65,000 Shades of Grey

0:00Dr. Jim Arnold Today's guest is Gray Bonin, founder and CEO of Process. Gray is building something much bigger than just another software company, though. He's rethinking the infrastructure that connects financial, clinical, and operational data inside of dental practice. Today we're talking about his vision behind invisible payments, prognosis, connected intelligence, and where dentistry is headed next. Gray, welcome to the podcast.

0:24Grey Bonin Thank you for having me, Jim. I just I really appreci appreciate getting to be here.

0:29Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah, man. I'm I'm really glad to have you here. I I've enjoyed getting to know you over the last six months or so. I've been blown away by the things that you're developing. mean like your your your brain and how it works and the the software and how hard you work at all of this and I think the impact that it's having on dentistry. So I've been looking forward to this for a while.

0:51Grey Bonin Yeah, me me too.

0:54Dr. Jim Arnold Good. Well, hey, before we jump into, you know, the company and all of your big projects that are changing the world right now, I I gotta ask you, because you know I did a lot of background info or background research. You know, I like to I like to get to know the person before I get to know the person to some degree, but I've been dying to know where did the name Oak come from?

1:14Grey Bonin I love that. That's too funny. You know, when we were thinking about when we were thinking about naming our kids, not not just oak, but also my firstborn Theo. you know, we like to give them names that have like really powerful meanings. And you know, Theodore Titus means like a gift from God and you know, strength. Like Titus shares the same Greek terms of like Titan and stuff like that.

1:42Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

1:43Grey Bonin but valiant oak, the valiant part is obvious, it's you know, brave and strong. And then the the oak part of his name is is is connected to it. Like we want him to be as strong as an oak, an oak tree. So that's how we that's why that's why we gave that to him.

2:02Dr. Jim Arnold that that that's such a you know we I think traditionally you just like go down your list of traditional names and all that sort of thing and you know we thought we're so smart as parents or future parents like nobody has this name and you know here we are 25 years later there are like seven kids in the you know every class with each of our kids' names so I I love that you're not running into a lot of oaks I I would guess

2:22Grey Bonin That's right. That's too funny. Yeah. You know, my so my parents modeled they modeled giving names meaning for us. so that's why each you know, each kid in my family, I'd say most of us have, you know, at least one unique name. so you know, my unique name is gray, like the color. And and I'll just add because we're on it, you know, there's a difference between G R E Y and G R A Y, Jim. G R G R A Y, yes.

2:32Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me. Tell me. I've always wondered about that.

2:53Grey Bonin Yes. So it's not just English, you know, versus the, you know, versus the US spelling. It actually has to do with the the actual makeup of the color gray. So in art, G R A Y is the composition of the colors black and white to make the color gray. And and G R E Y is a composition of any color to make the color gray. So that's why I think I'm a colorful person, because of I'm, you know, I'm the G R E Y of the of the Grays.

2:59Dr. Jim Arnold Okay.

3:23Grey Bonin And yeah.

3:25Dr. Jim Arnold I never I never knew that. That's actually pretty interesting. You know, I I know that you were one of eleven kids growing up. Like that is that is a unique experience. I mean, for you, that's that's all you know. No, but I had one sibling growing up. What was it like to grow up in a house of eleven kids?

3:37Grey Bonin It is. Yeah. man. So imagine that you're stuck in a party for eighteen years and you can never go. The the rave is always going on. yeah. I honestly it's you know, we were j mo we were texting about this in family chat. 'Cause by the way, in family chat there's like thirty people, right? Just in my meat just in my immediate family. Like you count the the parents, their kids, their kids who are married, those kids like

3:55Dr. Jim Arnold my god. Who are

4:14Grey Bonin It's cr like it's just crazy. But one of my sisters was talking about they'd just had their fourth baby and she was like, I didn't realize that when you have four, it's like it's like you it's like you're you've you have been invited to a party that you're not allowed to leave. And my and my mom was like, That's you know, I did it for twenty two years, you know, you can do it. So but yeah, I know it's it's a lot of fun. And you know my we we I would say we got very lucky in the way that

4:39Dr. Jim Arnold Mm.

4:43Grey Bonin that my parents had kids, like boy, girl, boy, girl, girl, boy, boy, girl, girl, boy, girl, boy. So yeah, the spread is the spread is very interesting. There's a lot of there's a lot of interconnectedness. My my brother's my co founder. He's he is literally my best friend. and we've just we've we've gotten experience that most people don't. And I will tell you, a lot of people are really attracted to that. You know, for me it's normal.

4:50Dr. Jim Arnold Wow.

5:11Grey Bonin But we do this we do this thing where where where once a month we invite another family to come do family dinner at my parents' house. Because yes, yeah. So we we do it every Thursday and it's it's a lot of fun. It's complete chaos, by the way, with having that many people in one house. but but what we like to do is we like to get we like to extend that experience to other people who have never been a part of a large family. and it's been it's been mind blowing.

5:19Dr. Jim Arnold Really? Huh? I bet it is. Hmm.

5:40Grey Bonin what that's done. I mean, we've seen people choose to adopt more kids. We've seen people choose to have to have more of their own kids through that. And so, you know, f families are pretty big pretty big value for us.

5:55Dr. Jim Arnold Well, I think I think it's great. You know, my wife and I each just had one sibling growing up. And when we were dating, we talked about that and we thought like having four kids would be a big family, you know, and it was from the standpoint of what we were accustomed to. And our whole thought process was, hey, you know, t for the kids to grow up with like best friends under the same roof is just like a gift that keeps on giving, you know. And I think now that they're all

6:22Grey Bonin That's right.

6:24Dr. Jim Arnold you know, twenty five, twenty three, twenty one and nineteen, I think they're closer than they've ever been, you know, because even when you're under the same roof as kids and you fight and do all those things, you know, you know as well as I do there's nobody in this world who's going to have your back like a sibling will in the long run.

6:30Grey Bonin Absolutely. Yeah. No, y you you're you're absolutely right. My mom said something this was late last year. She said, I didn't realize when I was having kids and raising them that I was actually raising my future friends. And yeah. And so, you know, I I think there's so much truth in that 'cause like we we go over there and you know, when we cook, we we make some food. You know what I mean? Like like we there are

6:56Dr. Jim Arnold Wow.

7:09Grey Bonin Let me think about this. I I think there's two or three different grills at my parents' house because we have to have that much space to be able to cook at one time. and it's just so like it's just so fun because everybody's got a different talent, you know, like we have people who love to make food and we have people who love to play music. And you know, my brother one of my brothers is actually an artist. He releases music on on the Apple music and Spotify, you know.

7:37Dr. Jim Arnold Cool.

7:39Grey Bonin but it's cool to see all those talents come you know, come together. It just makes makes a really interesting environment.

7:45Dr. Jim Arnold I bet. I bet. Well, you I'm gonna be in Houston next Thursday, so I'll I'll make sure and stop by for dinner. Sounds amazing. So, you know, I know you've got some dentists in your family, and once upon a time I think you were heading to dental school. So so what happened and why why did you change your mind?

7:50Grey Bonin Perfect. Come on. You're more than more than welcome. Well, so yes, I two my uncles are dentists, my dad's also dentists. why I didn't go to s dental school, I regained my sanity was the was the answer. No, I you know, I no, I really did. I wanted to be a dentist. I wanted to be a dentist my entire life. I grew up working my dad's practice, you know. I got the privilege of processing x rays in the red room back in the day, sitting chair side, you know.

8:15Dr. Jim Arnold Yes, good answer. my god, yeah.

8:34Grey Bonin getting getting to assist and eventually worked the front desk as as an admin, then got trained as an office manager. So I have a really unique experience whenever it comes to dental and and now the whole reason that I create dental technology. but I didn't become a dentist because I applied to four schools and the only school that I wanted to go to was the only one I didn't get accepted.

9:04Grey Bonin too. And yeah. And you know, but I realized at that point, because you know, I I the factor that I was weighing was I could still go to dental school, the but the cost was was two or three times higher of going to the school here in my state. And I just asked myself, do I really want to do I do I really want to take on that much debt? Why is it that I want to be a dentist? And and I realized at that point that I didn't really want to be a dentist. I just wanted to be my dad.

9:21Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

9:33Grey Bonin I I really admire I really admire him. I really, you know, I think he has a lot of great values and I like the way that he has that he's led his life. but I recognized at that point that that I probably wouldn't have been happy as a dentist. I think that I would have been a dentist who came out of school and within five years had probably sold out to a DSO or just became a just became a dental business owner. because that's really where my gifting is. I'm I

9:34Dr. Jim Arnold Mm. Mm-hmm.

10:02Grey Bonin I'm able to see the problems and create solutions for them. you know. And so that's what I do. Now I do now I do it for everybody. Now I'm doing it on a on a technological scale.

10:13Dr. Jim Arnold Well that's that's pretty cool. You know, I mean that's a unique skill set and not everybody has it and people some people who do have it, you know, they they really use it for their own betterment, which is fine. But the fact that you have taken it into the industry that y has been a part of your life your entire life and you know, are making things, I think just so much better for dentists, for patients and for the industry at large that you know, kudos to you. Thank goodness you didn't get into that dental school that you really wanted to go to, really.

10:40Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah. No, I it I it didn't feel good in the in the moment, but now looking back, a pretty significant blessing in disguise. I've really over you know, over the last almost decade now, I've gotten to I've gotten to be in the founder CEO role. I've gotten to work on some pretty amazing projects. and I just

10:46Dr. Jim Arnold Well I'm sure.

11:06Grey Bonin I lo I I like doing things that have big imp big impacts on people. and what better place to do that than to than to create better workflows for the core systems that are being used in healthcare today.

