Paule Delaney graduated in 1998 with an International Masters Degree from the European School of Management, an elite international school that took her through the curriculum in Paris, France; Oxford, United Kingdom; and Berlin, Germany. She fluently speaks French, English and German, in addition to possessing a good working knowledge of Spanish.
In 1999, she was recruited as a Director of Business Development for a young Telecom company in Montreal, Canada where she contributed to expanding the business. The company was rapidly acquired by a big communication consortium prior to the industry’s peak. In 2004, she moved to the United States of America and decided to utilize her previous background to create LoupeCam® - pioneering a new multimedia imaging product (both hardware and software) that is highly regarded as a fundamental tool for internationally-renowned medical and dental professionals world wide.
https://www.loupecam.com/
VIDEO - DUwHF #1040 - Paule & Jenna
AUDIO - DUwHF #1040 - Paule & Jenna
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Howard: And it's just a huge honour for me today to be podcast-interviewing Paule Delaney, founder and CEO of LoupeCam right here in my backyard in Scottsdale.
Paule: That’s right.
Howard: But you have a French accent. So before we start, how did you get a French accent in Scottsdale?
Paule: I took French lessons. Good morning Howard. It is a true pleasure to visit you today. And then I decided to leave that part out and try to ramp up a little bit.
Howard: Well, you know who your biggest fan is?
Paule: Who?
Howard: My buddy who's sat in that exact chair, Jay Resnick. And he's on Dentaltown. There's a quarter million dentists on Dentaltown and he is the number one oral surgeon, most revered. He put up three online CE courses and they were each viewed ten thousand times and he was the one who told me to talk to you. And so why does Jay Resnick think you walk on water?
Paule: Well, walking on water, yeah. Thank you, Jay, for that really nice word. We've been in business for the past ten years, a little over ten years, and Jay has been a customer of ours from the very, very beginning. So, he saw us, Jay is one of those more visionary and does things very differently - he's the 1% of the industry who has a vision for things and puts actions behind them. And he's been a customer of ours for many years and then kept upgrading as our solution and products migrated over the years. So he obviously uses our LoupeCam product every day and has become his own key opinion leader and has built his own practice and name, very involved in CE credits.
Howard: He's actually his own universe when you get near him, there's gravity and you start. Let me read your bio. Paul Delaney graduated in 1998.
Paule: Paule
Howard: Paule. Sorry, my brother’s Paul.
Paule: That's right.
Howard: Paulie Delaney graduated 1998 with an international master's degree from the European School of Management, an elite international school that took her through the curriculum in Paris, France; Oxford, United Kingdom; Berlin, Germany. She fluently speaks French, English, and German in addition to possessing a good working knowledge of Spanish. In 1999, she was recruited as a director of business development for a young telecom company in Montreal, Canada where she contributed to expanding the business. The company was rapidly acquired by a big communications consortium prior to the industry's peak. In 2004 she moved to the United States of America and decided to utilize her previous background to create LoupeCam, pioneering a new multimedia imaging product, both hardware and software, that is highly regarded as a fundamental tool for internationally renowned medical and dental professionals worldwide.
Howard: Now you would think since I'm the owner Dentaltown and we have four hundred online CE courses, that I think in fear and scarcity and wouldn't want to talk about Jay. I think in hope, growth and abundancy. I love anybody that helps dentistry, but Jay Resnick, what's his website?
Paule: Onlineoralsurgery.com.
Howard: Onlineoralsurgery.com. And it is... online CE is so cool because if I go to an over-the-shoulder program I'll drop three or four grand. I'm five foot seven and I'm too fat to jump up and look over and all that stuff and I can barely see and it's a surgery and there's only like six other doctors there. Then I go to oral surgery online with Jay's stuff and I feel like I'm sitting on the tongue and looking down into the deal and I would call him up and say, “how do you film that stuff?” And he's like, “oh, I got on my head, I got on the overhead, I got this and that.” And it just keeps getting better and better and better. And I said, “but nobody else does it like that.” And he goes, “because I use LoupeCam.”
Paule: Yeah. So LoupeCam is actually a camera system that's been... very early in the game we understood that everything that's facial for a dentist, dental professional or surgeon is prime real estate. And so we basically have made a great effort to reduce the size yet pack the camera system with technology to mount it onto the loupe. So LoupeCam means it's a camera for loupes. We're non-denominational...
Howard: Do you mean loupes like that?
Paule: That's right. So any kind of loupes. There's about ten, fifteen, twenty different types of loupes.
Howard: Is there really that many – ten or fifteen?
Paule: Yes with China entering the U.S. market, you'll see there's different types of loupes. And so for us, the vision behind LoupeCam is to have a camera system mounted onto your loupes regardless of the type of loupes you carry. So we have adapters – about eighty to a hundred different types of adapters – so we basically are able to mount across the board on anybody's loupes. That's for one. The cameras, we have two different models, at thirteen gram one, they're both high def. Thirteen gram...
Howard: This is the United States – if you ever start using grams, the only time you use grams in the United States is when you're dealing drugs!
Paule: Oh, so zero point four ounces.
Howard: There you go. Now they think you're legal, legitimate and above the board.
Paule: The reason why I use grams is I found that normally doctors, especially in any kind of surgical specialty, they will use grams because it's a more accurate reading, so I kind of try to talk to them using their language.
Howard: But you know why the United States doesn't switch from imperial math to metric. You know why? Because it would be mass confusion!
Paule: (laughs) Probably so.
Howard: Get it Eric? Get it Greg? Ryan? Why is it the United States doesn't switch from imperial math to metric?
Ryan: Why is that?
Howard: Because it would be mass confusion...
Paule: So the camera mounts basically in the middle portion of the loupes with (indistinct) adapters, as I mentioned, we have about a hundred different ones, and so you're able to align the camera with or without a light – preferably with a light – most dentists as you know use a light. Lighting is very key. And so you're able to, like on the fly, have a visual and that's super important. People used to ask us, why do you need a camera to loupes. And it's interesting that that question is no longer asked because we're in 2018 first off, but just like when you were in college, university, studying for dentistry, you didn't have a pair of loupes and then somebody told you, well you need to buy a pair of loupes for precision, for increasing the level of detail that you're seeing. And the same goes with the camera system for precision and increasing the level and it gives you a completely different idea of what's going on.
