Hello, Voices of the Bench community. John Isherwood from Ivaclar here, inviting you to join us this February at LMT Lab Day in Chicago. Over the three-day show, we're excited to be offering 16 different lecture programs for you to choose from. Simply log on to labday.com/ivaclar, that's labday.com/ivaclar, to check out our lineup and register for these amazing courses. Looking forward to seeing you in the Windy City this February. Welcome to Voices From the Bench, a dental laboratory podcast. Send us an e-mail at info at voicesfromthebench.com and follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Greetings and welcome to episode 407 of Voices from the Bench. My name is Elvis.
My name's Barbara.
What's happening, Barb? Are you excited? This is the week 4 Vision 21.
I'm so excited. I finally made my plane reservations last week.
Can you believe that? Oh, you know what?
I always wait.
I'm surprised you're made now, honestly. I know.
I did learn a hard lesson. It was like 1000 bucks to get to Vegas this year. So I think maybe if I do it a little earlier, it won't be so expensive.
Yeah. But yeah, Caesar's Palace, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, this week. I'm really excited just to see everybody. It's always a great way to start the year, hang out, have a good time. They look like they got some good speakers. We're welcoming Megan Nakanishi as president, I believe. Yeah.
Congratulations, Megan.
Yep. up Joe's mess. I love it. And I'm just super excited. It's going to be a lot of fun and the weather's looking decent to get out there. I think it was last year that the weather was bad and everybody got delayed. But yeah, super excited.
Well, there's always that buzz in the air. You know, everybody's just so it's the new year. It's the first meeting. Everybody's stoked. Everybody's excited to see everybody. Plus it's Vegas. I mean, you can't go.
Yeah.
So we'll see you there.
Yeah, it's like Chicago is great. But there's it's so big you might not see everybody.
Yeah.
You get a little bit more time in Vegas, but I what are we just finished our first full week of 2026.
Yes.
So far so good, I guess, right?
Yeah, it was an amazing week. I actually took yesterday off because it dies a little bit those first two weeks in January and I took advantage of it and I went and babysat my grandson. So there you go. It was a great day. Good times. All right. So what's happening?
So this week we Talk to a dentist, actually, that will be joining us in the Ivoclar Ballroom during Lab Day Chicago. Doctor Miles Cone went from loving dinosaurs and living in his car. to one of the top respected prosthodontists in the field. But don't ask him because he wouldn't agree to that. You see, Dr. Cones totally, totally respects the team approach to patient care, especially working with a good dental technician. Right on. Dr. Cones talks about his interesting journey into dentistry via the Army, using photography as a new way to add a new level of appreciation, and finding the right technician that sees things in the same way, and also what him and Janelle are talking about at Lab Day Chicago. So join us as we chat with Dr. Miles Cohn.
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This year, set your dental business up for success from day one. Choose Roland's DG Shape dental milling solutions, crafted with Japanese precision, trusted by dental professionals worldwide. For more information, visit RolandDental.com. Voices from the bench. The interview. Barb and I are excited today because our good friends at Ivoclar reached out and asked me if we've ever had Dr. Miles Cohn on. And I said, who? Miles Cohn, why is that name? Why is that name familiar? Miles Cone, how are you, sir?
I'm doing well, Elvis. Thanks for having me on board. Happy to be here.
Yeah, so thank you for coming on. So dentist, right? You're a dentist in Maine.
Yes.
Which we don't get a lot of dentists on the podcast.
But we love them, just so you know.
We do. We have to. We have to because we need your work.
Well, I mean, does it help that I'm part CDT as well? Is that?
Yes, it does. Are you kidding me?
It does help a lot.
Yeah, don't tell any of my friends that I'm a dentist.
So tell us how you got into dentistry. What got you interested into teeth?
That's a fascinating story, I think. But so I had no initial plans to do dentistry whatsoever. My folks weren't parents. Nobody in my family, sorry, my folks were parents. My folks were parents. The folks were not dentists. That was awesome. Well, okay, both things are probably true. So my parents were not dentists. Nobody in my family was a dentist. Went to college right after graduating from high school, like many people. And while I was there, I thought, I want to pursue being a clinician of some sort. Did a volunteer stint at the Buffalo General Hospital. Quickly decided that I hated.
Buffalo. How'd you, how'd you?
Yeah, go ahead.
Go ahead. No, I was just wondering because Buffalo's where Ivoclar's at.
Yeah.
So how'd you land in Buffalo?
Well, so originally from upstate New York, I'm from a small town called Fulton, New York. I tell people generally that I'm from Syracuse. People know where Syracuse is. Nobody knows where Fulton, New York is. And so Buffalo was about two hours due west from me. And it was a state school and I didn't have a lot of money growing up. My dad was a drill sergeant in the military. My mom was a special ed teacher, so we didn't have really much money growing up. So I went to a state school. I think my entire final tuition after four years was something like 12 grand. I mean, it was like nothing. It was next to nothing. And so I went there, was doing some volunteer work at the VA hospital at Buffalo. hated it right away, hated it. And I thought, my gosh, I'm not, I can't be a doctor. I don't like this at all. And one summer day while I was volunteering, I walked across the street to UB's dental school. And one of the first folks that I met there was a guy named Dr. Sebastian Ciancio. And little did I know that he was a world famous periodontist. You wouldn't know it to speak to him. He was a very humble guy. Really got me excited about dentistry as a profession. And I kind of put that on the back burner a little bit. And I mean, I was still young and early in school. And as I progressed through school, I still stayed on that pre-med track where I was taking the biology, the chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, all the crap that people hate. It actually ends. Yeah. Oh yeah. At some point during my junior, senior year, I thought, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do paleontology. I was really into dinosaurs. So I probably know more about dinosaurs than just about anybody you've had on this podcast, I'm certain. And I got so into it that during my study abroad, I did a study abroad in Australia, and I went there and I was digging up dinosaur bones and stuff on the coast and volunteering there and doing really cool things. And I got set up with a woman in Australia who was from, she's from Long Island, her and her husband were American paleontologists that had resettled in Australia. And they were going to set me up with John Horner in Montana, who, John Horner, by the way, is the guy, whenever you see the Jurassic Park behind the scenes, the original Jurassic Park, like the good one. And Steven Spielberg is standing there and there's a guy next to him in khaki shirt and like a wide brim hat. That's John Horner. He was the consultant to Steven Spielberg for that. And so I was going to go to him and, you know, do Tyrannosaurs and all this kind of stuff. And during my master's degree, I came back first, started doing a master's at Buffalo.
And dinosaurs.
