In this episode of The Knoodle Founder’s Hour, host Rosaria Cain sits down with Dr. Howard Farran, the visionary founder of Dentaltown. Howard shares his remarkable entrepreneurial journey, from launching a pioneering online community for dentists back in 1999 to his current investments in artificial intelligence.
Operating at the crossroads of dentistry, technology, and media, Howard explains how Dentaltown was built on a simple but powerful premise: no dentist should ever have to practice solo again. Beyond technology and business strategy, Howard brings a refreshingly candid perspective to the realities of healthcare, the necessity of customer empathy, and his own personal transformation from struggling with high blood pressure to completing three consecutive Ironman triathlons.
Whether you are a seasoned business owner or an aspiring founder, Howard’s insights offer a masterclass in innovation, resilience, and prioritizing what truly matters.
Key Takeaways from This Episode:
- Spotting the Next Big Thing: How Howard recognized the massive potential of the early internet through AOL and Amazon, and why he believes AI will completely define the next 20 years.
- The Reality of Entrepreneurship: Why building a successful business relies heavily on sheer persistence and intellectual curiosity rather than just innate brilliance.
- Leading with Empathy: The importance of understanding that customers (or patients) are often scared and anxious, and why simply listening to them is the best way to predict the future of your industry.
- Health is the Ultimate Wealth: Howard’s wake-up call regarding his physical health, his journey to rewire bad habits—like swapping out his Rocky Road ice cream addiction for Greek yogurt—and the importance of taking care of your body to maintain a sharp mind.
- Conquering Fear: Why taking the leap into business ownership is best done before you let fear hold you back, and why we shouldn’t live our lives guided by anxiety.
Tune in for an engaging, high-energy conversation that reminds us all that business, just like life, is a marathon, not a sprint!
Full Transcript:
Rosaria Cain 0:00
Welcome everyone. Good morning. I’m with Howard Farran from DentalTown. So tell us all about the work you do with dentists, orthodontists and hygienists around not just the country, but the world.
Howard Farran 0:16
Well, it was about 1998 and my kids’ teachers want us to download the internet and get this new AOL to help them do their homework. And so we got the, remember the AOL? You had to get the CD ROM, and you had to install it, and you had to dial online.
Rosaria Cain 0:33
I can still remember the sound it made.
Howard Farran 0:36
You’ve got mail. And I was looking at my boys using it for doing homework, and I just thought, Oh, my God, wouldn’t it be nice if there’s a place on the internet where you could talk to another dentist? You’re always alone and you realize dental education doesn’t start until you get out of dental school. Now, you’re all alone. You have no professors. You got an X-ray of this tooth. You can’t figure it out. And I thought, my God, if we could just post the Xr-ay and an image and say, I am Howard, and I don’t know what to do. And, oh, my God, it was just so amazing. And the orthodontist, I mean, they’d have some really complicated case. And out of nowhere, no one’s heard of it. And then all of a sudden, some dentists from Australia, post an ortho case exactly like this, that was done five years ago. So he’s got the pre op, the post op walks you all through it and I realized that if you created a place where really smart people could go and help each other, that would just be so valuable. And it turned out to be right.
Rosaria Cain 1:39
And Howard, so you bring dentists and people in the dental professions together, and you were ahead of your time, because did you say you you found a DentalTown in 1999?
Howard Farran 1:52
It launched in ’99 and started in ’98
Rosaria Cain 1:54
Okay
Howard Farran 1:54
But didn’t launch until ’99. Took us a year to get it up.
Rosaria Cain 1:56
But definitely ahead of your time, because the internet really was just starting to limp along at that time, take us through that time. Getting dentists together so they can compare notes and learn from each other, I think, is one of your stated objectives. Tell me how that all came together, where you realize that the internet was something that you could use for dentists, which was incredibly new. Let me know how that percolated.
Howard Farran 2:23
That’s always a journey of keeping your eyes open for what is the next best, next big thing. I mean, when I graduated dental school, there were no laptops, no iPhones. I mean, when I graduated dental school, the hottest new technology was an automatic garage door opener and a remote control on the TV, two things that I thought were genius. I didn’t see any of this coming. And it’s always coming. And you look at the history of the US stock market, I mean, it starts with the combustion engine, then it went to the telegraph, which then turned into the telephone and the internet, we went from horses to cars, and I was always had that eye out for the next big thing. And when I saw that, AOL, I said, this is not a little thing. This is an inflection point. This is going to be huge. And then also in ’93 or ’94 Amazon had launched, and I was watching the stock just go up higher and higher and higher. And I said, okay, that smart people, and they’re making decisions with money. They’re not talking, they’re not cheap talking. They’re putting their money where their thoughts are. And I thought, what is it about that? And then I finally realized that this is a huge change. This is no longer the telegraph, the telephone, this is a two way deal. And then I had that same thing happen to me just a few years ago, second time my life, where DentalTown had been out for, you know, 25 years, and then all of a sudden, I got ChatGPT, and I’m looking at ChatGPT and I thought, oh my god. So in dentistry 25 years ago, I had just paid off my student loans. I had just paid off my house. I graduated in ’87, I had just paid everything off, and I had just crossed the 1 million in savings, and that’s just paper, and I spent it all that year, I hired a dozen programmers, and a year later, we had DentalTown. And then 25 years later, I said, I already know the the strategy you don’t sit around and kick the ball around. You don’t kick the can down the road. You jump on it with everything you’ve got. So I took another million dollars and I hired a dozen software engineers from ASU and from the old world, I thought this would take a year. Oh, hell no, we’re two and a half years into it, and it just keeps changing and growing, and the goal post keeps moving and right now I still think I’m a year out, because the goalpost. I mean, AI, it’s the biggest inflection point there is and, just like what the internet did from, sure, it had been around for years and years, but it didn’t get in front of the consumer until about ’94 and the next 20 years completely defined by the internet. And the next 20 years will only be defined as AI.
Rosaria Cain 5:19
So 25 years ago, we invented the internet, or it really became commonplace. 25 years later, AI, what happens in 25 years? Have any predictions?
