Full Transcript
Dr James:
Ed what I might do now. We’ve had a lot of questions coming in on the private chat. I was going to throw the mic out to the audience and let them have the opportunity to ask you questions about Keystone Bio and a little bit more about yourself. If that works for you, absolutely 100%. Okay, let’s go. So we’ve had a private question come in first of all. First private question says Ed, entrepreneurship runs in your family. Of course, given what we know about your son and he is obviously the person that we’re speaking to regarding this well, he’s the person’s platform that we’re speaking to you on. Can you give us three bits of advice for anybody who wants to encourage entrepreneurship and their children? I thought that was an interesting one.
Dr Ed:
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that my wife and I both grew up in New York City, both, obviously, we had, you know, a little bit of intelligence enough to become doctors, and I think that there was a lot of subliminal parental influence on us to become doctors and it was kind of a be all and end all right. You know, if you were smart, you know that’s what you did. You became a professional, a doctor, a lawyer, you know what. Those were traditional occupations for children growing up in my generation. And yet while it worked out phenomenally well for me, my real passion was mathematics and that was kind of suppressed. I mean, I really don’t know how to computer program and I kind of regret never learning that. But you know, and my wife, you know we she found that a medical career and raising children didn’t go well hand in hand for a female. So maybe she would have chosen a different profession if she really thought it through. But it’s that parental influence is very powerful. We, on the other hand, opted to not exert that influence on our children, and so what we did was we kind of exposed them to a lot of things music, computers, sports books, you name it and kind of. Let them kind of show us what they enjoyed doing the most. So one daughter just couldn’t get her hands on enough books and she wound up majoring in college in the classics. Greek and Latin were her passion in life. You know anything she could read, ultimately got a PhD from Princeton and classics developed an online community for promoting the classics and teaching lecturing, that kind of thing. My oldest daughter had a passion for music so we supported it with lessons and whatnot. You know that kind of got subverted a little bit by her brother. Her brother was he. Just he showed a fascination to my early computers that I had in the house, so he was the first one we got their own computer and we you know he outgrew the knowledge that I could give him. We brought in a professional computer tutor to supplement, supplement his studies at school with some computer tutoring. You know, when he was 11, I think it was 11 or 12 in middle school we heard that they were giving an advanced computer class in high school and he was kind of bored with school. So we had him meet with the computer teacher. We got permission for him to go up to the high school and take this class. It was basically a college level computer class taught to the high school students, but he was only in middle school. He interviewed with the teacher. The teacher of the class met with us after and said your son, this would not be a good class for your son. I said why not? He said he already knows everything I’m going to teach. So he wound up. They had a program at the high school where high school students could take college courses at the local community, at the local college in Dobbs Ferry, and he got approved to take one college level class that met from like six to nine PM one night a week and he took a course on Java programming. He was 12 years old. I dropped him off. He was a small 12 year old. I dropped him off at six. I showed up at class with him at six o’clock and the instructor looks at me and said I’m sorry you can’t bring him into class with you. And I said you don’t get it, I’m leaving him. He’s the student. I’m going home. You know. At the end of the class, when I came back to pick him up, the student said you mean, we can’t take him out for a beer with us? These were grad students, it wasn’t even an undergrad course. They were grad students. So I said, yeah, come back in nine years. So you know he had a passion that we supported. Our oldest daughter we packed, you know, is now when he’s when Mark started Facebook. About a year or so later, he brought his older sister out west to run his marketing department. She actually graduated Harvard, unlike him, who dropped out. She was working in marketing for Forbes at the time and he brought her out to run the marketing program at Facebook. After about, she actually built Facebook’s media platform. So Facebook Live that we’re doing now was the result of her early seed efforts. She was the one responsible for getting President Obama to be the first person ever to do a live town hall on Facebook with Mark back, I think, in 2011, 2010 or early 2011.
Dr James:
I had no idea but that bit of trivia.
Dr Ed:
And she got an Emmy nomination for doing Facebook Live broadcasts of the elections in 2011, the New Hampshire primary elections and had that on Facebook. People were doing live Facebook polls and she was giving the results of the polls. Wild election results were coming in, so she eventually left Facebook and started her own media company, and now she produces Broadway plays. So you cannot take the music passion that was in her life out, and we’re so glad we fostered it, because our feeling is that you’re going to spend more hours working than anything else, and so you may as well be working in something that you’re passionate about. And getting entrepreneurism into your kids’ bloodstream is a harder deal, but by getting them at least into a field that they’re passionate about will make them happy individuals, and that’s the best thing that I can recommend promoting in your own children as they grow up.
