Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran

In this special episode, Howard Farran steps into the lecture hall rather than the studio, delivering a guest lecture to dental students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas at the invitation of Dr. Karen Kucharski, Assistant Professor in Residence in Clinical Sciences. The talk — titled The Business of Dentistry After Graduation: DSOs, Practice Ownership, Student Loans, and Career Strategy — was requested for a simple reason: students are increasingly convinced that practice ownership is a dream that has died, and they want an honest, balanced education on what actually awaits them after graduation.
Howard works through the questions students themselves submitted, covering the realities of production inside a DSO and how much control an associate truly has over it, what separates thriving associates from those who feel taken advantage of, and which clinical skills new grads most wish they'd developed more in school. He addresses the pressure to produce at or beyond one's level of clinical expertise, what a genuinely competitive associate contract looks like and which terms are actually negotiable, whether associates are converting their own cases or depending on a treatment coordinator, and how much the mentorship and CE promised by large groups really improves clinical competency. The lecture closes on the bigger career questions: appointment length and autonomy, what high-production associates actually take home, student loan strategy, and the honest case for and against lifelong associateship versus ownership — delivered with the goal of educating rather than selling students on either path.
 
Episode #1739 : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, Howard Farran takes the podium at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Dental Medicine, invited by Dr. Karen Kucharski to speak to her students on The Business of Dentistry After Graduation: DSOs, Practice Ownership, Student Loans, and Career Strategy.
Students today are being told the dream of ownership is dead. This lecture is a straight, no-spin education on the real trade-offs between DSO associateship and owning — production limits, contracts, mentorship, case conversion, and the numbers behind it all.
🎧 Required listening for dental students, residents, and any new grad weighing their first job offer.
#DentistryUncensored #DentalStudents #DentalEducation #PracticeOwnership #DSO #NewGrad #UNLV

In this episode, Howard Farran sits down with Dr. Jill A. Tanzi, current president of the Alliance of Independent Dentists and a partner in Shero Dental Advisors. A valedictorian from Oxford, Massachusetts, she earned her BA cum laude in Biology from the University of Rochester and her DDS with honors from the University of Maryland, and has owned and practiced in a successful group practice in Hopkinton, MA for the past 23 years. That combination of hands-on ownership and organized advocacy gives her a grounded perspective on the pressures facing independent practice today.
The conversation tackles the question at the heart of her work: who is actually representing independent dentists, and why multiple voices serve the profession better than a single unified one. Dr. Tanzi and Howard explore why independent dentists should care about advocacy at all, why a retiring dentist might be better off selling to another dentist than to a DSO, and what's really at stake as consolidation accelerates. They also dig into bigger policy questions — whether dental coverage should be folded into medical insurance, and what the "Break Up Big Medicine" movement is aiming to accomplish and why it matters to dentistry.
 
Episode #1738 : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, Howard sits down with Dr. Jill Tanzi — president of the Alliance of Independent Dentists, partner in Shero Dental Advisors, and owner of a thriving group practice in Hopkinton, MA for over 23 years.
Who's actually representing independent dentists? Why are multiple voices better than "one voice"? And why should a retiring dentist sell to another dentist instead of a DSO? Dr. Tanzi doesn't hold back.
🎧 A passionate, pointed conversation on advocacy, independence, and the fight for the future of private practice.
#DentistryUncensored #IndependentDentists #PrivatePractice #DentalAdvocacy #DSO #DentalPolicy

In this episode, Howard Farran sits down with Dr. Lior Tamir, a practicing dentist and entrepreneur who spent more than a decade in marketing technology — building platforms that turned data into action for global consumer brands — before returning to dentistry and finding a fragmented, outdated ecosystem with almost no real-time clarity. He grew his de novo practice, Bloom Dental Group, to $5M in its first seven years and used it as the testing ground for The Dental App, a cloud-based platform combining practice management, patient relationships, and real-time analytics into a single AI-powered system.
The conversation centers on a provocative claim: the traditional practice management system is no longer enough. Built for an era when front desk teams manually handled everything, today's PMS simply stores data while practices juggle thousands of patients, hundreds of unscheduled treatment plans, and endless overdue recall — forcing dentists to bolt on third-party tools just to drive action. Lior argues that dentistry is only now entering the era that sales and marketing entered years ago with CRM and automation, and that data without action is worthless. His central point: most diagnosed dentistry never gets done, and while the profession obsesses over marketing, SEO, and Google reviews, millions of dollars in already-diagnosed treatment sits idle in the database.
From there, Lior and Howard explore AI agents as a genuine digital workforce — software that can identify patients with outstanding treatment, reach out automatically, answer questions, book appointments, fill schedule holes, reactivate overdue patients, and collect balances at a scale no human team could match. His view is that AI won't replace staff but create "super staff," turning a treatment coordinator managing 100 cases into one managing 1,000, while freeing teams to focus on relationship building, problem solving, and patient experience. The episode closes on the rise of the dentist CEO and where the profession heads over the next decade: collapsing software categories, real-time business intelligence as standard, and winners determined less by clinical technique than by an understanding of business, hospitality, and a willingness to adopt change.
 