Howard Farran 5:33
Oh, you mean, what’s after AI?
Rosaria Cain 5:35
Or what does it evolve to?
Howard Farran 5:37
Well, you know, look at the internet. When the internet start from ’94 to 2000 when the internet crashed, because, again, the price of the stock, like now on the price of AI stocks, has nothing to do with the core technology. And I think at 2000 no one could have pictured where it is today. I mean there wasn’t Facebook, I mean, there wasn’t all these things. And I think AI, is there a lot of hype? Yeah, is it going to be able to do all the things that everybody thinks that it’s going to do? Of course not. But is it going to do a lot of amazing things that you can’t even envision right now? Absolutely.
Rosaria Cain 6:16
Is it going to destroy the world?
Howard Farran 6:18
You know what? That’s so funny, because, well, you know, I like pattern recognition. And, you know, I grew up Catholic and went to Mass every day from, you know, my whole childhood, and about 20% of the people always thought the inner world was coming, you know, it was going to come right now. And then you go in the stock market, and there’s very famous analysts out there that for 25 years, the sky’s falling. It’s gonna crash. We’re all gonna be, you know, eating out of our own garden, homeless. I mean, no, I think that’s a great story for fiction and writing. And I think they’re going to write, I think Netflix will explode just from AI doomscrolling movies.
Rosaria Cain 6:59
Well iRobot’s already been there, done that.
Howard Farran 7:02
Oh, I mean, my God, you’re you can’t even have your car. Well, well, look at, look at the job creation. Like your car only lasts five years, but somehow these robots are going to last forever and repair themselves and all stuff. It reminds me of Milton Friedman. So 1980 I’m a freshman at Creighton University, and two things really collide in my mind. One, Warren Buffett lived there in Berkshire Hathaway, and he came over and lectured to our business class. And he was real good friends with the Italian business teacher with long gray hair and he would always talk, and everything he said was just so profound. And then Milton Friedman came out with this book, Free To Choose. And Caterpillar called them up because India canceled all their equipment orders, because they thought, like, AI is going to take away all the jobs. And all these big tractors were taking away jobs. He’s like, man, we got 1,400,000,000 people. Why do we need some big tractor we I’d rather employ a bunch of guys with shovels. And Milton Friedman went over and said, You are absolutely right. And to follow up on your idea, let’s take away their shovels and give them spoons, and then it’ll take everybody in India to make this highway. And that was a deal where the guy realized that, you know, the big tractor is going to augment to workers so they can build a road faster, easier, higher quality, lower cost and scalable. And AI is, I mean, look at when the calculator came out. You know when the calculator came out? When I was at Creighton. That was a computer. Remember TI-55 no TI-54 it was the most expensive Texas Instruments. It was the most expensive calculator you could buy, calculus and integrals and derivatives, and it was just like, blew my mind. And then this one kid in our class, Joe Dovkin, was able to hook it up to a printer so he could print out. So, I mean, it was just like, mind blowing. Well, no matter how fast that calculator got, it never started talking to you and became your math teacher. No, I mean, it’s a large language model on a computer, and you think it’s a human, you think it’s going to think and take over the world. It’s the highest speed word processor you’ve ever found.
Rosaria Cain 9:13
It is, and it’s helped power DentalTown.
Howard Farran 9:15
And media, we’re both in media, and it’s changed media immensely. I mean, you can, I mean, it used to be, you know, when I started DentalTown, we didn’t have two dental schools. You know, we got two dental schools in towns. We got Midwestern Glendale and at still in Mesa. But before that, there was no dental school. So there’s no dental libraries. You know, how hard it was to find research before? And then you go the internet, then PubMed came out. That was a big thing.
Rosaria Cain 9:41
We used to go to the library for research.
Howard Farran 9:44
I’m from Kansas. It’s pronounced libary and get it right and but now you can, you can sit there and I spend like an hour before I write article, I spend like an hour thinking of like every possible question any dentist could have. And I’ll go. A dental town. I’ll search a word and what everybody’s talking about, and then I’ll enter that in AI and say, I’ll ask AI all those questions. And I’ll say, give me a source of published research. And I mean, and it’ll give you sources. I mean, that, you know, I probably couldn’t find in PubMed. And, my gosh, it’s just so amazing. I mean, I can do the deepest dive. Another one scary story. This friend of mine got this cancer. We ran into each other at the car wash, and he was telling me about it and everything. So I thought I just out of my own curiosity, I thought, I wonder what he’s up against, so I went and did my total deep dive on the deal. Well, it turns out that, you know, everybody thinks that their own country is the greatest. Nobody thinks a country far away that speaks a different language is greater than their country. Well, America, everybody thinks that, you know, like Barrows is the greatest, and it is. It’s an amazing institution. But is it the greatest in the world? Well, it turns out his cancer, that everything published in it was from a few universities in Scandinavian countries, Denmark and Finland. And I started doing a deep dive that then one of them had a vaccine experiment that they weren’t doing it in the United States. And I sent this guy all this information. He immediately booked a flight. He got on the vaccine study, they told me had a year to live. And this is a while back, and now he’s, like, I was like, 15 months ago, and he thinks his vaccine saved his, you know, say, I mean, he should be dead, and he feels great. And so you can do a deep dive like that on business. And a spray foam insulator guy was telling me that his biggest problem is the big boys buy this at 150 gallon barrels at a time, and he can only afford one, but they charge him like three times a barrel than the volume discount of, you know, buying 100 and I said, well, so I did a deep dive on that, and I found out all the answers for that, and I sent him this long deal, and he’s like, it’s all thanking me. And I said, Well, I was just curious. That whole thing only took me, like, a couple hours. And he just thought it was, I mean.
Rosaria Cain 12:09
It’s amazing, yeah. Let’s talk about DentalTown for a little more, because I find that fascinating. What’s your elevator speech? When, you meet someone and you talk about DentalTown.
Howard Farran 12:23
My elevator speech.
Rosaria Cain 12:24
Is it a community? Is it a media platform? Is it a shared objective? What is it?