Yeah, it wasn't for dinosaurs. And so that was the thing that kind of started driving me. So when you kind of get deep into it and you realize that, hey, you know, you're studying a few toe bones for five years, like it becomes not fun. And you realize the struggle for funding and money. And during that time, I was living out of my Jeep, and this is in Buffalo, New York. So, I was living in the natural sciences parking lot on the North campus of Buffalo. Anybody who's been there knows it gets freezing cold in the winter. And I had a North Face Dark Star sleeping bag, a minus 40 degree mummy bag. That's what I slept in the back of my Jeep during the winters. And I was working on my master's degree. And shortly before that, I had met my then future wife while I was actually doing a little fossil dig. in South Africa. And she had never met an American before. And she was 19 at the time. I was 22.
And she was into guys that slept in their car.
Yeah, she was into dudes with earrings and tattoos and had an American accent. And I was, I fit the bill. And anybody who knows South Africans know they're very conservative. I mean, they're very, very conservative. So I was definitely an odd duck for her family to meet. And long story short, we kind of started chatting and discussing and saying, what? I don't know if dinosaurs is going to make money if we want to have a future together and family. And so the thing is with paleontology, the thing that usually is left over after millions of years is the teeth. That's usually what's here. So I said, you know what, teeth are pretty cool. Let me, maybe I'll apply to dental school. And I kind of had this dental school, this intro in my early days at Buffalo, kind of in the back of my mind from when I met Dr. Ciancio. And so I said, you know, I'm going to apply. And I went back to Dr. Ciancio. He wrote me a great letter of recommendation. I got letters of rec from my other, you know, evolutionary biology teachers and a couple of paleo courses I'd taken. And I sent off my applications, got in everywhere, and then I drove as far east as I could go until I hit the water and I wound up in Boston. And so that's where I did my dental school at Tufts in Boston. And to be perfectly honest, I hated it. wasn't very good. And I felt sort of lost.
Was it the hand? I mean, you weren't good with drilling or.
No, it wasn't that. I just, I didn't really enjoy it. And I felt lost in terms of, where do I go with this? And I had, growing up, I had a real graphic design sort of penchant. I really enjoyed drawing and art. And I remember when I was living in my car, I would make my own t-shirts and I would like screen print my own t-shirts. And then I would sell them to all the guys at the local climbing gym. Like I was that guy. I was that climbing hippie. And so I would make my own t-shirts. get a little bit of money to pay for food, for the harsh winter coming. And so dental school just never really filled that niche. And of course, I mean, as a laboratory technician, at the time, I didn't even know what a lab technician was. There's a real art to what we do, of course, and there's a science. And I was just so inundated in the science of it. And as I mentioned, you know, I didn't like the sciences when I was, on the pre-med route, but I just thought, this is what you do. You want to be a doctor? This is just, you kind of, you just deal with it. And then suck it up.
Suck it up and keep going.
And during my 4th year, I had this woman, Dr. Antoinello. She was like everybody's mom at the dental school. She was this Greek woman. So nice. You know, and she came up to me and she says, Miles, she said, you're going to apply to prosthodontics, right? You're going to apply for a specialty when you graduate next year. And I said, how? Hell no. Hell no. Thank God, I couldn't, nobody wanted to be in the lab. Nobody wanted to set their own teeth. Nobody knew what a, you know, mounting a face bow, nobody even knew what a face bow was for. Like, you know, my articulators looked awful. There was plaster stuck in all the gears. And so, you know, all of the things that went along with the lab work, who would want to commit themselves to that? What psychopath would want to do that for a living?
Let me ask you a question. Why did she think that you were a perfect candidate? That's my question.
Yeah, so that's a good question, Barbara. And as you mentioned, you were like, oh, was it your hands? No, my hands were actually really good. And that was the part, when it came to the art side of things and the engineering part and figuring things out and the way things fit together and keeping parallelism between teeth on a bridge, I was really good at that. It's just all the other stuff that I hated. And she said, listen, I'm gonna write you a letter of recommendation. And as sort of your mentor and your mother on the floor here, I want you to apply. and this is a woman you didn't say no to. She says, I know you're in the army. Yeah, no pressure. She says, just submit it and see what happens. And I applied, and so the military, by the way, was paying for everything. I was getting it all funded from the military, because like I said, I had no money growing up. And tuition at that time, now I graduated in 2008 from dental school. Tuition between the years of 2004 and 2008 at Tufts, my four-year combined was maybe just shy of $300,000. So that's a big chunk of change. Yeah. And I hadn't even- Yeah.
But compared to now?
Is that because your dad was a drill sergeant?
No, that's just because that's what tuition cost.
No, I think that it was paid for.
Oh, no. So my dad, one of the great things that he did for me was he took me to a local recruiter, and this was in Oswego, New York, took me down there one day and had me meet with some of the folks in the military. And basically what they said, here's the deal. If you have good enough grades in college, if you get good enough scores on your DAT, your dental admissions tests, and you get an acceptance letter to a dental school, we will pay your tuition. Like no question, like all of it, like everything. And you know, they give you a monthly stipend depending on where you live. You know, so for example, if I was at Nova, like down in Florida, the cost of living there is probably a little bit less than it is in Boston, say, which is probably a little bit less than it is in San Francisco. If I had gone out to UOP, for example. So wherever you're living, the army gives you sort of a prorated or I guess a graded income, you know, livable income that they want you to survive on while you're there with a stipend. Yeah.
So you served in the military then?
Yes. So, but during that, you know, there's a big misconception. In that four years, I only put the uniform on once. And that was when we did our externship. So all dental students do an externship where they send you out. Most people do it at like a local jail or an Indian reservation or something like that. All the military folks said, hey, let's go to Hawaii. I'll go to Oahu. And so that's where I went. I did my military externship for six weeks in Oahu. And you go out there and you do class 2 amalgams all day long. And then you go surfing. And then you go surfing and then you surf because you're, from the East Coast, you didn't grow up with that. But it was a lot of fun. I'm not going to deny that going to Hawaii wasn't a blast. It was great.
Sure.
And actually, we were talking about running beforehand, and I did the Honolulu Marathon while I was out there, and that was actually really cool. Running around Diamond Head, if anybody's ever been out to Hawaii. It's a cool place. Highly recommended. And so I applied to the prosthodontic residency in the military. And at the time, you basically got in if you had a heartbeat. It was not. Oh. It was awful. Yeah. The folks that were there, their reputation sort of preceded them. And you know, at the time, it seemed really harsh. I felt like it was a three-year hazing. Looking back, it was the best education I ever got because It was such an intense crucible of sort of pain and education that when you came out on the other side, you were so battle hardened and you'd seen everything. You know, the number of full mouth cases we did during the residency, I mean, dozens. And the guys that I graduated with at Tufts that went off to, Loma Linda, UIC, University of Chicago, they went to, there was only, by the way, out of a class of like 150, 160, only three people were dumb enough to become prosthodontists. And I was one of them.