You're able to interact with the patient. I mean of course prior to surgery. It helps the patient to understand as opposed to talking acronyms. Five or twelve, thirteen, you're losing everybody and telling you they're going to do an ACD procedure. That also doesn't help. So when you're using the camera to explain, people understand more, they visualize more, they're more on the same page with you. So it really helps the dentist to convince the patient to move forward with the procedure. You can use the camera for, if you do paediatric dentistry, to explain to the parents. Parents, they're the ones pulling the trigger on whether they do a procedure or not. They need to understand same, likewise. You use also the camera for documentation. So if you have patients coming to your practice that have private insurance – private insurance are very challenging to deal with because they never really cut a check when you submit the paperwork, so they always come back with a series of questions.
Now we have a LoupeCam customers submit video footage to the insurance company because they know they're going to get back to them with some series of questions. So basically the video footage is complementary information to help them to resolve or answer the question quickly. And then of course, more recently, the social media portion is the one that basically makes the whole LoupeCam exploding because a lot of dental professionals spend a couple of thousand dollars a month on marketing services. Dental professionals have to self-promote. There's oftentimes more than one dental in one town, dental professionals. So they have to self-promote and how do you promote yourself? Oftentimes, if they have not studied business, they're going to try to turn around to a marketing agency and spend a couple thousand dollars a month to help them to rank higher in Google's search engine.
So Google has changed the algorithm so that if you want to rank higher nowadays, you have to have video, any kind of video, linked to your practice and that is what's driving the traffic and how you come up higher. So we tell the dental professional that you don't have to change anything you're doing. It's not another thing to try to change what you're doing on a daily basis. Keep doing what you're doing the same way you're doing it, only mount LoupeCam onto your loupes. And when you do that, then you have some video footage. Then use existing resources. Your office manager, who happened to be tech savvy, to extract a portion here and there, you know, so that you can utilize those footage. You don't have to upload an hour long every single day. You can cut it by segment and, you know – chapter one, how to do an introduction to root canal for instance, and then the day after, three days after, chapter two, three and four and five, and so you're basically showcasing your understanding of the procedure. It helps you to rank higher in the Google search engine and everything is kind of closing into a loop so you're able to utilize your marketing agency for what they're supposed to be good at, but you provide them with the content so you're able to generate that. So it's a completely different approach to outsourcing marketing and expecting them to generate traffic for you. You're able to really put your hands and utilize your skills for that. It makes a huge difference.
Howard: You know, we've done a show every day for a thousand days so we've had a lot of people come on and talk about before and after cosmetics, just talking about it, and they keep sending me emails. Dang, I'm in New Jersey, I had a lady fly in from South Carolina and had me do a $25,000 implant case. You know, when I was little in the sixties, only rich people flew or they worked for big corporations. Southwest Airlines, number one carrier, at 27% of all sea miles. And these dentists who you're thinking about getting before and after veneers or a big complex implant case and you're in Oklahoma and they're surfing and they see somebody in Kansas City. Well, Southwest Oklahoma to Kan City is a couple of hundred bucks. And these people who develop their websites with these videos and things like that, those are the ones selling a $25,000 case every Friday. It's just, I mean, it's amazing marketing.
Paule: I think the dental professionals, they have to understand that outsourcing to marketing, it's a great idea, but outsourcing, finding the right skill set is great if you give the right skillset the talent and the expertise to work with. It's going to be so much more traction for their practice because it's just, I'm not telling them to change what they're doing, I'm just telling them to start thinking before they get to do their cases. It's just a little addition to what they do that makes a huge difference at the end of the day and that's as simple as that. So we have dentists that buy our product and say, well my patients, they want to see what's going on when I do the work. That's why I buy your product. So also there's some demands driven by patients. Of course we're not talking about the ninety-year-old nanny – granny, I'm sorry – that is asking you that, but the younger people. They are much more engaged in what's going on. They want to see. So we see ourselves being driven by the social media portion, but we like to see that LoupeCam is a great tool, but it can really help the bottom line of the practice. A small addition that makes a huge difference.
Howard: You know a ninety-year-old granny – nanny that you said – ninety year old nanny, is actually twenty-three years off. If you make it to a hundred and thirteen years you're a teenager again.
Jenna: Is that right?
Howard: Yeah, a hundred and thirteen. When you talk about loupes wanting to see better, a lot of the kids, about 25% of our show, is in dental school and they're mostly young. In fact the number one question is like, is that dude still alive? And that's how young they are. But anyway, a lot of the young kids, they think that loupes are so that you can see better and it's true, the number one way to increase quality in healthcare is visualization. If you can see bigger, whether it's the loupes or telescopes or surgery, all that stuff. But that's not why you do it. You do it because of your posture. If everybody, I'm fifty-five, all of my alcoholic drinking buddies are always doing this all night long. Our necks are all jacked up because this is a ten-pound bowling ball – in fact, mine even has three holes in there to bowl with – and you lean over like this for thirty years. I mean, if I could go back in time it would only be for one thing, it would be to get my neck back. I can't tell you how many dentists have had lower spines fuse, necks fuse, so you do it for posture and you do it to save your tool and then the patient benefits because whenever you can see two, three, four times bigger, it's just so much better. And, so are you the founder of the company?
Paule: Yes, indeed. I founded LoupeCam. So originally I was located, I worked in the telecom business in Montreal, Canada, the French portion of Canada, and I got approached by a group of surgeons from a remote town that had read an article about the company and they said we need multimedia in surgery. And I was stunned. I said, multimedia and surgery – what do you mean? It's like we don't have any of those multimedia things that are starting to be commercialized. And I was very intrigued because I said people don't think about those things. And so that kind of planted the seed. And then initially when we first introduced the product, it was geared toward surgeons initially. So the dental professionals were not even in the loop – L-O-O-P – and so we started to push the camera system for strategically cardiac and the top of the pyramid and other specialties for the first few years. And then back in around 2010/ 2011, we started to pick up some phone calls at the office. They'd say, hey, I saw your product online, I'm a periodontist and I want one. And I was like, yeah, that's great, I'm sorry, who are you – a periodon what? It's like, what do you do for a living? And so it went from one call to many, many other calls and then what we just kind of realized, we entered the dental market through the back door. We never knew there was an application, it was more surgical driven by cardiac/plastic surgery, orthopaedic, neuro, a little bit of spine. And then all of a sudden we had massive inquiries over the years from dental professionals. And this is how we got started, after we realized that we just sold in excess of a hundred units a year without promoting. So dental professionals say we might have to look at this market.