Howard Farran 12:34
My elevator speech is just that, you know, we just use, you know, we’re dentist, we’re technology. I was, you know, media, and those three crossroads of dentistry, technology and media. I just wanted to build a place where really smart people could go and just help each other with that. With DentalTown.com no dentist would ever have to practice solo again. And, you know, I can see the future.
Rosaria Cain 13:00
And that’s great positioning, by the way. I think that really sums it up.
Howard Farran 13:04
And I think that the way you can see into the future, and the way you can see around corners is to close both your eyes and just listen to your customers. I mean, if you know where all the, what the all the dentists are thinking, well, you can predict the future because they’re not changing. They’re very consistent and and for founders, since this is founder to founder, you’re never successful because you’re brilliant. It’s never because you got a flat head from like, you know, oh my god. What did I just I just saw a vision? No, no, no, it’s persistence. It’s just the people that get up every day and run their marathon from eight to five you know that they want to go to work. They’re intellectual cures. They love their work. They even have a big part of their personal identity, like when I’m hiring programmers, you know, our dentist associates, you know, I want to make sure that it’s part of their identity. Like, remember, I think the biggest example that was Steve Jobs. They fired him from his company. Well, they might as well just killed him, because he was the company. It was his identity, innovator. He was it was just all he was. And when you find it, even when dentists retire, they still call themselves dentists, and go to continue education. I take more continued education now than when I was a dentist, because I have more time, right? But I’m just so curious about it. In fact, with dentistry, I don’t feel like, Oh, I got 48 years experience. I know that because that’s all old school and everything’s changed. I always feel like I’m a beginner, and I’ve been in this AI for three years, and I feel like I’m a junior in dental school, and I know that it’ll take four years just to say, Yeah, I got an honorary doctorate in AI from doing it for four years. But I know that’s when the education starts. It’s just listening to your customers, looking at the technology. And if you just, if that’s a big part of your identity. And the dentists who hate dentistry, I wouldn’t want to be their patient. No, I wouldn’t either. It’s the ones who love dentistry. They just, you know, the ones I can’t believe we have to take 15 hours of continuing education a year. It’s like, really, I mean, I’ve gone to courses where I literally fell in love with the instructor. I remember my first implant course was Carl Misch, and he’d been doing it forever. He even worked on the Pope. And it was like, his course was seven, three day weekends. I was sad when I finished course seven.
Rosaria Cain 15:34
It’s so much fun to learn.
Howard Farran 15:35
And I’m like, Are you gonna make a course eight? And he’s like, Well, you should read my book. I’m like, I did that before class one. I wasn’t gonna come here and ask stupid questions. I read your book. You had several editions, and yeah, it’s just if you know and and if you do things you hate for money, it always leads to burnout, disease, depression, and you don’t do anything for money that you hate. You do something because you love it. And if someone walking in in pain, holding, you know, something cold against their face and they’re stammering with their foot, if getting them out of pain when they walk out and they give you a hug and thank you, and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t scare them and all, if that doesn’t turn you on, if that doesn’t give you some kicks, what does? Or orthodontics? You know, a little kid, they won’t even smile without their teeth. Look like they could eat corn on the cob, do a chain link fence, and when they’re done, they look better than Tom Cruise. I mean, literally. I mean, makes a big difference. Oh, yeah. How do you not love that health care?
Rosaria Cain 16:43
I agree. It’s the most basic thing. Really, it’s it’s right there with food and shelter, is your health.
Howard Farran 16:50
The only wealth is health. And you know what it was the Mayo Clinic. I think they’re the biggest pioneers in health care, because before Mayo Clinic, when great grandma got sick and had cancer and all that stuff. They just wanted to keep her comfortable, and they give her these little bottles that had, like, part opium and morphine, and just keep her comfortable and let her die. And was the mayo brothers thought, dude, she would, she’s she’s a widow. She’s sitting on 100 acre wheat farm. She’d sell the whole farm and give you a million dollars if you could keep her alive another year or two so she could see her granddaughter’s First Communion, and that was just that was like, Are you serious? And look at Mayo Clinic. They got one here. And people, you know, when they get a toothache, they don’t care about one single person in China. They just want to get out of pain. And every day you live, supply and demand. Let’s say, you know, the average human 30,000 days. Well, if you live 25,000 days, you’ve bid up all the price of the last five every day starts getting more valuable, and that’s why the average American spends half of their entire health care expenditures in the last one year of life, because they don’t want a dirt nap. I mean, I got eight grandkids. I mean, I’d give everything I have to have one more Christmas with my grandkids, you know? So, so that’s a big problem.
Rosaria Cain 18:12
Time is, it is a huge commodity. And you’re right, especially as we get older, we realize how valuable it is.
Howard Farran 18:20
Yeah, my book Uncomplicated Business says it’s only people time and money.
Rosaria Cain 18:24
So let’s talk about your media tools, your media entities. You have a magazine, you have a podcast, you have a I believe you call it a message board, but it’s like an all encompassing website. I’ve been on. It is that, do I have everything, or is there more?
Howard Farran 18:43
No, you know…
Rosaria Cain 18:43
A book.