11:22Dr. Jim Arnold Wow, that that's awesome. And I know you work hard. You work really hard. You work long hours. family's important, all that sort of thing. But like for anybody who's just like never met you, who are you outside of work? 'Cause that can become such a big part of our identity.

11:37Grey Bonin That's so true. That is, man, that is so true. And and I do get in trouble, by the way. I'm I I have a tendency to talk about work all the time. what one of my one of my friends told me, he said, you know what your problem is? Everybody everybody who who gets close to you ends up working for you. And I said

11:46Dr. Jim Arnold I can relate.

12:01Grey Bonin That's kinda that is kinda true. I mean, I don't I don't know what it is. I just I guess I'm really good at creating jobs for people. but yeah, I mean outside of work, I'm I'm an athlete. I I love lifting. yeah, I am passionate about peptides and pushing the limits of my body. I'm a musician. I you know, I I'm a classically trained pianist.

12:07Dr. Jim Arnold Ha ha ha.

12:29Grey Bonin and a naturalist on guitar. Yeah. And you know, it's I it's kind of unfortunate because I'm in a I'm in a season right now where where most of my life is work. So I'm not really getting to do too much outside of that. But I love spending time with people. Last night I went and I went with with some friends to go do karaoke, which was awesome. my gosh. I was yeah. You know, I like i it was like the

12:51Dr. Jim Arnold Good for you.

12:58Grey Bonin First time I think this year that I got to go do something like that. But, you know, I what what I learned so, Jim, a little bit about me and my background. I actually am a former workaholic. I used to I I call it Elon Musking it. when I was running my last business, I really pushed the limits of what is possible for a human tuner, like crazy stuff, like staying up and working. forty four hours straight. in an industrial environment, by the way. Like a like commercial I previously ran a commercial printing organization. and that, like like doing that, like literally almost killed me. it was way way too much to way too much for my body. and so I think my I think my pos like my

13:32Dr. Jim Arnold Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

13:57Grey Bonin perspective and position towards work is I do it, I enjoy it, I love it. but I've got but I have gotten a lot better at being able to put it down and actually prioritize what really matters, which is our relationship with each other. you know money I gotta I gotta say as somebody who as somebody who has gotten to have a lot of money pass through their hands, it comes just as quickly as it goes.

14:13Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

14:26Grey Bonin And it is not it is not the most important thing in life. You know, the all the the real thing that will that I believe that will be measured by is our impact on other people. indeed the great news is you don't need any money to do that. You just you need you need kindness in your heart.

14:35Dr. Jim Arnold Wow. I love that. And you know, that ties right into what I wanted to ask you about next. You know, I know that your faith is really important to you and I think that it has a big impact on how you lead people. you know, what is how does that come into play on a you know, a a typical Tuesday afternoon?

14:57Grey Bonin Yeah. I I love this. I love this question. So you know, I like to say that you know, like Process the Business itself is not a faith-based organization, but it does have people in it who who are faith-based and there's an impact there. we you know, our our our focus when it comes to how do we let our faith play into how we interact with with others.

15:21Dr. Jim Arnold Mm.

15:25Grey Bonin It's really those it's really those values that drive the way that that we treat people, you know. Like Jesus tells us, you know, treat treat others the way that you would want to be treated. and I'm really good at treating myself very nicely. And but when I think but you know what I mean? But but when it comes to yeah. Yeah. But but to actually extend that to the to the people that

15:42Dr. Jim Arnold Hm. Good. Big deal. Not everybody is, man. It's a big deal.

15:54Grey Bonin Don't expect it, the people who we're just interacting with the first time, you know, I I tell the team all the time, I want our customers, like we may sell technology, but I want them to I want them to be able to appreciate the the service mindset that we have. And so like some of our some of our sales reps walk into offices and one of the one of the pe the pieces of language that I've given them is to is to just ask your customer, hey, how can I serve you today?

16:19Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Yeah.

16:25Grey Bonin That's so disarming. you would be s you would be shocked by you know by what by what people say. and so

16:26Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. They're well, they're probably just dumbfounded. Like, wait, no, nobody's ever said that. Like, what what is that even? What do you mean? They don't even know how to respond, I bet.

16:37Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the I I think the I I think the faith part to me, as I've as I've come to learn, it's it I've made a I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. Like a lot. And you know, be it's especially being a an entrepreneur, like I'd say probably ninety five percent of what I've experienced has been through failure, you know, the all that growth. There's a lot of value in that. I think I think failure I think failing and being able to continue going forward is really the mark of somebody who ultimately becomes successful. and the faith component for me is is substantive fuel. I I can honestly say that you know I've walked through deep waters. I've in twenty twenty three, my wife and I at the time were in a car accident that killed our baby. I would not have made it through that experience.

17:11Dr. Jim Arnold Amen.

17:34Grey Bonin if if I didn't have faith. And it was actually it was actually that experience, it it had a reciprocal effect. That pain was was measured by a portion of faith that ultimately helped me walk through it.

17:47Dr. Jim Arnold Wow. You know, that's that that's probably the most intense experience we can have as humans, you know, losing losing a child. I I can't imagine anything more devastating than that. And you know the fact that your faith carried you through that is is remarkable. And and you know, great, is that is that why you're so open about some of those setbacks and challenges and things that that you know, I don't want to say didn't go well, but like these devastating moments. I mean You're you're more open about that than than the vast majority of people. And why why is that?

18:20Grey Bonin Yeah. Well, I just believe that you know, that in in my story that there that there's something to be or that can be learned so that other people don't have to walk through the same experiences. You know, like you know, like I I like to share about you know, about how before before walking through what I went through, man dude, I my whole identity was was trying to get my value out of work. You know, the the big question on my life that I did not know, Jim, the question that that I'd been asking internally but unconscious of is Am I worthy? Am I worthy of love? Am I worthy of affection? Am I worthy of admiration? And that that question that sat inside me, it made me very performance oriented. It's the reason why I was, you know, that I grew up as an achiever. I wanted to go out and get good grades. I wanted to go be the doctor and when I, you know, have to make all the money and be super fit and I want people to think well of me, all those things. but not for the right, but not for the right reason. It was because I it was because I needed it on the inside. And so instead of operating from a place of wholeness, I was chasing fleeting moments where I could feel where I could feel it and

19:33Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Mm.

19:43Grey Bonin It would evaporate into thin air and I was right back into the cycle of, okay, I guess I gotta go just achieve the next thing. And I gotta tell you, now being on the other side of that, wow. It is so it is so much different getting to operate from a place of fullness because now in every relationship, I have something to contribute instead of trying to take something out. And and I just want I want people to know that's out there. Like you can you can get there. And and it takes a lot of honesty with yourself. You know, none of us escape from from a childhood without being wounded. Like I think that's just a reality. And our and our parents did the best that they can. And I'm and by no means am I, you know, am I saying that you know that that it's all their fault or whatever. but I think that I think that we as a culture have not learned how to how to really look at what's going on inside. You know?

20:18Dr. Jim Arnold Mm. Yeah. Okay, okay. Mm-hmm.

20:41Grey Bonin And so I, you know, I've gotten to I I have gotten that teaching, you know, I've gotten to walk through and really evaluate like what is going on inside of me and get and get clarity on that so that I could so that I could actually I could actually accept the fact that God calls me one of his sons. And that has, you know, and that's changed that's changed my perspective about myself. That's why it's why I get to be kind to myself now.

21:10Dr. Jim Arnold Great, that's a really powerful statement. I mean, everything you just said there is something that I think that every human can really relate to on some level. you know, I think the human condition is to feel insecure to some degree and want and be performative and want people to think well of us and all that sort of thing. And for most of us, like we never necessarily get past that just because we don't even know another way. It's just the way that it's been hardwired into us, you know, from from childhood. And, you know, I think a lot of times we do get all that positive affirmation from our parents, you know, and and which is great. You know, you want to be positive and affirm things for your kids and make them feel good about themselves. But, you know, sometimes then we leave the house and all of a sudden we don't have those positive affirmations. The world doesn't give a shit. You know, the world looks at us is just like another person and you know, we're all busy. And so when you don't get that, it's been removed. I think that a lot of us go and and reach even harder for it.

21:58Grey Bonin That's right.

22:07Dr. Jim Arnold And and that can be a real problem. And and Gray, I'm I'm amazed that like you got through that and now have come out the other side just so much happier, so much healthier, so much more balanced. And and by the way, sharing that perspective, which I've I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that. And it's to me it's it's tremendously profound. Thank you.

22:28Grey Bonin Yeah, no, I I appreciate that. I you know, I I recognize now that I don't have to be afraid to share any of the failures that I've walked through because I I chose to actually learn and chase and change from them. You know, that failure is only if you should only ever be afraid of failure if you're afraid of change. If you are if you're unwilling to change, if you're so stuck on being whoever you are or doing it a certain way, like yeah, you should you should be afraid because that because that will destroy you know the your experience and destroy your your b your belief. but you know, I tell my team, we need to get out there and we need to fail as fast as we can so we can change as fast as we as fast as we can. That's what we want to do. you know? Yeah.

23:19Dr. Jim Arnold Wow. You know, you read that in books, you read that in books, but to hear you say it, like I mean I mean I see it and I think that's that's remarkable. like gosh, I nobody nobody actually takes those things from the book and applies it like like you are, I don't think.

23:36Grey Bonin Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I s you know, p people are so focused on delivering something perfect that normally they show up to the party too late. When what and when really what they should be doing is they should be focused on massive, imperfect action. If you if you actually want to make a different difference in the in the world, you just gotta start ruffling the feathers. That's it. Put technology out there that's, you know, ninety percent done. You know, it doesn't need to it doesn't need to be a hundred percent.

