Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran

How to perform dentistry faster, easier, higher in quality and lower in cost. Subscribe to the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dentistry-uncensored-with-howard-farran/id916907356

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**Please excuse any typos as this was digitally transcribed.

It's just a huge honor for me today to be podcast interviewing Dr Effie Greathouse PhD she earned a bachelor's degree in wildlife fish and conservation biology from the university of California Davis and a PhD in ecology from the university of Georgia where she did research on freshwater shrimp and dams in tropical island streams she did post-doctoral training at the us environmental protection agency focusing on water quality and stream chemistry of the Oregon coast range and then worked in stream chemistry database management with the us-4 service she is currently director of digital resources for community and science based in Portland Oregon she is the main lead on the fluoride exposed project at fluoridexposed.org which i am going to give you a donation today just for coming on the show um but i um i just but before we get to i just want to say one thing um i got out of school in 1987 and uh let me tell you how dumb i was back then so i'm in Kansas city and the hardest requirement to fill was the pediatric dentistry requirements it was like two pulpotomy chrome still crowns no big deal right and there was this really um successful dennis who died who in Kansas he left his money to the dental school and that foundation every Tuesday it would take a big city yellow bus and go to the poor school district in the town bring in the second graders or the third graders i forget what i think it was second or third and then it was the Lowry claims dr Lowry and then the dental students would fix up all the kids for free and when that yellow bus pulled out you knew when you got your kid that you'd say well do you have a toothbrush you'd say nope and you say well do you floss nope and you're sitting there with your finger crossed behind your back thinking oh please lord let there just be one pulpotomy chrome still crown and then the kid didn't have any cavities and maybe you know it was just so hard so then i graduated in 87 i moved and by the way that dental school was right downtown Kansas city and it was an African American population three miles every direction then i come to um Arizona where across streets see Guadalupe Indian reservation and large Hispanic population but I’d say it was about a quarter African quarter Guadalupe quarter um Hispanic cult quarter European and um these European i mean i mean i was doing Paul potterby's two or three times a day so i was so dumb i called the um the department of uh health i was uh jack dillenberg was the dental director of the state health association whatever that title called and i said jack i can't believe i got out of eight years of college and did know that black people have perfect teeth and Europeans and Indians and Mexicans um don't they have horrible baby teeth and he's like what are you talking about and i told the story no he goes Howard you graduated in Kansas city and they have water fluoridation and now you're in phoenix which is this largest unfluoridated city in America and i'm like what and so then i got on uh you know so then we anyway so that was my obsession with water fluoridation me and jack started the Arizona general health it took us two years we finally got it done and the Arizona dental association gave me the Arizona award for my efforts to fluoridate water but my god was that controversial i mean i thought one in four people were going to try to shoot me i mean and i was just i was just a young dumb kid i'm like well dude if you're that concerned buy bottled water but the kid that doesn't have the money to buy bottled water he's drinking out of a garden hose he's drinking out of school and the thing that my first red flag that i hate is when someone who has who's rich and has three or four options is trying to take away the only option for a poor guy right and i'm like okay well you don't like water fluoridation and you have money to buy bottled water then go buy a bottle of water but this kid at this public school he doesn't have bottled water at school or home and his dad doesn't live in his house and his mom's working three jobs but anyway long story short holy mole that's when i first learned that one-fourth of Americans are bat crazy and uh so uh when i saw you Effie and all your work on this stuff i thought i want to see if she's would come on the show and talk about her project fluoride exposed project because man that's a hot topic isn't it sure is uh i my background um like you introduced is in water science and i'm a stream ecologist by training and i did not know the level of controversy that would um erupt in our city when Portland had our fourth attempt to bring fluoridation to our city um and it was an amazing wild experience to go through uh as a scientist uh to watch the claims that were being made um see how controversial it got um yeah it's fascinating now when people say are you for water fluoridation i go no i'm a gay communist anarchist and they go okay you're safe i thought for a minute you're going to say water fluoridation i mean wow i mean one-fourth of you and then and it doesn't make sense to me because i don't know i mean it seems like that um you know they told us in physics that three-fourths of the universe is hydrogen and that one-quarter is helium because when the hydrogen gets all dense and gravity you know that's the sun smashing two hydrogen together to make helium and then when that star is all done it explodes and throws out you know the bigger elements like gold and silver and all these things like that and i'm like i'm pretty sure fluoride's natural i mean it was made in a supernova not at you know Walgreens it wasn't made by a pharmaceutical guy with a test tube i mean you need an exploding star and then i tell them i said well you know the oh and i don't like the term natural because it doesn't mean anything they say well is it natural i mean you mean natural like the coronavirus or aids or natural like a black hole that's going to suck in the whole galaxy and destroy i mean i don't know what natural means but they love the word and i said well yeah it's natural it's the 13th most common element of the earth's crust and it shows up in the ocean at 1.3 part per million which covers 70 percent of the earth and we were just trying to get it in the phoenix water supply at half the level of the ocean 0.7 and you're acting like i got dr evil in the corner and we made some super nasty chemical and we're poisoning everybody i mean i mean it's just i don't even know where to begin with these people how do you how do you talk to people in pol and I’ve seen Portland in the news lately i mean it sounds like sounds like Portland is kind of the Florida of the east coast of the west coast is uh is Florida are they going to rename Portland Miami west uh we do have some uh some big things going on lately in our city but um i am fascinated by the natural history of uh fluoridation and fluoride in water and that the you know the development of fluoridation came from natural fluid occurring in water at different levels and Colorado being the center of the initial research by Frederick McKay and um uh ji black um and to me that is really fun water history as well um that there were these you know varying levels and naturally some of it was too high it was causing uh severe dental fluorosis Colorado brown stain those descriptions in that early research of you know so many kids in Colorado having these brown stained teeth uh is just such a fun and fascinating science story uh using [Music] epidemiology and the development of new tests to be able to determine what's in the water and they uh you know came up with new uh chemical tests for water chemistry in that research and uh yeah as a water scientist it's just a really fun and fascinating story of figuring out that there are natural sources of drinking water that are at just the right level to fight tooth decay but not have too much so that people don't get fluorosis uh and then from that you know we get all this dental and innovation with fly toothpaste and in-office treatments um yeah so i'm kind of a fan of uh that old saying nature's way to prevent tooth decay uh and because i'm fascinated with streams and natural water resources and that whole story of um also making sure that our drinking water doesn't have too much fluoride in it uh because there are natural water resources that uh we've stopped using and that early research you know helped uh end severe dental fluorosis in Colorado as well so what went wrong in your childhood that you had all this beautiful long hair and wanted to uh fish in wild streams i uh i can't imagine any of my five sisters wanting to go fishing i think i would uh was that were you uh did you grow up with five brothers who like to go fishing you know i do have some family who are um really into fishing uh up in Montana um i uh was not a fan of the fishing and didn't go fishing with them um did you some camping uh and did get to eat some of the fish sometimes um were you were you a tom boy or a pretty girl uh i was definitely more of a pretty girl i played with a lot of barbies but i loved science i loved science in school and really loved my high school chemistry class and i was uh part of that late 80s early 90s generation that really wanted to save the earth and i had a reduced reuse recycle shoelaces in high school and i knew in high school that i wanted to do something with the environment and going off to college i was um sort of deciding between environmental policy and environmental science and just kind of checking out the coursework uh and taking a few classes i really uh fell in love with my major wildlife fish and conservation biology uh and i was i didn't come to it with um necessarily a love of streams over other habitats or ecosystems or organisms but just going through the looking at the professor's research research in my department and knowing that i wanted to get some research experience i was looking at the descriptions of the different faculty members research and it just happened to be that one of the stream researchers in my department Nancy ehrman her work just really jumped