Christian Coachman in conversation with Dr Kyle Stanley, Part One

What follows is the first of two interviews with my dear friend Dr. Kyle Stanley, one of the new members of the team of young dental celebrities, he’s a super-successful dentist from Beverly Hills, and with a bunch of great new ideas -  a breath of fresh air into the lecturing circuit. We talk about Kyle’s career and how he is working to make changes to prioritise the things that matter.

This interview was originally taken from Coffee Break With Coachman, a series of interviews with the best dental brains and the best personalities, in short, the most influential people in our dental industry today. From business to marketing to clinical to research, academics, laboratory technology and digital, each of the interviews is a conversation with a thought leader in their field, sharing their knowledge and experiences.

CHRISTIAN: To get started Kyle, introduce yourself to us.

KYLE: My name's Kyle Stanley, and I like to introduce myself on a personal level. I'm a father, I'm a brother, I'm an artist at heart, and I happen to be a dentist as well. I'm a speaker too, so a big part of my profession now is being a professional speaker, and that's pretty much it. You know, I've been trying to do some good stuff in our profession, and I think we'll get more into that stuff.

CHRISTIAN: I want to start, since you have a very interesting career, and I think many young people watching us here would love to understand, how did you plan your career? How did you build the path of first getting out of dental school, selecting your mentors, and most importantly, making your mentors give you attention? That's a very key factor. We all want mentors, the key is how do you make your mentor believe in you and open space in their super-busy schedule to help you? 

You have people coming to be mentored all the time, and mentors are hand-picking the people that they want to really embrace. You did some kind of magic, because really top people embraced you and guided you through your career. Please explain to me, in your mind when you first graduated, what was your plan? Did your plan change? How did you pick your mentors, and how did you make your mentors pick you?

KYLE: It's an interesting thing, because you are my third mentor. I was lucky in the fact that I found my first mentor before dental school finished. My first mentor is Pascal Magne, as many people know, the father of biomimetic dentistry. He's one of the innovators with minimally invasive dentistry and of course an aesthetic genius. I found Pascal because he inspired me, so I had all these dentists that were speaking to us in dental school, and when Pascal came I saw the artistic side.

During dental school, he gave a bleaching introduction to the second-year dentists. His slides were beautiful, he dressed nice, he had this cool French accent, and I was like, "Okay, this person is different." Then in dental school, there were all these rumors going around like, "Oh, he's like this person or this person."  Then Pascal had this course called the Aesthetic Selective program, where he selected about 10 students to work closely with him, and what you had to do was you had to take time out of your clinic time to come I think it was once a week do a full day or a half day where he was giving lectures. That was a whole semester, and it was on your own time. You didn't have to be there, so I made the time to be there. Then at the end there was a test, and you also had to submit a PowerPoint.

I think that just showing that I was there every time, and I did well on the test because I worked my ass off for it, and then I think with my PowerPoint I tried to get into that artistic aspect that I knew he had, because that was me. I was an artist before I was a scientist. I think it was just hard work, because like you said, so many people are coming to big mentors and saying, "Teach me, teach me and show me stuff," and you have to show why you're different. Also with Pascal, I tried to speak with him on a personal level. My brother lived in Switzerland, we both liked watches. People have to respect you, people have to like you. I tried to get in with a personal level as well as the professional level. Then with Pascal, once I got into the Aesthetic Selective where he worked really closely with 10 students, I showed what I wanted to do. I worked hard, I was passionate about it. I asked him about research, and we became friends as well as colleagues.

CHRISTIAN: You can confirm it, that actually happened with you, because of a course creating a relationship that is very important with the mentor, but to get to the point that the mentor is actually allowing you to create a personal relationship. I usually suggest when you have a successful professional, and the mentors are usually successful professionals, they're really busy, so they are lacking time. Time is very valuable, so somehow the new pupil needs to show that he's willing to give his time to do things and to save time for the mentor. The teacher, the mentor, you know, you have so many projects going on. You have a lot of stuff, so you're always seeking for smart young people to help you.