Dr James:
Amazing stuff, some talented, cautious children that you have, you know. It reminds me of a quote and it’s about playing and work. Okay, so for those out there, people who find their passion, find the thing that feels like play to them, but it is work to others. By default, you can become so much better at that than everybody else because it feels like play to you. And the quote goes along are you with me? Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, the quote goes along the lines off. It’s from a book and it goes along the lines off I am always working inverted commas. For those who are listening to the audio of this, I’ve got my hand up, my two fingers up, inverted commas style. Okay, I am always. I am always working. Hang on, I’ve just lost my video here. I’m back. Can you still hear me? Yes, yeah, sorry, I thought we lost connection there for a minute. I am always working inverted commas, but to me it feels like play. So to me, I’m playing for 18 hours a day, while others think that I’m working, and no one can ever play as much as they can work, and that’s why I’ll always win at my chosen gift or talent. You know what I mean. So, by default. Let’s put education on one side. Education is great. We’re not diminishing that. But if you can find your passion and wrap it around something else that is maybe your formal education, a bit like your daughter then by default you have this huge advantage. But then of course it’s just finding what that is. But it’s an interesting way of looking at things.
Dr Ed:
You know, I look at people that work so hard in their lives. And when are you going to have fun? When are you going to travel? When are you going to do this? What are your real passions? Oh, I love golf. I’ll play a lot of golf when I retire. And then they get to retirement and they get sick, you know, and they’re incapacitated and they don’t enjoy their retirement. We need to enjoy our lives, exactly, you know, we don’t break it into our work years and our retirement years. I hope to be advising companies and startups forever. I love what I’m doing now and you know, after 44 years of dentistry, I’m not suited, you know, with my eyes. My hands are still great, my eyes aren’t as good as they were, and so the thought of putting in an eight hour dental day is horrifying to me. I go into the office, maybe now one day a month and see two or three patients Just to keep my skills sharp, sometimes to try out a new product on a company that I’m advising. I want to try out the product first hand, something like that. But the passing on of the knowledge and the work I’m doing now with Keystone Bio is like you said. I mean, I’m not working. I’m not working now. I’m sharing my knowledge with your listeners, and this is fun.
Dr James:
Yeah, exactly, this is fun, so it’ll never feel like work. So retirement, described as exchanging unhappiness and time today for happiness tomorrow, but what if that happiness never comes? You know what if you never make it to that day? We have to talk about this sort of stuff and that’s why it’s so important to seize the moment, you know, because that’s the thing, it’s all on this promise, this promise that this debt of this particular day which may never arrive. You know what I mean, and that’s the thing. And, yeah, the point that you make is so relevant. Next question we’ve got in the chat. We have Rafula from Pakistan. Shout out to Rafula. My question is to Dr Zuckerberg Do you have any advice for new graduates like myself who are trying to find their feet in the world, trying to find their hobby, trying to find their passion, any advice that you can give anybody who’s just graduated?