out at me she was talking about the effects of land use on stream insects and i went to meet with her and she and i was just sort of offering up to volunteer because i wanted to have get some research experience and she put me to work in her lab doing some grunt work uh maintaining the macro invertebrate uh collection from her many years of field research on stream invertebrates and i was filling little vials uh up with ethanol uh making sure that the ethanol over the years wasn't um evaporating too much uh because that's how she preserved her stream invertebrates from her research and um uh it was pretty soon that she actually hired me in the lab and um that's yeah that's how i got started um she was a great mentor it was uh really uh i really enjoyed that kind of um riot scientific work why were you pouring ethanol alcohol in it so that's uh i mean i'm Irish and i so i know that's the only time you can drink so i'm like did i hear did i hear ethanol at all so i mean yeah that's the most trustworthy um undergrad to put on this task because um i didn't drink at all so you're not Irish said that's what you just said you're not Irish okay but what were you doing with the ethanol alcohol okay this is uh this is quite fun so um i keep these up on my wall these are uh caddisflies and here they are um in this little vial they are from a stream i don't have memorized off the top of my head skull shoals George’s where i collected them and um these live in streams they make these little houses out of sticks and leaves and when we collect insects like this from ponds streams rivers we put them in these little vials and then we put ethanol in to preserve them and it uh keeps them from rotting over time uh so i collected these in 2000 uh another example here these are dragonflies uh that i collected and they're in ethanol and so over time you know that evaporates off and you got to fill it back up and re replenish that ethanol to keep the preservatives i know i know you're a PhD but technically are you a nerd or a geek i'm just uh i i think uh i'm probably a nerd maybe you're probably a nerd i may identify with both you know um i love that i love some star trek you love some star trek um so um you know i'm trying to go to how you go from a stream ecologist to fluoride org but before i get to that i want to go to uh as i get older i mean i'm almost 60. some of the best ideas like smokey the bear and don't burn down a forest you know uh um turned out to be maybe not a great idea as all the pine needles build up and you were working in streams where you know back then a great idea was to build a dam and dam up the water and all these things and then 30 years later now there's people saying that damn maybe that wasn't a good idea so how do you um when you were dealing with the streams um and you got a PhD i'm sure damn issues came up um and smokey the bear so has a lot of this environmentalism changed over the last 30 years of what was the best thing to do three decades ago now you're looking at and saying okay that we went the wrong way or that wasn't a good idea um i don't know if i would quite characterize it that way um so i did my PhD work uh starting in 1999 and finished up in 2005 and i was doing research on the effects of dams uh in Puerto Rico uh on uh freshwater shrimp and fish and their uh their effects on the stream ecosystem uh and uh we knew then that dams have big effects on rivers and streams and all the organisms that live in them um in the pacific northwest we are particularly uh love our salmon and you know trying to uh conserve wild populations of salmon and those big dams have huge effects on those populations and in Puerto rico uh the freshwater shrimp migrate uh between fresh water and salt water very similar to salmon uh so they are both diadromous organisms and that means that they are migrating between the sea and fresh water and when you build a big dam then that stops that migration so in the rivers and streams above large dams in Puerto rico there are not freshwater shrimps anymore the native shrimps natural to that ecosystem and the freshwater shrimps in Puerto rico they have all sorts of effects on the rest of the stream ecosystem there are uh freshwater shrimp in Puerto rico streams that grow up to like be lobster size people will catch them for you know good meal uh and there's others that are smaller and they have these little uh fans on the end on their appendages and they go around and they clean up the stream bottom uh clean off all the algae because they're eating the algae and the other little bugs that are on the rocks and uh when you build a dam and then those shrimp aren't there anymore then the rocks get covered in the algae and um sediment that when shrimps are there they're cleaning those all up so i was doing research on comparing the streams above the large dams versus the streams that didn't have dams on them to document and demonstrate what the consequences were when we eliminate those native shrimps uh from that ecosystem and um know those issues are still uh at play today and you know that dams have effects on these ecosystems and they change things uh and uh i think that you know fundamentally the you know we learn more and more about the details of those effects you know all the time but you know we've known for a long time that those dams have those consequences for you know what the stream looks like so how do you wrap your mind around looking at somebody and saying well this is just a trade-off if you want a dam for water irrigation electricity the trade-off's gonna be um a change of the the shrimp and et cetera how do you wrap your amazing mind around it to say if it's a good trade or it's a bad trade that that means you have to you have to like do you have to like pick sides like you're a shrimp or a Jamaican i mean i mean how how do you how do you settle that in your head um you know the issue with dams now is that we are not building a lot of them anymore because we already did it uh and one of um the aspects of my research in Puerto rico as well was uh sort of documenting that um Puerto rico as a commonwealth of the united states they had a damn building history that sort of mirrored ours so you know in the united states we built you know the vast majority of our large dams in the 30s 40s 50s 60s and then and you know and then we kind of dammed up everything we could really kind of build a dam on um and Puerto Rico's history of building dams was in that same time period uh so you know nowadays there's the questions more are on when we have dams that have outlived their lifespan perhaps uh and or maybe starting to fail are we gonna take them down uh or you know are they still serving purposes that people are wanting to keep and maintain and that's been a long-term controversy with dams um in our region um so there are potentially applications of the work i did in Puerto rico in terms of other uh nations in the world have not built as many dams as we have and might still be interested in building more dams for those purposes so you know there may be other islands tropical islands where they are considering putting in more dams and the consequences for their native fish and shrimp populations would be questions for them to uh to consider um and i don't personally uh jump into sort of uh those decisions i i think uh you know i'm interested in that i documented those effects and uh you know the people who live in those nations uh you know can take that research and sort of make those decisions on the trade-offs themselves and they're probably best poised to uh you know try to look at our history and figure out what would be best for uh you know their needs i i love your mind um i live in phoenix which is uh um between here and Vegas is hoover dam and do you realize in the beginning when they were building huberdam they were gonna build it twice as high but then they figured out it'd be too damn high um so um yeah i love that because what she just said is that um you know the individual should make the decision i mean i remember in 1980 i saw a study um where you know the united states the farmers decided what they were going to plant and we were a wheat exporter and then there was a centrally planned society i don't want to mention any names Russia where the Moscow decided what you could plant and they had to import grain and the bottom line in economics is that the people closest to the situation could make the best decision and what she said is she just wants to make sure her research is right so this island that 99 of the world's probably never even been to before they can decide and i i love that i i think the um i think the biggest uh issue um why would you have someone a thousand miles away in washington dc making a decision that only affects you in your house and your family you know what i mean you know i mean that's that's that's your decision uh no one else's but i'm still lost the one that i would put on that is that um you know the the um the push to build dams also though may be coming from far away and not be coming from locally so um you know we do kind of need to be careful about thinking about that um you know whether it's a you know world bank or uh uh you know big damn building companies um that are kind of selling uh you know the dam and sort of pushing for it um so you know that's something to be sort of aware of and and also make sure that um that you know those decisions about what would be best for uh people's water needs and their uh you know local people's interests in preserving their native fauna um versus you know their economic development needs yeah i'm i do feel like um you know i am not one to uh go in and judge you know if a nation has really or a local you know state in another country that i have never visited you know has had a local process that they decided you know this dam would make sense for them i'm not going to really judge that but i would also be you know wanting to support local people if they were feeling like uh it was you know an outside from across the world organization kind of pushing for that damn to be built well I’ve lived in Arizona since 1987. i doubt you were even born then right in 87 were you even alive i was oh you were okay maybe all the hair is what makes you look young but um the natives here the native american Indians they had been farming with agriculture and and all that for i don't know just you know just about 10 000 years