Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran

Latest Episodes:

Drs. Michael Silverman & Anthony Feck : Dentistry Uncensored w/ Howard Farran #1743 Oct 16, 2026

Show notes

In this two-guest episode, Howard Farran sits down with the leadership team behind DOCS Education. Dr. Michael D. Silverman, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine, is a globally recognized lecturer, author, and patient advocacy leader with more than four decades of clinical experience as a general dentist. He co-founded the Dental Organization for Conscious Sedation in 1999 to give dentists the training and safety protocols needed to treat high-anxiety patients, and as President — and a Fellow of both the International College of Dentists and the American College of Dentistry — he has helped teach over 40,000 dental professionals how to safely implement sedation. Joining him is Dr. Anthony Feck, DOCS Education's Dean of Faculty and an engaging international lecturer across the United States, Canada, and Europe, whose teaching style blends humor with contagious passion and whose career spans sedation dentistry, dental technology, pharmacology, and practice building.

The conversation centers on sedation as a path to expanding access to care — reaching the enormous population of patients whose fear keeps them out of the dental chair entirely, and doing it with the protocols and training that keep it safe. Dr. Silverman draws on his experience appearing before numerous state dental boards to advocate for safe, reasonable regulation, while Dr. Feck brings the educator's perspective on what it actually takes to bring sedation into a practice successfully. Together with Howard, they explore the clinical, business, and regulatory sides of sedation dentistry, and how a practice that can confidently treat anxious patients opens a door that most of the profession leaves closed.

DOCS Education: DOCS Education (@docsdentaleducation) • Instagram photos and videos

Dentistry Uncensored by DOCS: Learn Sedation Dentistry | DOCS Education

Episode #1743 : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, Howard sits down with the leadership behind DOCS Education — Dr. Michael Silverman, co-founder and President, and Dr. Anthony Feck, Dean of Faculty.

Between them, they've taught over 40,000 dental professionals how to safely implement sedation and treat the high-anxiety patients most practices never reach. Add four decades of clinical experience, advocacy before state dental boards, and a passion for practice building — and this one covers a lot of ground.

🎧 A must-listen on sedation dentistry, patient safety, access to care, and reaching the patients who've been avoiding the chair for years.

#DentistryUncensored #SedationDentistry #DOCSEducation #DentalAnxiety #DentalCE #PatientSafety

Tobi Bosede, CEO of DentalFynd : Dentistry Uncensored w/ Howard Farran #1742 Oct 14, 2026

Show notes

In this episode, Howard Farran sits down with Tobi Bosede, a recognized leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning — named one of Samasource's "12 Women in Machine Learning to Watch" — who left a career building production AI systems for Fortune 500 companies to found DentalFynd, an AI-powered prepaid booking marketplace for fee-for-service dentistry. The conversation leans hard into the AI question dominating the dental community right now. Tobi draws a clear line between genuine application and buzzword, describing overkill AI as "trying to hit a fly with a hammer when you can just use a swat," and pointing to where it earns its keep: complex and tedious work, like the patented AI quality score she designed to give patients an objective measure of care quality rather than relying on subjective star ratings. She also walks Howard through GEO — generative engine optimization, the emerging successor to SEO — explaining that patients are now searching for dentists inside ChatGPT and Claude rather than Google, and that practices need to show up in those answers. The two also take on the existential debate head-on: Tobi argues that fears of AI revolting or making humans extinct are overblown, that AI only reasons from data humans have already fed it, and that it will most likely fade into the background like electricity or the internet.

The business half of the conversation centers on breaking free from insurance dependence. Tobi lays out the opportunity: roughly 70 million Americans — about 25% of the population — have no dental insurance, representing more than $50 billion in out-of-pocket spending. DentalFynd lets patients browse procedures, see transparent pricing, and prepay at 2 a.m. without playing phone tag, meaning dentists get paid in days rather than months and patients have skin in the game, which sharply reduces no-shows. She and Howard swap stories on the psychology of free versus paid — from FQHC no-show rates to London's congestion charge — and Howard delivers a characteristically blunt rant on why dentists will sign a 40%-off PPO contract without blinking but hesitate over a few hundred dollars in marketing. The episode closes on People of Color in Dental, the nonprofit Tobi founded to build trust, visibility, and connection for minority and newcomer dental professionals — and an on-air invitation for Howard to join the board.