I'm glad you said that and not me, because I always say that on this podcast, and I'm sure they hate me for it.
No, it's true. You know, in hindsight, my wife said, why didn't you?
I know it's true.
Why didn't you do endo? Why didn't you do endo? It's been two years, it would have been a year shorter, and you'd be making three times as much as you know. And we wouldn't have to see these patients all the time again. You know, if we could just, you know, put a slap a rubber dam on them and go to work and get paid. Bingo. Yeah. So that's that was my foray into military. dentistry. And so I, the process residency was three years. I did it in Augusta, Georgia, which being a vegan yank, was really difficult to do. And my wife coming from South Africa, she's an Afrikaner, and she's got this very strong sort of Germanic, Dutch, British accent. You know, she really didn't fit in. You know, I remember her going through the drive-thru with all of our kids and she's speaking the Queen's English here, but they just could not understand her with her accent. She was just ready to lose her mind, And so, that was, it was a tough go, my residency, but I feel like I came out the other side better for it. But what happened during residency is the oral surgeons, the endodontist, the periodontist, they all went to the college right down the street, I think it was called MCG at the time, Medical College of Georgia. I think they've since changed the name, but they were doing research projects there and they got their master's degrees and they got these extra letters after their name. And all I got to do is, you know, festoon three dozen dentures and press, you know, like 400 Emax crowns and veneers, you know, and we were doing, and then we had, you know, some CAD CAM systems and like, that's what we did. We did this nonstop lab work and we didn't see the light of day. Literally, our lab had no windows. It was awful.
I've got to ask a question though. Why nonstop lab work? Like why did they drill that into you guys when you're in that? Do you know?
The idea, Barb, was that eventually when the time came, you would be deployed as a dentist, not as a prosthodontist. You would go as a general dentist and guess what? They don't send civilian laboratory technicians over to the sandbox. So guess who becomes the laboratory technician? Oh, it's you guys. It's the prosthodontist. And so you had to know how to add a wire to a broken flipper because all of these soldiers are walking around rolling around in the sand and cracking their flippers or they're gritting their teeth and breaking things. So you had to know how to cold cure and bend some wires. You had to know how to add some low fusing Ceramco porcelain.
Yeah.
Under the bags, these metal, old crusty metal ceramic crowns that would fall out. You had to know how to do all of that kind of stuff. And so I had a really good lab technician in the military. His name was Mike Noriega. And he said, he pulled me aside one day and he said, he said, hey, Cone, they just always referred you by your last name. Hey, Cone. He pluralized my name all the time. It was always Cones, actually. So Cones, come here. After 3 years, he never figured out that it was singular. So he says, Cones, come here. He said, you need to get a CDT. And I said, I can't get a CDT, man. It'll, it'll, I don't have the experience. He's like, no, Your time in residency counts as three years. After you get out of here, put your elbows into it, man, and just go at it and just take the test. And I eventually ended up doing this. And I will let you guys know, I don't know if I've ever told anybody this, the CDT exam, when I took it, is the only exam I've ever failed. It was really tough. What?
That's very profound. It. Just so you know, I'm the NBC right now, so I'm kind of intimately involved with this process, but wow.
And I went into it fresh off of getting my boards, getting my pros boards, which I know I'm biased, but I did.
Which you take in, right?
You were super proud about that. Yeah. And the pros boards are notorious for being some of the most difficult exams because it's all patient-based. You have to have all of your master casts. Your articulators have to be perfect. You can't have any, you know, stray plaster. Everything has to be, in the military we say dress right, dress, like just so and perfect. Your models have to be, you know, that ortho angles, like everything has to be just right. So I came off of that, head held high, just ego vibing, walked in, got thumped.
Did you think you were going to ace it?
I thought I was going to crush it. I thought I was going to do so well. And I show up. The first sign that, you know what, this might be tougher is everybody there had their own little pressure pots and their kits. You know, these guys came, they came ready to rock'n'roll. I was like, this is not what I thought. So then what happened after I failed that I was so, I was so mortified. I was so embarrassed. I went back home. This is when I was in Watertown, New York. This is upstate New York, finishing out my last year or so in the military. And I went and I did some work at a community dental center. It wasn't volunteer work, but it wasn't, I wasn't paid very well either. And I told them, I said, I only want to do dentures and I'm going to make everyone from start to finish. I'm going to festoon it. I want to process it. I want to divest it. I want to trim it. I want to insert it. Like, and so I did, I don't know, 60 or 70 of those dentures over the course of a year. And then I went back and took it and did so well. It was night and day. And I thought, my gosh, and so this is, partly why I try to advocate so much for laboratory technicians and why I get so furious when you, I know you guys see this all the time on Facebook and social media, where some dentists will post a case before and after, and get all the fire emojis and flexing biceps and everybody telling them how great it was. Zero mention of the lab or the technician. And you're like, did you make this thing? You know, it's like, I don't I'll post a photo of a Ferrari and people think I made it.
Yeah, your four-axis mill didn't do that.
Yeah, 100%. And so this is why if you see any posts I do, any lecture I give, I never gatekeep that information because I feel like... if I can't stand on my own two legs, then what do I have? If my ceramist or my denture technician is literally the only thing that makes me stand out, then maybe I'm not a great clinician. And I realize that happens for many folks. Like maybe you don't have a special skill. Maybe that technician is a magician behind the scenes because your preps look so bad or your impressions are so gnarly. And I'm sure you got, I'm preaching to the choir here, of course, you know, but I think it's very, vital to maintain that sort of collaboration and the acknowledgement of, hey, there's another person here on this team that helped me out.
Well, I would just like to say on behalf of all technicians that we appreciate that because we are kind of like the unsung hero, right? Patient thinks the doctor makes the prosthesis or the crown or the veneers and you know, we don't get a lot of credit. So thank you.
Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure.
That's cool.
Did you ever practice dentistry? All I hear you talking about is making dentures.
So I did practice a lot of dentistry, obviously, dental school I did, and residency, of course. And in the residency, you have to make all of your own stuff. And that was their thought in the beginning, that in your first year, second year, we had a sheet that was like, you had to tick the boxes. All right, you need to do 20 gold crowns. You need to do 3 gold FDPs, like 3 unit gold bridges, right? You had to do so many RDPs, like partial dentures. Oh, and by the way, what a nightmare. there that was to wax and cast a partial denture framework. Oh my gosh. Like if I never did you do.