Howard: So how did you get from Montreal to Scottsdale? And when did that happen?
Paule: So, I went from Montreal...
Howard: Because they say you only, they say we're coming up on 8 billion humans and only 1% live in a country they weren't born in and they say you only leave for love, a job or you're running from the law. I'm serious, I'm not kidding. Did Montreal drive you to the border and say "out!"
Paule: Not quite but I did meet my significant…
Howard: So it was love.
Paule: It was love. And now I'm married. He's from the Midwest originally. And now we have two beautiful children.
Howard: So I was right. See, you think I'm dumb.
Paule: No, so love is a good reason to move, to expand.
Howard: I would move to a different country if I thought I was going to fall in love here, I would, I'd move all the way to China. So, what percent, how long have you been in America?
Paule: Since 2004/2005.
Howard: So it's 2018. So how many years you've been here?
Paule: Twelve-ish.
Howard: When you moved from Canada to the United States, could you feel your IQ go down? I mean, were you aware that you dumbed it down?
Paule: Can I plead the fifth?
Howard: Oh, trust the... Canada is the same size as California. They're the same. They're like 10%. They have to be. I view Canada as like there's this frat house going on and they're the straight-A students up in the loft looking down over the banner and saying “tell me they're not doing ping pong bong before the night of the finals!”.
Paule: Everywhere you go is very different, every place you go. I lived in the UK, in France, of course, I lived in Canada, in Germany. So you just kind of have to learn to adjust. And the way I look at things is of course every place has great things and not so great things. So I try to focus on the great things and kind of not the other, cause you have to see the glass half full, not half empty.
Howard: Well Scottsdale has better winters than Montreal.
Paule: That's for sure. The food generally speaking in Montreal is a little notch higher. I think you can find great food here but the calibre is not the same.
Howard: Well you know why Montreal has the best food in the world?
Paule: Because French and also…
Howard: No, it’s because they make 80% of the world's maple syrup. You pour maple syrup on anything it tastes better. I'm from Kansas, I don't care if it's waffle, toast.
Paule: You will be invited to my sweet and savoury crepes with cheese and a dash of maple syrup. My kids...
Howard: Did you know Montreal made 80% of the world's maple syrup?
Paule: I did not know. But Vermont does maple syrup as well. I mean in Toronto area.
Howard: It's crazy because I grew up in Kansas and so my friends, most of them are small grains farmers, a lot of dairy farmers and a lot of (indistinct). But they took the dairy farming technology to trees. So instead of having a tree with a pipe with a can hanging on it and drip, drip, drip, drip, every one of them has got that same dairy suction unit on it and they're not waiting to empty a can. So twenty-four hours a day you're filling a swimming pool. If you grew up on dairy farms, half of Rain's cousins and uncles are dairy farmers in Kansas. And if you ever saw a well-run dairy operation, then go see the maple syrup operation. It's amazing. What percent of your business now is dentist versus physician?
Paule: I would say to this day, I would go with the eighty/twenty rule, 80% dental.
Howard: 80% dental. And that makes me so proud. And you know why that is? So you know what she has said to you, you cannot sell a medical practice in Arizona. You sell a dental office, practice. Dental offices are for sale. Vets are for sale, chiropractors are for sale. But you can't sell a medical practice. With Medicare, Medicaid, any position that opens up is already booked out three months in advance of all these patients you're just going to lose money on. And you know when you go to any of the physicians, it's still the old glass wall, somebody opens the deal and says sign this. They don't make eye contact. I am so proud, I don't want to be hard on my homies, but dentists, vets, chiropractors – when it comes to business they're up here. So thinking about what she said, there's only 211,000 Americans alive with a dental license, but only 130,000 are general dentists practicing thirty-two hours a week or more or 30,000 specialists working thirty hours a week or more. So that's the only 160,000 people. There's over one million MDs, yet the dentists buy 80% of the cameras. So why don't they MDs buy the cameras? Because they're not marketing, they're not advertising, they don't have to do anything. And that's why so many patients are always asking for a recommendation about which physician, because you go to that physician's website, shit they don't even have a contact form, an email address. I mean go to every plastic surgeon in all (indistinct)'s website and you'd think he was an accountant and then you go in there and ask for before and after pictures. Then they come back and they'll give you a brochure. And who's crushing it? You know what the number one cosmetic procedure is in Arizona, in the United States for women? Well, women get ninety...
Paule: Breast implants?
Howard: No.
Jenna: Dental whitening?
Howard: No, it's eyelid.
Paule: Really?
Howard: Which really blew my mind because I never knew there could be something right or wrong with a woman's eyelid. I mean I just don't ever remember looking at a woman and thinking if your eyelid was only somehow different, but anyway. But I'm serious, think about this – the average eyelid surgery for the United States of America is $3,200. There's a guy in this town who's getting eight thousand and the reason he's getting eight thousand is because when you go in there, he has his chair, a deal, a couch, and then he throws up a big screen TV and he says basically there's about four different types of before and after boobs. You can have like big boobs and one small, whatever, but the thing is with eyelids there's about four different sets. So he looks at the deal, the patient, and he says, okay, she's this age, this is her issue. And then his technician person pulls up and just starts throwing out video and they're like, oh shit that's what I'm going to do. Because the other guys, oh yeah, we do that, here's a brochure for the American Association of Cosmetic Eyelid Surgery Bullshit. And they're looking at this brochure. He's cutting on my eye, I'm nervous, I'm nervous, I'm nervous, and they all have the same price. It's like $3250 and then this guy – eight grand. And check this out, he only does one in the morning, one in the afternoon. You have to give them the $8,000 to make the appointment and if you miss it, you've lost your time. He says, look, it's your face, your eyes, that's what everybody looks at. If you're born hydrocephalic with no cerebrum, cerebellum, medulla oblongata, you still maintain eye contact. This is a brain stem function. So is crying, nursing, maintaining eye contact. And he says I'm only going to do one case in the morning and one case in the afternoon. So the $8,000 is for my morning and if you don't show up, I don't give a shit. And it's the same thing with implants. So all these patients that have been presented these big implant treatment plans, they've all been presented it and most of them want it. And then you say, well, they can't afford it. Between sixteen years of age and seventy-six years old, the average American will buy twelve new cars with a mean average price at $33,500 base. They buy a new car every five years and there's dentists right there listening to me right now that have never done one $33,000 car treatment plan in your entire career and then there's guys like Jay that do that all the time and you say they don't have the money. I was having lunch in Kansas. I went back and visited my mother because I just sometimes get really bad ideas. So I went home and visited mom, who is turning eighty this summer, and we went to lunch with the dentist out in the middle of this bumblebutt nowhere town of two thousand out in Kansas. But she loves this dentist too and we're sitting in this little restaurant and he's telling me how there's no money out here. So we we've got to remember we're out here in Kansas, there's no money out here and we're looking out the window and there's a 711 there called…
Paule: Circle K?