Episode #1742 : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, Howard sits down with Tobi Bosede — AI and machine learning leader, founder & CEO of DentalFynd, and founder of People of Color in Dental.

Before dentistry, she built production AI systems for Fortune 500 companies that generated billions in revenue and multiple patents. Now she's tackling the biggest AI question in dentistry right now: where does it actually create an advantage, and where is it just a label everyone's slapping on things?

From GEO (the new AI-driven SEO — patients searching for dentists in ChatGPT instead of Google), to patented AI quality scoring, to whether AI will ever outsmart the humans who built it — this one goes deep.

🎧 Essential listening for any dentist trying to separate real AI value from the hype.

#DentistryUncensored #DentalAI #ArtificialIntelligence #FeeForService #DentalMarketing #DentalFynd

Jordon & Justin Comstock : Dentistry Uncensored w/ Howard Farran #1741 Oct 12, 2026

Show notes

In this episode, Howard Farran sits down with brothers Jordon and Justin Comstock to dig into the economics of recurring revenue in dentistry. Jordon is the founder and CEO of BoomCloud, a dental membership-plan platform he bootstrapped into a multimillion-dollar SaaS company now serving hundreds of practices. He has spent years helping dentists create, automate, and scale in-house membership programs as an alternative to relying exclusively on traditional insurance and PPO reimbursement, with a focus on shifting practices from one-time transactional revenue toward systematic recurring income.

The conversation starts with a blunt observation: most dental practices begin every month at $0 in collections, and membership revenue fundamentally changes that position. Jordon and Justin walk through the "PPO tax" — how stagnant reimbursements, rising overhead, and write-offs quietly squeeze profitability — and how practices can reduce PPO dependence without recklessly dropping insurance overnight. They explain how membership plans convert uninsured and out-of-network patients into loyal recurring members who often behave differently than cash or PPO patients in terms of retention, treatment acceptance, and lifetime value. The discussion also covers what a high-performing membership-driven practice actually looks like by the numbers, the biggest mistakes practices make when launching a plan, how technology can automate billing and enrollment without burdening the front desk, and the bigger picture of where dental economics is headed as inflation, staffing costs, and insurance pressure continue to mount. Jordon also shares lessons from building BoomCloud as a bootstrapped vertical SaaS company focused tightly on a niche.

Episode #1741 : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, Howard sits down with brothers Jordon and Justin Comstock to talk about one of the biggest shifts happening in dental economics: recurring revenue.

Most practices start every single month at $0 in collections. Jordon, founder and CEO of BoomCloud, makes the case that in-house membership plans change that math entirely — reducing PPO dependence, boosting retention and case acceptance, and getting practices paid before the doors even open.

🎧 A smart conversation on the "PPO tax," membership plans, and building a more predictable practice.

#DentistryUncensored #BoomCloud #MembershipPlans #RecurringRevenue #DentalBusiness #PPO

Dr. Ann Marie Gorczyca : Dentistry Uncensored w/ Howard Farran #1740 Sep 25, 2026

Show notes

In this episode, Howard Farran welcomes back Dr. Ann Marie Gorczyca for her sixth appearance on the show. An orthodontist with more than 36 years of experience, she is a graduate of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine with a Master's in Public Health from Harvard's Department of Health Management and Policy, completed her orthodontic residency at Northwestern, and is a Diplomate of the American Board of Orthodontics and Past President of the Northern California Angle Society of Orthodontists. She taught practice management to orthodontic residents in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly a decade, leads her team at Gorczyca Orthodontics in Antioch, California, and is the author of five practice management books — with her sixth and final entry in the series, One Team, One Score, arriving in September 2026.