Yeah. Like never see one again.
Like 3, like 3. You know, it wasn't a lot. It wasn't a lot.
It doesn't really need to be, does it?
No.
And you know, one and done.
And in the military, I mean, everything was so we were so implant heavy. And it's like you get a patient in and they're missing 2 teeth. You're not doing a partial, you're doing 2 implants. Like, come on. You know, so our mentors knew that, the writing was on the wall. We didn't really have to do that, you know, that much at all. But we did practice dentistry, Elvis. And you know, there was a phase that came about 18 months in about halfway, yeah, halfway through the three years where I felt sort of a similar vibe that I had when I was in dental school and I wasn't sure that I was supposed to do this. And again, I was pretty decent at it, but I just, it never really clicked. And I'll tell you what happened one day. So at the time, that time, I think I had three kids. I had two daughters and like a newborn son. And I had my camera. We had to buy a camera. We had to get a Canon. I had a T1i. Gosh, this is, yeah, 2009, a camera I bought in 2009, a Canon T1i with 100 millimeter macro lens. We had to document everything. because we had to start prepping for our boards. If you didn't have your boards as a military prosthodontist, you were nothing. Like you were a general dentist with some pros courses behind you. Like that's how we were viewed. And so there was tons of pressure to get your boards. Not my words, by the way. So just let me make that clear. That is not my sentiment. There are plenty of prosthodontists that should never touch a human being. And there are plenty of general dentists that would, you know, leave me in the dust. I just want to make that clear.
Sure.
That's a fair thing.
So we would do all of these photos. We'd take all these photos and stuff, and I didn't like it. My photos sucked. They were really, really bad. And I would go home, and then I really enjoyed, however, taking photos of my kids on the weekends, at the beach, you know, what little spare time we had. And my wife one day said, she said, you know, is there any reason why you can't bring the photography like you do at home, you know, making the kids like artwork and the cookies they made looking like it belongs in a magazine. Couldn't you just do that with the dental stuff? And I said, no, that's not a thing you do. Nobody does that. You know, everything has to be very clinical. It has to look sterile and horrible, right? Like the patients need to have shiny cheeks and like the little red in their eyes and they need to look like a mug shot. And you know, everything needs to be just like straight on.
You can't show emotion.
You can't show, no, you can't show any emotion. And you know what? I went to a meeting. This was in Orlando. It was the ACP meeting, I believe in Orlando. an unknown ceramist by the name of Michelle Meunier. Oh, I love it.
Yeah.
Unknown. Nobody knew who this guy was. Yeah, so Michelle Meunier gets up to give a presentation. And I knew the name briefly at that time. You know, I was just kind of, this is way before, you know, Facebook was kind of getting up and running, like TikTok wasn't the thing, or, you know, Instagram wasn't really big. I didn't know what really Michelle Meunier was. There was like a book on one of our shelves or something. But this guy gets up and he starts, this is on a three by one screen. This is these, crazy long screens. And I'd never even seen a screen like that before. I was so used to like the 16 by 9 format, whatever my PowerPoint was. This guy gets up there. I think he showed, you know, his hour long presentation showed maybe 15 slides and every single one, just the negative space that was on there, you know, 3/4 of the slide, pure white, with half of a woman's face in there with hair spiraling, across the slide with like biting on an implant. And, I saw that you couldn't see her face just like the teeth with the implant. And he's, in his, French, Swiss accent, like talking about what he's doing. And that's when it kind of clicked for me. And I said, oh my gosh, like dentistry can be artistic.
Sexy.
You can't. Yeah. It can be sexy. And I said, gosh, I wonder if I could take photos like that. Gosh. And every single image was so deliberate and you could see the passion that went into it. And I thought, golly, like this is something else. And there's only been, I can count on one hand the number of presentations I've seen over my career that I thought that changed me. Like that changed the way I view something, that changed the way I'm going to do something. And that weekend, when I got back the next week, I switched everything around, started changing the f-stop and the aperture and the shutter speed and the way my lights were angled. And so a lot of people that know me based on my photography now, that was the origin there. That's when everything started to change. And then I really fell in love with dentistry because it became this positive feedback loop. I enjoyed taking the photos and you guys know how many cool things are there on your bench every day to photograph and.
Tons, yeah.
And I started to notice the magic in the mundane, the small things that, gosh, just a couple VPS tubes, like the caps sitting there, that you see every single day when you do your, heavy body, light body for your final impression. I thought, that's kind of a cool image. And I kind of started doing my photos in that sort of, yeah, negative space, sort of moody. And I kind of created my own sort of, I guess, vibe, I guess. And then I really liked it. And then the more I showed it, professors, people that were in the audience watching my treatment planning boards and my cases would say, wow, Dr. Cohen, this is really cool. And then they would ask more about, hey, what bird did you use? What ceramic did you use? Tell me about your bonding protocol. Hey, what were your camera settings? Where are you even standing to get this photo? How did you get the patient to smile like that? And that's where that really kind of evolved. And I thought, man, people like what I'm showing. They enjoy it. And so it made me want to go do more cases. And can I show this a different way? And can I be, start telling a story now? And that's really where it took off for me was, but I mean, I was four years through dental school and nearly two thirds of the way through a residency before dentistry really clicked for me. So if there's anybody listening to this, it's going any sort of, you know, career path and you're like, I don't. I don't know. Find that thing that you love. And you know what, Barb, and I would say it was never about the money. And I know that you guys know there's a lot of influencers and folks out there that just want to, oh, I want to make money doing this. I want to take photos for the money, or I want to do cosmetic dentistry for the money, or I want to open a new lab for the money. If it's about the money, I mean, it's just never going to be I feel like that legacy is just, it's gonna tank and it becomes that race to the bottom always.
It's obvious when it's about the money.
100%.
But you mentioned changing like F-stops and lighting and stuff. Did you interact with patients differently?
Yeah, 100% because yes.
To get what you wanted.
That's a great question. I don't think anybody's ever asked me that question, but it deserves. and a little bit of an explanation, because absolutely I would. Because the first thing patients, and these were on patients that I'd already seen, I'm halfway through treatment. And then one day I come in with this like soft box foot and they're like, what in the hell? And they're like, is that going in my mouth? And you've got these, pouncers on your camera and all of these, flexi palettes and things. And they're like, what the, what am I doing? And it also meant that when I say one more photo, add a zero to that. Like they quickly figured out, oh, that's like 10 more photos.
Let me take a quick picture.