Episode #1737 : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, Howard sits down with Dr. Lior Tamir — practicing dentist, entrepreneur, and founder of The Dental App — who grew his de novo practice, Bloom Dental Group, to $5M in seven years and used it as the proving ground for a new kind of platform.
His argument: the PMS was built for an era that's gone. Meanwhile, millions of dollars in diagnosed treatment sit unscheduled in practice databases while everyone obsesses over new patients and Google reviews. The fortune is in the follow-up — and AI agents can finally do it at scale.
🎧 A sharp look at AI, systems, and the rise of the dentist CEO.
#DentistryUncensored #DentalAI #PracticeManagement #DentalTechnology #TheDentalApp #DentalBusiness

In this episode, Howard Farran sits down with Jim Glidewell — the man he calls his idol, mentor, and the GOAT of crown and bridge — for a conversation nearly 1,800 episodes in the making. Jim traces his improbable path from a one-room Kentucky schoolhouse with a coal stove and no electricity, to returning from Vietnam, selling insurance at 21, and stumbling into dental technology after visiting a friend at his lab bench. He explains the philosophy that shaped everything since: like Henry Ford, Sam Walton, and Southwest Airlines, the winner isn't whoever charges the most, it's whoever delivers the most value for the dollar — and why he's always built for the working man rather than the "Neiman Marcus of dentistry." From there the conversation covers an enormous amount of ground on technology and the trade, including AI trained on 45 million archived crown designs that can match a crown shape in 8 to 10 seconds, the "Lego partial" that prints frame, teeth, and tissue simultaneously for a four-hour turnaround, and the surprisingly brutal engineering behind diamond-coated burs for milling sintered zirconia. Jim predicts chairside-printed dentures within three to five years and the decline of metal partials, reflects on how introducing zirconia in 2007 ended the gold and PFM markets overnight, and notes an industry that has consolidated from 17,000 labs down to just over 4,000.
The back half turns candid and personal. Jim weighs in on open versus closed systems, why scanner prices are collapsing, and what actually keeps customers loyal — not the hardware, but someone picking up the phone on the first ring. He offers blunt advice to indebted young dentists about whether dentistry was ever the right fit, predicts DSO penetration could reach 70%, and shares his distaste for exit-strategy thinking and EBITDA-driven ownership, noting that most dentists he meets who sold to private equity wish they hadn't. He also talks about his management philosophy of staying out of employees' way, the AI avatars now handling customer calls, his son leaving college to learn in-house, and his near-death experience with COVID, when he was intubated at 32 pounds down with less than a 10% chance of survival. Asked why he's still first in the door at 81, his answer is simple: this isn't a business he's building to sell. His exit strategy is death.
For more information on Glidewell TV: https://glidewelldental.com/company/tv 
 
Episode #1736 : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, Howard sits down with his longtime idol and mentor — Jim Glidewell, founder of Glidewell Dental and, in Howard's words, "the GOAT" of crown and bridge.
From a one-room Kentucky schoolhouse with no electricity, to the largest private employer in Orange County with a million square feet of space. From selling insurance at 21 to building an empire on a simple belief: the winner is whoever delivers the most value for the lowest price.
🎧 A candid, wide-ranging conversation on AI, dentures, DSOs, private equity, and why at 81 he still shows up at 7:15 every morning.
#DentistryUncensored #GlidewellDental #DentalLab #DigitalDentistry #DentalIndustry #Zirconia

In this episode, Howard Farran sits down with Dr. Arthur Volker, a graduate of the Columbia University School of Dental and Oral Surgery who went on to complete a Master's degree in Prosthodontics and New Technologies from the University of Siena. In addition to his private practice in Sunnyside, New York, Dr. Volker owns DigiDent Laboratory — giving him a valuable dual perspective from both the operatory and the lab bench. He has published multiple articles and textbook chapters and lectures nationally and internationally on cosmetic dentistry, minimally invasive dentistry, dental materials, and digital dentistry.
The conversation centers on one of the most underrated fundamentals in clinical dentistry: isolation. Dr. Volker walks through practical isolation tactics and the specific advantages of the Isolite system, explaining how proper isolation affects everything downstream — bonding, material performance, patient comfort, and long-term restorative success. From there, he and Howard range across restorative, esthetic, and digital topics, drawing on Dr. Volker's expertise in materials science and his hands-on experience running a digital dental laboratory.
 
Episode #1735 : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, Howard sits down with Dr. Arthur Volker — Columbia-trained clinician, owner of DigiDent Laboratory, and an internationally recognized lecturer on cosmetic, minimally invasive, and digital dentistry.
From isolation tactics and the real advantages of Isolite, to dental materials and digital workflows, Dr. Volker brings a rare combination of clinical depth and lab-side perspective to the conversation.
🎧 A practical, technique-driven episode for any dentist who wants better isolation, better materials decisions, and better restorative outcomes.
#DentistryUncensored #DigitalDentistry #MinimallyInvasive #CosmeticDentistry #DentalMaterials #Isolation