Howard Farran 18:45
Yeah, the magazine. Well, a book is the new business card. I mean, I remember 25-30 years ago, you had a business card. People like, wow, you’re fancy dancy. I mean, I don’t have a business card. And then if you’re an expert, I mean, why can’t you write a book and it was a really good experience for me. I took all the articles I’d ever written, and I just sat down, and I got in the zone. I said, Okay, here’s what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you die. And I picked one grandchild. I picked my first granddaughter, Taylor Murray. I said, Okay, you’re dead. You’re in a dirt nap. You can’t come back. And Taylor’s now 25 and she wants to open her own business, whatever that may be. She may be a dentist, restaurant, whatever she may spray insulation. She may be a welder. I mean, whatever I said, What would you want to tell Taylor and keep it succinct? And the goal was, and so I wrote it all out. And then I thought, okay, you’re a dentist. Get an editor. So I get an editor, and she went through the whole thing again, and she got it down to, like, 400 pages. And I said, No. I said, I can’t hold Taylor’s attention for 400 pages. Just get it down and and we worked on it. We took it really serious for Taylor Marie, and we got it down to like 200 pages and got it down to just people, time and money, and that’s what it all is. And you know, you know, if you get, you know, if you can figure out and do well on people time and money, you know, and then you have persistence to where it’s not going to be easy, but, but see the entrepreneurs. And here’s another thing I think about entrepreneurs, but I don’t want to say this to discourage anyone, but in my 63 years of pattern recognition, I’ve noticed that the most successful dentist they were always born, bred and raised in a in a self employed house. Dad and Mom owned their own farm. They owned their own restaurant. They you know, they own something. So those dinner conversations made you realize that all problems are just opportunities. And they didn’t throw in the towel and quit the family farm. They said, Wow, well, we got this. We got how we can do this. And they networked and they talked and and, you know, and how old is that family farm might have been 33 generations. No one ever gave up. That was never even an option. It was just persistence. And so if your dad was an employee on assembly line and your mom stayed homemade cookies, you might not, you didn’t come pre wired for entrepreneurialism, you can still get it, but you just got to realize that it’s going to be harder than you think. It’s going to take longer than you think, but it’s not work if you love what you’re doing. And I noticed that in dentistry, obviously my favorite procedure is a root canal, because I noticed that every time you start to do a root canal, you can look at the clock and be like, say, 7am and you start figuring this out. And it’s basically, it’s like Stevie Wonder picking a walk. You can’t see up in those canals. It’s all by feel. And you’re feeling all these canals, and got all these different places, and you finally get a picture in your head. You finally get done. And you get it all done, you take x ray. It looks beautiful. You’re like, Oh, wow. You look at the clock and like, an hour, an hour and a half, 60 to 90 minutes went by, kind of like a great movie. What is a great movie when the credits roll and surprise you? What’s a bad movie when you keep looking at the clock, or you start daydreaming. But some of those actors, I mean, they’re priceless because, I mean, you know who they are. Marlon Brando and and who’s the guy in The Godfather?
Rosaria Cain 22:12
Al Pacino.
Howard Farran 22:13
Al Pacino, I mean, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise. I you know people don’t realize, you know people that talk crap about Tom Cruise. Do you realize he’s had a top 10 movie every year for 25 years? Nobody’s close to that. You’ll say, Oh, Tom Hanks is great. I mean, what? We’ve got seven movies eight maybe. I mean Cruise every year. Same thing with religious people on churches and religions and synagogues and all that stuff. Joel Osteen sells out a basketball stadium every–there’s not a rock and roll band on Earth that could sell out that stadium every Sunday for two decades. And he’s my I’ve listened to a million people, you know, you got to remember the first 10 years I went to mass, it was in Latin. I didn’t even know, I knew what they were talking about. And then it was so many rituals, the sermon to be the smallest part. I get more 30 minutes with Joel Osteen. I mean, he just, he just takes something, he’s a good storyteller. He makes you feel better. He gets you in the zone. Like, yeah, you know, just every day, just want to be a better version.
Rosaria Cain 23:18
Well, getting back to your entrepreneurial leaning. So you’re talking about when you’re raised by entrepreneurs. It has a big effect. I was raised by entrepreneurs. Actually, you were raised by entrepreneurs. Your kids were raised by you. Entrepreneur. What does it mean for you? So, were you born an entrepreneur, or did you develop into one?
Howard Farran 23:42
No, I think, you know, humans had a population collapse like 10,000 years ago, where they think it was down to just 1000 people. So we actually, the three people in this room right here, have less genetic variance than the manatees in Florida that are on endangered species list. I think we’re all the same and but you know my dad, you know, we grew up, you know, I had five sisters. We had so much fun. And my dad saved up for 10 years, which shows that it’s not how much you earn, how much you spend. And he bought a Sonic Drive In franchise, and we went from making 11,000 year to 60,000 a year. And I just thought, Wow, a career, your job completely changed your life. We were so poor. We didn’t know we were poor. I didn’t know that people had air conditioners inside their house. I thought it was only at the Dylan’s grocery store, and Costco and are in a TG&Y and,
Rosaria Cain 24:35
Oh, my God, I remember TG&Y!
Howard Farran 24:38
And JC Penney and and, and we moved out to this the nicest area in Wichita, HIDDEN LAKES estates. And my next door neighbor was Kenny Anderson, the dentist, valedictorian of his class from Creighton University. And I go to work with dad, who’s the love of my life, and I go to work with him. And they both own their own business and technology. You know, I was a. So amazed that we would take an x ray to film, then go in a dark room and dip it and develop it, and you could see through the tooth. I mean, that was so amazing that I wrote my dental school in the seventh grade and said, How do I become a dentist? They said, Go to go to high school.
Rosaria Cain 25:16
So you knew you wanted to be a dentist from what age?
Howard Farran 25:20
I’d say it was the first dark room experience, and watching that X ray developed. I mean,
Rosaria Cain 25:25
How old were you?
Howard Farran 25:26
Oh, I think I was in the I think I was in the ninth grade, seventh seventh I think it was seventh grade, seventh grade. And, and I, and my dad told me he goes, and my dad told me he goes. Well, Dennis, that’s eight years of college. If you’re going to go to school for eight years, you might as well be a real doctor. So that’s why, at Creighton, I applied to med school and dental school. When I got accepted med school, I’m like, “Hi, Dad, I’m going to dental school. You can keep this,” you know, and my backups was dermatology and ophthalmology. But again, it was I own my own land. I own my own building, like Kenny Anderson. I own my own staff. I can hire and fire. I don’t have to work with toxic people. I’m not I’m not going to school, eight years of college to be an employee under somebody’s thumbs. The politics in hospitals and dental schools and medical schools is so insane. And I always tease them in dental school say, “Well, the reason there’s so much politics is because the stakes are so small,” meaning that you guys are just fighting. I mean, just crazy. And I always know is in dental school, the only good instructors for the part timers that came from the real world. They just come in one day a week, and every student just gravitate and now the dental schools have gotten rid of all those and go to professional, full time faculty, where those who can do and those who can’t teach and that they’re not in the real world. And so, you know, I just love that dentistry. I love getting people out of pain. I love giving a shot that didn’t hurt. You know, people always come in. Can you imagine if when I came here, the first thing I said to you is, Oh, I hate podcasts. I hate you. I’ve been dreading seeing you for a year. I can’t believe I’m in here. Okay, make it quick. Rosaria, you know, that’s what everybody says. That’s how everyone says hello in the dental office. And you have to
Rosaria Cain 27:18
That’s true. Nobody thinks they want to go to the dentist.