or more and then they dammed up that river and um and um canaled it down to phoenix for drinking water etc etc but anyway it took away the water for all these Indians and then they supplemented that with food stamps to buy processed food out of a box or a can and then now they're standing around saying well why do they have diabetes it's like really you gotta you got any other great plans i mean but we just live and learn i guess i guess history just making big mistakes so how do you go from um stream ecology in jamaica um to water Puerto rico i'm sorry Puerto rico um to um fluoride um how do how do you get to fluoridexpose.org and by the way is that your website it is yeah so that's your own website so it's fluorideexposed.org so so continue on your journey how did you um what what happened next uh so after my PhD work i did a post-doc with the epa uh one of their research labs and i was still working on streams but i transitioned a little bit to doing more stream chemistry and stream nutrients so water quality related research uh and that was here in Oregon and then after the work with epa i moved on to another stream chemistry focused project that has water quality implications i was working with collaborators at the u.s forest service looking at stream chemistry in the u.s forest service experimental forests and ranges system and the national science foundation's long-term ecological research sites uh both of those systems have there are a lot of stream researchers over the decades who have been collecting water quality data data on the chemistry of the water for decades and it's this kind of national resource of long-term data on all of these you know wild streams um you know some of our most natural um unaffected streams in the nation and documenting you know what the stream chemistry is like over the decades in those um those places and our project was working on sort of bringing all that data together making it more accessible to download for other researchers who might want to do analyses on it and the project we called it streamchemdb it was i was doing a lot of database work and developing a database for that data and then i um was pregnant with my first kid my first baby and um that string candy b project my work on it ended right around the time that i uh my due date was so then i was at home with a newborn and uh going through those wild times um of having a new baby and being a new mom and uh this was in 2011 that she was born and uh i um ended up joining like a lot of other moms over the past 10 to 15 years have done joining the online moms groups for sort of support from other moms um so i was in a number of facebook moms groups that were Portland-based uh i was pretty active for a while on baby center um and you know when you are you know things like you know this baby's crying into the middle of the night and you think it might be teething and you know what are other moms doing do you have any advice for me and um what else was going on in those moms groups is it there were especially in Portland uh where we have quite and a lot of people who go for sort of natural health there were quite a few debates going on about vaccines and circumcision and sunscreens and there was there were all these debates that science came into play um and i have a PhD i have published in my field um my field has a lot of um overlap in the kinds of methods that we do with health fields and fields like epidemiology and fluoridation where we can't always do those gold standard controlled double-blind experiments we can't do uh experiments to where we dam up some rivers and we don't dam up other rivers and we choose those randomly when i'm doing my research on dams i'm having to make use of some of the same kinds of weight of evidence approaches that are used in epidemiology so um i had been quite influenced by some stream researchers who have sort of taken that long history of the weight of evidence approach that's been in use in health sciences for decades and started to bring over some of those approaches to stream ecology so I’ve been sort of long fascinated by that kind of um uh how we determine cause in science when we can't do controlled experiments and um uh you see even in these mom debates you know sort of confusion about those types of questions and sometimes even those types of questions about you know whether experiments were able to be done come up um and i was uh often finding myself liking and agreeing with comments from another mom in one of my facebook groups kylie mina johnson we were liking each other's comments in the vaccine discussions and other science related discussions and we became facebook friends and then we met up for lunch and um i was also at the time um concerned as a mom about some of the gun violence in our country um and had started to volunteer with some of our local gun safety groups and kylie uh what had just at the point that we were meeting up for lunch she had just accepted the um the spokesperson position for our effort in Portland to fluoridate our water uh so there are uh yeah our fluoridation uh effort came sort of right around the time my daughter was about nine or ten months old uh and and she just had a baby too her uh baby was maybe about six months to a year older than mine um so yeah we were both sort of had babies in the house and were you know seeking support in these groups and were the two babies named chlorine and fluorine they wouldn't those would be pretty names wouldn't they well the bad one you know the one whichever one's really negative you'd name them fluorine or chlorine right uh so we were we we planned to meet up for lunch and i sort of had a little ulterior motive that i wanted to get kylie involved in some of the um gun violence prevention groups in Oregon that i was volunteering with and she had sort of a ulterior motive of wanting to recruit me to write an op-ed for our fluoridation uh initiative and we met up for lunch and we had a great time at lunch we became fast friends and we both were on board with each other's ideas for each other um so kylie uh then uh by six months later she was actually working professionally for one of the gun violence prevention groups and i was getting um really fascinated by fluoride um the our history with our fluoridation effort in Portland was initially there was a public health coalition that um that sought for the city council to vote for fluoridation uh and start fluoridating portland's water and um it hit the news and there was a lot of controversy right away and the discussions in our mom's groups really blew up right away that there was just all sorts of discussion and debate happening in our mom's groups and i was um frustrated by a lot of those discussions in addition there were you know debates happening in all sorts of venues all over the city so in my social media feed i was seeing artists and bartenders suddenly talk about water chemistry and um and what the epa says um they were posting all sorts of scientific claims that were did not match my professional understanding of epa science and water science and a lot of times we're pseudoscience uh and you know not representing what the epa says uh and so i was frustrated but i also started to get very fascinating that uh get very fascinated that when fluoride sort of uh when people start thinking about it or when it becomes your question in an area then uh people start wrestling with questions about water when normally as a water scientist i'm kind of trying to get people to care um you know a lot of people and even i do this you know turn on the tap without thinking about it and sort of take for granted our you know running water and um uh our water systems and drinking water systems and don't necessarily you know we're not always thinking about the effects of our um water use on our local stream ecosystems and local rivers so i also started to view fluoride as an opportunity for science communication and science learning that suddenly people are wrestling with questions about water and water chemistry and water quality when they're not normally thinking about that um so we um my op-ed i initially wrote in conjunction with the the city council portion of the fluoridation campaign um then the fluoridation question went to referendum there was um a big grassroots effort that was anti-fluoride that um got it on the ballot and the and then kylie and i was sort of stepped back from the fluoridation campaign and you know we were still supportive and still you know uh participating in discussions in our mom's groups but kylie was not the spokesperson for sort of the referendum portion of the fluoridation campaign and i wasn't writing more op-eds and we were kind of had stepped back and we were still observing sort of this wild debate that was playing out in our city and then the referendum went against fluoridation uh and it was sort of immediately after the uh failed referendum that uh we really kylie and i really started talking about you know sort of processing this wild experience of watching all these debates go down and what kinds of questions people had and what kind of misconceptions there were and talking about uh this new idea of well you know fluoridation failed but there was sort of this um silver lining of people were wrestling with science questions and um and we were seeing so much misinformation all come from the internet uh and that then we wanted to start a website add a science-based website to the internet um you know there are a lot of you know the ada's website the cdc's website on fluoride um i like my teeth uh originally from pew and now managed by the american academy of pediatrics was uh up online but it just seemed like there was room for another an additional approach that we needed more um uh and more websites online sort of communicating in different ways sort of kylie and myself as moms who are professionals in myself in environmental science she's in public health uh we can build a website that can sort of really approach the questions in different ways than cdc and ada can you know cdc and ada have their um you know very uh you know big organization ways that they write about fluoride and kylie and i have a lot more freedom to write um features on the fluoride exposed website that they get a little fun um and uh uh you know throw in some humor um tackle the questions sort of with the kinds of perspectives that moms have and that we've learned by we've