Then you see these students come in saying, "I want to be inspired, I want to learn, I want to do this," and then you see among them a student that says, "Look, I'm putting some time free, and I can actually run this project for you. I can help you write this article. I can organize your desk. I can help you carry your computer.”

"I can be with you and work as an aide, an assistant for you. I understand about technology. I can take photos, I'm very good with photos. I can document the case for you. Not only document, I can organize the images online. You know, I can start putting your slides together and then you can work from there." Somehow generate value related to time, saving time. Then sometimes if the young dentist student is very precise and efficient on what he's doing, you actually get the mentors addicted to that. "I cannot live without your help." That's the point when the student really gets the attention and makes the shift to becoming a colleague. You somehow helped Pascal initially with projects and things that really helped him.

KYLE:  I volunteer my time to help teach his course at USC, and I've done that for seven years now. That's a day a week of my time that initially would have been really nice, to have an extra day of pay, coming out of school. That's why there's problems with dental schools right now I think is because coming out of school we have a lot of debt, especially in the United States, and then they want us to come back and teach and it's like, "I have to take a day? I can only work five or maybe six days a week, and you want me to take one day out of my practice to come teach?"

I did that and I made that sacrifice, which some people told me it was stupid."Just work and have the money," and I said, "No, you know what, I really want to help. I really want to give back to Pascal."He gave me so much. He got me into my residency. He introduced me to my second mentor, who is Sasha Jovanovic, and so I think it's giving that extra time. Like you said, if we give the extra time, we can help that mentor, then they'll be willing to help us. Oftentimes as a mentee, you may have to put in weeks, months, years even, before you get that one comment that may save you years in your career.

CHRISTIAN: Before we go to your next mentor, what were the biggest or the best tips that Pascal gave you, the shortcuts, by being his student?

KYLE: I think the main thing is that he inspired me on natural shapes, natural teeth, what we should be trying to replicate. He can get you inspired about doing something natural and doing something imperfect, and that's what him and his brother Michel Magne have been talking about for decades. That was one of the first things he introduced to us, so that was one of the main things that was inspiring me and making me want to be the best at certain things and not sacrifice. Then number two, is he kind of introduced me to my residency program. He kind of got me into my residency program in Brazil. They had never had an American do that implant program.

 CHRISTIAN: Explain a little bit of this story, because it's a very cool story. You came back to him saying, "Look, I'm just a general dentist and I want to learn how to place implants," right?

KYLE: Yeah. I told him I want to learn how to place implants, and I said, "You know, I'd like to maybe live in another country too." Originally my plan was go to somewhere in South America so that I could learn Spanish. I was like, "Okay, I'll learn Spanish. I can really use that in California." You know, we have a lot of Hispanic culture here. He said, "Well, if you really want to learn implants well, you have to go to Brazil," and I was like, "Okay." My brother lived in Brazil, my brother lived in Belem, and so I said, "All right, well, tell me more about it." He put me in touch with people in Brazil.

CHRISTIAN: Equal here is that as an American, you never spoke a word of Portuguese. The program is completely in Portuguese, right?

KYLE: Yeah, except one day a week which is in English for the PhD students, but everything else. Patients, calling patients, learning the instruments in Portuguese.

CHRISTIAN: Everything that I just said, you just decided, "Okay, I'm gonna just learn Portuguese in three months and go"?

KYLE: That's pretty much it. I knew about six months before I was leaving that I was going to go, so I had earbuds like this and I'd be doing wax-ups in dental school or pouring out models, and I'd be listening to mp3s in Portuguese, and it was difficult. It was really difficult. But when you're immersed in it, it happened. You know, I had to learn while I was doing surgery. I had to call patients, which was so difficult. Now it's actually been a gift, because I speak Portuguese to my son so my son's learning two languages, which is great. Even though my Portuguese isn't perfect, you know.

CHRISTIAN: You liked it there last year, the big meeting, and people were super-happy to see you introducing yourself on stage. You know, an American that looks so much like an American, like you look like an American, and suddenly you open your lecture speaking in Portuguese, not only saying hello in Portuguese, but actually really speaking in Portuguese. People were very impressed. That was a great introduction.