Howard: No, no, not Circle K. That's here. What is it? The Q? What is the convenience stores out there? Quick stop.
Off camera: QuikTrip
Howard: QuikTrip. So we're looking out the restaurant and there's a QuikTrip over there and I say, hey, dumbass how many trucks are in at the QT right now? And he looks over there and he goes. How many? Seven. I said, yeah, and every one of them is an F150 Ford pickup truck or an F250. The cheapest truck over there is thirty-eight grand and the black one decked out is almost a hundred and they all live in this town where no one has any money. So isn't it kind of interesting how the average American buys a new car every five years for $33,000 and you've never sold one single case for $33,000. And then when they were telling me, when my homies that do this type of dentistry would tell me about this company, I was looking at them like, shit, it's in Scottsdale. I mean I didn't even know you're in the backyard.
Paule: Yeah, we're in the backyard.
Howard: So you make your own luck and you can sit there and blame it on inflation and the bond curves and you blame it on every single thing instead of saying, why are these people... why is one guy in my shithole town crushing it? And the other seven guys are blaming it on a small town. It's just, they want to blame it on everything but themselves. So, it made my day that 80% of your sales are to dentists because physicians are arrogant and dumber than rocks.
Paule: My summary of what you just said is – I like to say that if your neurosurgeon or cardiac surgeon is a jerk, chances are you're going to suck it up because if you have to have a cardiac surgeon or neurosurgeon you're in bad shape. But if your dental professional is a jerk, you're going to turn around and find another one. So that describes a little bit the philosophy that we find, I mean a lot of dental professionals are easier to have access to. They have to deal, interact with their patients. They're much more easy to talk for most and it's just they're very hands-on. A surgeon is hands-on in surgery, but we have to realize all what's going on in the back scene before he shows up and everything is tendered over to him. The dentist does the work on his own and gets up, manages employees, he has a wife, kids, a practice, patients. So it's a much more complex situation compared to a surgeon's and it's a great market to be in. I mean our customers, they love our product. I think we do great technical support, great support, customer service. When they come and see us, they sit at meetings, we get hugs.
Jenna: Yes.
Paule: Invitations to visit. They're happy.
Howard: That has nothing to do with your camera. I've never got a hug or a kiss one time in thirty years and I started Dentaltown. Trust me, this isn't a camera issue.
Paule: Well, we started this meeting with a little gentle French on the side.
Howard: And you know what I like most about the French? That, the whole planet – after HIV the whole planet realized that you can transmit diseases below the belt and kill each other and the whole planet, especially this part of the world, unlike the Middle East and the French, who they kiss to the side because a little newborn baby isn't born with streptococcus on its hands, they're not born with (indistinct), they'll never get HPV. I mean, they're not born with syphilis, gonorrhoea and herpes any more than they are with dental decay. And I remember when we were little, we had two grandmas – dad's mom Nola, and mom's mom Mary, and we all liked dad's mom better because she would kiss you on the forehead. Mary would kiss you, holy crap, can you hand me a towel? And she doesn't realize that a nickel's worth of saliva, a nickel's worth of volume of saliva has 1 billion bacteria, microorganisms, fungi, bacteria. And it still just blows my mind. Even walking around here, I just got word of my fourth grandchild. And you hold your grandchild, and everyone wants to kiss it on the mouth. The French have class. The Muslims have class. I fist-bump people. I don't want to shake your hand and you just picked your nose. Did you just itch your tooth? I mean I'll touch knuckle-knuckle and it's tempting to kiss your granddaughter, but you don't do it. You bite her on the foot and she'll scream just as loud. But fist-bumping is what people should do. You should stop kissing. And if you got to kiss, do the French thing, the Saudi Arabia thing off to each side.
Paule: Elbow rub.
Howard: Elbow. And so in the United States in the dental market, I'm not familiar with how many different loupes did you say you're selling?
Paule: So we have adapters for about eighty different types of loupes.
Howard: But is it the eighty/twenty rule? I mean 80% of your adaptions are to what?
Paule: Dental. I mean it doesn't matter because the loupes are the same. The manufacturer, they're selling the same frame whether you're a surgeon or a cardiac surgeon or a dentist. What changes is the magnification. You can go from 2.5...
Howard: Now for me, you probably don't want to piss off any of the glass... It'd be channel conflict for me because I know the kids are saying I want to pick a pair of glasses...
Paule: We're not bringing up names, but....
Howard: I know, but that's why. It's called channel conflict. So the dental students right now are saying, okay, well if I'm about to buy my first pair of loupes, what would you recommend?
Paule: To go shopping…
Jenna: And do your research.
Paule: Do your research. when you've found what you know, what fits your needs, then come and find a LoupeCam.
Howard: See what she's saying and you've got to be fair, they're not politicians. They're trying to convince. If you service ten different companies but you recommend one then the other nine companies are coming to you and like what the hell? So they can't say.
Jenna: And we don't want anyone who already has loupes to feel like they have to change anything. So we make sure to make adaptors for as many as we can so that we can adapt to whatever the doctor already has. I mean honestly, I think you would probably have better advice for a dental student wanting to purchase their first pair of loupes as, what are the things in loupes over the years that you found the most beneficial? Is it weight or size or a specific design or something like that because that's probably what they want to evaluate.
Paule: And also I have to put a little comment onto that. Oftentimes nowadays, the loupes companies have gotten a little bit more sophisticated and they attach certain accounts. So I do know there's an account here in town in Glendale School of Dentistry that I'm not going to name. They are bound per contract with a certain loupe company and they basically force the university to have all their students buying exclusively from that company.