learned that moms have by being in these groups um we can do things like name our website fluorideexposed.org to sort of poke fun at the conspiracy thinking uh while also getting across that our mission is to explore all the science and kind of um open the doors to what the science really says and make the um the science more accessible and um uh clear so um that was the flooring campaign that was back in like 2013 right so uh the the uh city council vote was in 2012 the referendum was in 2013. um and we we were still new moms so you know the first six months was like just us going on walks together and sort of you know discussing with each other while we were sort of on our you know get out of the house away from the babies walks uh to get some exercise in and you know get some uh alone time and uh you know adult time talking with another mom um and uh and so the we it was a few years before sort of the full concept of what our name is and what the design for the website would look like and um you know developing sort of you know the full concept um and you know getting some funding for uh this because we were wanting to start a non-profit website so uh it was we went live in i believe 2017 with uh the site and had secured a sort of startup funding uh grant uh to to produce it and get it published and out the door uh in about 2016. so right as we speak right now isn't water fluoridation in the courts new health data puts epas fluoride toxicity trial on ice and no one ever thought that a judge would let this go to trial but it's actually in trial now isn't it it is and you know this is um it's not really new for fluoridation to be you know questions about fluoridation to be um in the courts uh questions about fluoridation have been in um different lawsuits and uh you know answered and asked of course to deal with over the years so um uh yeah well we um you know i when i was in the water fluoridation effort in 87 and then it got past 1889 and then it um they they signed it i just said it was good for 20 years so 20 years we had to go through the whole damn thing again and my boys told me they go dad okay that's the last time you're getting old and the people are getting crazier they have more guns or more nuts and i actually don't think i would do it again um i think that um because sometimes i think you know it's like when you're raising kids well maybe maybe you have to stick your tongue in the light socket a couple of times before you learn and you know and so um because you don't know i mean the world's kind of binomial you know you can't have right without left you can't have up without down you can't have cold out hot you know um addition doesn't work without sir you know subtraction multiplication you better learn the opposite division and i i actually kind of like it when they pull the fluoride out of the city and then you get 10 years of more observations and then you you know because i don't believe anybody's infallible i mean where eight billion monkeys who lost their tail are trapped on the surface of a rock and can't get off yet they think they're masters of the universe i mean it just blows my mind it's like okay you know you're trapped on a rock and can't get off right so you know you're not the smartest person in the universe because you're trapped on a rock and can't get off and and that's what concerns me the most about this i'm i'm really glad about the environment that they're woke to the environment because it's a rich world problem i mean during world war ii i remember they were grilling jack wells said the ceo of ge and congress are saying well why were you dumping all this stuff into the river and he's like uh ge was in the middle of a war we were building you aircraft carriers and we asked you what to do with this and you said just dump it in the hudson because at that time the major deal was a world war when you're in a world war you're not trying you're not worried about the shrimp in Puerto rico right i mean you know it's a ritual problem so i'm totally excited that everybody's woke to the environment but what scares me is you know the it's always the same thing it's like okay they they get a new idea and the government stands up and says oh i want to get involved and i want a carbon tax i mean you know the government's just going to show up and figure out another way to shake you down for money and as a dentist what i want to do is you know they trained this in school that the most important thing that you could ever do for a patient is the diagnosis and treatment plan just make sure you get that right I’d rather you get an a on the diagnosis and a c on the filling then an a on the filling and it wasn't even needed it was the wrong diagnosis and i just wish all the environmental people would just can we just raise a bunch of money and just study it and first find out what the hell is going on but you know that's not what they're gonna do what's the first thing you're gonna do is just start the government's gonna take your money and then they're gonna make up lots of crazy decisions and then 30 years later they're going to say well god that was kind of dumb and i thought when the internet came out because remember when i got out of dental school in 87 i hadn't seen a computer and i i thought we were lucky we we saw them stalling them for the next year's class we're like giggling like ah those poor bastards behind us they're gonna have to get on that damn computer i thought i mean and when the computer came out when i finally got religion on the computer was about 94 and i thought wow man the whole world's gonna get smarter they're gonna have access to all the information no they didn't they got access to their drunk cousin eddie and their crazy aunt matilda and i i when i'm in this water fluoridation campaign i mean there's like three dentists who have read all 5 000 studies on pubmed on water fluoridation and then everybody else is on some crazy website and i'm still wondering if the internet overall for 8 billion people is the internet making 8 billion people smarter or is it misinforming eight billion wild crazy animals stuck on a rock and making them crazier i mean i i think the jury's still out i think someone learns crazy misinformation twice for every time someone re learns something about the periodic table what do you think i i think you made some good points about questions about um the internet accelerating you know misinformation but also being uh such a source of uh great information um i uh may have you know maybe i'm a an optimist um but i'm still pretty excited about um all the amazing information we can get when we you know do searches in google um you know my experience in these moms groups it was frustrating to see you know other moms sharing misinformation um but it was also uh so key for me so helpful to be in this online community of other moms in Portland um and have a chance to uh you work things out with my peers um that and not be so isolated as a new mom with a newborn um so you know the fact that i am leading up this nonprofit um that runs a website and runs two social media accounts and that we hope to expand to more social media channels where we are working to get more good information and more science-based information about not just cavity prevention but all sorts of science that um fluoride is related to um you know the fact that we are running a science learning non-profit that's all about uh helping people learn more science from the internet definitely shows that i think there's still so much potential and um opportunity there with the internet um but you know what what's really weird to me is um um but by the way uh you i i love your deal history i just want to make one comment on the um when you're talking about Colorado rocky mountain you know spotted teeth and all stuff the reason the way i read it and learned it is that the reason they weren't looking they didn't think about the fluoride for so long is because they never found a water supply without fluoride it was actually the the equipment had to start measuring in part per million before they saw the variance because when they started early looking into it it was just there's a test is there fluoride or not and so since there was fluoride in all water ever found they didn't think it was fluoride but when they got technically enough to measure it in part per million that's when they found out that the fluorite could be too high too low and that that's what zeroed in but i love the grand rapids story the most um i don't know if it's folktale or legend but they when i when i went to grand rapids and by the way I’ve gone to the monument they got a tooth out in the middle of the river but the guy knew the guy was i think it should be a million dollar movie and uh you know i'm sure uh it'd just be the greatest move but anyway he knew unlike me he already knew a quarter of America was just batshit crazy and he knew when he turned this thing on it was going crazy so what he did is how we learned the story is um when it came to water fluoridation they announced and all that turned off and sure enough people started having hyperventilating and rashes and going to the hospital and and he didn't hold the press he wouldn't say nothing and the governor's like what's going on and the next day it got even worse and worse and finally the government said you gotta get out there and take their questions and you know this is a show and he goes out there and he goes we haven't turned it on yet and we knew this would happen so now that all the crazies are at the emergency room freaking out and their hair loss uh now we're gonna turn it on i thought holy moly that was the best chess move ever made in dentistry um is that how you heard the story um i my understanding is um similar but um not quite it being a deliberate i haven't heard that it was a deliberate strategic chess move on the part of the uh you know water operators um i had heard that just there was a you know an announcement that was starting on this date because they thought that they were gonna start it on that date and then there was a delay um you know for working out more technical issues um but my understanding yeah i do have the understanding that the community members thought it started uh you know like you know january 5th or something like that and started coming forth with you know i'm feeling all these effects uh you know i'm feeling sick from it um and those