KYLE: That was a really special time for me. I get emotional when I talk about it, but Brazil is such a special country for me because they really just opened their arms. You know, they didn't charge me anything for the program, which is like crazy from an American standpoint. I had to pay for my materials and things like that, but they didn't charge me tuition. They just knew me as Pascal Magne's student and everybody just embraced me and welcomed me, helped me with my Portuguese. I'm so grateful for Brazil, and that was one of the best things.

CHRISTIAN: You're connected with Brazil. That's a great shortcut. One of the things of the programs here in Brazil is that people do things themselves with a lot of bonding. You know, many professors, they organize courses in Brazil because here the students can actually do surgery, place implants themselves. We really take the patients, so you probably did hundreds of implants during your program, right?

KYLE: That was exactly it because if I did some type of implant program in the U.S., which kind of doesn't exist, to do it on patients, I maybe would have done 10 implants or something. When I was in Brazil, I did 10 the first week. It was like they said, "We have 1,200 patients. What do you want to do?" I was like, "Oh, posterior molar." "Okay, call these 10 people." Then I'd be on the phone. Having someone there to help me, but I got a lot of experience just because of the fact that there's a lot of patients.

CHRISTIAN: At such a young age, you became an experienced implantologist, even as a speaker for implant companies, super-fast. Definitely this experience with volume, it's very, very interesting. You coming back from Brazil, you went back to the U.S. What happened? Did you immediately open your office? You already had an office? You were working for somebody?

KYLE: I was working for about 10 different offices, and I was working for DSOs, which is kind of interesting, to get that experience. I was working for my father's practice, which is about an hour from my house. He has a small general dentistry practice. I was placing implants and doing inlays and onlays and things. I got this interesting experience of going around to these different offices and seeing what I liked, and I think that I give most of my mentees or my students that advice too, is when you get out of school, work for some other people and realize what you like and what you don't like. Most of the time I realized what I didn't like, which made me realize what I wanted to do when I had my own practice.

One of those offices was Sasha Jovanovic's office, and I was teaching with Pascal and I said, "Hey, do you know Sasha Jovanovic?" He was like, "Yeah, he's been a good friend of mine for decades." I was like, "Do you know if he needs anybody in that office?" He was like, "Well, let me email Sasha."

CHRISTIAN: Did you hear a lecture from Sasha? Did you admire his publications?

KYLE: What was interesting was that in Brazil, when I would do a few implants a day, my friends would joke. They would be like, "Oh, Sasha Jovanovic." We were reading his papers in our review, our study clubs and things, I knew who he was, I read his papers. One of my friends would tell me, "Oh, Sasha Jovanovic," making fun of me. I didn't realize that he was in L.A. doing research and finding things out, I found out he was in L.A., and then Pascal made the introduction.

Sasha was like, "Nah, I don't really need anybody to place implants here or do surgery here, but maybe for restoring cases that I get directly referred to me." Then when I entered into there, there would be cases where if he was gone, then I started placing implants there and doing surgery there as well. Sasha welcomed me again which was crazy, because I was just out of school.

CHRISTIAN: You started to also help him in the course, right?

KYLE: It was the same thing. He would be like, "Ah, I've got to do a lecture tomorrow. Can you put together these slides?" Oh, "Oh, I totally double-booked myself and I have to fly to Japan. Can you give this lecture tomorrow to 10 people that are coming?" I'm like, "Uh, okay."

CHRISTIAN: Learning and understanding Keynote, and having artistic skills to put cool slides together, is definitely a good thing to know, right?

KYLE: It definitely helped me with my first two mentors.

CHRISTIAN: Very, very cool. Well, you know, when I introduce you when you're giving courses, the DSD courses, I always introduce you mentioning Pascal and Sasha, because I think when we see that these two amazing names in our profession really embraced you, that says it all. You don't need to explain. I think you should be very proud of this early beginning.