Howard Farran 27:23
They all, I mean, you hear all day long. It’s a running joke in dentistry. We, we have all these joke follow ups. I mean, you know that, you know you say that to any dentist. I go to dentist, every one of them’s got three one liners to give you, but, but you just got to be the adult in the room realize, well, they’re scared. I mean, if you saw this person getting ready to go to Disneyland. If he was in line for Disneyland, or he was at a drive thru at Sonic, getting ready to order a foot long chili cheese dog, tater tots and a cherry I made, he’d be so excited you couldn’t slap the smile of his face. But he’s scared. He hurts. He’s it’s he doesn’t know how much he’s going to cost. The pricing isn’t transparent, and health care like it is in everything, every other industry, and you just have to, you just have to have empathy, and you just have to understand what and that you have to train the whole staff that, no, they’re not, can you cuss on this phone? Oh, yeah, you know, no, he’s not an asshole. He may be 60, but he’s a six year old child. He’s scared. He doesn’t want a shot, he doesn’t want a shot. He doesn’t want his credit cards are probably maxed, you know, I mean, this is not where anybody wants to end up. And dentistry, you know, there’s two sides of dentistry, ones you come in every six months to prevent all the disease. And the ones that are scared of the dentist never come in. So they need all the dental treatment.
Rosaria Cain 28:38
They don’t want the news.
Howard Farran 28:39
Oh, yeah. And they come in and, you know, it’s like, okay, I haven’t seen you for five you know, you don’t want to say it’s gonna be bad. I have a toothache. Well, five years ago, I told you you had a little cavity there, but you decided to soak it in Mountain Dew for five years without seeing me, and it’s grown into a full blown abscess. And now it’s a root canal build up and crown, or we have to extract it, do an implant and crown. But you just, you just got to love it. It’s like an emergency room doctor. I mean, no one’s happy when they get out of an ambulance. I mean, they’re just, they’re scared, they’re mad, they’re upset, they don’t know what’s going on. And everybody in the ICU, I’ve been in the ICU for kidney stones before, and they’re just loving, I mean, they’re just, I mean, everyone I’ve ever gone to. I mean everybody that picks that as a career knows that you’re not on your way to go shopping at the mall. You were delivered in an ambulance and you’re and I’ll never forget this young doctor the first time I had one, she couldn’t have been 25 she didn’t look old enough to drive. She goes, “Oh, I’m so sorry you have a kidney stone.” And I looked at her as a dentist, where you got to take X rays. I said, “How the hell would you know I need a kidney stone just by looking at me?” She says, “It’s the only thing that makes a grown man cry.” I said, “I’m not crying.” She said, “Look at your shirt,” and it was wet. The tears were just streaming down my face. I literally thought so someone knifed me in the side. And I’m not dramatic. I’m not a baby. It’s just, have you ever had a kidney stone?
Rosaria Cain 30:06
No, but I’ve had a baby.
Howard Farran 30:08
You had a baby? Well, the will the urologist tell me–
Rosaria Cain 30:11
I’ve heard it’s the same, a similar–
Howard Farran 30:12
No, no, the urologist tell me that they have you done this 100 times, like a new Sharma. He goes, “Oh, I’ve had so many women tell me this was worse than childbirth,”
Rosaria Cain 30:22
Really?
Howard Farran 30:23
And I said, did they have an epidural? He laughs, he goes, No. I mean, I mean the real child. I mean, it is crazy, and then it’s all because of some little stone the size of something you can’t even hardly see. But, um, yeah, I just love the game, and I love having controllers to I mean, when you pull into your parking lot, and you cringe because you see your hygienist’s car, your assistant or your receptionist, like, Dude, you don’t pay people money that you don’t like.
Rosaria Cain 30:50
That’s a big perk, that’s one of the biggest perk of having your own business.