types of claims and that it had not in fact been turned on yet it wasn't turned on until january 20th uh so i too have been just fascinated and tickled by that story um that it was right from the very beginning that um i also want to do a big old shout out to uh harry s truman i mean i'm from Kansas he was uh independence uh which um right up the street from our dental school in Kansas city and um but anyway um i i i think he was the uh the greatest dental president because he asked um um you know they taught us at our school that he is asking everybody well what what's with all the goiter and and how do we cure that and a holistic nutrition guy said well it's because they don't get iodine and they say well where'd he get iodine he said seafood and and harris truman knew they weren't gonna eat a lot of seafood inland in missouri and Kansas he knew that would be you know if you are against the ocean and he said what are we going to do and he said well we could add it the the iodine to salt we could iodize salt and now salt iodize is gone and then he asked what's this berry berry and they said the same thing it's uh folic acid whatever and we could subsidize that in uh wheat and bread and cereal and berry berry's gone you don't see that uh what was the other one um little kids were dying of a cholera and in fact just every time I’ve ever lectured in uh south America africa asia it was the worst um I’d ever seen and i said well why do the kids have so many cavities he says because all the doctors tell him to only drink coke and i said well why so i went to the eye and said why he said well if they go down to the well and they drink dirty water and get cholera they'll die i and coca-cola is the cleanest bottling water facility i don't care about the sugar the cavities diabetes down the road i don't want them to die a caller today and i thought man that is so cool uh but the um the color was a problem and every american town built a water tower putting chlorine and and chlorine and fluorine are in there together that's why if you put your air up to the tank you can hear hey bro bromine and uh anyway um another bad joke but you you sit there and i like chemistry jokes and you're sitting there going okay this this saved this the number one cause of death in the world today is diarrhea and dysentery from drinking dirty water in fact the most life-saving medication given today on earth is not even a chemotherapy it's their diarrheaing to death there and so they know they're going to run out of sugar glucose going to shock and they're going to run out of water and be dehydrated so they take a a little teaspoon of salt and they put it in a little pad of honey and they make a little honey ball with salt in the middle because when you take the honey ball the salt is going to retain water and the sugar is going to give you some glucose um so you don't go into diabetic shock and people people just don't i mean it's just so obvious and common sense and and then the reaction to everything but anyway truman he got the chlorinated water he got um he got iodized salt he got all these things when it came to water fluoridation that son of a gun said ah why why don't you uh work that out the local level because a crazy senator goes on the floor of the senate and you can watch this on youtube and he puts up a chart of the human brain with a little red dot in the middle and he says that when Americans drink fluoridated water that's the area of the brain that gets sensitized to communist ideology and it was a communist plot and because russia remember russia they landed on the moon first with the droid they had the first man in space dog in space woman in space you know i mean they're the one of the greatest scientific countries of all time they uh were behind water fluoridation and as soon as the russians did it it became a com anyway it's just so crazy um but um man i don't even i don't even know if it should be a national policy because i i can't stand the government i mean the government is a mob i mean they just all others the mob they hire a bunch of thugs i mean i mean really if i disagreed with you post off with the epa and worked with the us forest service so i may have a little more you know sympathy for the government science agencies right and and I’ve been to the cdc in atlanta and several times and those dentists down there like i'm not talking about the employees and the scientists and the people i'm talking about everybody in washington dc i'm talking about you know those guys those guys are not on they've never been they've never been on my side they've always been on who's ever given them money um just like this wealth tax like they say income inequality we need to have a wealth tax it's not even the wealth taxes that if you get one guy who's got at least five or ten million dollars like at jeff bezos he can go into washington dc and buy anything he wants i mean it's all for sale it's it's it's um so you know uh but anyway we're getting off topic but um the bottom line is i think harry s truman um prevented as much or more disease than anyone with water fluoridation um chlorination beriberi all this stuff like that the centers for disease control and this is the point i'm trying to get to it's a long-winded deal but i'm getting to a point i swear there's a point in all this is that the the um at the end of the road you know the centers for disease control uh says that it was one of the top 10 things they ever did um what number was it um i'll try to find it uh cdc i say number four yeah number number four but then you gotta ask yourself well why does no one trust the cdc and that's where the government's at fault they have they the one pattern I’ve seen the most of my life from going to uh when i got you know from birth to now is that every year that goes by the people in my tribe in Arizona they trust everybody less and less and less i mean like when i was talking about well the centers for disease the centers for disease control they're just a shill for the american pharmaceutical company i'm like wow because I’ve actually met them and people like you you're not a shell for the farm you know I’ve been in this place i mean cdc's got like 15 000 phds and there's not one of them that's a shill for the pharmaceutical now the president the leaders and the appointees they might be crazy but it's gotten to the point now where um any reputable deal if you say the cdc the world health the american dental association just saying that is gonna trigger at least one in four Americans say well now that you said that now i don't trust it anymore i mean they've been hurt and they they've got some type of post-traumatic stress disorder i mean i mean they've been burned a thousand times from government so um how do you build trust and credibility in a world where they're i mean look at um again it's so hard to explain it's out of politics but in the in the separation of government between the executive branch the congress and the senate um we're supposed to the congress has to declare war they have to vote on this but but now the president if he just wants to send drones over and start shooting people and everything it's not technically a war i'm not going to ask congress i'm just going to go murder people and it's like it's like the institutions are breaking down and people don't have trust anymore and it's not just recently i saw it in 1987 30 years ago you said cdc world health organization one in four phoenix people are like oh well they're the conspiracy they're the brahmin it's just a lack of trust so how why do are you seeing a lack of trust in these institutions and why do you think we lost it and how do we get it back um yeah that is um one of our core interests um particularly because i did my postdoc at epa and with people at the forest service um and kylie has worked in public health um and we too we have met um the hard-working dentists and scientists in the oral health division at the cdc that we know personally that these are um people who really care that they've devoted their lives to to working in oral health um and you know coming from a background of working at epa where i was um mentored by and working with environmental scientists at the epa you know i just had this experience of working with these scientists to know that they're really top-notch scientists they really care about doing science that serves the public interest and that um yeah those sort of working scientists and the agencies are working hard every day um you know to to gather data to assess the data um for the public interest um and i just but i also had um happen to have friends who worked in other parts of the cdc sort of around the time i was doing my PhD and um so you know I’ve known people personally uh to know that those were some of the most caring people i had ever met and um some of the smartest people i had ever met um and so we have been really interested in helping to sort of humanize uh some of those institutions and to bring forth the stories of the scientists um the organizations themselves don't you know always do that you know cdc is the government agency and um you know they don't always do the best job of uh you know sort of bringing out their scientists to uh you know tell their story personally so yeah and it's not just um the the government science agencies that are involved in assessing this kind of data and assessing you know whether water fluoridation works and whether fluoride works it's also academic scientists um so i love having the opportunity with fluoride exposed to tell some of those stories of the scientists involved um so an example would be dr john featherstone he was um oh yeah you know at ucsf for many years he ended up being the dean of that dental school um and he did some of that amazing lab research um that you know then changed how everyone thought that fluoride worked um and you know demonstrated and how you know to prove with some of those lab experiments that uh it works and exactly how uh and so you know sort of telling some of those stories about what researchers like him found um with pictures and uh uh you know sort of telling the story of that research um and what those publications found um that's where we try to go with um building some trust um to so that you know hopefully people don't think that it's just some sort of faceless bureaucratic institution there are scientists working in universities and our science agencies