Howard: That's so shocking that a private dental school acts like a whore.
Paule: That's why we make it we're non-denominational. We basically believe in different types of religion. So you can mount the camera system onto your preferred frame.
Howard: All I want to say is that your human eye, I mean the smallest thing your human eye can see is fifty microns, (indistinct) is five microns wide. I mean, we're so limited as apes and so you've got to get loupes. But my biggest pet peeve on loupes right now is a lot of people say, oh, I know what they are, tell me something I don't know. I'll tell you something you don't know – anybody with wet hands in a dental office should be wearing loupes. So you're wearing loupes and your assistant isn't. Then you look at their temporary and say, well I've got to go in there and touch it up. Well you're wearing 3.8 magnification and she's not. My wet hands – my hygienists, assistants, dentists, everyone wears loupes. And if they say, I don't want to wear loupes, I'd say, okay, well I don't want to go to a doctor named Stevie Wonder. Okay, so go work somewhere else. Dry hands can wear whatever they want and wet hands have to wear loupes and then for the wet hands, once you get familiar with it, you've got to have two pairs because what you'll find is that your assistant will kick and scream, getting them the whole time. Then you force her to wear them. Then she's been on them for a year, then she drops something and now she's afraid to go back in the mouth. I have three pairs because I dropped one one time and if one eye fogged and it's like I just didn't even want to do dentistry because I knew that I was going to be doing somewhere between Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles dentistry. And then the endodontists, those microscopes are only 8X. It might have settings eight, sixteen, twenty-four or down to four, but all the endodontists I know, it's just a check. They do their whole root canal, their 3.8 or whatever, but right before they fill they just pull the scope over and look at it 8X. And once every two or three days it's like one of the canals is still filled with sludge or they missed the (indistinct). So magnification is huge. Where were you going to go? That's your website?
Paule: No, I just wanted to show you. This is the latest addition to our product lines. So LoupeCam, as I mentioned, we adapt across the boards for different types of loupes and we're oftentimes referred to as the GoPro for dental. So you get to choose your platform so you can go with Windows which is traditional efficiency, suite for practice. Some go with Mac. So we have software for both. And then we recently introduced this…
Howard: What is this though? Huawei?
Paule: No this is a mobile device.
Howard: But what does this say?
Paule: Oh this is a mobile device.
Howard: It's not a smartphone?
Paule: It is a smartphone. We disabled the telecom because we don't want your wife to call you when you do dentistry with it.
Howard: Oh, this is what you use with the cameras. I thought that was your personal telephone.
Paule: So this can go into your scrubs pocket and upside down. You can connect the camera here because remember the camera is 13 grams/0.4 ounces, so it mounts onto your loupes and then you basically put the wire directly into this and this is your recording platform so you can record. You don't have to record all the time, but you can record if you wish to. And this, the screen of your phone can be comcast onto your monitor into your practice so your assistant can actually also visualize what's going on. So we utilize technology to serve the purpose and so while the phone or the mobile device isn't to your pocket, we also have this little tiny hand control that lets you activate so you can start and take pictures just by clicking. Because if you have a three-hour case, you don't need to record three hours to spend three or five hours editing. So you just want to be effective because time is money. Everybody is busy with their practice, patients, office and so those are the tools that we have to simplify your life so that you can start utilizing video yet don't feel completely overwhelmed by the video that you're generating.
Howard: So at Ahwatukee, just little old biddy Ahwatukee - it’s only got eighty-five thousand people. I know a lot of people just use a microscope for a check. They have to do every single one of their fillings through a microscope because they can't bend their necks anymore. I mean, because kids, they're never going to get pregnant, they're never going to catch a disease, they're never going to wreck their car, they're never going to do everything. And you got to look at the people who've been doing it thirty, forty, fifty years and say what are their biggest regrets? And their biggest regret is posture and trashing their spine. And this goes back a hundred years because one of the biggest debates when they started the first, when dental school started, it was all the surgery was stand-up and then it started to sit down. Because what was the problem with stand-up? Why did everybody start going to sit down? Because their bodies were all trashed because they were standing up, still leaning their bowling ball over. And so they thought, well, maybe we sit down and then they sat down and they still lean their bowling ball over and I'm telling you, you go back for a century... By the way, dentistry started in France, Pierre Fauchard.
Paule: Really?
Howard: Have you heard of him before?
Paule: Pierre?
Howard: Pierre Fauchard
Paule: Fauchard. How do you spell Fauchard?
Howard: F-u-c-h-a-r-d
Ryan: I think it's f-o-u
Paule: Oh, Fouchard.
Howard: Is that familiar to you? Text it to me.
Ryan: We're both wrong. It's F-A-U
Howard: F-A-U
Paule: Fauchard.
Howard: And when we were lecturing in Paris, France and doing podcasts and saw the Louvre, that damn museum for Pierre Fauchard was being renovated. After twenty, thirty years, they decided to close it down for three months and redo the whole damn thing. And I'm like, really? Really? So I got to go stand by the door and just cry.
Paule: The good news is you get to have a second opportunity to go and visit again.
Jenna: Exactly.
Howard: There you go.
Paule: If you need some guide, you know where to find me.
Howard: Yeah, it's amazing. And actually, before you leave, I want to do... I'm going to get his book because it's like 1750 or whatever, but I bought the GV Black for the father of American dentistry – a century later was GV Black. Green, Bernhardt's, Black, whatever. But I'm going to get Pierre Fauchard’s book and do a podcast and just read the book because it's not that big of a book, but it's in French.
Paule: So you need my help to read.
Howard: I do, I do. I need someone who can read French and I'm going to read that book because I think, the reason I want to do that is because people always think the sky is falling and dentistry is always going the wrong way. Well go back a hundred years and read GV Black's book, and then you realize, oh my God, they thought that. I mean he would drill holes at the end of the tooth to let the evil spirits out. And you think the sky is falling because your bonding agent's not working. You know what I mean? So you’ve got to put it in perspective. It's like politics. Like these little kids. I had some twenty-five year old punk-ass kid telling me these are the worst political times of my life. I'm like, dude, the first president I saw on TV got shot in the head. The next one was impeached. I mean…
Paule: It's all perspective.