Click, click, click, click. Yeah, it's a Paparazzi style. They're like, oh my God. And you know, but they also. I would share their portrait photos with them. Yeah, I had to start getting back a little bit further. I had to make room for some of the lighting. I had to do different things and I would have them stand to the side, not Olin Mills style, but you know, hey, give me a smile, stick your tongue out. You know, I started interacting with them a little bit more. And because I wanted to create that authentic interaction, you know, I didn't want it to be forced. I wanted it to come across in the images that, oh, Holy crap, there is a human being attached to these white things that we're just so obsessed with all the time. And that didn't matter whether it was, yeah, like a six through 11 like Emacs case or whether it was, you know, a denture. Like, you know, I wanted whoever was viewing this to say, oh my gosh, that could be my uncle Chris. Hey, that's my Aunt Sally. You know, whatever it was, they could see somebody in there, they could see some familiarity. And also, I didn't realize this at the time, that I would then set up my own private practice and have to market myself. I thought, I figured I'd stay in the military forever. But that's one of the things that patients tell me all the time. Oh, I saw your website and I saw like Kyle on there and he looks like, he looks like, he reminded me of my dad. Or, Jessica's story reminded me of what my sister went through with the Milogenesis imperfecta. And you know, it just spoke to me and it felt real because customers are savvy. You know, patients are savvy now. They know when it's Adobe stock images or whatever it is. They know when it's like, free, patient because they go to three or four different websites and they see the same woman, the exact same woman on every web page. And it's like, hey, want a denture? And this woman's?
I laugh at those, but I've noticed lately is the obvious forced smile.
Yes, absolutely.
You get a patient and you're like, all right, smile. I'm going to take a picture. And it's a smile they'll never reproduce in their life again.
100%.
And you're like, what are you doing? You're not going to do that ever.
That's not a real smile. Well, somebody asked me one time because when they see my lectures, they'll say, how did you, I can't get my, and they'll say this thing, I can't get my patients to smile like that. And what they're seeing in my images is what we call a Duchenne smile. It's that true smile where the orbicularis oculi are firing and women hate it because it shows the crow's feet. Like, I don't want to see the crow's feet, but the crow's feet is what adds life and vitality. And I love it when I get the patients laughing. And the way I do that, to be honest, is I usually tell them a dirty joke or something, what I mean? But at this point, this isn't visit one.
Totally.
Hey, by the way, for anybody listening, don't start telling your brand new patients dirty jokes before you've built.
A room. You might get a lawsuit. And they're not stressed about meeting you for the first time.
100%, but exactly. And so I'll do that and I have my camera waiting for them. And when they, start snorting and the nose wrinkles and their eyes are squinting, that's when I pop that picture. Because that to me says more than the postured smile, you know, the social smile that they give when it's like, I don't care, I can't believe I'm here. You know, your passport photo pic?
Oh my God, someone's taking a picture of me.
Yeah, get me a hottie. Most people, myself included, are pretty uncomfortable behind the camera, or on the other side of it. Like, I'm in front of it, yeah. I don't like it when I have to get my photo taken. I don't know what to do with my hands, and do I have a good side? Do I have a bad side? I don't know. so that's a really great question. the relationship with the patient changes 100%. Yeah.
I think for me, when you said after Michelle Monnier's course that you wanted to get better at telling a story, meaning the patient's story. So it seems to be an emotional connection between you and the patient and the camera so that you can get that reality from them where they don't feel like, is this my good side? Is this my bad side? And just kind of get that light.
Absolutely.
That's a gift, to be honest with you.
And the thing is too, Barb, like once you have a little bit of a portfolio, it was tough goings in the beginning because people are like, all right, can you show, you know, imagine you have nothing to show. Imagine you're going to start doing tattoos And you're like, trust me, bro, I'm good.
I don't have any examples, but.
So now, you know, I've got a whole look book and when patients look through there, they feel more comfortable and they're like, all right, this guy's, there's no way he's going to make me look bad.
He's legit.
Yeah, he's legit. And so that definitely helps. And so, you know, to people out there, and this is the same whether you're making cobalt chromium partial dentures or refractory veneers or yeah, flippers all day long. Like, Document your work. Start taking pictures of it, because that really, really helps. And people ask me all the time when I speak to laboratory technicians, like, hey, what would it take for me to get somebody like you? I'm like, I got to see your work, man. And I think you guys know, Elvis, you were telling me you're in Indiana. The woman I work with for my dentures, Janelle, is in Indiana. Am I allowed to mention other people?
No, absolutely. Janelle's been on before.
Ellie.
Yeah.
She's up in like South Bend, which is so close to Chicago. We don't even consider them in Indiana, but I get it. Yeah.
Well, you know, and somebody asked me, they're like, how did you find her? And I said, dude, Instagram. Like I said, homegirl post.
Yeah, she was all over it.
Oh no, it was all day, every day. And then somebody made a real snarky comment one time when they were looking at my work and then they were looking at hers and they said, but her stuff doesn't look like yours. Why would you pick her? There's a million other people out there that take high quality photos of their dentures and stuff. And I said, you know what? Like, I know what looks good. I said, I can tell what that looks like with a cell phone and how much better it's going to look like once it's in my hands. And like, sure enough, I took that bet and it paid off. And I'll tell you, if you've never seen her stuff up close, it's phenomenal. It looks better.
All of the features and the beauty and just the skill and love that goes into her work.
Yeah.
I mean, you see that, right? When you put those in the patient's mouth, like all of those little details.
100%, yeah. And you try to find somebody as a prosthodontist, I try to find technicians that match my energy. And she matches that energy. She is more excited about the final result than whatever the paycheck was. Because that final result, that's a thing that you show in a lecture. It's your calling card. It defines you. That was like your last victory. That's the new bar by which you set all other cases going forward. That's the legacy that I was kind of talking about before. And it's unbelievable to me that there are people in our profession that don't photograph their work. And I just wonder is like, are you just, you know, when they tell you, whether it's a dentist or a technician, oh, we do this and we do that, but you can't show it. So it either says to me, you either don't do it or it's not good enough that you don't feel comfortable photographing it.
You're not proud of it.
That's a great point. Seriously. Like I just started photographing my work about a month ago and I'm like, is it good enough? Do I want to put this on Instagram? Can you see the texture? Can you see the low being? And it was like, it raises the bar technically and skill level wise when you're going to put something online and photograph your work.
