you don't know.” If you ask Warren Buffett: where's the market going to close tomorrow? He'd say, "I don't know." And he will say, "If you find anybody who tells you where the market's headed, cross that guy's name off your list because that guy's freaking crazy that's crazy shit." And I'll tell you what. I woke up blindsided to Mikhail Gorbachev and the Berlin Wall fell. I was blindsided on 9/11 and the year was 2001. I was blindsided by the Arab uprising. I've been blindsided several times in my life. And I was blindsided the most when I got out of dental school and I bought a Subaru and I went to my uncle's house who served during World War Two. And I pulled up in a Subaru and he came out screaming, yelling and made me pull that thing all the way around the side of the house. Then I had a four-hour lecture about what the Japanese did to him in Okinawa and his friends and all this. I mean you just don't know what's around the corner.
But the last century -- it's funny and humans never learn lessons. Because like, we're in 2017, so 2017 -- the first 17 years of the last century, let's say if that was in this century: well you'd already have the Spanish influenza, where five percent of the planet died. And what are the millennials? They're against vaccinations. "Ahhh vaccinations. I’m just going to feed my kid granola with no gluten." So the last generation knows that viruses, the number one public health measure we ever did was vaccines. And push back on vaccines now.
Also by 1917 you already would have had a world war. I mean it smells to me like there's one brewing in North Korea. I mean, what if anything happened and you had $300,000 floating 200 basis points over prime.
Omid: Game over.
Howard: But you can't bankrupt your student loans. If you would've bought a McDonald's franchise or a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise or open up a restaurant you get BK that off. But these millennials can't BK off over a trillion dollars of student loans. So I would get them refinanced, fixed. That'd be the first thing.
Omid: That's awesome. Thank you so much. I learned a lot. So I got to ask a lot of questions that I wanted to ask from you and you've done everything that I want to do. So it's nice to talk to you and see your journey and see what you've done and how you continue to do things and you're still ahead of the curve which is awesome. So thank you so much. Thank you for giving me an hour of your time and sitting down with me on my show. It's a new show and it's a competitive market now, a lot of great podcasts, especially for a young dentist: like The Life of Dentists podcast, The Millennial Dentist podcast. So it's hard to stick out amongst the crowd. But being up in Canada, I think I'm one of the only ones up in Canada doing a podcast. Most of my listeners are here, but also in Australia because I have my dental school buddies back home listening. But hopefully with having you on the show it’ll help me tap the US market a little bit.
Howard: Are you posting your podcasts on Dentaltown?
Omid: Yes I have been doing that, so hopefully that helps a little bit as well. Thank you so much. Thank you for talking to has been a it's been a pleasure.
Howard: The honor and privilege was all mine buddy, I hope you have a rocking hot day.
Omid: Thank you.
Howard: Thank you.