KYLE: Thank you. One thing that's interesting is that all three of my mentors ... you know, Pascal, Sasha and you ... no one's American. Pascal's from Switzerland, Sasha grew up in The Netherlands, and you're in Brazil. I don't know what that is. It's an international mentor program.

CHRISTIAN: That's a good point. Now, moving forward a little bit, after this period of your life of learning from mentors, becoming a partner of your mentors and really growing professionally, you get to a point where people that like to lecture like you and you do it well, you start to be recognized. You get some kind of recognition that usually happens because you're good, but happens before you get the financial feedback.

I want you to talk a little bit about the challenges that you went through and that you're still going through, because I think that brings you, your name, to reality. Sometimes we create this character, this persona, on social media, and younger people start to look at you, look at this persona. I think it's very interesting for people to understand that we all go through struggles, we all suffer. It's not easy for anybody and it's very hard. You have to work very hard.

KYLE: It's a hard time. You know, it's kind of like with the speaking community. I don't think most people realize that when you get invited to the real top of the line, you're lecturing in front of a thousand people and it's AACD or it's SBOE or it's all these things. These are voluntary. You know, these aren't paid speaking gigs. It's an interesting business, because you can make more money speaking to five people in the middle of Wisconsin than to a thousand people at one of the most prestigious meetings.

I think that many of us are guilty in social media in general of saying, "Look at how great my life is." We post the cute pictures of our baby, not when our baby is going crazy and smashing their head against the ground, and I think it can give the wrong persona, so you're exactly right. I'm in this in-between stage where I am getting invitations to big conferences. Patients are coming to my practice because they've heard of my name somewhere, but by no means am I a wealthy man. I have a ton of debt, a ton of debt.

CHRISTIAN: As we say in Portuguese, you have to kill a lion per day.

KYLE: That really is a stressor in my life, you know? I go to sleep and wake up at night thinking about how I'm going to support my family. I've told my wife this before, but sometimes I wake up in the morning and feel like a hamster running on the hamster wheel, because immediately I've got do emails and call people and there's an interview, and I've got a patient that's calling and she's in pain, and it's stressful. It's by no means easy.

CHRISTIAN: How do you plan to balance the lecturing part with the clinical work in your office, knowing that money comes from the office, not from the lecturing, but lecturing gives you a reputation and pleasure? Do you have a strategy for that? I remember talking to you about that.

KYLE: You gave me some good advice in New York a few years ago. I'm by no means a great example of this. I've gotten a lot better in the last year. I was doing about 40 dates a year, and this year maybe I'll do, I don't know, 32, 35. I've brought it down a little bit, and I had to learn how to say no, not only with speaking but with everything in life.

That was one thing that I got from people like you, people like Chris Ramsey and Rob Ritter. These people told me, "Kyle, you have to say no, and you can't do everything." I had to learn that the hard way, because I would say, "I'll book a few more," and then I would hear it from my wife, and rightfully so. She said, "Hey, you're going to be here." It's a hard balance, but I've recently in the last year and we'll talk about this later but I went through a kind of midlife crisis, and this is why I started talking about this stress topic.

I went through this midlife crisis where I've realized that money is not that important. When you're talking about I know that the office makes more money, but other things may give me more pleasure, I'm not always chasing the money now. What I'm chasing now, which is kind of interesting, we were talking about this before,  is I'm chasing time. I'm chasing things that will allow me to be with my family more.

My dad always said that how life is structured kind of backwards. You work very hard while your kids are young, and then when your kids are old you retire and they have their own life. What he always said was that you should take the time off when your kids are young and then work later in your life, after your kids have their own lives. I'm trying to balance that right now. I'm trying to. I'm doing a lot of things, but I'm trying to see what I can do now remotely, what I can do to travel less.

CHRISTIAN: What kind of projects do you have now, or strategies? Are you building some strategies to generate revenue without having to be with your hands working in somebody's mouth? Do you have that in mind? At that age, if you start thinking about that, you can achieve that much earlier that when you're 50, you know.