100%. And when people ask me, hey, what took you from like a five out of 10 to like a six out of 10 to like a seven out of 10, I tell them, going and doing my own lab work, like that was one thing, you asked before about like, why did you have to do so much lab work? I think our mentors recognize the fact that Prost and the laboratory component is so, there's such organic bedfellows, you can't really tease one apart from the other. And when you see your margins for the first time under a 16 power, like a microscope, and you're like, you're like, oh my gosh, like I suck. and you realize just how bad you are. And when you do all that painstaking work, that takes you to that next level. That took me to that next level. And then the photography also took me to that level, because it took a little bit of time for me to photograph my work. And then, you know, you put a crown prep up on a movie screen and that crown prep is, you know, 4 feet tall and you can't hide anything on that, you know what I mean? And you've got a bunch of full bird kernels and, you know, snaplists in the audience, like looking at your work, not, that ain't it, dude. and they see it, it's glaringly obvious. But let me tell you this too, I think there is something to be said about just putting your work out there and just, ignoring the trolls, ignoring the noise, everybody out there. And to this day, I can't put, the best work I've ever done, like the greatest thing you've ever seen, the closest to a 10 out of 10 I've ever done, there will still be some cuts that will come on there and make some comment about, you know what I would have done? Meanwhile, this guy's got no profile picture, 8 followers, profiles. You're like, okay, you know, let's go. And I always think about that Churchill quote about, you know, the man in the arena. It's easy, if I'm in the arena, it's easy for you to throw stones down at me and being like, not good enough. You know what I mean? I'm like, show your work, man. You know, so if people are listening to this and they're timid, you know, same, Barb, you know, I tell people, just put your work out there. If you need to, create a fake, or a private anonymous Instagram account and start posting there without your name on it and just seeing what the reaction is and just developing that skin, over time. Because there are so many people that do not put their work out there for fear of the critique. But I will tell you, I will take the critique, like 1 critique, like legit critique, not, yeah, not the troll. A legit critique over like, hey, your A2 denture should have been bleach white. You know, I would have done white. Like, okay, well, that's meaningless. You know, I'll take one legitimate critique about, hey, you know, check out the midline here. Well, you know, something I do, blah, blah, blah, over like 100 likes and shares, because that's how you progress. That's how you develop your clinical skills, your technical skills, you know, anything that you want to do. And I find that, especially, I don't know, maybe with today's, these kids these days, they seem, they seem a little bit softer, they seem a little bit, gun shy. Everybody gets a trophy. Yeah.
I always tell people if they're afraid to post their work and they're like, it's not good enough. I'm like, well, that's where you start. Yeah. Post it. So in a year or two down the line, you can go back and see how much better you are.
Absolutely.
It's totally pushing you to do better because it's out there.
And I am mortified if I if you scroll to like my very first, you know, two dozen posts on Instagram, I look back and I think, oh my gosh, why did I? What was I thinking? What was I thinking? thinking, why did I use that font? What the heck? I can see the background here. I did a terrible job of like cutting that out or cropping. It just didn't make any sense. Same thing with my presentations. Like, Most of the presentations I had from even six or seven years ago, I don't show those anymore. It's not good. relative now, at the time, people are like, oh, it's so cool. I look at it now and I think, oh, shoot, my one bake enamel and dentin might've been fire for the first year dental students at University of New England. Like now, I mean, I couldn't. I couldn't tab day and show that I'd get, the hook would come and like yank me off the stage.
But Barb and I constantly tell people, if you go back to the 1st 10, 20 episodes, don't expect a whole lot.
And it's with everything, right? It's like- It was rough. Yeah, it's a throttle, not a switch. And you got to ramp it up slowly. You know, it's not going to be like one day you're bad and like tomorrow all of a sudden you're good. And that's so, and you know, you mentioned good enough. I mean, what's good enough? You know what I mean? When you start getting into that rarefied air up in the clouds where only a few percentage of people kind of hang out, I mean, what's good enough anymore? You know what I mean? You can only break your own record so many times. And this is something my wife, who's much smarter than me, by the way, told me in the beginning, because I was a little hesitant. I wanted to curate everything. And she says, you can't have Every case can't be your best case going for. At some point, you're going to have to show something that maybe wasn't quite as good. But you find the pearl, you find the nugget, whatever it was that makes that particular case stand out.
So Ivoclar says you're speaking for them in Chicago?
Yeah, man.
Or what are you talking about?
Well, I'm really excited. So just so you guys know, I have a brand fledgling relationship with Ivaclar. Everybody knows Ivaclar, of course, and Ivaclar was, has been at some point in my dental career since day one at Tufts. And Janelle and I, because we do so much removable work together and everything that she uses, that we use in these cases is typically Ivoclar, whether we're doing like the Ivotion or the Ivobase, or she uses, we talked about, and Barb, you had mentioned sort of the subtle things that she does and the nuanced details, the way that Janelle can make a, you know, a blood denture look like, holy cow, was this pulled out of somebody's mouth? She uses a lot of their Nexco composite. You know, she does these little details where she'll add and layer the soft tissue, you know, and which is great Because if you think about a denture, what percentage of the denture is pink and what percentage is white? And yet so many people neglect.
Everyone neglects the pink.
It usually looks like everyone. It looks like something that came out of a vending machine. And so that was one of the things talking about like the energy. I thought, gosh, this woman puts, pours her heart and soul into that soft tissue and making that look good. And so one of the things that we're going to be talking about, the lecture that we have is all about removables. And it's called Hiding in Plain Sight. And it's about...
Oh, how'd you come up with that?
I don't know. how it was? Actually, I do know. I do know.
Yeah, you know.
I had this awesome photo. So I was really into herpetology in the throes of my youth. I had pythons and lizards and stuff growing up. And I had this true chameleon. And I have this like awesome photo of this true chameleon. You know, he's all colorful. And one day I thought, I got to just put this into a presentation somehow. And so actually it started with a photo. And I said, could I base a presentation around a photo and a title? And I thought, wouldn't that be cool? to have him as the title slide. And you'll see it. If you guys are in Chicago, come by, you'll see the title slide. And it's got this chameleon and he's like all different colors. And it's not AI, it's a real photo. And I thought, you know, we'll call the premise of this. We'll be hiding in plain sight and developing teeth and dentures and prosthetics. They're so good that when it's on the movie screen, you can't tell. And you know what you're looking at, but it disappears in the mouth. And so that was the idea. And so I called Akbar and I said, hey, I would love to lecture with Janelle. I know she's doing a hands-on course immediately following our lecture. We've got a one-minute joint lecture together. And then immediately after, she's going to do an awesome hands-on demo, which I'm going to because I don't know how to layer like she does. So And I'm hoping to learn something from her and she's going to hopefully learn something from me. And that's part of a great collaboration is like, and I tell doctors all the time, if you can't learn something from your technician, you need to find a new technician because they should be teaching you.