Dr Ed:
Well, I mean, I think the conversation we’ve had the last 10 minutes is basically bad advice. You know, you got to love what you’re doing. And I know a lot of dentists who did not love dentistry and so they figured out like how to turn their knowledge of dentistry into an entrepreneurial thing. And I know dentists who said you know young dentists who’ve left practice running dental supply companies. They said you know, hey, there’s a real disconnect from the way dentists get their supplies. The big, the big companies like Shine and Patterson are charging way too much. You know we can, we can really, you know, disturb this market and make a difference, and so the fact that they have knowledge and dentistry opens doors for other things. I, the guy that I started working with in my first office practice management software, when I got that IBM PCXT in 1985, the one that the product store sold was horrible. Two years later, in 1987, I met a dentist by the name of Jeff Teifer who never practiced the day of dentistry. After he graduated dental school he saw the future. His passion was computer programming and he wrote dental software. And he never practiced so, but he knew enough about dentistry that helped him write dental software packages for the dental office. So you know, like you said, it’s not about working 60 hour weeks and killing yourself so you could build a lot of, you know, a nice nest egg for the retirement that may never come or may not be the shape that you envision it because of health concerns later in life. So probably the old way of running your own practice as a solo dentist doesn’t make sense. For that reason, by have by affiliating with a group practice, you have a better quality of life. You’re not on 24, seven on call If there are other dentists in the practice. Look for a situation where you can vacation frequently and enjoy life with your significant other and family. I had a friend who went into pharmacy from college and he got connected with a company that had. It was a unique setup. It was three guys who were partners in the company and they hired new pharmacy graduates like him to work as pharmacists, but at any one point in time only one of those three owners was working during store hours. They had an arrangement where they each worked four months a year and took eight months off. What a phenomenal idea, right? And what they did was they the new hire that they got? They paid him a fairly low salary. But over 10 years he bought into the pharmacy practice. That was the deal. He got a lower salary to work as a pharmacist. He worked 10 hard years, you know, a full-time employee as a pharmacist. At the end of 10 years he became an equal partner with the other three guys. Now the four of them only worked three months a year each until they bring the next person in. So talk about quality of life. But of course, if you love what you do and you wanna be involved in the day-to-day running of your office, that doesn’t work for anyone. So for everyone you really hear about it. For everyone you really have to. You know, take a deep look within, look at your own personal situation. But you know life is the right, you know enjoy it Couldn’t agree more.
Dr James:
And here’s the thing hard work matters, but not past a certain point, because if you think about it like this, the people that would be the most wealthy in the world would all be coal miners or you know, people who are performing heavy manual labor all day. It’s about leverage in that hard work and thinking about it and giving it some thought, which is, in essence, what you said, because those people work hard, but, however, it’s directed in a certain way and they thought about it, and it’s not just hard work for the sake of it. There needs to be some intelligence behind it, effectively, absolutely, absolutely cool. So we have another question. This is a brilliant question. This is from Michael Davidson. Michael would love to know your thoughts, ed, on AI in dentistry. What are the exciting things that are on your radar which could affect the dental world that you can see on the horizon Over the next few years? Maybe the metaverse which, as we know, mark is making really boldly changed Facebook to meta because he anticipates this huge. How do you see this effect in the dental world?
Dr Ed:
Well, first I want to say hi to Michael.
Dr James:
We collaborated on an event about a year and a half ago. Oh, I had no idea in each other.
Dr Ed:
Yeah, but yeah, we’re seeing a number of really interesting companies in the AI space. I mean the one that’s probably most prevalent, and there’s already a half a dozen companies in the space are Using AI to interpret X-rays and images. So you know, we’re humans, right, we can make errors. Computers tend to make less errors than humans unless a human made an error, programming the computer to solve it. But you know, all too often we see the tree and not the whole forest. With AI Evaluation of a set of x-rays, we can’t miss the complete picture of all the Pathologies that are going on in the mouth, even though a patient may present With one particular problem. That being said, one of the biggest use cases for AI interpretation of radiographs is With one of the companies that I’ve been advising here in the US, a company called retrace AI is the name of the company, and retrace has partnered with many of the dental insurance companies here in the US. So the the process typically when a dentist submits a claim for a significant amount Is that the insurance company will Refer the claim with the radiographs to a consultant to review for necessity and then either approve or disapprove of the dentist treatment plan. Individual