23:54Dr. Jim Arnold Mm. Mm. Mm-hmm.

24:08Grey Bonin I do I do have some thoughts by the way about about the the idea of an VP today. I think it's totally shifted from what from what it used to be. but you know, like just get out there, you know. Like I what I am so I mentor a lot of people. I I say a lot, I've mentored like five or six people w who are on their own entrepreneurial journeys. I've got some awesome, awesome mentees, you know.

24:18Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Mm-hmm.

24:37Grey Bonin A couple of a couple of my mentees have have really have really grown in the last couple of years. One of them has grown their business from zero to two hundred thousand a month just in the last six months. Another yeah. I know. And then an another one of them i is his business has grown from from zero to I think almost a hundred fifty customers just in the last year alone.

24:49Dr. Jim Arnold my God, that's incredible.

25:03Grey Bonin And he's in a he's in a service based industry, so it's a lot of you know recurring business. you know, I look at that and I ask myself, like, you know, these guys, they wouldn't have got they wouldn't have jumped in, probably, I think, if I didn't really push them to, if I didn't encourage them. Like I remember I remember how I felt whenever I was first considering going into entrepreneurship. There's so much you don't know about you know about getting into it can be a a little bit daunting.

25:05Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

25:33Grey Bonin But what I'll add is man, information has never been so readily available to us. you could literally set up your own personal coach now using y you know, using a gentig AI to to t to teach you. And I yeah, so yeah, I'm I'm it's

25:40Dr. Jim Arnold Right, yeah. It's a brave two world, man.

25:58Grey Bonin It really is. It's it it it really is mind blowing. The the the amount that technology is changing and so rapidly, like people just don't even know. Like and I and I and let me t and I let me say this. I know this because I'm on the cutting edge of it. Like we like we actually we're an AI like our the portion of our business that develops AI is a is a frontier AI developer for computer vision models. Like, you know, we'll at some point today we're gonna jump into

26:22Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm.

26:25Grey Bonin How is prognostics positioned to the competitors? Prognostics is not simply a dental AI diagnostic solution. It's not that's not what it is. Prognostics, the the intellectual property that actually drives the that image segmentation, right as of today, it is the leading model as far as accuracy goes for segmenting patient anatomy morphology within the body.

26:53Dr. Jim Arnold Man.

26:53Grey Bonin I mean we have the highest die score on the smallest anatomical structure in the body of any computer visual model company today. And that's something I'm that's something that we're super proud, super proud of.

27:08Dr. Jim Arnold You know, I'm gonna I'm gonna take a couple steps back. I wanna go back just a little bit in your history because I think that it's germane to where you are today and why you're doing the things that you're doing and and how you're doing those things. because I like we can talk about prognostics for hours because it's so it's so fascinating. It's so next level, man. nobody else is doing anything like this, which is so exciting. But any rate, like you were b you mentioned the printing company and I know you grew that to like a very big operation. Like what did you learn from that experience that you've carried over into the, you know, AI healthcare space? And and why did you why did you leave that when it was going so well?

27:50Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So man, there's so much there. I so when you first start your entrepreneur journey, the thing that I tell every entrepreneur that they need to learn is this skill that I like to call figure out ability. You either develop your figure out ability skill or you will you will not make it. and so man, so the story behind that, Jim, is you know, I'd been working for Ben Codental, is having a lot of success in that role.

28:08Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

28:20Grey Bonin and was just honestly kind of bored with it. I did not like I I didn't like the the travel schedule, you know, having to, you know, visit so many practices. And I just I remember having this moment where I was in an office. I just said to myself, Man, if I can sell goop and gunk for you know these materials to random doctors out on the sh you know out on the street, then I can then I can certainly sell my own my own business.

28:44Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah, right.

28:48Grey Bonin So we made an acquisition of a of a retail shipping store, you know, like a FedEx UPS, that type of that type of store. six months after we acquired that store, there was this little epidemic or pandemic called COVID. And yeah. And it was it was amazing. I mean, I felt like I was the best investor in the world, you know, owning a store that no longer had any customers.

28:56Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. yeah, I I think I heard something about that.

29:18Grey Bonin But you know, there was it's so funny. There was this woman who came into my store probably like two months after after we acquired it. And we had this big printer in the store. And she looked at me and she said, Hey, wow, that's like the biggest printer I've ever seen. You know, what what can you do? What can you print? Can you print like these postcards or brochures for me? And I just looked at her and I and I said, No, no, I can't. I don't know how to I don't know how to use it. I went home.

29:42Dr. Jim Arnold This fan this printer's way too fancy for little jobs like that.

29:49Grey Bonin That's yeah. Well I just it would it cracked me up because you know, I I remember thinking to myself, like I'm just I'm just a dude with a biomedical science degree from Tech St. I don't know anything about printers. And I I went home that night and I told my wife, I said, I said, this lady came in today and she like wanted me to print stuff for her. I was like, How crazy is that? And she looked at me and she just goes, Great, you can't tell customers no. Like you had it's right, it's right there. You gotta figure out how to do it. And so So I did and kinda lo and behold, I end up I end up with the idea of calling the calling the government and seeing if there were if there was any contracts that I could do. I end up on the on the phone with this lady out of Chicago and she, you know, I I don't think I have an accent, but she just she falls in love with with me because she's like, You have the best southern accent that I've ever heard. I'm like, What are you talking about? I was like, what are you talking about?

30:44Dr. Jim Arnold even hear that. Come on man.

30:46Grey Bonin I was like, ma'am, I was like, well, ma'am, you know, that's how we do it down here. yeah. I was like any anything that you can do to help me. but yeah, so I, you know, I I put in a filing with the government and I'm not joking when I say this. The same day that the Texas stay at home ordinance went into play, I got my approval to to print for the Fed. And so yeah, I'm not

30:50Dr. Jim Arnold Really play it up. my God. Unbelievable.

31:14Grey Bonin Yeah, I mean it's just it was perfect. I mean it like to talk about God's timing. And so I I remember telling her, I was like, I guess I guess we're printing now. And so it was cool. I mean, we very we very quickly scaled that business from a nine hundred square foot retail shipping store over three year period, eighteen thousand square feet, round you know, almost two and a half million dollars worth of equipment.

31:45Dr. Jim Arnold Just a twenty fold growth in terms of your footprint. My God, that's incredible.

31:49Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome. it was also incredibly stressful. I mean, running an operation like that is a lot. I mean, you're talking hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of paper, you know, l people working around the clock. and and I I'll add my biggest failure in that in that business gym, because like all businesses have their struggles. Like in w no matter what you do, you're always gonna you're constantly running into issues. I was so hyper focused on growth that I didn't slow down to bring the right team members on board to actually create something more effective, you know, make it more efficient. And when we when we when we went through our car accident, I had to I had to ask myself if I wanted to put up with the crap that I was having to deal with at work or if I just wanted to quit. And for the first time in my life, I quit.

32:21Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Mm.

32:47Grey Bonin It was and it and I I paid the price for that, man. Like I I paid the price for that big. you know, you can't just you can't just get out of contracts with with other companies and the government. Like there was there was a lot of blood that you know that that came out of that experience. but I think that I I still believe that it was the right call. Because of because of what I learned in the process was

33:19Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm.

33:25Grey Bonin I needed I needed to change how he treated me. You know, I I said earlier, like I like I should treat myself kindly. I didn't I did not before. I abused my body. Like to like just you know, push trying trying to work too hard, you know, put you know, not literally believing that I did not deserve to slow down, that I didn't deserve to sleep, that I couldn't stop to eat. because

33:31Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Mm.

33:50Grey Bonin I guess I guess I believe that because I thought that if I did that I would fail and everybody would know, you know, everybody would know and it would be all my fault. And you know, I I think now I look I look at that and I just have to ask like, who was I surrounding myself with that that you know that wouldn't have supported me if if if I failed? You know, and like why did I ever lift those people into my corner? I think that I think that was Robert Kay Kayasaki says says in it in his book, you know, the the thing that I love about Texans is that they like they go big, you know, or they go home and when they fail, they fail big. And I I remember when I read that for the first time, I was like, This guy wrote this about me. I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure, you know, 'cause I felt like a catastrophic failure.

34:21Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Mm.

34:48Grey Bonin but but I really learned who was in my corner. And guess and guess what? My my ability to move forward today has never been stronger. My conviction, my sense of direction, the training that I've had for my gut, like being a, you know, being able to assess things and know what the next right thing is to do. like I I can honestly say that.

35:11Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Mm.

35:17Grey Bonin As far as my ability to lead, I don't think I've ever been in a better position because because for the first time in my life I'm operating from wholeness. You know, like now peop now people can follow me, you know, without me trying to s

35:24Dr. Jim Arnold Good for you. Yeah. Yeah. Well look look, man, everything that happens in life, you know, the good, the bad, the tragic, all of those things, they mold us into the people that we are. And, you know, how we deal with each of those setbacks and challenges and tragedies is you know, a reflection of what the rest of our life is gonna look like and the value that we can create for others. And I think that I I say this all the time, Gray, but

35:39Grey Bonin Mm. That's right.

35:56Dr. Jim Arnold people can learn a lot from our successes, but they learn even more from the things that didn't go well, or how we rebounded from a tragedy like you guys did. And and that is a turning point in your entire life. You know, it it puts you in a position to look at everything differently. And it's remarkable how you've maintained that same focus and balance since then. And treating yourself well, I mean it's like putting on your own oxygen mask first. It gives you so much more.

36:01Grey Bonin That's right.