Howard: Yeah and they're like, oh you know the North Korea thing... Dude, the civil war – one in every thirty Americans was killed and you're whining crocodile tears because Trump and somebody are farting at each other. It's like every hundred years, the world is so much better. It's so much better. It's so much better. So I want to go back and I want to read the first dentist ever two hundred years ago, GV Black, if you can find someone who can read French and speak English, and then I want to go a hundred years forward, which is a hundred years ago, to GV Black. And I think listening to me today, GV Black minus a century and Pierre Fauchard minus two centuries, they'd give you some perspective about two things. One, arrogant people always are proud to tell you what they know and they never realize what they don't know. And a hundred years from now, you know what this is going to look like a hundred years from now when they watch this? This is the most state of the art surgical camera on earth, and you know what they're going to think about this a hundred years from now? It's going to look like Fred Flintstone's little rock wheel thing. and they're going to…
I want to ask you another high-tech thing. Virtual reality. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, whose dad's a dentist and has sat in this very chair. His son paid two billion for what was it, Oculus Virtual Reality? Does that interest you? I mean, some people think that the biggest overblown things in dentistry and eye are virtual reality and the printing, what do they call the printing?
Paule: Sirona?
Howard: No, not the cad cam reduction.
Paule: 3D printing.
Howard: Yeah the 3D printing. But do you ever sit around thinking that there'll be a virtual reality deal? Because I'm wondering, I'm wondering. Take Jay, one of the greatest oral surgery educators, he's probably the best ever. Should that dentist be watching Jay's course on Zuckerberg's Oculus Reality? Because right now, I don't know this but Genesis right now it's only use that it's good for is in porn. And because thinking about that, would everything Jay's doing be better sitting in my chair looking at the big screen TV or crawl into virtual reality?
Paule: We cannot currently do it. I mean we've tested internally. You can put the phone of Samsung with the 3D goggles, that's all possible. We also had software running on Google - Google Glass before they discontinued that. So we're assessing different things, but at the end of the day, what is missing, like when you're trying to get from A to Z, understanding of procedure and ramp up your skills. Why people are doing CE credit is because they have a need to keep up, keep up with what? Techniques, new products or how to improve a surgical technique to make their patient's life better, a shorter, potentially shorter procedure, a shorter healing time, less drama into the mouth. All those things are the elements driving the dental market nowadays. And so because of the massive influx of technology and new techniques relating to using this technology, people have to figure it out real quick. So you have a dentist in Kansas City who needs to ramp up because his clientele, they're very loyal to that doctor. And he said, well I don't do implants but I'll send you over to a buddy of mine two hundred miles away from him and now people feel that they need to secure, a lot need to ramp up. You see more and more GPs doing implants. So they want to secure their clientele or their clientele doesn't want to migrate away from them. So those are the driving forces, so I think we're catering with our product to help all the dental professionals who needs to ramp it up. So whether it's a technique, surgical skills or knowledge, generally speaking.
Jenna: Even if it's sharing a case on Dentaltown for feedback, we have a couple of clients who do that and, and that's a really useful tool for them to learn by. I don't know if I see students in dental school using a 3D, like the Oculus device. I mean, it's definitely possible, it could totally go there. It's just is that the most practical way to learn?
Howard: Well I know the Facebook shareholders wish he never would have... Well Instagram that he bought for a billion was considered the best.
Jenna: Oh, absolutely.
Howard: The best purchase ever. And I noticed you don't have Instagram on your website. Which is the highest...
Paule: We do have Instagram, but the icon is not there.
Howard: Instagram is the highest engagement social media. WhatsApp will probably go to zero but all the Wall Street boys think the virtual reality thing was a complete waste of money.
Paule: You know, depending on what industry. If you're in gaming, yes because gaming is all about stimulation of different senses. I'm not sure you want to stimulate all of those senses when you do dentistry. You might, but have different results than expected.
Howard: So on your website. So what does something like this cost?
Paule: So we have different products, a high definition camera, full high definition with different accessories, so ranging between $2,500. Really affordable.
Howard: But you're from Montreal so you're talking about Canadian. You just pay 2,500 Canadian.
Paule: No, we're talking about Uncle Sam, green colour.
Howard: Then you better move back to Montreal so we can pay 2,500 Canadian.
Paule: No.
Howard: Yeah 2,500. I mean, and then that's the other thing, like some guy was telling me, he wanted to learn Ortho, but Richard Litt's course was five grand and Brock Rondo's course is five grand. He said, dude, I just don't have five grand. I'm like, yeah, that makes sense because your first Ortho case is six grand you idiot and this is $2,500. I mean a single implant and crown – one implant and a crown is $2,500 and then I'll ask you these questions. I'll say, okay, well if someone goes to your website, how many people have to land on your website? If a hundred people land on your website, how many convert and call your front desk? Oh, you don't know? And then I'll say, well if you have a hundred people call your office, how many convert to schedule? Oh, I don't know. Well, if I told a hundred people they each need an implant and a crown, how many of them come in for treatment? Oh, I don't know. Oh, so what are you doing right now? I'm reading a math book. I mean this is the (indistinct). Then I hear every article or lecture ever written on marketing starts talking about Facebook and my God, marketing starts with a camera and then you convert those images to your website. My mom, when I was little – our phone was nailed to the wall and we were so poor, it didn't even take pictures. And the greatest present I ever saw my mom get at Christmas – because our family exchange the night before and then Santa Claus comes in the morning. My mom, the phone cord is like six feet, and dad found her some thirty-foot long cord. And when mom saw it, she screamed and her and all of her seven kids ran into the kitchen and she walked all three ways to see how far she could get. And it was so exciting. And now they're sitting there, everybody's at IBM mainframe and the average SEO expert I talked to, for every one hundred people that land on a dentist's office website, only three convert. So man, when I go – and I'll do this right here and show me my proof – if I go to the number one search for dentists, looking for a new dentist, is “dentists near me”. So I go “dentists near me” and how many does it say? I mean it goes for eternity. So they go to your website and they're thinking, I want to get something done, I want to get an eyelid surgery, I want to get a tummy tuck, I want to get veneers, I want to get implants... Three seconds on your site and they just hit the back button and go to the next one. You didn't grab them and a picture's worth a thousand words and a video is a thousand pictures and it's all about visually stimulating them to build the trust that, oh man, these people know eyelids, these people know implants, these people know veneers.