that are real people who really care okay well let me ask you a specific question um i love my homies and when i don't believe anybody knows the answer like like they take tmj i mean if you think you really understand tmj um you know you just probably don't i'm sure it's gonna look very different a thousand years from now right so you got so i got homies on one side um like john featherstone who's got a masters in science a PhD i mean just just as smart as they get and he's for water fluoridation and then i got um other townies I’ve got um a townie uh uh dr j harris levi who was in the clean water Portland and he's completely against water fluoridation and was out there organizing against it correct yeah so so how does how does eight years how does all this college get two guys on the same team of dentistry uh seeing it just you know totally opposite how do you how do you try to um reconcile that and get them to see uh find common ground i mean they both know they have to drink water uh so it looks like fluoride is the issue but how do you how do you reconcile uh you know those two amazing minds um well i definitely uh come from the perspective of uh of you know listening to what the scientific consensus is uh so uh you know it's a minority of uh dennis and it's not the ada who's opposed to fluoridation ada you know puts together whole panels to assess the science likewise you know cdc uh in revising the recommended level for fluoridation you know put together a whole panel of you know a dozen professionals who are really experts in their field and they all you know worked together to assess the science together um yeah and put their um put that um you know those reviews through peer review um so i'm always about uh looking at what have the institutions that have you know duked it out on these kinds of um panels that put together a whole host of experts to assess the science together and then put it through peer review then what's the recommendation um i'm gonna go with the science that's been put through that kind of um uh you know review and um comes out as an official recommendation uh and you know ultimately uh i have you know on the other end i also have my you know family dentist um that we go to and you know that's an individual dentist that i do you know listen to their recommendations and i trust uh their assessment of the science uh but for something like water fluoridation um or other you know public science questions as a scientist i'm looking for what's the official position that has passed muster from you know a whole group doing peer review yeah and the other thing is and i just want to say um you know um if you're trying to change someone's mind um you know calling them an is probably not the best way to do it but i always notice even in water fluoridation i mean i remember when i was doing uh water fluoridation and um you know you start getting emails and uh you know i don't want to say what the guy's name is because it'll get back to dr jim and uh tulsa oklahoma but he says uh um he says you know uh i saw that debate you did with uh doctor you know it doesn't even matter he goes and uh and he starts off he goes uh got your ass whipped uh to assist you with any future debates read this information and i'm like okay well first of all the you send me one email jim and the fir the only thing i can think is okay you're an i mean that i mean you know when friends and then influence people is saying um you know but that is your opening but it's just why is it so emotional and my joke is to people like jim because you know i i mean he's from oklahoma i'm from wichita Kansas my two older sisters went straight to the nunnery after high school and you couldn't change people's belief system so it's in his head you know i'm sure he's oklahoma he's christian he's anti-Florida there's no chance of closing their mind uh but for the young kids out there just remember that when someone says what's two plus two and they say why do you ask because you're fat i mean that that that's you know you're not dealing with science anymore so it's um all those colorful things um that you arguing it should just be red flags that this not author search and and i i am really glad i went to catholic school because i see what how catholic school changed my mind because if we had to do a paper in school the first thing you had to do is go to the library and do an author search and then you had to get your author approved then you could do the deal so say i was going to do a paper on mars and i came to him and it's the uh the ceo of mars uh chocolate company um you know i mean none would have tie you well mars chocolate has nothing to do with the planet mars and you had to and and they the nuns always taught us spend twice as much time picking the right author than spending twice as much time listening to misinformation and people just don't do an author search and one of the fastest red flags for me to figure it's an author search is when they can't answer a very simple question and they try to distract you with profanity changing the subject but here's another thing i noticed when i was fluoridating phoenix i was debating you know so the biggest names out there on television radio city council all that kind of stuff but i was but i first trust that you're a good person and that we're all on the same species i mean the homo sapien only has one species there's not even such thing as a race or a breed like they have in dogs we're we all have the same brain we're all stuck on the same rock nobody's getting off so i figure there's got to be something wrong but for me it always turned out to be the money so i started uh in that campaign i started going to the anti-fluoridation deals because you could just walk into the back of the room you have to sign in show id none of that stuff and i just sit back there and sure enough from what i saw in phoenix at my debate is they have this they're so against water fluoridation and you could just start looking at your watch saying okay give it about 20 more minutes and by 8 30 they were selling water purifier filters that was reverse osmosis today and i was like all right so all this is just so you can sell a ro system jiminy christmas wouldn't you get and I’d go up to him and I’d say dude if you just did a direct mail campaign i mean you rented this room and I’d say how much money because i know the only reason you're here is to sell machines so i'm telling you that instead of all this anti-fluoride bologna you could actually make more money in just marketing and advertising effectively your ro system did you ever see any evidence of like that um or do you want it there's a lot of um that going on on the internet now um uh and what are the right who are very anti-fluoride and cell um water filters um uh very famous uh personalities who think that Florida has something to do with frogs and um sexual orientation and they sell water filters um and i you know i i think that it's not well i'll give you i'll give you another example one of their one of their gods is hal huggins who's no longer with us he passed away in Colorado years ago right have you ever heard of how huggins i have not heard of hal okay well anyway he was an anti-mercury filling and and when i started hearing him lecture and everything back in the day i thought well i mean i'm not going to just write that off i mean it's mercury everybody knows you don't put i mean i there's no mercury in the multivitamins you know i take my flintstone vitamin every morning uh with uh rubbles or bambam and there's no mercury uranium or plutonium in the multivitamin I’ve noticed that so i wanted to hear them but it was kind of weird because first it's all about this mercury listen i mean yeah you know you're not supposed to break open a thermometer and drink it so i want to hear it all up but it only takes about 30 minutes to go from mercury's bad to a 30 000 treatment plan where we have to take out all your mercury fillings into gold and silver and then the people that are coughing up the 30 um um you know those people um were doing it because they had ms they had cancer they had whatever so they're spending all the money they don't have and i'm like okay well if these mercury fillings were so bad and they only got 32 teeth so say um say they only got eight molars eight premolars so they only got a 16 teeth and every one of them had an mod amalgam i mean i don't know how to remove 16 mod amalgams and get to 30 thousand dollars i mean hell i'll get out my calculator and tell you right now if you had an mod amalgam in every tooth in your body um every eight molar and a back has so 16 times 250 um i'm at 4 000. and i'm like well how the hell did you get to a 30 000 and then when i was learning these courses at that time i had never done a thirty thousand dollar trade plan in fact i remember when i was taking that course i was sitting there thinking okay the most the biggest case i ever had was ten so why are the people that are just so crazy against amalgam why do they always have these treatment plans that are thirty thousand dollars when all the dentists that i drink with they never do i'm sorry you don't drink um i uh we were drinking lemonade i swear to god we were at the we were at the uh lds lemonade bar club in downtown nice but uh but i'm cert but by the way you know why we always take mormon dennis with us when we go drinking for a designated driver all through dental school scott dalquist was the mormon dentist at our drinking club and he he took every one of us and it was so funny because i I’d always say uh scott do you ever get the urge to drink he said after watching you guys you walk in there completely normal and then you walk out insane and you're asking me if that tempts me goes he goes Howard you personally are the poster child for why i'll never drink uh but anyway um but the bottom line is money is the answer what's the question i mean when you go from this patriotic cause uh like we've got to save the environment to one second later uh a a a cold a coal tax uh you know a carbon tax a tran you know it's just like they have a great idea and one second later it's a trillion dollar tax and it's like really so that that's the red flag for me and i would give them a trillion if they said you know what we're going to do we're going to do just like we did los alasmos we're going to get all the smartest scientists in the world we're going to put them in