KYLE: That was what this midlife crisis was kind of about. My brother's a dentist, my dad's a dentist. Like you, I come from a dental family. I talked to my dad, who is retiring in the next few weeks, and said, "You know, Dad, if you would go back and do it again, would you tell me to get out of clinical dentistry," and he said, "Yes, I would." He said, "It's so stressful, and you can make a lot more money in other places." As much as I love clinical dentistry and I'll never not be a wet-finger dentist, but maybe a little bit less now. When I had this midlife crisis, I talked to my pastor. His name's Erwin McManus. He's an international speaker, he's a book writer and he's a fantastic person, and he said, "Kyle, let dentistry be your platform, and maybe not have it be your only thing. Have it be your platform. Use dentistry to do other things." Right now I'm working on a few products and I'm working on some software, and things that will allow me to be at my practice less. Although I'm at my practice still, even saving a day at my practice or two days a week, something like that, allows me to be with my family more, which is worth it for me.

People don't like to talk about money, and I love that you do talk about money. There was a guy named Scott Luna who's a speaker and I think it was the year after dental school, I took a course from him. He said, "I'm finally talking about money, because money means more time with my family. The more money I make, the more time I can take off," and that just stuck in my head. I didn't even have a family then, but I knew I wanted one. The more money I make now, the more time I can spend with my family.

CHRISTIAN: That's a basic rule. Unfortunately we need to make money, to make more time, and then to find ways to make money without having to be doing clinical work, or creating a system that can use your skills, your intelligence, your ideas, and somehow multiply yourself. You have to be creative and start thinking about it when you're 30. You cannot make that magic happen when you're 50. Maybe the artificial intelligence project you're in, maybe this is one of these projects. Is it?

KYLE: Yes. So a little introduction with this is that one of my patients owns an artificial intelligence company. He's about 35, and it's one of the top artificial intelligence companies in the world in the ad tech space, so in advertising. He does about $150 million a year in revenue, works with 70% of the top Fortune 100 companies. I mean, it's the gigantic companies with offices all over the world.

Two and a half years ago I was doing a hygiene visit on him, and he said, "You know, I thought about doing this thing with dentistry where we could read X-rays with our AI technology." His dad is a retired dentist, so this is where his interest came from. I was like, "Okay, so, let's talk about it." Two and a half years ago we started working on this, and now in the fourth quarter of this year we're going to be rolling out into 2,000 offices.

What it is, imagine you make your FMX, you take your full mouth series. Instantly the artificial intelligence will find existing restorations and chart them for you. It will also find pathologies like widened periodontal ligament, caries, periapical lesions. It'll find existing anatomy, like sinuses, nerves, nasal cavities, in milliseconds. From the clinician's side, it does a few things to where it instantly charts, so it saves you money and time.

It'll then take any pathology and can automatically bill to insurance, so it saves your staff time, and it will allow to you talk to your patient and say, "I don't just think that you have a cavity here, but a thousand dentists from around the world think you have a cavity here." We call it the second opinion. It's actually like a thousandth opinion.

CHRISTIAN: Which is what we, on the DSD program, call the mix between cloud dentistry and interdisciplinary treatment simulation, right? That's when technology starts to help you make better decisions. Just to put some context on this topic, because when people ask me the question, "What are the new trends in dentistry," many people expect me to say that it's digital dentistry. For me, digital dentistry is not a new trend. Digital dentistry happened yesterday already. It's a reality. It's an obligation. It's done. It's ready to help us, right? For me, the new trends that will become reality much faster than we expect is exactly artificial intelligence and automated processes, meaning creating solutions that will save you time, again, because it's all about time.

I went to an amazing meeting and one of the key speakers mentioned that the main thing we should use technology for is to help us to save time, so we can do whatever we want with our lives. If technology is making you waste time, technology is not ready. Technology today is saving time if you know how to use it.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, what is the difference between digital dentistry and digital dentistry with artificial intelligence? Until yesterday or until today, technology helps you perform better procedures by allowing you to use technology to produce devices. When we talk about artificial intelligence, that means that you're not only operating technology to produce things better, but that now technology is helping you with the decision-making process.