Paule: That's right and the truth is, as I said, it's just like you do what you do every day. You just have to, before you do it, know that you're doing it with purpose. Knowing you're going to take care of your patient, but you're going to record a portion of it. And we have even dental hygienists that are actually recording a portion to show the patient. I'm going to show you how to floss because clearly you don't. Who taught you how to floss? Nobody taught me. Just take a string and move it around. But there's techniques for flossing that work more efficient than others. And so they basically show, they let the patient go home and send them a brief email – Thank you for your visit, just as a reminder, this is what is most efficient for you and they insert a little video footage.
Howard: Because it's not about the patient, it's about the insurance claim. Because like when I was little and when you went to the piano teacher, the piano teacher didn't sit on the piano and play Beethoven while I sat and watched. I had to sit on the piano. When you played sports, when you were in little league, your parents weren't playing softball. You were playing softball. Then you go to the dental office. Here's some six year old kid. He's never brushed his teeth once. He's never flossed his teeth once. He sits in the chair. She scales, she polishes, she brushes... What the hell? I mean, it's like they're out of their mind. I mean, you would sit down and say, hey Johnny, show me how you brush, and then he puts on the wrong amount of toothpaste and squeezes too much. You got to teach them that. Then he starts brushing and no, we start in the upper right, then we go to the upper left, we go down. Then the floss, no, we start back here. I mean if your kid came to my office at four years old, chances are it'd be the first time the kid ever flossed his teeth once because we're in this deal, I'm just going to get this kid in and put them through a semi. Because what that kid does twice a day matters. What you do twice a year does nothing. So doc, the word doctor comes from the Latin word docera, meaning to teach. Just like the word Bible just means book. So everyone that teaches is a teacher and I think the greatest teachers in dentistry should be your assistant or your hygienist. And I think it could easily be your website because I watch these encounters, like my YouTube is 80% males because males, the average female ape and monkey talks five times for every time the man does. And so, males like YouTube because there's no talking, there's no interaction. Girls like the other social media sites where someone's going to comment or reply. Girls have got to be, there's got to be five of them or they're not alive. Boys are more solitary. And so many people are going to your website and if you catch their eye you catch them with a video. I mean I think the average YouTube viewer video is, Ryan, can you find me a stat on how long is the average YouTube video viewed? But on Facebook it's like nine seconds. And on YouTube it's almost three minutes. And so, if you have 97% of the people…
Off camera: Four minutes twenty seconds is the average view.
Howard: Four minutes twenty seconds. That's for YouTube?
Off camera: Yeah.
Howard: And could you find one for Facebook.
Paule: You can teach your clients a lot in four minutes and twenty seconds.
Howard: And imagine if it was a mom and the number one goal of the species is to survive long enough to reproduce and have offspring. And imagine the mom and there's a video, there's a four-minute video about your hygienists teaching, talking to and communicating to a six-year-old child. The neatest video I ever saw in my life, my son sent it to me, well I deleted it because I didn't want to abuse my granddaughter because I've got a big platform, but she turned on her iPhone deal and she was teaching a class on how to brush. So she started the sink, the water was on for at least half an hour. And she's talking about how to put it on and she's putting on this toothbrush and I think she was like three and then...
Off camera: Twenty-three seconds on Facebook.
Howard: Yeah, Facebook. I mean you guys,
Jenna: But you can still leverage that if you have the content. You can leverage all of those.
Howard: You guys think about it. The two biggest search engines in the world are YouTube and Google and Facebook has got this smoke and mirrors over everybody that they're the hottest profile in the world and they're not. But anyway, if it was a mom, mom's number one deal is little Muffy. And if you caught her eye with a four-minute video or less by your hygienist on kids or it's an implant or it's a cosmetic. Number two, when they put these on their websites, do you recommend a YouTube file?
Paule: Yeah, YouTube is great because the way it works is if you upload things onto YouTube – and YouTube everybody knows it's owned by Google – so when people are doing searches the algorithm from Google is picking up video related to your practice. As a matter of fact, for dental, we're listening is your chances to get picked up by Google and rank higher in the Google search engine is much, much greater if you have any video linked to your practice. Now unfortunately if you go fishing, your trophy or fishing or hunting thing is not going to work. It has to be dental-related for a dental practice and this is what helps you to when you did the search "dentists near me" – the ones that are video-driven are going to come up higher. That's number one. And YouTube, fabulous platform because you will find a lot of different things is going to be picked up by Google, but also is very much informational as to if you go direct in terms of dental implants or best implants, then you'll have all sorts of things they can navigate yourself into. So really self-serve dual purpose.
Jenna: And you can still embed that on your website and just do double duty by still using YouTube but embedding it on your own site to capture people who jump on there.
Howard: I want to say two things about that. The first bubble that I lived through and remembered, okay so when I graduated from high school was in the 80s. So that was the worst – it was 21% interest rates, double digit inflation, double digit interest. What was the other one? Unemployment, inflation. I had three friends whose dads lost the family farm and went out in the barn and blew their head off. That was crazy. So then the 2008 meltdown. Again, the millennials are crying crocodile tears – oh my God, I lost my Starbucks pass. It's like were interest rates 21%? When I bought my first house in '87, my interest rate was 14%. And now America's shitting because the Fed has raised interest rates back to three dow. They're like three, end of the world. My first house, fourteen, back then twenty-one. But the first bubble though was '93/'94 to March of 2000 and it was four stocks – Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco and then that all went pop and we know what happened. Now we're at the top of another bubble that is completely going to pop because you're calling Netflix has the same value as Disney and you're going to have the first company to have a trillion dollar market cap – Amazon – and they don't even have earnings. I mean I've seen this rodeo so many times but going back to that, what's interesting to me the most is that in the second bubble, there's only one company still in it. Microsoft, again. It's Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google's in it again, and I love Google the most because Facebook makes all their money from one thing. Amazon is just too, it's cloud storage and retail and the retail has never made a penny of that. They've only ever made a dollar on cloud storage, but Google... But Microsoft has a nice diversified portfolio. They bought Skype, they bought LinkedIn very nice, but they own Bing and it always amuses me how gullible you are. There's some guy at the Holiday Inn talking about SEO and you believe him. It's like Bill Gates would give that guy a billion dollars if they could fortify Bing to take out Google. So trust me, if anybody knew shit about search engine optimization, it's the most guarded secret in the world because it's Google's. 130% of all of Google's profit comes from search and that's what I said – 130% – because every other thing they do loses money. The two biggest surgeons in the world are googling YouTube and what Bing will tell you is that if you have a YouTube video and on a google search, and if it's a Gmail – I go to so many dental websites and their email is DrSmiles@yahoo. Oh, why don't you go home tonight and introduce your wife to your girlfriend. That would be the equivalent. So yeah, it's got to be Gmail. It's got to be a YouTube. It's got to be Google. I would just do every Google product. I mean, just stay with Google. They're the beast, I don't know. They're such an amazing company.