The conversation centers on leadership as the capstone of everything she's written. Dr. Gorczyca explains what "One Team, One Score" actually means, walks through the four forms of leadership — authoritative, bureaucratic, democratic, and laissez-faire — and how a dentist knows which to use and when. She shares what she learned studying leaders like Alan Mulally, Indra Nooyi, and Ursula Burns, why the single word "WE" changes the dynamic of an entire practice, and the "Achilles' heel" she sees in women leaders and how she coaches them through it. She and Howard also dig into the deceptively simple communication rules teams still get wrong, the warrior-versus-victim mindset in daily practice, where most dental teams get stuck in the forming-storming-norming-performing cycle, and the right way to address insubordination before it quietly poisons a team. The episode closes on a fitting note: quoting Michelangelo at 87 saying "I am still learning," Dr. Gorczyca reflects on what she's still figuring out after 36 years and six books.

Episode #1740 : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, Howard welcomes back Dr. Ann Marie Gorczyca — orthodontist, author, and practice management expert — for her sixth appearance on the show!

With 36+ years in orthodontics and a Harvard DMD and MPH behind her, Dr. Gorczyca joins to discuss her sixth and final book, One Team, One Score. From the four styles of leadership to the warrior-versus-victim mindset, she breaks down how great dental teams are actually built.

🎧 A must-listen for any dentist leading a team — and still learning how to lead it better.

#DentistryUncensored #DentalLeadership #PracticeManagement #TeamBuilding #Orthodontics #OneTeamOneScore

UNLV Dental Practice Ownership Lecture & QnA : Dentistry Uncensored w/ Howard Farran #1739 Sep 21, 2026

Show notes

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

Dr. Jill Tanzi : Dentistry Uncensored w/ Howard Farran #1738 Sep 17, 2026

Show notes

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

Dr. Lior Tamir : Dentistry Uncensored w/ Howard Farran #1737 Sep 14, 2026

Show notes

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

Jim Glidewell : Dentistry Uncensored w/ Howard Farran #1736 Sep 11, 2026

Show notes

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

Dr. Arthur Volker : Dentistry Uncensored w/ Howard Farran #1735 Sep 09, 2026

Show notes

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

Dr. George Hariri : Dentistry Uncensored w/ Howard Farran #1734 Sep 08, 2026

Show notes

In this episode, Howard Farran sits down with Dr. George Hariri, entrepreneur, educator, and co-founder of Shared Practices — one of dentistry's leading coaching and consulting organizations. After acquiring and scaling his own practices, George built a reputation for a candid, systems-driven approach to ownership and a willingness to challenge the conventional wisdom that leaves too many dentists overworked and underpaid. The conversation arrives at a milestone moment: the Shared Practices Podcast turns ten this year, and George reflects on what has changed across a decade of coaching aspiring and current practice owners, the growth of the coaching program, and the release of his books Dental Moneyball and a new title aimed at pre-owners.

At the heart of the discussion is a claim George is happy to argue: the industry insists 10%+ same-store growth is impossible, and he believes that's simply wrong — pointing to clients posting 37 to 39% growth year after year. He walks through the four levers behind that performance — patient retention, case acceptance, consistency in the team, and efficiency — and how that framework came together. Along the way, George shares how Howard's own work in practice management shaped his thinking about growth, and makes the case for building a practice that's both genuinely profitable and sustainable, without sacrificing your life to get there.

Episode #1734 : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, Howard sits down with Dr. George Hariri — entrepreneur, educator, and co-founder of Shared Practices — as the Shared Practices Podcast celebrates 10 years.

The industry says 10%+ same-store growth is impossible. George flatly disagrees — and his clients are posting 37–39% growth year after year. He breaks down the four levers behind it: patient retention, case acceptance, team consistency, and efficiency.

🎧 A candid, systems-driven conversation on growth, burnout, and building a practice that doesn't cost you your life.

#DentistryUncensored #SharedPractices #PracticeGrowth #DentalBusiness #PracticeOwnership #DentalCoaching

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