We know that this is going to happen. It's already started happening in medicine, and it's going to happen in dentistry. One great example is Invisalign. You know, exactly as you said. You can be the best orthodontist in the world, but when you have an issue in front of you and you need to make a decision, if the best thing for the patient is going Path A or Path B, the patient depends on your unique knowledge that is only yours.

Once you use a system like Invisalign, and not just to defend aligners, but the concept that when you submit a case to Invisalign, and the Invisalign technology brain already did five million cases, and from these five million cases maybe 30,000 cases had the exact same issue of your patient. Suddenly the computer, using 30,000 examples to understand the result and the consequences of the decision, is saying, "According to our experience with 30,000 cases," this is the computer talking to us, "you should do A and not B." That's the beauty of what you're doing. When you mentioned to me about X-rays, I think that's super-smart, because it's probably one of the easiest things in dentistry to incorporate artificial intelligence. Now thinking about it, if I could start artificial intelligence in dentistry, I would definitely go through X-rays, because it's a very visual thing. It's black-and-white, right? You see, you identify, you detect, and you create a report. How is the project going?

KYLE: It's great. We're working with about two to three of the biggest dental service organizations in the world right now, so like I said, over 2,000 practices. It's our tier one partners basically, and this is our starting point. It's such an interesting thing, because we started with X-rays and we've already been experimenting with CT scans, intraoral scans, the lab protocol, the patient experience. We have the computer vision engineers that can do this stuff very quickly, and we have all the data. We've compiled basically what we think is the biggest set of digital dental X-rays. We're working with universities now as well, so working with U Pen with our friend Markus Blatz, and it's just very exciting. Also the research.

I told you what's good for the clinician, but with GumGum dental, which is the name of the company, what's the great thing about it for the patient is it brings trust back in, which I think is missing in our practice. You say, "Oh, I'm a dentist," and the patient says, "Oh, I hate dentists." It's like, "Don't you remember that I just told you I was a dentist?" You know, because they don't trust us. Bringing that in like I said and saying, "Not just I think you have a cavity here, but 100,000 dentists think you have a cavity here."

CHRISTIAN: I don't know if you agree, but all these technologies, and when this project evolves, you're probably going to start entering a new phase that I've been going through many years.  The new phase is that as soon as you have a technology that you know is fantastic and is working, you're going to enter the phase of trying to convince other dentists to adopt it, because your business will come from that. No matter how powerful you think that solution is, people need to actually pay for it and buy it, right?

As we know as human beings, we like to be in the comfort zone. We don't like changes. We usually think that we don't need that. "I've been analyzing X-rays since 30 years and I'm fine. Why do I need this new technology and invest on this?" As I always tell people, it doesn't matter if you like these things or not. It's a matter of understanding if it makes sense to the final consumer, because if the final consumer likes the story about not depending on one opinion but actually having the world looking at your little problem and together defining what is best for you, once this goes viral and you talk direct to the final consumer. And if they like the idea, they're going to come back looking for dentists that use that technology. It doesn't matter how good you are and how much you're going to explain that you don't need that technology, you're going to lose that patient. You're going to lose that lead. I usually say that the pressure will happen outside-in. It's not a matter of enjoying, liking, needing. It's not you. "It's not about you, doctor, it's about your patient. It's about what they think, what they think makes sense. If the story about this new solution makes sense on social media, this goes viral, and people will knock on your door asking for it."

KYLE: It's a crazy thing to think that we may be able to have so many things automated and not miss something, because we all make mistakes, you know? We can actually get it to where, with artificial intelligence or computer vision or neural networks, whatever you want to call it, we can get it to where the computer thinks better than we do.

The computer won't miss that caries that we might miss, or the cancer. You know, it’s something we don't talk about often, but pathologies. What I like about this, and take into account too I have invested interest into the company, is lowering the liability for the doctor as well.

We're going to talk about it later, but liability is a huge thing for doctors.