Howard Farran 30:55
And right now, the biggest thing that’s scary is in in Ahwatukee for all those decades, so many kids had come by and they said, “I want to be a dentist too.” And I’d send them to get ortho, and they’d say, “I want to be an orthodontist just like him or her,” and this and that. And then in high school, they were coming in, and then in college, they want you to write a letter. And they couldn’t wait to be just like you. And they told you that for a decade. And then the minute they get out of school, they go, I go. “So are you gonna open your practice?” “Well, not, not now. I think I should get some experience. I think I should get married, have a baby…” All this. So not now is just a real rational way of saying I’m scared. And it’s like, Well, that just means you’re smart. Well, you should be scared, but you know what you do? You know, the best time to open up your own business and start a family. I graduated dental school, and I said, I want a family. I had four boys in 60 months, and I opened up my practice four months out of school. I wasn’t ready for either. That was the craziest decade of my life. But when that decade was over, I had four amazing, potty trained kids, and I had a unbelievably successful practice and Associate’s and all the greatest technology. And the people who walk around the pool keep dipping their toe as they get older and older, they have a kid, and the and the people that like, when I employ you as a dentist, I pay you enough money to kill all your dreams. That’s intentional. It’s like, you know, so basically, if you pay a dentist 25% of what they do, and the average dentist has 65 overhead, I make a dime on every dollar you do. Well, I want you to stay and be a wage slave forever. And if they fall under that umbrella, so, so entrepreneurship is irrational. It’s illogical and it’s a dumb idea. That’s why you dive in head first while you’re young and dumb and have nothing to lose, because the more you have to lose when your spouse is lean over saying, honey, we got a home and kids and and our life is perfect, and stay at your job. And that’s not what the kid was telling me from the seventh grade to the end of ASU before they went to AT Still. So fear is okay. Fear is okay. But, and now it’s funny, because now I’m 63 you know, I’m not taking any of my money with me. I thought, you know, giving inheritance to your kids when you die, by then, they won’t need it. So I just thought, I’m gonna give you your inheritance now. And I just, I all I was gonna do, I was gonna give him any money. Just erase all their debt, whether they didn’t have student loans. I paid that way. Wiped off houses, cars, tractors, you know, welding, I just wiped out their debt, and I said, Okay, I’m giving it to you now. You’re not going to get a dime when I die. And so now it’s just paper. And so now, when I’m saying, Well, do you want all that paper? Or would you rather have 12 AI programmers from ASU that are all young and bright eyed and bushy tailed and think this is the greatest thing, and I can be a great conductor. I’m not a programmer, but I know that. But time people, humans are 50 or 60, a lot of that curiosity has gone away. Now there’s examples to the contrary. I mean, look at Colonel Sanders. I mean, he started his first KFC after he retired and was getting a pension check and, and a lot of people say that, you know, you can only do one thing really. We’ll explain Yamaha. He has the number one motorcycle and the number one piano, because those were his two hobbies, was dirt bikes and playing the piano. And he got really, really tired. He was repairing pianos, and the hardest part of it was getting the piano from your house to his house so he could repair it. And the digital revolution, he thought, wouldn’t it be nice if he had a piano you could actually carry with one arm? And so he had two passions, and a lot of people, I don’t believe you know there’s passion, but humans are very multi factorial, and if your career is providing for your family, your kids, your in laws, your parents, I mean, that makes you feel like a baller, and that makes you love your pro it didn’t matter if you’re hanging insulation, sheet rock, whatever you’re doing, if it’s a provider that makes you love what you’re doing, and if you actually love helping people, I recommend health care, you know, and that and that, and that’s the fastest growing sector of the economy, because, as we The one thing AI and robots in 25, 50, 100 years, could do is it could do all the labor. I mean, there’s no reason anybody has to do most of what people are doing. And robots is kind of weird, because when you go into, like, I on vacations, I always stop at all the dental manufacturers, because I could get a tour show all my kids. But like, we go to toothpaste factories that we’re making 1000 tubes of toothpaste every you know, every hour it’s all automated. Well, that’s AI, that’s robots, that’s that’s robots, and AI.
Rosaria Cain 36:09
Assembly line.
Howard Farran 36:10
yeah, that’s assembly line. And the robot there might be a human, but you mean, look at the assembly line. They still got all that automated manufacturing stuff. So none of that’s new, but let’s say that it does all the manual labor known to man, my gosh, well, how do you used to play when you were a kid? There’s going to be health care when, when everything’s in you? Let’s say that it’s 100 years now, 1000 years now, and you inherited your great grandma’s house, but everything’s built to last. It’s going to last 1000 years. Your car has no moving parts. It’s, you know, you have everything. You don’t have to do anything. And then your eyeball falls out, and you inherited, like, a million dollars. You will take that $1 million and you’ll give it to Darren, if he can put your eye back in.
Rosaria Cain 36:58
Absolutely.
Howard Farran 36:59
And so healthcare is the, you know, right now, everybody’s talking about clean air and clean water and all that. Well, that’s a luxury item. During World War II, you were worried about winning a war, and you were dumping all that chemicals in rivers. You were trying to, I mean, this country mass produced so many tanks and guns. No one cared about the environment because they didn’t have the luxury to well now, as we solve all these problems, well, now you want clean air and you want clean water and you don’t want to die, and so health care, I think in I think in 100 years, I think health care will be 50% of the economy. And all these government people say that we spend too much on health care. Well, watch what happens when the politician gets cancer, he’s on his first plane to Mayo Clinic. He’s dropping 100 grand at the front door, cash. He’s not using insurance, you know.
Rosaria Cain 37:48
So let me ask you this on the subject of health care, because it’s such a fascinating subject. Do you think the government should fund it, or should it all be self funded? Or a combination?
Howard Farran 38:00
It’s got to be a combination. I mean, you’re going to have people. I mean, let’s face we all have the same DNA after the big population collapse, but somebody, even within your own family. I mean, some people, some people are too young, some people are too old, some people have too many other challenges that they can’t get it together. And you got to have empathy, and you got to be there for them. And furthermore, with education. I mean, which I think universities, you know, should, there should be a lot more grants to go to school without these kids, you know, being afraid of that much stuff, but, but how are you going to how are you going to run a country if everybody’s sick and uneducated?
Rosaria Cain 38:34
And they all eat junk food.
Howard Farran 38:34
Yeah.
Rosaria Cain 38:34
Not a great ingredient.
Howard Farran 38:34
I mean, yeah, I mean wouldn’t it be a lot easier to have a great country if everybody had a lot of education and we’re very healthy, and education is to diet, you know? And it’s sad because I was this impatience. Would tell me this like, 30 years Well, I’m trying to eat better now. I’m really cleaned up my diet. I only eat at the Waffle House because I’m I’m eating eggs and hash browns and bacon and whole milk. And I’m just like, poor guy, his heart’s in the right place, but he has no education and nutrition and but he’s, you know, you just it’s two steps forward, one set back. And for all the doomsday heirs, go back every century, back to Jesus, Caesar or Genghis Khan. I mean, it’s better every century. And, yeah, it’s two steps forward, one step back. But I wouldn’t want to live 100 years ago and look at 1900. 1900 there wasn’t one person on earth who knew that in 30 years there’d be planes, trains and automobiles, and then when those came out, there wasn’t one person on earth that knew that Neil Armstrong, he’d be standing on the moon in another 30 years. And when I got out of dental school, I had a Doctorate, and I missed pretty much everything in this room, this, this, cell phones, computers, none of this was here. And one of the most and I tell my grandkids, and I tell my four boys all the time that you cannot even predict what you’ll be doing 30 years from now, because I never knew, you know, and useless to the people like I knew that. I knew the iPhone was something serious, where it was lunchtime and the staff, we all piled into my Subaru, my suburban, and we’re gonna go the restaurant and someone else, wait, stop. And she jumped out of the car and ran in and grabbed her iPhone and came back. And I thought, Damn, she was like, leaving a kid or something like that. Is that your child? And I realized she’s emotionally attached. She felt anxiety being separated from this phone. Now, how many people do you know that always have their phone?