Love it.
So we're doing this course and we're talking about removables and there's going to be some implants in there and it's going to be, it's really, really great. And these are cases that we've been working on over the last, I don't know, three years that we've been working together even three years. I don't know. We've got, we've got some. Wow. And what's awesome is I called her the other day and I said, Janelle, what cases do we show? I said, we have so many. And our biggest problem is trying to fit the cases that we want to show into this little one-hour presentation. And the goal that we want to kind of establish for this is we want to have people walk away and say, you know what, gosh, dentures are are sexy. Gosh, you can do a denture with some dignity and it doesn't have to look like it came out of a vending machine. It doesn't have to look like my old Nana's teeth that are on the side table next to her bed. Like this looks Like I want my stuff to look like that. So that's the whole idea. And Ivaclar, I'm always hesitant when I give them my synopsis and the lecture title. I'm always waiting for them to, whatever company it is, to round the edges and make it.
They're not pushy.
They don't want to change you. They just don't work. And so I thought, hey, this is going to be the start of a beautiful relationship with Ivaclar. Awesome. So I'm super stoked. And I cannot wait to go and give this joint presentation with Janelle and also equally excited to see her do her hands-on in person immediately after.
So maybe this is a question for Janelle, but also for yourself. How do you get good at doing pink tissue? Like, you know, you always see teeth, right? And all the photographs on teeth, but how do you get... Are there courses on stippling and how do you make pink and make it real? And like, how do you get good at that?
Fairly certain, Janelle does this a lot. And I know she's been to Australia, New Zealand. She's been all over doing these courses. And I know from my end, what she does is she will frequently ask me, she'll see a photo that I posted with my ceramist, Dominic. She'll see some cases with like natural tissue and she'll say, cone. Send me that case. And I'm like, why? It's a beer, it's an implant. No, I want it for the tissue. Can you send me an unedited, uncropped image of the tissue? I want to practice. So I know behind the scenes. She puts in- So just studying, right? Yeah, she puts in the work for sure. So she's putting in a lot of work. And I'm certain if you ask her and go to her Instagram and go to the beginning, you'll see the trend. She wasn't Janelle Rocco like today that she was a couple of years back. I can even see it in there. And I think that was one of the things when I first started following her and seeing just the abundance of stuff she was putting out there, I could see the trajectory. And I thought, you know what, let me work with her for a little bit. Let's see if we can take this next level. And she has not disappointed. And I don't know if she's gonna ever listen to this, but I hope she doesn't figure out where she falls into the food chain because she could practically charge me double and it would still be worth it. For anyone that is legitimately looking for just a solid denture technician, great with implants, great with bars, great with attachments. You know, she's getting really, really good with like the digital stuff now. Janelle is your girl. Like if I can do a plug, like 100%. And again, people always want to know who I use. It's Janelle at Ottawa Dental Lab. Like she's awesome.
Yeah. What are your thoughts on digital? Because I imagine through your whole schooling, it was not.
I mean, I can't imagine the army doing digital.
Yeah.
When we, when I was in residency, We had, what was it, Dentsply, we had the Red Cam, the Dentsply Red Cam, where you take 3 photos, you take the pitch, the roll, the yaw, you'd have to spray that, you know, powder, and I can still, I can still smell it, you know. And it was awful because, you know.
That was freaking fantastic. I'm sorry, but that's got to be a meme right there, Elvis.
You know what happens when you tell a patient not to do a thing? Like, hey, don't lick your teeth. You know what the first thing they do is?
Lick their teeth, yeah. And then you got to start over again.
And even being trained as prosthodontists, and they were training us up to be laboratory technicians at the time, we'd go and mill out these little inlays and crowns. Son of a gun if they didn't fit like socks on a rooster. Oh my gosh, they looked terrible. And you know what we'd always say? The cement will fill it in. We'll just fill it in. It doesn't fill it in. And then you take that blue rubber wheel and it starts like crumbling in the margin. And now this patient's got blue and pink, you know, silicone stripes on their, oh my gosh, it was terrible. And I would shout from the rooftops, CAD scam dentistry, it's awful. Anyway, handmade, boutique, bespoke, like all that. I was all about that.
Same here.
And just to make a long story longer. My wife mentioned to me one day, she goes, you are just throwing your back out. You're missing soccer games. You're at the lab till, you know, 8, 9 o'clock, pouring these models, waiting for them to break out of the alginate so they don't like desiccate. She's like, there's got to be a better way. And she was with me at lab day a few years back. Yeah. And she's walking around. And she says, everything, she's like, when I came here like five years ago, everything was all about, the stone and the handmade. She goes, everything now is just scanners and printers. And she's like, the landscape, the ecosystem of dentistry has changed. And she says, if you don't get on it like yesterday, you're going to be so far behind the 8 ball. And you're going to be one of those dinosaurs that you study. You're going to be extinct and obsolete.
Wow. Yeah.
That was very profound.
In all fairness, my wife was the one that says, you got to go digital. So she called, I remember she called up like Henry Schein, brought in a trio. She called up Medit, you know, Dentspla with the Prime Scan. And we tried all of these scanners. She blocked off like 3 days in the office. She's like, I'm going to be your guinea pig. You're going to scan me. You're going to bring all these folks in. And that was end of 2022, 2023. So I have not actually been digital. that long, but we have this.
Not long at all.
Kind of cliche saying that when we went digital, we kind of burned the ships and we just didn't look back. We just kind of went. Good for you guys. But you know what? And I would say now, and now we've got a 3D printer in our office and we're doing all this great stuff. We're probably 70% digital, maybe 30% analog. And you know, a lot of these denture cases that Janelle and I do, I still like pouring a traditional implant impression and doing the soft tissue mask, it just looks cool. It just looks nice. I just enjoy it. And people are like, why do you do that? And it's like, man, I spent years perfecting this. I don't want to give it all up. And every once in a while, you still need, you still have that patient. You just got to do it. Like the digital isn't going to capture that vestibule or that movable tissue. You know, there's a time and a place. And I like having that arrow in my quiver. And I don't want to just, I don't want to get so divorced from that. like that guy that my buddy and I saw one time in the woods who had this fancy GPS that he got from EMS. It was like $1,000 Garmin. It was bright yellow. And the batteries died. And we ended up, he had enough following me and my buddy with a good old fashioned map and compass. And you know what I mean? So, and I know there's a lot of young doctors getting out of school now and they invest 200 plus grand and the milling unit and the scanner, multiple scanners and the face scanner and the printer and the blah, blah, blah. And they don't know the first thing to do with it. And I'm like, look at how much work it takes for your restorations to look like crap. How much technology does it take for you to have a completely disgusting restoration? So I think there's, you got to learn it. There's steps. And it's the digital dentistry, it's not a shortcut. You know what I mean? It's not a shortcut. It can make you more efficient. And for my ceramist, for Janelle, for myself, it helps us to put our fingerprint on it. does the grunt work for us so that we can put our DNA into that restoration and a little bit of our love without all the backbreaking work that is, that really a machine could do. You know what I mean?