36:24Dr. Jim Arnold To give to others and lead in a better way and create in a better way. And I love, I love your just the the whole methodology and the thought process of like getting something out there, even if it's 90%, because guess what? It's gonna get to 100% faster by doing it that way because you get the feedback and you get the rap and all those things. And by the way, I have a really hard time with that.

36:44Grey Bonin That's right.

36:49Dr. Jim Arnold so hard because I am the same way that you used to be. Like it like it has to be perfect or I'm not even gonna show it to anybody, you know, and and that's a problem. And this is a great conversation for me personally. And I know that this is gonna really hit home for a lot of other people who are, you know, perfectionists and, you know, there's like a failure to launch. Like you never get there, you know, because that four month forward momentum stops.

36:57Grey Bonin Mm-hmm.

37:18Dr. Jim Arnold Because you're afraid to put something out there that's not perfect.

37:21Grey Bonin Yeah. No, it's it's I it's something that's wired in us. I think because we interact with so many professional companies without knowing what their experience was, like what they actually what it actually took to get there, that we as we assume that the version one of their product was just this perfect thing that was released. And that's not it, man. Yeah.

37:31Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. my God. You mentioned MVP earlier. MVP is it's like a real thing and that's a new new acronym in my you know, vernacular here in the last year. And I I like I get it now. Like I understand it. And how old are you, Gray? I mean I don't even know.

38:02Grey Bonin I am thirty.

38:03Dr. Jim Arnold Holy crap, you're thirty years old and you have all this incredible wisdom.

38:05Grey Bonin I know, I know, I lo I know I look like I'm f I know I look like I'm fifty. stress will do that too. See all those grays in there? Man.

38:12Dr. Jim Arnold Well great. You know, I'm I'm thirty also. So like I feel you. Yeah. That's right. You know, one of the other things you did like after the printing company, or I maybe it was before, I don't even know like the timeline. I don't remember because I did so much of this research months ago, but I I know you were doing like building mach machine learning for like prescription drug monitoring. Like before people were even talking about AI, you were doing AI.

38:16Grey Bonin perfect. Okay. Brothers in arms over here. That's awesome. I love it. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. That's correct. Yeah. We we didn't we didn't even know what to call it at the time, Jim, because we were so we're we were working with legislators, regulators, law enforcement. in in in Texas, okay, so between Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma, there is a major drug trafficking highway. It's like one of the largest in the US. and and in twenty eighteen, the Fed was rolling out a requirement

38:42Dr. Jim Arnold How did that happen? What did you get out of that experience? Yeah, right. Mm. Mm-hmm.

39:10Grey Bonin For tracking prescription drugs through a new program called the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, PDMP. The problem was that that what they had rolled out was so ineffective. The the mandate for doctors was when the when this program grows alive, every doctor has to check every drug for every patient before they prescribe. And the system that they had to use to do it was something that was created by a private company for the government and it was the worst website I think I had ever seen. I mean, each you know, each you gotta check every single patient who who you're prescribing to now all of a sudden they the government was was throwing in an extra twenty minutes of work for each patient that you wanted to prescribe to. I mean it's so burdensome. so what we did was we created we we created something that, you know

40:01Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

40:08Grey Bonin We called it A three, the algorithmic automated assistant, because we didn't just think call it AI at the time. it was a machine learning program that that could actually determine whether or not somebody was was trying to traffic drugs by pulling information from all the state databases. Yeah. Yeah, it was awesome. And so you know, the issue the issue with that project is the cap was the capitalization that was required to make it

40:25Dr. Jim Arnold Wow.

40:38Grey Bonin to like really make it go national. I mean that that project that that that company would have been worth about six billion dollars to give you some perspective. yes, but the but the startup the startup cost to actually take the AI and flush it through through the entire US was just over fifty million in capitalization. So you know we my brother and I talked about this all the time.

40:49Dr. Jim Arnold my god.

41:07Grey Bonin You know, we like especially with the improvements in AI today, like we want to we we want to we want to finish rolling that out with with the the Fed because I don't know if you if you c kept track of p PDMP, but it failed. They rolled they rolled out the legislation and then within one year they rolled it back because

41:11Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. No.

41:35Grey Bonin Yes, they put a requirement on all the doctors. It was totally unsustainable because there's no there's no automation that, you know, that was built in. The CapEx

41:43Dr. Jim Arnold So it's still there, it's unfinished. Like nobody has taken the ball and run with it. Wow. Talk about an opportunity, like at some point. I know you've got a few other projects going right now, but

41:48Grey Bonin That's right. That's right. Yeah. So So I mean, somebody's gotta yeah, I mean s somebody somebody has to do it. I mean, I like, you know, there's so much under the hood here, and I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist, so I'll just throw that out there. But I mean, th there I will say that there would have been significant impact to to pharmaceutical sales in the US if we had rolled this algorithm out. and I should probably state on this podcast I would never kill myself. but

42:00Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Mm. Yeah.

42:23Grey Bonin But we you know, we recognize that that for this to work, like it it ha like it just it has to be completely automated. You know, you're not gonna you're not you are not going to get around to actually detecting drug trafficking patterns without the type of interconnectivity and and AI that w that we created. Yeah.

42:50Dr. Jim Arnold Okay. Well, look, man, I mean, these unique experiences have all put you in this position to come into dentistry and make a huge impact. And so at what point did you turn your attention back to dentistry? I mean, I know like obviously you decided not to go to dental school, you've got a family of dentists, so you've always been around it. You've had all these incredible, interesting, diverse roles within the dental world. What what brought you back to dentistry?

43:17Grey Bonin Yeah. so when I so when I exited my my last business, I was doing some consulting on the side and trying to figure out, you know, what is it that I wanted to do. and then I got this phone call one day. it was this payments company. And I've always like my like my shtick has always been like I'm like in my community, I'm known as the guy who does big deals. Like I just everybody knows me for that. So I I get this phone call, have no idea who this person is. And they're like, Hey, you know, like, we heard you're the guy that that does big deals. And I was like, Who told you that? you know? And I was like, What what do you what do you want? What do need? And I was like, Let's do something. but they were like, We are trying to get our payments product in online and we'd like for you to have for you'd like for you to come and evaluate and help us do it. And I was like, What's a payments product? you know, like what does that mean?

43:56Dr. Jim Arnold Ha ha ha. Yeah.

44:16Grey Bonin So I sat down with their with their C-suite and got dialed into what it what it is that they were doing and what they were working on. within three weeks of signing an engagement with them, I had brought them an enterprise customer. It was actually a practice management software in the elective service health space for you know for primary care. And after connecting the the C suites of the payments company and the that practice management software, I get a phone call from the CEO a of the of the PMS. And he says, Hey man, you know, we like you. We want to do business with you. These guys don't have it. They you know, I don't know what they what they told you they had, but they don't have the technology for us to be able to integrate. And I said, Okay, well, I don't want to lose this deal. I mean, it's like, you know 300 million in payments, what can we do to what what what can we do to keep it going? And he said, either bring us another payments company or go start your own. And I was like, dang it. I was like, Wow, like my inner entrepr my inner entrepreneur, I was like, son of a gun. I was like, this this moment got so I told him, I mean, how do you how do you say no, right? So I I told him, I said,

45:27Dr. Jim Arnold Wow. Yeah, right.

45:41Grey Bonin I need like five weeks, you know. Let me go look at what's let me go, you know, talk to my brother and get gather some information and I'll circle back with you. So he yeah, so I it took some convincing, but got Ethan to to commit to found a process with me. the word process, by the way, as a homophone for the actual word process, came from the idea of being a merchant processor. So

45:49Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Okay. I you know, I was gonna ask you about that 'cause I've been curious about it for a while and I always forget to ask when we're when we talk. Okay.

46:10Grey Bonin Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I I I love it because you know, I so I'm like I've always been like a I've I've always gotten enjoyed like d creating marketing and branding, you know, stuff like that. but for you know you know, for this company, I was like, man, all like the great companies, you know, they their names are like five or six letters, you know, like Google, Apple.

46:29Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

46:44Grey Bonin stripe, you know, super short. I was like, I gotta come up with something that that's shorter and and unique. And then I wanted to like I wanted to buy the domain process.com, but it was like I don't know, like it was like a hundred K, two hundred K, something like that. And I was like, you know, if Google can make up their own word, why can't I make up my own word? And so I was so I

46:46Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Yeah. Mm.

47:10Grey Bonin So I did. I made up my I made up my own word. I you know, I actually used AI at that time. I was like, give me some give me some other ways that I can spell the word process uniquely and phonetically, you know, with an H, P R A H S Y S is an another way you can spell out the same you know, spell it out and get the same word.

47:30Dr. Jim Arnold Interesting. That's so cool. You know, so somebody just hearing about process for the first time, which is a lot of people. You know, it's not a household name yet. It will be. I know it will be. In fact, I think it's a billion-dollar company personally. But that having been said, for somebody hearing about a first time, tell people what you're actually building.

47:50Grey Bonin Yeah. So all the Yeah.

47:54Dr. Jim Arnold Because I mean some people think about payments, other pe things think pe people think about imaging, but like what are you building and why those two things belong together?

48:04Grey Bonin Yeah. Well so let me say this. I think this is a I think this is really important. what we sell to our customers is not where we are today, but where we're going. And so if to so let me tell you where we're going and I'll tell you where we are is so that they can have some context. All those things that we use in our practices above the PMS, all the technology, you know, the the tools that we have twenty different subscriptions for.

48:16Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm.

48:34Grey Bonin I was reviewing my dad's book. He spends like fifty thousand dollars a year in software subscriptions. Blows my mind. all those things will be consolidated by process. The tech the the future for dentistry, the future when I believe the future for healthcare actually looks like your core EHR, your your or your practice soft management software where you're actually managing your patient health record. And then the only other tool that you'll need is your subscription to process.