insurance companies are spending in the multiple millions of dollars a year on Consultant review of claims. So with the AI software available, which retrace has licensed to many of these insurance companies, they can now run the x-rays through the software and the, and the algorithm will interpret each tooth. For example, it’ll say to number 14 appears to have 80 percent Restorative material on it and as such, would be a good candidate for a full coverage restoration or, you know, periapical pathology exists on tooth number so and so. So what we’re finding happening is not only our insurance is approving More work at less cost to the insurance company, but insurance companies are also now Asking dentists what their treatment plan is on teeth that they haven’t even submitted a claim for, because the software has told them about other work that that patient needs and they want that dentist taking care of that, do restoration before it becomes an endodontic therapy. So that’s one obvious use case. Another is a, a company that I actually have a call with after we finish here. The name of the company is proteo site AI and it’s a Canadian based company and they’ve got software for Surgeons, mostly oral surgeons. They work in the in the oral health care space. So now, typically what happens is if a dentist sees a patient with a lesion in their mouth, most general dentists will refer the patient to an oral and maxillofacial surgeon to do a biopsy, or some will do the biopsy themselves, whatever the case may be, and let’s say the biopsy comes back nonmalignant but at the same time not totally harmless. So say it comes back with some minor dysplastic cells that get labeled as a premalignant condition. In the past our surgeons really had a dilemma. So it’s not cancer. Do I subject the patient to a more radical procedure, say with a fairly broad white spot lesion, where I now decide to go back and remove the entire lesion based on this biopsy result? Or do I put the patient on a watch and see and ask them to come back in six months, in a year, and look for changes? It’s a dilemma. Well, what the proteaside AI software does is it will actually quantify with a number the biopsy results. So they’ll say this is not a malignancy, but this patient has a 37% likelihood that this lesion will turn to a malignancy in the next five years, or 68%, or 1% for that matter. So now the surgeon has actually a basis whereby to make their treatment planning decision on whether to do a more radical procedure or not. So that’s two use cases I can think of. I’m working with another company that’s using robotics to do crown preparations Wow and the AI will look at the tooth that we’ve scanned and, on a cone, beam on and the AI will actually determine the best preparation that the robot will then perform and do the crown prep. So when we made the quantum leak 15 plus years ago to CAD-CAM technology, we had the ability to deliver the patient a complete restoration, a crown restoration start to finish, where they get prepared and walk out with their permanent crown bonded in place in about two hours. With the work that CyberDonix, which is the name of this company I’m working with, is doing, we will know before the patient comes into the office what the crown preparation is going to look like. So we can actually prepare the crown before we’ve even cut the tooth, because it’s not a human cutting the tooth, it’s going to be a robot cutting the tooth and we know exactly the shape of the tooth that’s going to be cut. So now look at a workflow like this Patient comes in, administers the local anesthesia five minutes Snap on the robotic device onto the quadrant. In five minutes, the robotic device prepares the crown without the dentist fatigue associated with doing the crown preparation Right Now you take the robotic device off. you have the crown already on the bracket table seat, fit bond patients out of the office with their permanent crown and a half hour Wow. So some really exciting ways that AI is changing things and will continue to change them, and that’s part of my job. That I wake up excited every morning is looking forward to the new companies that are going to be pitching to me and showing me what their great ideas are.
Dr James:
That’s cool, the robotic crown thing. I thought to myself OK, fair enough, prep the tooth, then you mill the crown. But obviously there’s no need for that, just as you pointed out, because all of these things, all of these parameters, are already. The robot has already figured it out before you’ve even stepped in the room. It’s actually massive Emax crowns, and here’s the beauty of it right, you have the Emax stand in glaze beforehand, which is a huge part of the appointment as well, when you’re doing your crab plan.
Dr Ed:
Amazing. All that before the patient even comes in.
Dr James:
Amazing, that is cool. That is cool, edward. You’ve been so generous with your time today. Thank you so much. I think we have time for one more question which someone has just squeezed in here, which I really liked. Edward, congratulations on all your success, your brilliance as a dentist and all of the information you shared with us today. We’re so grateful for it, and Keystone Bio certainly sounds like an interesting prospect. Your son, mark, has obviously achieved massive, noteworthy fame with his Facebook platform online. What was the one moment that you thought to yourself from the outside, looking in, before it got big? Wow, this he’s really on to something. This is getting huge. What was the moment that that A bomb dropped and you thought this is going to be massive? Or was there one particular moment, or was it an evolution? I love that question.