Yes, but I'm curious, you know, when you talk about like photographing and the teeth and the shapes, do you just love the Ivoclar teeth? The shapes.
Oh my God.
I mean, give me a little bit of background on that.
The way that it works in the residency is all of our patient treatment. is free and it's just your taxpayer dollars, Barb and Elvis. Oh good. Oh no, yeah. So when we had the opportunity, I'm not. I guess when we were voluntold to do our part 4 board case, which is a denture, up to that point, we had, we had some, I won't mention the brands, but you have everything. You have the key to the candy store. You can, there's nothing that's out of range for you. But every single resident, and it's rare that I can say like every or always in dentistry, but every single resident, we use the Finaris II teeth for our teeth because they're amazing. Tell me what tooth is more recognized? recognizable, more natural than the Finaris 2. There aren't any. The Finaris 2 is, that is the gold standard and everybody knows it. And one of the things is that, you know, when you show it in a lecture, everybody knows exactly what tooth you used. You know what I mean? And anybody that's seen my photos online, I did one recently, if anybody wants to check my Instagram, maybe, I don't know, like 10 posts ago, where it shows like a denture and it says, you know, talks about dental photography and like what I see versus what you see in the post. You know, so I had a dentist denture that Janelle sent me with a card of teeth. She's like, hey, doc, these are the cards, this is the card of teeth I use for this case. So you can like, you know, write it all down. And I thought, you know, people will ask me all the time, well, how do you get the pictures of the dentures? And I can't, you know, capture that texture and I know how to do it. So I showed some behind the scenes of, you know, the lighting setup and what I did because those teeth in particular, the topography is just, It's delicious. And it's so great. It's so good. It's so good. And so those are the teeth that Janelle and I have been using all this time. And when we first started working together and I would request that, she's like, doc, you know it's more expensive. And I was like, I don't care because if I can't show the photo of it, if I can't share it with the world and feel proud about this, then what's the point? Because the money, The money is irrelevant to me. I can always make more money elsewhere. I would just go be, like I'd go get my NBA and do literally anything else besides dentistry if it was like strictly about money. And we've got some phenomenal cases we're going to show at Lab Day with the Finaris teeth as well.
Do you get that same excitement and emotion out of.
I do now. Yeah, I do now. when it happens, Elvis, is when...
Is that only after Janelle puts 6 hours of texture on it?
She puts 6 hours of texture on it. So here's the thing. You know, one of the issues with a lot of like digital dentures is that they kind of look like a digital denture. And what happens is, and I don't need to tell you guys this, I'm saying it out loud because somebody's going to listen to this and find a familiar tune to this. But I feel like a lot of doctors, they get these machines, these scanners, these printers, and if you have an elephant gun, everything becomes an elephant. And every patient that walks through your door, guess what? They get a digital denture, whether they should or not. And so Janelle and I, we do some digital dentures, but again, the digital component of that, it absorbs some of the brunt force and the time that it would have taken, the man hours or woman hours for Janelle to make, to physically make this stuff. And then here comes Janelle and over her lunch break, like I said, she puts her fingerprint on there with some of that, a little of that Nexco, you know, a little stain and glaze. on the teeth and she puts her little, just little seal on there that says, hey, a human being was here. This isn't just automated. You know what I mean? This isn't just mass produced. This is a one-of-a-kind piece of art and hey, check it out. It's gorgeous.
Awesome. Love it. I mean, it makes the world a difference, especially with everybody. outsourcing designs. Everyone's going to have the exact same denture here in about 20 years if we're not careful.
Absolutely. And the thing that I always wonder is with these dentists, I mean, you endeavored towards this profession a fair chunk of your life. If you're just a general dentist, it was four years. If you were a specialist like me, it was seven years. So I'm like pushing a decade of just schooling and financial burden. Why wouldn't you pour your heart into it? Why would you do anything less than my gosh, this is amazing. And here's the thing. You've got a lab like Ottawa Dental Lab. They're not in my, they're not that expensive. You know what I mean? Like Janelle isn't like that costly. You can have world-class aesthetics and design team working with you for what I would consider, you know, like a lower tier cost price point. So there's, in this day and age, there's really, really no excuse for it. And with social media being so popular now, everybody knows what's out there. You can't plead like, oh, I didn't know who these people were anymore. It's out there. We're all out there, you know, doing this stuff. And hopefully, if there are a few of those stragglers left behind, we'll catch them in Chicago.
Right on. Yeah, for sure. Do you know what day you're speaking yet or has that not been finalized?
No, the, hey, registration is up now. I would encourage everybody to go register. So we are lecturing Friday and I believe we are lecturing from 1.30 to 3 P.m. in the Grand Ballroom AB East Tower.
We will be there too. That's where we set up to record every year. So we'll definitely be there to check this out. Of course, everybody else should.
Awesome. Well, I'm so excited to meet you guys in person finally. I'm so excited to be chatting with you live now, finally on the podcast. It's still good. Yeah, good things coming.
Well, we appreciate your passion and we appreciate your appreciation for the dental life.
Thank you.
Right.
Yeah.
Great.
Keep telling your colleagues the same.
Will do.
All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Cohn. We appreciate you and we'll see you in Chicago. All right.
Big hugs.
Peace.
Let's do it.
Have a good one.
A huge thanks to Dr. Cohn for coming on our podcast and being really honest about your struggles and your appreciation for the lab technician. It's amazing how good you have become because you've actually aligned yourself with technicians that have the same patient values as yourself. And Elvis and I and everybody else knows Janelle's amazing. So it is definitely a throttle and not a switch to get better and photography is a great way to do it. So be sure to check out his Instagram at Miles Cone DMD and especially be sure to see them speak at Ivaclar Ballroom. while at Lab Day Chicago. Janelle and him are going to be awesome on stage. So they will not be hiding in plain sight. That is just so funny. So go check them out.
All right, everybody. That's all we got for you. Hopefully we'll see you in Vegas.
In Vegas. We'll definitely talk to you next week. All right. Have a good one. See ya.
Bye. I don't have any plans whatsoever. The views and opinions expressed on the Voices from the Bench podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the host or Voices from the Bench LLC.