48:59Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Well, you've said you've said like most offices have like twenty disconnected systems. And as a guy who practiced for twenty four years, my God, it's such a freaking mess and it's so overwhelming. And you don't know what to get and what to do and how many of your different systems have have redundancies and it's just you got all these dashboards and everything. So this is incredible.

49:04Grey Bonin And it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, and it's and it's important because that fragmentation in the current st text act with in offices, it makes the data that you have totally useless. I mean, if you cannot c collect all of your data into one data lake, the like you're you're unable to do the things that you should be that you should be able to do. The you know, this is th this is actually really interesting. Because like I'm out raising capital right now. You know, we're raising we're ra we're actually raising another seven million at this point. and just secure the investor, by the way. so super excited about that. But the the fragmentation that we see in dentistry is actually is was actually caused by the venture capital and private equity models that exist today. Because

50:07Dr. Jim Arnold Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's awesome.

50:25Grey Bonin those models that they have do not support platforms. They don't. The only thing that they su point that that they support are point solutions. We're exper we're actually experiencing this problem right now. it's really it's you know it's really unique. so you know we're we're pretty creative. We're able to think through you know how to you know how to raise capital and and still create the the platform that that we want to. so I told you where we are and I'm

50:37Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

50:52Grey Bonin Sorry, I've told you where we're going. Let me tell you, let me tell you where we are. So we have two two solutions in market today. we have our financial technology product, which is you know, process payments, and we have our X ray AI product, which is called prognostics. The payments piece we built because in dentistry, seven out of every ten dentists are at risk for fraud at for fraud and embezzlement. It's the highest amongst the eighty plus domains in healthcare.

50:55Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Absolutely.

51:21Grey Bonin I mean that's shocking. Average dentist is embezzled just over a hundred thousand dollars over a two year period. And the and if you actually account for the number of repeat cases that that are happening, it actually looks like nine out of every ten dentists are getting embezzled from.

51:37Dr. Jim Arnold Dude, like over the course of thirty years, you're talking about like one and a half to two million dollars. And that's just right off the top, not even including the opportunity cost and everything else that goes along with that. Holy crap.

51:42Grey Bonin Easy. Yes. yeah. So our approach to that is this. we built we built a payments product, we own it end to end. we we we actually facilitate the payments from you know bank to bank and we in it we have a fully integrated ledger that is able to keep track of every dollar that flows through your practice. So integrated with the PMS, integrated with the bank.

52:14Dr. Jim Arnold Mm.

52:18Grey Bonin Can actually tell, you know, can actually tell practices whether or not their their money is flowing the way that it should. And as we continue to develop that, by the way, you know, we're currently working on some models. and by some, I mean we're working on over 60 different Agenc AI AIs right now. they all they all do something unique, but one of them, but one of them is is called Pulse. And the the Pulse product tells you the heartbeat of your business.

52:36Dr. Jim Arnold Wow.

52:47Grey Bonin Cash is the is is the lifeblood of of a business, hence why we call it Pulse. and that AI is is when we release it, we'll be able to functionally be your virtual you know, banker, your virtual accountant, your virtual financial advisor on on money actually moving the right way. One thing that I've never understood, Jim, this is this is something else we've been thinking through. Why is it That the the practice management software accounts for revenue but not expenses? Can somebody please answer that question? I mean, like, why am I I like it it's crazy. I mean, I've worked in a couple of other industries and I, you know, I haven't really seen that issue. Like you go into the service in industry business and it's all in one, it's all it's all in one place. But

53:20Dr. Jim Arnold That's a a hell of a good question. Yeah. How do you run a business like that, right?

53:44Grey Bonin I don't know. I you know, I think about the tools that are at are at our disposal today and it's just too fragmented. Like it's it's it is it is not sustainable. it's great for capitalism, but the the future that we're seeing being created by AI right now, I I'm telling you, it's it is cutting down the number of tools that you will need to run your life.

53:55Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Mm.

54:14Grey Bonin And the idea of having like a personal virtual assistant that is that is an AI, is very real. I mean, it is like tomorrow type of real.

54:17Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Well you s you say all the time that like most payments accepted in dental practices are outside of the practice management software. Why why is that such a big deal? And how is what you do different?

54:37Grey Bonin Yeah. So this is really important. Any and any dentist that is that is listening to or watching this needs to hear this. Your payments not being posted within the PMS, meaning you're not using a processor that is actually within your PMS, opens you up to fraud like there is no tomorrow. Because what you have is a disconnected workflow. Here's what your admin is doing, whether you know this or not. They look at the PMS, they see the amount that they have to collect, but they're not they're not using the PMS to collect it. Now they're going and touching a third party terminal that's sitting on their desk and they're typing in the amount, they're taking the patient's card, they're swiping it, and then they're supposed to go back and manually enter that payment within the PMS saying that they collected it. Well, what is to stop them from not entering the payment or just charging off the account or creating a unique payment type that, you know, we've seen cases where people do that. what's to stop them from using their own personal square reader? You know, like you would e be shocked. I mean, you would be shocked as to the things that that we see. it is incredibly important to use to use a payment processor who's actually embedded within within your workflow. yes, it's more expensive. This will blow your mind. less than 10% of dentists use a a a payment processor that that is actually connected to the PMS.

55:39Dr. Jim Arnold Absolutely.

56:05Grey Bonin It's crazy. Less than ten percent.

56:05Dr. Jim Arnold Less than 10%? Well, you know, I mean, I never did. I mean, I practiced for twenty-four years and I was completely clueless. And if I was clueless, I mean, I ran a good business. You know, we ran a 31% EV though. We were highly profitable, blah, blah, blah. Did all those things. But if I was clueless about that, I can only imagine how much opportunity there is out there to educate and provide this kind of solution for ninety-eight percent of dentists.

56:11Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's and I I'll say this. There's a reason it's it's that way. The reason that number is so low is because the the the existing legacy processors understand the risks that are associated for dentists not using it, and so they take advantage of that and the people who are using the the integrated payments are paying four percent. And so

56:47Dr. Jim Arnold Mm.

57:01Grey Bonin What dentist is gonna hand that much revenue over to a payment processor? I mean nobody in their right mind would do that. but I but we see it we see it all the time. Four percent, five percent. And it's it's just it's not fair. I mean I've got I I have real ethical beef with with that for payment processors actually doing that. That's why like our our pricing model, two point nine percent is the highest you're gonna pay. Like we just like we don't we we don't allow

57:07Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Mm-hmm.

57:30Grey Bonin We we just don't we just don't allow that.

57:32Dr. Jim Arnold Well look, at the end of the day, you know, I mean, every every payment processing company says they're gonna save you money and blah, blah, blah. And it but then they often they hide fees and it ends up being way more. Like you you started this conversation by saying, yeah, we're more expensive, but not really. At the end of the day, you're a lot less expensive and you're providing a hell of a lot more value, wouldn't you say? I mean, is that is that what makes you guys different?

57:42Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you know, we like we actually just had this we we we literally just had this scenario with with one of our customers. they they came to us and you know we we we talked with them about our technology, our integration, you know, everything that we could do for them, the protection, the whole nine. And then they come back like a week later and they're like, I got this offer from Chase, you know? They're gonna give us, you know, they're gonna give us a thousand bucks and we're gonna, you know, we're gonna get you know, they're gonna give us the same rate, they're gonna match it, they're gonna give us a cheaper, they're gonna give us a cheaper, you know, per transaction fee. And all of that like on paper sounds awesome until you start to until you actually start to dissect it. Okay. you know, process capable, you know, fraud it's capable fraud and fraud and investment detection. Chase.

58:38Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

58:55Grey Bonin Ch Chase has got a thousand bucks in their corner. Like that is the the that like we're more expensive for a reason and and we're not like unethically expensive. We're fairly priced for the value that we drive. But you can't, you know, when you look at your payment processor, do not make the mistake of thinking that that what you're comparing is is percentage to percentage and the fixed fee amount. That is not what you're comparing.

59:07Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

59:24Grey Bonin What you should be looking at is what is the technology they're making available to me? And does it does it actually meet my needs as a practice owner? And do I get do I get the value out of it? Because guess what? It actually might be worth paying an extra twenty cents per transaction if it's gonna save you from being embezzled $100,000 over two years.

59:44Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. absolutely. You know, you t you also talk about like money walking out the back door and that's not really talked about very much. How how do you fix that? And what does that like payment data tell a dentist that they're probably missing right now?

59:59Grey Bonin my word. This I gotta tell you, this is a this is a big can of worms. It is the it it's not just about the the payment data itself. It's about everything that the payment data is touching. All the patients, all the treatment estimates, all the all the you know, patient financing opportunities. You know, we you know, talking about like the fragmented tech technology that exists with within the practice today.

1:00:04Dr. Jim Arnold Mm.

1:00:27Grey Bonin If you if you took a look and you traced that patient against all the technology in you know in your practice, you would get a pretty good picture of, these are our opportunities with that patient. but but because those things aren't integrated, you know, that would be incredibly time consuming and so nobody's doing it. but one thing that I encourage practice owners to do, if you if you really want to get a sense of how much how much opportunity you're missing.

1:00:39Dr. Jim Arnold Mm.

1:00:57Grey Bonin go pull the number of treatment estimates that you've quoted in the last year. And there's a good chance that that the number of treatment estimates that that you have kicked out just out in the last year probably exceeds the gross revenue of the business for about three years.

1:01:14Dr. Jim Arnold come on, really?

1:01:16Grey Bonin Yes, easy. Easy.