there we're going to get unlimited money and they can solve the problem but i want to see i want to see them solve the problem first i mean you know i want all the money to go into research my phds to figure out what the hell is going on to where they finally all say yeah we figured it out and and you know other weird thing but anyway i go on that i don't want to get into uh um global warming but um so i want to finish we went over an hour but um tell them um back i want you to go to their site fluorideexposed.org and it's ran on donations i want you to pull out your ch how do my homies um give you some money even if you're a dental student what's the smallest donation you've ever got oh um uh we have supporters who uh give to our monthly donors program of five dollars a month we've gotten you know like 15 dollar one-time donations that you know even that just really i want to be i want to be the number one i want to be the winner i want to make the smallest donation ever of all time or is that or am i on the wrong side of the coin but but no but but um if you go to floridaexpose.org forward slash donate you can select your tax deductible gift amount 50 100 150 250 500 a thousand but um why should my homies uh donate some money to your nonprofit yeah so it keeps us going it helps us expand it helps us write new features we have um one feature that we're in the middle of producing uh it's a series of articles they're sort of targeting moms they're kind of written to be you know speaking to moms and addressing the questions that we've seen moms have in our groups um and we are on social media producing new content all the time so it's you know you come support us and you're supporting science-based information about fluoride about cavity prevention as well as other questions about fluoride um you know these questions about uh what is the true science about when there's too much fluoride in the water um what are the water quality questions uh and we produce things like um uh explorations on social media of um of uh for appetite in shark teeth uh and we create memes like that um i really like that that deal because that's that's the deal i mean sharks teeth like it's almost all floral appetite didn't it mm-hmm so yeah if you're trying to raise money you said you're in mom's group and the word mom comes from made of money that's why kids are always saying mom can you give me a dollar mom can you give me five dollars mom i know moms are made of money or they wouldn't be called mom but um i really liked your shark deal because i'm on uh with grandkids i mean this is my third rodeo with all baby humans love sharks and dinosaurs i don't know what it is and like ai they you give you give your grandkid i don't care if he's one two four or seven you give him 15 dinosaurs or sharks he's going to line he's he'll eventually get to the point where he lines them up from smallest to largest and then you know it's like okay why is a two-year-old kid sorting like an algorithm all of his sharks from the smallest to the la i mean we're just we're just natural-born thinkers and it's so biz and i don't have any trust in ai because all they're talking about is big data big data big data i got six grandkids and I’ve seen one of them so far where he touched the charcoal pit and he touched it uh we were charcoaling uh steaks and he touched it and he pulled his finger back and he ran away from it and i was there for 10 days never touched it again why does a human have to touch it one time and we'll never touch it again but in artificial intelligence you need millions of observations and millions more and bigger data it's like man my grandson needed to touch it one time at age two and he ain't touched it again and everybody in silicon valley who believes in a.i i mean uh it's uh i i think they're gonna have some ai someday but the pyramids were 5 000 years ago and ai's at least another thousand to five thousand years from now but to look at their little fancy typewriter and think they're close to ai uh it's hard to uh keep a straight face when they're saying that but your shark deal was very very good because it worked in my family because i told my grandkids about it and they they they were more excited about fluoride in the shark's teeth than your teeth are mighty through their teeth i mean sharks and dinosaurs my god that captures their imagination yeah so um uh you know there's definitely concerns about what all is happening in silicon valley but we are also um on social media and that would be another way that um coming and following um us on twitter liking our facebook page sharing the posts we put together that's another way that um i don't see your listeners can help out and get involved and follow us i don't see your facebook page link on your website fluoridexposed oh um so you would find us at facebook.com backslash explore fluoride or search fluoride exposed on facebook you should be able to find us and on twitter we are at twitter.com backslash fluoride exposed yeah that's that's where i felt i i dropped Facebook uh when the pandemic came out i had i had 300 000 followers on Facebook and people say well you can't quit doing 300 000 but the pandemic i i had to give something up and i couldn't give up my twitter uh and i couldn't give up my uh LinkedIn and um but um yeah i I’ve uh um what it comes down to is really old people like me are on twitter and then really rich people are on LinkedIn and then uh i don't know who's on Facebook anymore but if you're um still single and young and in dental school uh you're on Instagram uh and um and i'm not gonna learn any more of them i keep having uh people ask me to get on uh these other ones it's like no i'm uh i'm taking away so i dropped Facebook i'm selling Instagram uh but i follow you uh fluoride exposed they're not on the same team either because um i um several times before i dropped it it used to i just think it was so bizarre that you'd make a post on uh Facebook and they take it down because you know a dental surgery it's you know you know there's blood and they're laying a flap and and then people start saying it's not safe for uh not safe for work and all this weird stuff um but um okay there it is so uh so go there and um my gosh if you're trying to write a fundraiser if there's anything there's if there's anything dental town can do to help you with your goals uh whether it's write an article or if you want to make an online ce course or we've got a quarter million dentists on dental town um you could go in there and under the uh water fluoridation and and answer questions or where i post this or whatever because uh the bottom line is um i just think that we're dentists and um and um when it comes to amalgam and water fluoridation i don't care what rich people think rich people can go get a composite and drink their bottled water and have a perrier i don't ever wake up at night where you know the world's got eight billion people and if we condense them to three one of those three or just like you me and who has listen has a smartphone one out of three doesn't have a smartphone they just got a cell phone and one of the three don't have anything they don't have a smartphone or a cell phone and those people that don't have anything if you take away their water fluoridation and you take away their amalgam you're just a really bad guy and it's another pattern where i see where rich people who have five options always decide to take away the one option for a per poor person so this poor person could only afford a 20 silver filling and he doesn't take a multivitamin with a perrier he drinks out of a garden hose and then really rich people with like me i'm rich all my fillings are gold well guess what out of 8 billion people guess how many of them can afford an iphone and all gold fillings you know i mean we're only the top 1 billion out of 8 billion can afford this and i think it's a duty of rich educated people like you with phds living in a first world country like united states canada australia to keep your eye on the poor billion that doesn't have a smartphone doesn't have a cosmetic dentist isn't gonna get his teeth bleached and if you got five options and your best idea is to take away his only option i don't like you i mean i mean that that's just you know what i mean i mean my god I’ve been to all I’ve been to 50 countries and i also tried to get all four of my boys to go with me and a lot of times i got all four to go sometimes there's three two or one i didn't care if they didn't make it to oklahoma or celina Kansas but whenever i went to a different country I’d take him and i can still remember we still sit around and laugh i remember greggy walking around cambodia going with a shirt pulled up over his nose and he's like dad why does this smell i said oh today we learned that you live in a country that has a sewer system and a draining system two systems now you're in a country who had to combine drainage and sewage into one and see that little deal there you know in wichita um that would just be rain water but here that's also sewage water and and um i mean i just love that i i my boys tell me um they're like uh i don't know they're like 24 26 28 30. they tell me they learn more from going to 50 different countries than they did from going to asu or u of a or college or any of the books they read and and if you travel around the world um you'll start to realize there's a there's more poor people than rich people and i think if all the phds and all the dentists and you know keep one eye on your fellow human and treat that human like you want to be treated and keep the other eye on cost and once you take your eye off the human and the other eye off cost then you're you're not helping the problem and these are very very complex problems they're not going to be solved overnight and maybe water fluoridation isn't the best idea of the whole world but right now it's the best idea we got and then when you start coming up with these better ideas you're letting the better idea become the enemy of the best idea nev don't let the best like people will say well i'm not going to vote for uh the election because they they're both horrible okay well i i agree with that i mean i don't think anybody thinks you know that we're picking between batman and robin but don't let the best be the enemy of good you know i mean that that's all it is i mean um the world's pretty much binomial when you come to a fork in a