Dr Ed:
I mean I think it was an evolution. I was probably like most people in the beginning. You know it was a site for college students and it really took a broader vision to say, hey, this has potential, not just to be college students, but, you know, for everything else, and I guess it’s hard then to see the magnitude that it would achieve now. But, even more relevant, it was really hard then, even for the brilliant people that he brought in to work with him, really hard to foresee the role that bad actors would play. And I mean Mark’s vision for Facebook was to connect the world and give people a chance to obviously be more in touch. He saw that, you know. I mean when I grew up, you know if you were born in New York, you were probably one of the 95% of people who was going to stay in New York. I mean, hardly any of my friends went to out of town colleges back in the early 70s. Nowadays nobody stays home, everybody’s mobile. People move like we change underwear and because of that, staying connected and seeing people face to face is nearly impossible, and so the vision of being able to connect people who are on different ends of the country or different parts of the world was certainly a great one and it’s certainly been executed brilliantly. But, you know, unfortunately with that connection comes opportunities for bad players and bad actors. So that’s the unfortunate side. And now the company you know has been scrambling for the last period of time trying to, you know, to gain all that in and police that and obviously you can’t possibly have the staff to handle things one on one. So it’s done by a large part with algorithms and relying on users reporting bad actors and filtering it out. You know, I look at the metaverse as as radically different to what we’ve become accustomed to, with connecting on Facebook as Facebook was before we even had social media. It’s going to be that much of a change. I’ve already experienced the metaverse, you know, using the Oculus glasses and whatnot, attending live concerts, like I’m sitting in the first row from my home. You know just amazing stuff playing ping pong or tennis from my office with someone you know in New York. It’s something like I’m there with them. So you know and obviously for dentistry there will be implications for continuing education that we can’t even fat them. So as early as I think it was about 2014, eight years ago, I was with the team at Noble Biocare and they were doing some of the early virtual and augmented reality work with implant education and they had this contraption device that looked like a space helmet with, like I don’t know, 12 to 15 different cameras on all different, pointing in all different directions, on the head of the oral surgeon who’s performing implant surgery. And watch this video that they produced using Oculus headset was just mindboggling. He was doing an implant placement on a maxillary central and sizing To number eight in the US might be upper right, one in the UK, I’m not. I’m not sure the terminology there, but if it was as if you were sitting, you were miniaturized and you were sitting on the adjacent maxillary central and sizing. That’s what it felt like watching this educate, this video and it you know it hasn’t taken hold, but it will, thanks to the tremendous amount of research and money being dedicated to the metaverse. It’s never been about money for him, so Facebook, even though they at this point they lose billions of dollars on the development of the metaverse. It’s about making the world a better place in his vision, which is why I mean everybody’s probably familiar with the story. I think it was back in 2007 or 2008,. He was on the cover of a magazine, the kid who turned down a billion dollars. It was never about MoneyFan. It was all about his life’s mission and his life’s passion. If I sold my company, what would I do? This is my life. I love it and I have visions for what we’re going to do. His visions are always evolving and for me, it’s just crazy having an offspring who’s so genius and such a visionary.
Dr James:
Of course, congratulations, congratulations, and he must have got it from somewhere, probably my wife. But, yeah, just to just this testament to what you’re saying right now, I mean, merah marks double down on Merah, because he believes exactly what you believe, effectively, and he’s jumped in two feet at the deep end. He’s literally renamed his company Merah. So it’s Web3, I believe Web1, that was when we had the browsers. That was when the browsers were just getting up and running. Web2 was social media, which Mark has obviously at the forefront of, and this is what they now call Web3, which is the metaverse and blockchain, effectively. Yeah, so, honestly, it’s impressive stuff and so many ramifications and permutations, not just within that field, but outside of it as well. And, yeah, well, all I can say is, as I’m sure it has been said many times down through the years, hats off to yourself and hats off to Mark for what you’ve both achieved and thank you so much for your time, ed. So what we’ll do is we’ll wrap up now, ed. I know that some people listening will be interested to know more about Keystone Barrow, so you are happy for them to get in touch with you via the group and also via your email, which you mentioned earlier. Anything else you’d like to say? Just to wrap things up, ed.
Dr Ed:
No, I’m happy to do that and maybe we can also talk about a more formal presentation about Keystone Bio to interested users. That maybe we can do in the form of another Facebook Live at some point in time soon.
Dr James:
I love that. Anybody who’s listening, who’d love to know more about that or show you support for that, feel free to reach out to me, and Edward and I can definitely get that in the diary. Ed, you’ve been so generous with your time. I’m sure you’re a very busy man. Thank you so much. Thanks, Shane.
Dr Ed:
Appreciate it, and then Joy. I enjoyed presenting our topic to your listeners.
Dr James:
That’s awesome, my friend. Thank you so much for your time and you’re welcome back anytime with Dennis Hain-Vest. We’ll catch each other soon. See you later, Take care. Bye-bye