CHRISTIAN: That's definitely a huge point, and making people comfortable that you're using the best technology to identify what is going on. That's why I usually say, you need to understand when to jump into a new technology. I see that what you guys are developing, it's going to be a moment where a few guys, early adopters, will start embracing that. These are usually the guys that take the marketing advantage of it, because they become authorities on that, first-mover advantage. Probably after you guys launch this in five years, it's going to be nothing new anymore and it's going to be an obligation.

Related to any new idea, there's always the sweet spot to not jump in too early where you waste time and money, but jump in before a majority jumps in, so you take the advantage of becoming the authority about that technology. The final consumer will see you as an early adopter, and that is great. I know Millennials, new consumers, they like to be with people that have vision, that are really trying to move forward also with technology.

KYLE: It's something that you've said before to me a million times, and I've seen you speak on it, is that the business people get it and the dentists don't. The dentists are like, "Ah, not right now," and the business people are like, "Wait a minute. I can monitor a thousand of my dentists and realize how many people are getting good treatment plans or this, and I can do that in, you know, seconds."

CHRISTIAN: Through a very interesting process, my whole career teaching the DSD concept, I was teaching dentists for many years, right? Then I moved into teaching business people, and as I said, it was amazing for me to see how fast they could get what works, what doesn't work, what we should invest on, what we don't want to waste time with. The way they see dentistry is amazing, and I learned a lot from them. Recently I had another great breakthrough, and it was my first time lecturing to the final consumer. It was an unbelievable experience, and I'm sure you should look into that. We're going to talk more about that when we meet, because that is an amazing experience to share all the ideas that you've been trying to teach your colleagues. You know, if you're right or you're wrong, what works, what doesn't.

When you adapt your language to the layperson, to the final consumer, and you are in front of 800 not-dentist people, giving a lecture of one hour. First question is will people sleep or leave, you know? How can you make people really understand? The beauty is to see how attracted they are about the topics related to orofacial health and orofacial care. Smiling, and how they got each one of the messages faster than anybody else. For them, I can see in their faces, it makes sense. "I will look for a provider that gives me this." Boom.

KYLE: I get this all the time, because with my implants, I do everything with guided surgery, fully guided, facially guided. When I show the patients that, because I like to show them why I'm different, a lot of times they say, "Wait, how did the other people do it, then?" I'm like, "I know, right? You know what I'm saying?" When you show it to dentists, they're like, "I've been placing implants for 10 years. I don't need to do this."

CHRISTIAN: That is a great story. It's the quality of the implant at the end. It's the process. It's feeling confident. It's feeling safe. Predictability. I always say I believe that one of the reasons why people don't like to go to the dentist, actually people hate going to the dentist, is because they relate it to pain, they relate it to being expensive, they relate it to a waste of time, but I always add another factor. Somehow, consciously or unconsciously, people understand how unpredictable dentistry is. They have the feeling inside, you know? "I'm here with the best doctor in the world, but somehow I have a feeling that if he's not on a good day, if he's not inspired, if it's not a good moment, if it's not a good mood, I'm in his hands." Then they feel after that the picture that many procedures we do in people's mouth are irreversible, and we mutilate people. We cut pieces of their bodies that don't grow back. Teeth, bone, tissue, we cut those pieces and they're gone, and patients, they feel it.

Every time you bring a technology that generates predictable processes that are not directly related to your mood or your hand skills, you see in their expressions, mentally, psychologically, you see them getting more confident.

The story you mention is perfect. The technology you guys are working on, it's a perfect fit to this. You show them, this is how you analyzed X-rays until yesterday. "This is how we analyze X-rays. Do you see the value? Do you want to use a doctor that uses this technology?" I can guarantee to you, 110% of every patient would say, "Definitely yes, even if I need to pay 10% more. Even if I need to pay for an X-ray analysis, I want you to use this technology." Keep moving in that direction.

KYLE: Thank you. I'll keep you posted.

I hope you enjoyed this interview with Dr Kyle Stanley and were inspired, as I was, to continue to both surround yourself with the right mentors and voices in your career but also to make plans to focus on the things that matter. Read the second part of Dr Stanley’s interview for an insight into a huge issue in dentistry - mental health.

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