road neither one of them is going to leave lead you to paradise but i bet one road might be slightly better than the other road you know what i mean and um but uh any any um any any final words Effie on what you could say uh to uh um convince my homies to make a donation oh well um uh just tell them you'll give them a lock of your hair you gotta have hat hair for about nine bald dentists uh could you uh could you give them enough for a rug well the other thing we have for um fundraising to support the nonprofit but also to help with the science learning is um we have a little science shop we have a t-shirt featuring the 10 great public health achievements and fluoridation is highlighted on it we've got um mugs of our logo um and there's another mug where we have um sort of fluoride and water molecules on it um and so we also have some posters in there of the public health achievements so um we can sort of bring the science learning to the real world while also um you know making a purchase in our shop also supports the non-profit and also supports us getting this good science-based information up on the internet and uh into social media to help change the tone um that's another one of our goals is that we really seek to be um kind and empathetic to people's questions and concerns and worries um we are also about sort of combining the sort of environmental science and public health and oral health questions into one um you know place online you're a beautiful person i saw a um i saw a very concerned uh person at a city council meeting ask a ques a science question at a water fluoridation deal and the guy said from the government said i don't talk to flat earthers and then he went to the next question and i thought you dumb ass why why would you have to be me he just hardened this guy and i don't think that guy will ever ever ever respect the centers for disease calls again because said that idiot employee called him a flat earther it's like there's no such thing as a dumb question you wouldn't say that to your kid you wouldn't call your kid a flat earther so just be in that and that's a red flag i mean when when you say something and all they can come back with well you're stupid i mean okay okay you have nothing in fact i love it when they say that when they say well you're you're just a a jerk great you have no ammunition you have you have nothing so you have to call me a flat earther or be mean and you know when you're talking to human i always try to explain it like they're five because i'm only an adult in dentistry and economics when you switch over to rheumatoid arthritis i i don't i'm not a doctor of rheumatoid arthritis i'm a doctor of dentistry but if you're going to explain to me about my rheumatism i don't have a just a hypothetical I’d want you to first explain it to me like i'm five and if my question makes you call me a flat earther and walk away then you just lost me for life so just be kind be nice be funny win them over you catch a lot more people with with honey than you will beating them with sticks absolutely yeah uh we um and you know we do get some of the um anti-fluoride folks who are tend towards conspiracy thinking and you know hurling some insults our way but um even there we try to come back with some empathy and um and have you know try to have a real conversation and you know what and when and when you see those people out there with believing in conspiracy theories um it's because um there's probably a lot of truth to him i mean look look at snowden i mean he just showed you one percent of what he could sneak out on a disc and it was all real bad and and i remember sitting at a fundraiser i remember sitting next to a senator who was born before 1950 that's all i'm gonna say and i said well you know what why don't you just um open up all the files from the fbi the cia the nsa just just everything before the year you were born if you were born in 1950 how about we just open up everything before 1950 and give it to wikipedia he's like oh god we could never do that i'm like you can't even show us what the dead people did they're dead they're in a cemetery we we can't even talk about what the dead people do and then you want to know why margaret believes in a conspiracy because there's probably so much ugly stuff in there and i just i mean i just think just open it all up i i just think um bring back snowden open up all the files and let the cards settle where they can't and that my friends is the lack of trust this is why they don't believe the dentist they don't know i'm about one in four about one in four patients their 15-minute google search knows more about orthodontics than you just go to social media and the so there's oh i went to the orthodontist he said this but i mean i i went to this website and he's obviously should i sue him and i'm like okay you're you're 12 you did a five minute google search and you're already smarter than the orthodontist and this is the sapien we're dealing with he's been lied to and abused for 5 000 years of recorded history so what we need to do today is strike up a relationship eye contact listen don't be judgmental be nice try to leave them over and and as far as leadership i want to tell you this all the books on leadership um there's no science between there's just opinions and the only leadership that will work coming out of you is who is a good leader for you so what i want you to do is i want you to think when you were growing up who who made you be all that you can be for me is my dad and mom it was a wrestling coach jim hager dental school it was the anatomy teacher how did they talk to you that made you be better a better version of yourself well that's the leadership that worked on you so you don't don't read a leader book about some other guy of some some basketball coach in indiana throwing a chair across the room because he had a he's on a different journey but who was the leader to you and when the and when your patients ask these delicate questions be that guy be your mom you know be be that person because if you connect and and that patient trusts you then the door opens and you can start exchanging information but man when they don't like you when they don't trust you they're not listening to you and um you're not doing anything and you're certainly not doing anything by calling them a flat earther you know so whatever but hey Effie my gosh it was an honor um to uh podcast you um everybody knows what i do i mean i got a magazine a website if you ever see some way that the dental town magazine the hygiene town magazine the ortho town magazine or the their corresponding websites if there's anything I’ve got any asset I’ve got where you say god how he could help me if he did this for Effie consider it done just send me an email Howard at dentaltown.com because i like the fight that you're fighting because the kid that's gonna benefit from fluoridated water he ain't drinking a perrier his mom's holding down three-time jobs and he don't have enough money to go to a pediatric dentist and the math i see and i have an mba from asu is that for about every 14 cents you spend on water fluoridation you're gonna say what three bucks on dentistry or what what what kind of math are you seeing on their roi i think the um the latest is uh for every dollar twenty dollars saved yesterday yeah so so i mean come on dude if you're on wall street you could buy a stock for a dollar and sell the next day for 20 bucks you do it all day long and you're a dentist um you know a dentist they shouldn't be leading the cause to save the polar bears they should be leading the cause of safe teeth that's why you're a dentist it's the greek word o'donto and um Effie i think you're doing the best job out there on the lowest cost highest return on investment and even if they take it out of all the water in America i don't care about the united states canada australia and and and uh the rich world i'm worried about the third world i'm worried about you know i want them to see our data and i remember when i was in india it just really um it really blew my mind because you know Indians are so into education and all this and i asked the guy um about the dental deal and he says well you know we got a billion 100 million people and we did the math on what a u.s style dentistry cost so you guys got 331 million people this this system of deliveries cost about 120 billion dollars a year um you know we we have four times many people so now you're looking at a system that's gonna be you know 500 billion a year and we only have like five billion a year and we need like 500 billionaires so we're going to put all the money on a vaccine for streptococcus mutans and i thought hey you'll you're not going to get in your lifetime but b i thought well that's an outside the box thinking and my follow-up question was well if you can't afford the 500 billion us delivery system then do the water fluoridation system because that's 1 20th of the cost and and you should be the the uh fe the great house of return on investment in dentistry i mean you're saving teeth for lowest price and if that doesn't make you excited uh then you're not a dentist and on that note Effie thank you so much for coming on the show today thank you so much i have um followed you in doing this work for um quite a while and um you know coming across some of your uh memes and posts on fluoridation early on were uh you know a pick me up and um were also an inspiration for some of the approaches that we try to take and exploring the science and you must have been in a really dark place if i was if i gave you inspiration i'm sorry you were laying on the floor crying ready to end it all but uh well thank you for that Effie and uh um gosh just thanks for all you do and if you're a dentist put teeth first and the highest return on investments water fluoridation and amalgam to the one in three people who don't have a smartphone and if you got a smartphone and you're trying to take away uh water fluoridation for another guy with a smartphone we'll let two idiots battle it out but if you got a smartphone and you're trying to take away amalgam and water fluoridation for a guy that doesn't even have a motorola flip phone he doesn't even have a cell phone let alone a smartphone and I’ve been to his country and don't mess with that guy thank you so much Effie for coming on the show thank you and everyone come to floridaexposed.org fluoridexposed.org you got it