1:01:18Dr. Jim Arnold Damn, that's unbelievable. I how how do you get that message out? Like everybody should know this and understand this and you know, adopt a solution that's gonna solve for this.

1:01:22Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah. No, I I absolutely agree with that. Yeah, I think you have to holistically understand what the issue is. You know, you have to look at dental insurance enrollments are down year over year. dentistry is has has s has started to be seen as a traditional form sorry, has started to be seen as an elective form of healthcare, not a primary form of healthcare. That's a that is a huge problem. That's a massive problem. Yeah.

1:01:36Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I mean, dude, look at look at the freaking pandemic. You know, we were non-essential. I mean, like, how is that? How are we non-essential? You know, dental care is elective. I'm sorry, man, but the body is connected to the mouth, for God's sakes. Ugh.

1:01:59Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah. It's yeah. It is. The oral systemic connection, CMS CMS just recognized it and at the beginning of twenty twenty six as part of the twenty twenty six guidelines. We're we're gonna see reimbursement rates go up. We're in very interesting time, but like like not just with AI, but with with what is actually happening with dentistry. we're gonna see the industry explode. I mean, probably speaking too candidly here, but

1:02:15Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

1:02:32Grey Bonin If technology keeps going the way that it does and reimbursement rates follow, dentistry becomes the next trillion dollar industry. It does. So yeah. I mean it's at half a billion right now. I mean, it's not unreasonable to believe that if we get those if we get those caps raised, then then we can do that. But you know, you wonder why.

1:02:41Dr. Jim Arnold Hey, music to all of our ears, man. I I love I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you know the practices and groups that are gonna really benefit from that are gonna be the ones leveraging these technologies. And and I mean, it it makes all the difference in the world. And if you're we are in a competitive industry, I mean the world is competitive. You gotta have the tools at your disposal that puts you out there on on the cutting edge to take advantage of these opportunities to, by the way, serve more people, do better work.

1:02:59Grey Bonin Yes, yes. That's right. That's right.

1:03:18Dr. Jim Arnold Free up more time, build deeper relationships, be less insurance dependent. I mean, there's just so many things that come as a direct result of this.

1:03:26Grey Bonin Yeah. No no you've hit it, you've hit it all on the head. probably one of the most important technologies that that a dental practice can adopt this year would be dental memberships. So insurance enrollments this year are projected to drop below forty percent. Forty percent. That blows my mind. I think there I think we'll see a reversal over the over the next couple of years. But

1:03:37Dr. Jim Arnold Mm, mm. Yeah.

1:03:51Grey Bonin Memberships is becoming like for your patients, like you actually offering like a private insurance for your patients in your practice. That's one of the fastest growing technologies today. it's actually the reason you're gonna see in the next couple of weeks, guess what's coming that guess what's rolling out on our platform? Memberships. You know, over over 10 million patients are already enrolled in in in dental memberships at private practices.

1:03:59Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. Mm.

1:04:20Grey Bonin Because dental insurance sucks, bro. Like nobody it's nobody wants to get it. it is. Yeah.

1:04:23Dr. Jim Arnold It does. It's a coupon plan. It's not even insurance. My God. I, you know, and and I I know I've I've said this many times, but I was fee for service my whole career. I always said like I would rather I would rather sell used cars than give an insurance company 40% of every dollar. And that is really my the my passion, Gray moving forward. It is

1:04:34Grey Bonin That's so awesome.

1:04:45Dr. Jim Arnold driving dentists towards less insurance dependence. And that's what my mastermind is all about. You know, I got 25 niche experts who are focused on that. And how do you do that? Because most dentists think it's just like, I'm going to drop all these plans. I'm just going to well guess what? They shoot themselves in the foot every time. No, there's got to be a a process involved. And some of these tools and solutions that you're offering go hand in hand and dovetail with that process perfectly.

1:04:50Grey Bonin That's awesome. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, y if you really want to move away from insurance, one of the easiest ways to do that is start your own. Roll out that membership roll out that membership plan in your practice. It's it is super easy to do. Well, and and it hasn't been historically, just so that you know. it like ten years ago, people started doing it on paper, started hand tracking you know, c quietly selling them. today yeah, today it's technology driven. So

1:05:28Dr. Jim Arnold Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah, right. boy. Yeah, man. Well, hey, think thinking about technology and like looking at like the next level, like what you're doing with with prognosis is what really got my attention six months ago. I mean, the the payment stuff is remarkable. And I didn't even know about that when we first started talking. I was like, my God, this is incredible. Like you could focus on that and like build an amazing company, and you are.

1:05:41Grey Bonin But it's

1:06:01Dr. Jim Arnold But what you're doing with you know, 3D imaging, that is like what it like that's Star Wars in dentistry. So tell tell people like what it actually does because I've been dying to jump into this because it's so freaking cool.

1:06:10Grey Bonin It it literally is. Yeah. Yes, yeah. No, it it is. So the most important thing that I want to say is this the form of image segmentation that we've created, we own, it's patented, and it is non generative AI. So th non generative, okay, that's a very important distinction because b because generative AI makes assumptions about what

1:06:36Dr. Jim Arnold Non generative. It is.

1:06:47Grey Bonin could be there and then and then shows you the assumption. you don't want that happening when we're talking about real patient anatomy and morphology. You know, I don't I don't want I don't want the AI to show me what it assumes you know is there and to generate it. I want to see what's actually there and you know and for it to be

1:07:07Dr. Jim Arnold man, as a dentist to to like all the time, I think I see how nice it would be to just say this is what we see definitively.

1:07:17Grey Bonin Yes. So that that is the direction that that we went with our AI. You know, we we have just got our scores back and our our dice score on the on the nerve and pulp is a point eight two to point eight five. So to give you some perspective, it's there's actually not even something I can compare this to for other companies because no one has segmented that small of an anatomical structure and gotten that high of a score. We're the only company to have done it. You know, the the close the the closest you know the closest score that are sorry the closest anatomical structure that we've seen people is like you know the IAN which is way which is way bigger than the nerve pulp within a single tooth. And so we're just

1:07:57Dr. Jim Arnold Wow.

1:08:15Grey Bonin You know, we've got some smart people that that work over here, built some pretty cool stuff. Here's here's what we're doing with it. Okay. Yeah.

1:08:19Dr. Jim Arnold So for those of us Yeah, okay. I was gonna say for those of us who are dummies, you know, like a lot of a lot of people I think assume that like you're making images. So like be really clear about what we're talking about here in terms of what it is actually doing and why it is so extraordinary.

1:08:32Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So y your X ray that you were that you're going to review, your C V C T that you're going to make clinical decisions on, we are taking it and running it through our image segmentation pipeline and we are highlighting the relevant patient anatomy that you are gonna look for. If you are gonna do a root if you're gonna do root canal, we're we're highlighting the nerve in the pulp. you know, We you know, we're working on highlighting the PDL like dominolog. dental carry is one of the next ones that we're doing in a in a three D in in a three D structure.

1:09:16Dr. Jim Arnold And that's the differentiator because a lot of people are thinking, well gosh, all these other companies, they already do that. But the differentiator is we're talking about with three D imaging. That's what we're doing differently.

1:09:22Grey Bonin Mm-hmm. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, we yeah, we we're very we're very excited about that because you know, volumetric mapping is significantly harder than two D mapping. You know, we're not talking about a flat image here. We're talking about having to actually map something that is in a that that's in a three D space on a two D screen. To give you some to give you some perspective. The the number of of

1:09:52Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

1:09:56Grey Bonin of hours that have been poured into annotation is wild. I mean as part of this as part of the latest model that we that we're now training data on, we have annotated over 90,000 patient x-rays, which should blow your mind. The original model that we built was built on, was built on about 8,000 patient x-rays. This is more than 10 10 x

1:10:21Dr. Jim Arnold And again, we're talking about 3D we're talking about C B C Ts for the most part, right?

1:10:26Grey Bonin Yes. Yeah. No, all C B C Ts. All the training data, all C B C Ts. So that should, you know, that should blow that should blow your mind. But our yeah. Our our objective with that is, you know, you're there are things you're gonna be looking for. there are things that the computer see that it cannot render. Okay, so here's the here's the where the where the kind of riff is with technology that exists in the existing workflow. You've got a

1:10:28Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Yeah. It it does for my mind.

1:10:55Grey Bonin C B C T that can shoot sixteen bit sc grayscale. Okay, that means it captures sixty five thousand shades of gray. It travels to your computer, which your graphics card probably catching twelve bit grayscale. So you just lost forty thousand shades of gray. And then you have your screen, which is normally eight bit or ten bit, so now you only get a couple hundred to maybe a couple thousand shades of gray actually being rendered. So where did all the where did all the data go? Well it's it's still there. It still exists. It just it just

1:11:19Dr. Jim Arnold Huh.

1:11:24Grey Bonin has shrunk as it's come down through that pipeline. So what what what we do is we've trained our AI to see, like leveraging computer vision, all 65,000 shades of gray. So when we highlight you know that anatomy within within the within the body, what we're doing is on it like it's on your screen, you get you can choose what color we normally use red. We'll show you in red where it actually is. So, you know, that that anatomical clarity doesn't exist today. because there's a because of like the other companies that introduce color into the into a workflow, they do it through, you know, three D computer reconstruction, you know, some type of generative model. It's not real. It's not real. And you shouldn't rely on it to make to

1:12:11Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Yeah. It's making assumptions based on statistical you know, probabilities as opposed to what's actually there.