Rosaria Cain 40:39
Well, iPhones have our whole lives in it. It has all our appointments. It has all of our contacts. We don’t even know phone numbers anymore. It has our banking so if you think about how important those iPhones are, they are a big part of who we are.
Howard Farran 41:00
And you have your dog Max walking around here. And why don’t you just look at AI, is your digital dog?
Rosaria Cain 41:07
Right.
Howard Farran 41:07
It’s your friend. And just like a dog, you know, I always tell the cat lovers that if your cat really loved you, it would be a dog. You know, when you come home from work, the cat looks at you like, oh, you again.
Rosaria Cain 41:18
They’re very they’re very objective.
Howard Farran 41:22
The only reason they don’t murder you and eat you is because you’re too big. Okay, if your best friend is only someone that can’t murder you, doesn’t murder you because they can’t. But a dog unconditional love, you could come home dirty, everything and that, that AI, is is your unconditionally?
Rosaria Cain 41:41
But is it? Is it your bitch, Howard?
Howard Farran 41:43
Yes, okay, AI, is my bitch?
Rosaria Cain 41:48
Yes.
Howard Farran 41:48
Yeah, I’m not. It’s bitch.
Rosaria Cain 41:50
Right? No, some would argue the other way.
Howard Farran 41:53
Well, there’s the dooms there. You talk to that person very long, you’ll see the other patterns. The end of the world, stock market crashing. Sell everything, buy Bitcoin, gold. So the sky is falling, and that’s a human condition. I don’t know what they’ve gone through in their life, though, where that’s you know, I imagine they have a traumatic past.
Rosaria Cain 42:11
Well, away from business. What routines keep you grounded? How do you stay sane with all of these things around us going on and all of that kind of talk?
Howard Farran 42:20
Well, the one thing I was slow to learn, but I eventually learned, is that, you know, when you wake up in the morning and your fit hits the ground, the first thing you do, the hardest step of the day is out the front door. And I either have a mile walk to EOS gym. I got a long, five mile walk there, I lift weights, and then I do a 20 minute sauna, then I jump in the cold pool, and then I walk a mile home. If I don’t have time for that, I’ll go out there and just take a city block and just run the block, you know, just 100 meters fast as you can, to where you just completely drain all the glucose and oxygen your bloodstream, and then walk until you calm down. Then do it again. Do that three times. And all the research in the world tells you that when you do that, when you run completely that oxygen and glucose, it resets your whole metabolism, your liver, but if, if you don’t take care of your tool, you’re going to be not happy, not productive, not good memory, you’re gonna you’re more likely to be sad or depressed or burned out, or, you know, just everything goes wrong when your tool goes wrong. And then on the diet, I mean, they’re learning. I mean, the AI and the diet has been going on just long and bio, bio engineering and bio the bio sciences are all stretched, but you know, when you drink a Coke every day, you know there’s a trillion cells that came from your mom and dad, but inside you is 10 trillion cells or organisms that didn’t come from your mom dad. An animal cell, think like a big house, but a virus would be like a BB, and a bacteria might be like a marble. And when they’re all hungry, and they start communicating with each other, and they do those neuro chemicals get in your bloodstream, and now your brain thinks you’re hungry, because you’re both animals, and you’re both in the same family tree, so now you think you’re hungry. Well, they know it’s showing up that the schizophrenia looks like it’s the most obvious microbiome disturbance, because, you know, they they used to think there’s a blood brain barrier that kept everything out of the brain. They found out that’s not true. And they started pulling cerebral spinal fluid and brain fluid, and they realized, Oh, my God, the same stuff living in your microbiome, which is mostly the last your sigmoid colon, last foot and a half, is the same thing. Living in your brain is fine. So, so a lot of these people that, like, like, I don’t know. I’m not an expert in this, but it would not surprise me if, I mean, like, autism could be a fungal infection. It could be depression.
Rosaria Cain 44:51
A lot we don’t know.
Howard Farran 44:52
A bacteria infection. So, so since we don’t know, and we’re born like in the Flintsones, that you have to realize that if you’re not eating. 30 grams of fiber a day, if you eat out of a box and can and carbs and all this stuff, everything’s digesting your stomach and small intestine, so you don’t even feed your your gut microbiome. So the most important thing is fiber. And there’s so many high tech cheats like remember our parents used to eat Metamucil, and that factory’s right here in south Phoenix. And I remember one time I was going to a friend’s house, a dentist. And I saw this train, and it had like, 10 cars of like, like rolling, rolling tundra deals in a western movie, tumbleweeds. And my boys are like, what is that? I mean? Said, I don’t know. So he walked in the knowledge. So what the heck was that? They said, Oh, that plant has the most fiber in the world, and that’s what they they buy from Africa for Metamucil. Well, that that, that’s psyllium. And you know you need 30 grams. So, you know, you just one little teaspoon with a shot of water. It’s tasteless. You hit a shot. But when our you know, and, but you do that, and your whole, you know you don’t have leaky gut syndrome, your bowel movements are different.
Rosaria Cain 46:02
You could always eat legumes.
Howard Farran 46:04
Yeah, legumes, but, you know, you just, got to eat right and you got to keep your mind, as even my oncology doctors say that, you know, then two identical men have the exact same cancer, and one, his wife just died. He didn’t, and he’s just so depressed he’s, he’s dead right now, and the other one still got a wife or kids or a purpose or a passion. He says, I’m gonna be if anybody beats this, gonna be me? And sure enough, he does. So what is that psycho? Is that psycho, you know, is that, is that a placebo effect,
Rosaria Cain 46:36
Positive thinking? It’s been known to do a lot.