Paule: What people also have to realize is that Google, because of this massive imprint on search engine and dominating the market clearly, 70% of their searches are video-driven. So the question is if you, as a dental professional…
Howard: Say that again. 70% of searches are video-driven, what does that mean?
Paule: That means that when you search something, 70% of what is going to be fed as an answer to what your search is, is going to be video-driven. So do you want to be part of the 70% or do you want to be the 30%? Think about it. Like if you don't even know, like you're cooking something, for instance, octopus. Do you know how to cook an octopus? You go into Google, how to cook an octopus? What comes up? You're going to have classic recipes that you're going to have to take the time to read or you're going to have video. Which one do you think you're going to click on? Like you're trying to get from A to B, learning how to cook an octopus. Everybody's going to click on the easiest, the least path of resistance, which is video. The question is, as a dental professional, if you don't have anything video-driven, you fall automatically down at the bottom of the totem pole. You know, the 30%.
Howard: You've got me going here. Have you actually eaten an octopus?
Paule: I actually cooked an octopus this weekend.
Howard: Seriously?
Paule: I love octopus.
Jenna: Octopus is so good.
Howard: So how much of this before you ate the octopus?
Paule: I already gave her the French connection is Vegas and she was sceptical.
Howard: Did you try it?
Jenna: Yeah. Octopus is incredible.
Paule: Trust me, you're going to there.
Howard: Now you're going to buy a camera just so she could make some money and buy some real food. My favourite joke in China, I spoke to the world congress or something, whatever the hell, and you know what my opening joke was? Being raised Christian, I know that Adam and Eve were not Chinese because if they were, they would have eaten the snake too.
Paule: That's actually pretty good.
Howard: They thought it was funny. So we're way over time. One more thing on that site – when we were little, the number one cause of death in a car was alcohol, drinking while driving, and in Kansas it was beer and in France it was probably some fine wine or something. And in fact my boys lost one of their nephews, ran over by a drunk driver, and back then in the sixties when you killed someone as a drunk driver, you didn't even get a ticket. So you had mothers against drunk driving, there was a crackdown. Well, now alcohol-related deaths aren't even number one. They're not even in the top five. And guess what the number one is? Distraction on the phone. Again, back to video. They go to your website. I mean they've got an hour commute. They're searching for their dentist and they're trying to read your website and that's why all the news deals like Apple news and all that is all video driven because when I'm driving, I can't read your website, but if I hit dentist here and I'm at a red light and I hit the video and it's a four minute video talking about something, I can listen to a video. My phone's in my car deal while you're driving down the road. So this just tells you about the fall of journalism. So Phoenix is a test market for the driverless car and we had one driverless car kill one person and the whole world started. They don't even realize that over thirty thousand Americans are killed each year by human drivers. They didn't talk about that. That day the one person died, over a hundred other Americans were killed by a human driver, times ten were carried off in an ambulance to a hospital and didn't die. But so you have all the data in the world that it's a distraction. In fact, Warren Buffet, did you see his annual letter this year? His annual letter is the most brilliant letter on all economics. I went to Creighton. He lectured at our business school, just an amazing man. But anyway, he owns Geico and he warned everybody that he thinks it's going to be about ten or fifteen years and he thinks he'll even be dead, but he says in ten years it's all going to switch to driverless because of this thirty thousand killed each year. And he goes and there's really not going to be a need for auto insurance because you don't insure so many other activities do you, you only insure autos because there's so much carnage involved. And he says that Geico will actually slither away to nothing. He said the cars have been getting safer and safer every year, bumpers and airbags, but the driver is batshit crazy. He said the cars have gotten safer, but he said the drivers have gotten worse because of this thing. People know not to drink and drive. I don't do it ever because I don't want to spill my drink.
Paule: You know, what I came up with, an idea. I really feel like the insurance company should go back to the old world you were saying earlier, like dentistry. I think they should actually give a discount to people driving stick shift. Why?
Howard: Yeah. Nice.
Paule: Because if you're driving a stick shift, you cannot text, talk and shift the stick.
Howard: I know, one of my kids has a stick shift and I can barely, to drive stick holding a cigarette in your mouth, with a beer between your legs, it's almost impossible to get to work. And one last thing, I get letters all the time and emails all the time saying they want to be a speaker, they'd like to present at a meeting, they want to present at a Townie meeting. You know the best way to be a speaker? Start massively documenting some amazing cases. And I'm so old that I remember when the hot new speaker was the one’s who went from the carousels of Kodak slides to this thing called PowerPoint and we'd be sitting there looking at this like what the hell's this guy doing? Because the deal was you would walk out there with two racks and you would carry them on the plane because you had six carousels of slides and if you lost that, they would just have a heart attack. And then some guys come out with this little Macintosh thing, and it was a revolution. It wasn't evolution. It wasn't an incremental improvement. It was like, Holy Shit. And now everybody's doing PowerPoint and then you show up at these meetings and you're in high definition video with sound and this is where it's at. And the sound technology, the one thing you can be guaranteed – I've lectured a thousand times, I don't care how nice the Hyatt, the Hilton, whatever is, the speakers were made in 1912, the sound systems are horrible. Sometimes you can't really bring your own speakers, but did you see GM's getting rid of car speakers because the technology of using existing windows and doors and dashes – they can Bose sound that whole car with just existing windows and dashes. But I've already seen my first lecture, I already forgot where it was, and the guy had a little device as big as that, but you know how there's windows in the room and he just put like one little suction cup on one and you thought there was an orchestra right behind you, so why don't you show up with some amazing high definition video, some high definition sound. By the way, these are never commercials. No one has ever paid me a dollar to be on the show. I've been offered lots of dollars, lots of times. It was a huge honour. Thank you, Jay Resnick, and thank you so much for coming over and talking to my homies.
Paule: It was our pleasure. Thank you so much.