1:12:23Grey Bonin Yeah. That's right. And that's and I I think that this is ultimately this is ultimately where our position in the technology space like comes from. Like we we recognize that existing technology is not really being used or trusted by by practices to make clinical decisions. You know, like I'm not gonna trust a three D reconstruction of a of an X ray. to make a clinical decision because you go look at and you know patient anatomy is never that perfect. You know, I've never I've never seen a nerve that straight before in my life. What are you d what are you talking about? and Yeah, I mean, yeah.

1:13:03Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. With no accessory canals, no other, you know, weird morphology because nothing is straight. Yeah. Right.

1:13:10Grey Bonin It's completely patent. There's no calcification. I mean, just yeah, it's just it's kind of wild. So our our goal here is we're gonna show you what's actually there and we're doing it on the actual X on the actual X ray. Okay. We don't we're like we're not giving you anything else. The only thing that we're doing is we're ingesting an X ray and we're giving it right back to you. And and the only thing that that we've done is we've highlighted that you know, that patient anatomy and morphology.

1:13:30Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm.

1:13:37Grey Bonin And this is by the way, this is where our position of how does AI fit into the workflow? You know, there are there are other diagnostic companies that when you run their AIs will tell you this is a cavity, this is a this, this is a that. Okay. Well, what do we think is gonna happen to doctors over time if we start relying on on AI to tell us what's what?

1:13:43Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. it just dumbs us down. You know, we start to rely on it. Yeah. No. Yeah.

1:14:04Grey Bonin We already see what's happening to students. I mean look l I mean look at college grads, man. I mean like I I mean it's it's mind blowing. Even I I'd even argue the some of the workforce. I mean, they just did a study showing how AI is impacting IQ and like some people are down like thirty points. I mean, yes. Yes.

1:14:25Dr. Jim Arnold Wow, 30 points. I mean, my God. I you know, I wonder about it all the time. I mean, because we all become somewhat dependent on it. And I I just wrote I just wrote something the other day though about like you cannot abdicate your mind to AI. You have to use it as a tool to expand the the capability and what you can do.

1:14:35Grey Bonin Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes.

1:14:47Dr. Jim Arnold But you gotta argue with it. You gotta argue with it. You gotta push it. You cannot make assumptions about it just being right. And people who do it just bites them in the ass. And I can see where they're losing freaking IQ points because it can make you smarter, it can make you dumber.

1:14:56Grey Bonin Yes. That's right. No, liter literally it can. the the way that we approach AI, I think, is gonna have a pretty significant impact on our on our society. I at at my kids' school, I've you know, I've I think I've done two lectures on the use of AI in the classroom because there is no doubt that that kids are using AI in the classroom, you know? but are they but are they using it responsibly?

1:15:26Dr. Jim Arnold Course. Mm.

1:15:29Grey Bonin And a AI is meant to enhance our ability to think, but people aren't using it that way. They're using it to replace their ability to think. And that's that's a problem because AI is not it's not really capable of creativity. It's not, it's not a human. You know, it's its only capacity is to be able to take to take direction that a human gives it and to go with it. And so you still have to be able to think critically about it. And so how this plays into the way that we are AI.

1:15:33Dr. Jim Arnold Right. Mm-hmm. Right. Yes.

1:15:59Grey Bonin We don't right now we don't allow it to diagnose. We just don't. we do not want RAI displacing the humans responsibility to make a clinical decision. We want to make it easier. You know, we want to show we want to show you. Like we want to make it faster. But I mean we like we we're just you know we are convinced that like I our even our approach with education, like we're taking this to we're you know we're taking this to dental schools right now. like we hope that that our AI will help teach dental students how to read x-rays faster.

1:16:12Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Well yes Exactly. Yes, yes.

1:16:40Grey Bonin But but not replace their need to read x rays, you know.

1:16:43Dr. Jim Arnold Exactly. And that's the thing. You know, I I was a I was a an exec with a 250 practice DSO for a year, and we were rolling out you know one of those one of those diagnostic tools and it was great, you know. It brought our attention to things, you know, because dentists are missing 10 to 15 percent of stuff, it's probably even higher than that, but it brought attention to things that were being missed, which is great.

1:17:04Grey Bonin yeah, easily.

1:17:08Dr. Jim Arnold But then it comes down to clinical judgment. Because if I looked at 50 things that it said were going on, I probably agreed about 40 times. You know, but those other 10 times, no, there's some kind of artifact. It's a 2D image. You can't, you can't really see what's going on. And so anybody who's just like, yep, hey, gotta cut all these teeth, gotta do all this stuff. I mean, they are committing, you know, some really egregious acts when they just rely on the AI.

1:17:18Grey Bonin Yeah.

1:17:37Dr. Jim Arnold Nothing replaces clinical judgment, no matter how good the technology is.

1:17:41Grey Bonin Yeah, no, I I I agree with that. Because you know, the other thing is like AI is not gonna know our AI, right, as a as a tool to highlight patient atomorphology. It's not gonna know the tools that are at your disposal. It's not gonna know that a new, you know, drug has come out that can, you know, help actually cure and heal a dental cavity instead of you having to do a filling on it. I mean

1:18:09Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Yeah.

1:18:11Grey Bonin So I just my my opinion is at least for now, we're not going we're not gonna be in the in the diagnosis business. our you know, our position is to be a highlighter. That's what we are. We're a highlighter. And so

1:18:26Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. So yeah, sorry, go ahead.

1:18:30Grey Bonin Yeah. And so but I I still think that for the for the things that actually matter, which is the you know, the money walking out the back door, the studies are clear, twenty five to thirty percent increase in patient in patient engagement and case acceptance when you use clinical AI. So it's a lot of val a lot of value. Yeah.

1:18:41Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Well, look, a picture's worth a thousand words, you know, and we're all very visual. And so as a diagnostic tool, it's certainly helpful. As a communication device, it's incredibly helpful. And that's not just with patients and team, it's with even insurance companies. You know, insurance companies are starting to look at these things and you know, people are more likely to not only see it and say yes, but also have the procedure paid for like it should be.

1:19:06Grey Bonin Yes. That's right. Yeah. No, you you you're absolutely right.

1:19:20Dr. Jim Arnold So when you look at that, when you look at what prognosis is doing for dentists, what kind of dentists, what kind of practices, what kind of procedures are are the big winners here? I mean, obviously you're looking at endo, obviously you're looking at like airway, obviously you're looking at surgery. There's a lot, there's so many areas where this is so beneficial. Who's benefiting the most and how are you seeing dentists really use it?

1:19:43Grey Bonin Yeah. Okay, so right now we're really geared towards GPs. GP adoption of C B C T is sits around twenty four percent. that looks like it's changing, like more more C B C Ts are being sold to GPs, they're starting to do more specialty work, they're getting, you know, they're getting more training. we're we we're actually, by the way, we're actually the keynote speaker for the Texas AGD conference in Austin next month. Yeah, yeah.

1:20:03Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Yeah. No way. that's amazing. Cool.

1:20:16Grey Bonin Yeah, we'll be doing we'll be doing their advanced endodontic training and the use of clinical AI to to make, you know, decisions. And that's gonna be that's gonna be a lot of fun for us. but I I say that because, you know, the the this project w the prognostics, we've been working on it for right what like fifteen, sixteen months, something like that. all of the I know. All of all of that the

1:20:44Dr. Jim Arnold Why did you do all this in fifteen or sixteen months, man?

1:20:53Grey Bonin image segmentation pipeline that we've created, like it's done. Which means our ability to add new features to to the AI, man, you what what you're going to see happen over the next year, I mean my guess is we'll probably complete all of the mouth and we and we'll probably move to ear, nose, and throat. There's a good chance. And then and then and then from there we're going orthopedics, you know, we're going spine.

1:21:15Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. absolutely.

1:21:22Grey Bonin Because what we created, again, we're Frontier Computer Vision AI model company. We're gonna be mapping patient anatomy or morphology all over the body. And so that's our you know, that's that that's our goal. it's gonna be really cool because of we're already seeing like this interconnectivity between dentists and other, you know, and other primary forms of care. And I think it's gonna be I think it's gonna be really cool for

1:21:32Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Yeah.

1:21:51Grey Bonin you to be able to go to the dentist and if they're taking a a bigger, you know, picture field of view, for us to be able to highlight things and tell the tell the dentist to tell you, hey, you should go see, you know, your whoever because you might have a tumor, y but that

1:22:05Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. my God. Yes. I I mean, look, we we've always been in a position to use certain certain things, certain tells to help patients uncover medical diagnoses that they may have missed otherwise. But this takes it to a whole new freaking level. And we don't have to diagnose things. We can bring things to their attention that they can then share with their physician.

1:22:21Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and you know, the I think the the the scary part for me is where liability sits today. you know, I I'm not sure if most dentists don't know that they're liable for everything in an X ray when they take it, if they don't catch it. You know, you take a three D, you know, you're if you only focus on one the you know, one side of the mouth and you miss something on the other side and the patient the patient ends up in pain or hurting or whatever, it's technically on you.

1:22:38Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right.

1:23:00Grey Bonin I mean you took the you took the x-ray. there's a lot, you know, there's a lot under the hood there, and I think probably most patients don't don't know that that that's the case, but with with where the world is at right now, I think that we have quick we have quickly got to improve the clinician's ability to actually review an entire C V C T and for it to not take thirty minutes.

1:23:22Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Well, and there's a limited number of like denter dental radiologists out there, radiologists who are, you know, performing these services for dentists. So this kind of helps close that gap a little bit, doesn't it?

1:23:34Grey Bonin Mm-hmm. Does. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the CEO of of NVIDIA had had said something to the effect that, like, you know, don't go into radiology because computer vision is going to put it out of play. the his assumption before he ultimately ended up walking that statement back, but his assumption before making that statement was that AI was gonna replace humans in diagnosing humans.

1:23:51Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Mm.