Howard Farran 46:39
Yeah. And the opposite of a placebo is a nocebo, a negative like he believes he’s gonna die. Well, he’s probably gonna die,
Rosaria Cain 46:46
We’re all gonna die.
Howard Farran 46:47
So, my routine is I work out first, then I only eat at home, and I don’t eat out of a box can, and then I go to work and I’m hanging out with a bunch of 20 year olds. That’s what I love about my grandkids. You know, I’ll go to, you know, when you hang out with your grandkids. I mean, when you when old people hang out with young people the start of their career, you get their same energy. I’d rather hang out with my grandkids and my kids, because my different, yeah, my kids are telling me all their problems and work, and I can coach them all good. But, I mean, I remember, like, I pick up my kids from school. You know, I’m on 24 hour call. I drop everything for the kids and I and I just say, you know, listen to your customers. How can I see the future? And I’m driving home, and I said, “Taylor, Donnie, Gunner Mason, what do you wish your mom would do when she picks up from school that she never does, because she’s always in a hurry to get home” and Gunner, says, “Grandpa Howie, we always tell her stop, because we want to explore that house.” And out in the middle of this huge wheat field is some 100 year old house, and I might you only live once I dropped my Lexus from four wheel drive. We got off the highway, drove across the deal, parked in front of the house, and we probably played for three hours, and we found a, you know, old spoons, and I’m sure it was dangerous, and it could’ve collapsed, and killed us all. And we all died of tetanus, but we don’t live in fear. And you know, you just listen to your customer. Listen to your grandkids. What do you want to do? Like my kids always say, Well, you know, Grandpa, I know this your favorite restaurant. I said, Dude, I’m just getting ready for my dirt nap. I said, What did the grandkids want to do? What does your wife want to do? Who gives a shit what some old man who’s got one foot in the grave wants to do? What do you guys want to do?
Rosaria Cain 48:34
The message today is, don’t live in fear. Let me ask you one final question. What about you would surprise people.
Howard Farran 48:44
Well, you look at this short, fat, bald man, and you never would have guessed that he did an Arizona Iron Man three times in a row. And the reason I did that is, you know, I was going to my doctor. He kept telling me for years I was overweight. My blood pressure getting higher, my pulse is high. Finally got to where it was 140 over 90, and he says, you’re a dentist. I’m sorry, but you got to start high blood pressure medication. And I thought to myself, Okay, you’re not dumb. And I always tell my kids, you don’t have to be smart. Just quit doing dumb stuff. And I said, I’m just going to quit being dumb. And I wanted to coach, so I hired two personal trainers. They’re both had done multiple Iron Men’s. They’re age appropriate, so they could know my age. They’re about same age. I mean, they were 10 years younger, but, you know, they’re age appropriate. They’ve done all that stuff. And I said, I want, I’m going to call one of you even, and one odd, one even, every day five o’clock, you’re knocking on my front door. Odd, odd days, five o’clock and and then I knew there was no way I could swim two miles, bike 118 and run a marathon. I mean, I mean, the cow can’t jump over the moon and Howard can’t do that. So what I did, I got on social media. I got on DentalTown. I told everybody what I was going to do. I let everyone know, and everybody laughed, except my four boys. They said, “Dad, Dad’s different up here. He’s just different” and what he’s doing, because so many of those mornings, it’s like, I’m not gonna fail in front of every dentist on DentalTown that I gave up, I quit. I’m asking them to come out of school with a half million dollars in debt and borrow money and start their own I tell them not to live in fear, and then, and then I just have fear. And it’s like I told everybody, those people there, and I finished three Iron Man’s in a row. And when I went back to my physical a year later, my blood pressure 140 over 90 was down like 110 over 68 my pulse went from like 94 to like 62 he told me. He says, This is what a young, 20 year old athlete would look like, and it’s like and you felt better. And the other thing is, like things that you don’t realize. Like, like, I was completely addicted to Rocky Road ice cream. I mean, complete addiction. I had to have a bowl in the I believed I couldn’t sleep without it. I was craving it. Was one of them, favorite times a day. And I read that, you know that some somebody on DentalTown said, Well, you know what? Switch ice cream with Greek yogurt and then put berries in there, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, berries. And at first you won’t like it, but after 100 days, you’ll crave it. And right now, I think Rocky Road tastes gross.
Rosaria Cain 51:26
I have that every night.
Howard Farran 51:27
Oh, you do?
Rosaria Cain 51:28
I do.
Howard Farran 51:29
But, but you, but you can learn new habits. People say you you can’t old dog settlement, nurture. You can eat. You can learn new habits, like instead of eggs and toast. Now, you know, you go to Safeway, they have all the prep stuff, diced onions, diced fajita dill. I’ll buy diced fajita dill and an onion and put that in the pan and saute that in some olive oil. Then put my fried eggs. And instead of having a glass of milk, a bottle water and eggs with green peppers and fajita mix and onions, spicy, zesty, but it used to be eggs and cheese on toast with butter and milk and like, okay, that’s why you weigh 238, you want to weigh 178, quit eating it. You can’t eat that every day and not be heavy. And it’s just changing habits. And same thing with your you’re employed, you you hear what your customers want, and you immediately go into explaining why they can’t have it, instead of just thinking, how, how could we have a win? Win here. This is what you want. Why can’t we do that instead of the default? Well, you don’t understand. Let me tell you about dentistry or or, let me tell you about in No, no, no, no. This is the future. Because when everybody only wants what your customer is saying. Someone’s going to deliver it and you’re going to be ran over from behind. So you know where they’re going. So shut up and see it as an opportunity. And say, how can we do a win?
Rosaria Cain 52:53
If you were going to wrap this up and give me your final sentence, how would you end this podcast?
Howard Farran 53:01
Life is a marathon. It’s not a sprint.
Rosaria Cain 53:04
Perfect and well done. Howard and thank you for coming.
Howard Farran 53:08
It was an honor to be on your show.
Rosaria Cain 53:10
Thank you.