1:24:06Grey Bonin That's not a good idea, as we just talked about. You know, it's not. but it but it's going to enhance. And so my know, my opinion, I think the last time I looked, I think there's less than five hundred dental radiologists in the in the US. I mean, there is a very small number of dental radiologists.

1:24:08Dr. Jim Arnold A terrible idea. Yeah. That's all right. Yeah. And guess what happens as we get more and more CBCTs when we get pushed past twenty four, when we're at fifty percent, seventy five percent, that's going to become even more problematic.

1:24:26Grey Bonin Mm-hmm. yeah. I think what I think what we'll see is that they're going to be their workflows are about to become drastically faster. You know, their ability to be able to re to read those those x-rays using AI. And then we're also going to see a pretty great shift in the mean skill level for for dentists like just general dentists reading C B C Ts.

1:24:40Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Yeah.

1:24:57Grey Bonin Because the the AI is is just as much meant to be an education tool for you, actually in your practice, as it you know, as it is for your patient. You know, we're using like we have to use really smart people to to train the you know, to train to train this thing. I mean, it's it is astronomical how much time goes into into actually building the right training sets. But but

1:24:57Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

1:25:26Grey Bonin You know, that benefit, like you're getting in your office through our AI, the consensus of some of the smartest dentists in the world who have trained it to to read your x ray. That's the that's the beautiful part. That's the benefit, right? You know.

1:25:42Dr. Jim Arnold It really is. So so so Gray, you've been really open about, you know, it's pre FDA clearance right now, all that sort of thing. So how how can dentists get a hold of this? I mean, like t talk a little bit about how you're rolling it out, to whom you're rolling it out and that sort of thing.

1:25:49Grey Bonin That's right. Yeah. Okay. So actually a a dentist can go can go on the website today, prognosis.ai. So it's the the word prognosis but with an X instead of an S at the end. Yeah. Yeah. Prognosis, yeah. so it's funny, some of us just call it prognosis because of we just, you know, who knows? so you you can actually get access to the product today.

1:26:11Dr. Jim Arnold I have such a hard time saying that. Prognosis. Yeah. Mm.

1:26:27Grey Bonin you can go on the website, you can you can sign up for an account. And because of we are currently doing a usability test, we need dentists to do this. you know, the what's cool is the the the platform has actually been out been out for over a month, Jim. And it has been shocking to see how many people have signed up for it. We're not even advertising for it yet.

1:26:40Dr. Jim Arnold Okay. Yeah.

1:26:56Grey Bonin next week what you'll see is I'll be putting a post out because we were just notified that we need to do a usability test and we need to get a hundred doctors who we've never met and never interacted with, who have no financial interest in you know in the business, to come sign up, you know, process one x ray and and and if it filled a survey for the FDA saying whether or not our product does what we say it does. Yeah.

1:27:23Dr. Jim Arnold Nice. That wow. That I mean, look, all of these things are part of the part of the process. I keep saying process. Got it really ingrained in my brain right now. But it's all part of that whole you know, journey towards F DA clearance and FDA approval and all that sort of thing. So you're well well on the way.

1:27:30Grey Bonin Yes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It is. It is. Yeah. Yeah. We you know, we expect to we we expect to submit our for FDA clearance you know in the next couple of of of weeks. we you know w this has been a long journey. Like FDA FDA clearance is no joke and we've spent a we've spent a lot of time I'm very impressed with my team and the stuff that that these guys have built.

1:28:03Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Mm-hmm.

1:28:11Grey Bonin it is remarkable. And that in having that infrastructure now in place makes the next set of features and and you know, submission that much easier.

1:28:20Dr. Jim Arnold Well that's that's awesome. And so now we've kind of we've covered how dentists can get it. You know, go to prognosis dot ai. That is that it okay. and and be a part of this, because why not? Why not be one of the first ones in and and see how remarkable it is. What about you you did say you're raising money too. How would somebody, you know, approach that if

1:28:28Grey Bonin Yep, that's right.

1:28:44Dr. Jim Arnold somebody is looking at this going, my God, like this is gonna be a billion dollar company. Like I wanna be involved early on. How do people get get in touch with you about that?

1:28:54Grey Bonin Yeah, yeah. So best two ways to connect with me are on LinkedIn or via email. you know, we my email is my my name, gray dot bonin at process dot com. and what I'll say is this round is turning out to be really competitive, which is cool. You know, we our team has worked really hard to to get us to where we are today.

1:29:13Dr. Jim Arnold Hmm. Yeah.

1:29:22Grey Bonin And I will tell you I've I've you know I've gotten the privilege to literally talk to every single investor, which has been which has been a lot of fun. it's it's cool to see how how these things are are shaken out. and it's by the way, it's not just the the US investor market. Like we've got we have VCs from the other side of the planet, you know, European healthcare market, Switzerland, that you know, that are interested in in this investment. we love that.

1:29:29Dr. Jim Arnold That's cool. Mm-hmm.

1:29:50Grey Bonin because we see we see an opportunity to really enhance the patient standard of care. so it's good for everybody and we're gonna make a lot of money along the way, which is cool. You know, which is cool.

1:29:59Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. And we're talking global. I mean, this isn't just a a US based thing. You know, this is a global thing. And we start talking about global investors. Well, that just automatically is going to open up new markets and help help process grow even faster. So, you know, look at the the cool things you're doing, you know, with payments and you know with the 3D diagnostic tools. what I mean they seem like two totally disconnected, two totally separate businesses.

1:30:08Grey Bonin Yeah. That's right. That's right.

1:30:34Dr. Jim Arnold But y make an argument. Tell me why the two belong together.

1:30:38Grey Bonin Yeah. you know, I so I I I get this question a lot from in investors.

1:30:43Dr. Jim Arnold And and it wait, and by the way, your your name port is so freaking cool. Connected intelligence. Like I love that.

1:30:49Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I get this question a lot from investors, you know, how does how does payments relate to you know, diagnostic AI and you know, I think that I think that what I would say is when we're in our practice, we don't we don't view the front desk disconnected from the from the chair. You know, I need that front desk to be able to generate a treatment plan so that it Wait, so that I could actually do care. so those things are totally connected. Why are we so so here's y you know why I don't share this perspective with investors? Because I've actually worked in a dental practice. I've spent my entire life in there. And this is the problem that you know that we with the private equity and venture capitalist markets right now is people who've never spent a day in their life you know, actually working in in the space that they want to create create technology for.

1:31:33Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

1:31:48Grey Bonin They want to create technology and it just doesn't fit the you know the user expectations. That's right. So we we're doing it differently. You know, I think that I think that when we are one of the largest companies in healthcare because of we're building the the ecosystem and people are gonna go people are gonna go, aha, you know, it makes sense now, but like the c the customers do want something that you know they want one tool instead of fifty.

1:31:53Dr. Jim Arnold That's the fragmentation we talked about earlier.

1:32:18Grey Bonin so we're gonna we're we we're gonna continue building that direction and delivering value the way that that our customers expect.

1:32:27Dr. Jim Arnold That's cool. And that carries me right into my next question. You know, you've said that dentistry is running blind in a data rich world. I love that. But what does that mean for a doctor like sitting in his office today?

1:32:34Grey Bonin Yes, yeah. That's man, that that is that's your workflow today. That's that's all of those all of those tools that you could be getting so much value out of that that you can't because they don't speak to each other. And so if you know I I think we I you know when we think about like starting up a practice for an example, or or I or I'll use I'll use an exist an existing practice that I I said earlier. Go look at how many treatment estimates you've put out in the last year. I mean, y so many dentists are spending thousands of dollars marketing to new patients and haven't even considered marketing to their existing patient base. Like what like what why are we doing that? But it's because the lack of visibility to understand what is what is currently there. I mean, imagine if you had an if you had one platform that was aware.

1:33:22Dr. Jim Arnold Yes, thank you.

1:33:38Grey Bonin of how many patient, you know, treatment plans you put out and was automatically marketing to them to come back and get that care. I think, you know, I think that what I want in my life is no different than what a dentist wants in theirs, which is sim simplicity. I just want something that works. You know, fifty percent of what we do here, Jim, at at process is automated to give you some perspective. I'd like for it to be a lot more

1:33:54Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

1:34:07Grey Bonin I mean the the human element's never going to you know you know never gonna leave the humans but if as much as we can automate we should. Why w why aren't we automating payments within within a practice? Why aren't we automating the the you know the marketing and recall and the phone answering service and all those things, all these human touch points that exist today that frankly AI can do a lot better than we can. that is the you know, that's the that is the

1:34:32Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

1:34:37Grey Bonin you know, the idea of just running blind in a data rich environment. Like if you can't get all the data together, you can't make you can't make it useful.

1:34:40Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Connected intelligence. Let's bring it all together. Just like we do our front office team and our back office team. So, you know, so many offices, you know, they the schedule's full, they're productive, you know, feel like they're doing well and all that sort of thing. But, you know, at the end of the day, where are they bleeding money? Like where is, you know, profitability and now, you know, Ebitha, everybody's, you know, it's everybody's talking about it now finally. Like, what is driving those numbers down that can be changed with

1:34:47Grey Bonin That's right. Yeah.

1:35:14Dr. Jim Arnold Connected intelligence.

1:35:16Grey Bonin Hmm. Man, there there's so much here. I think you know, we we we look at we we look at the big ticket items at am I am I renting versus do I own my building? How much do I pay my employees? How much am I getting paid? You know, how am I treating how am I treating myself on payroll if I'm a private dentist versus if I work for a DSO? How am I negotiating with my vendors for consumables? Am I buying new equipment or am I getting you know, or am I partnering somebody like trusted dental brands or or voxel dental solutions as an example? there there are all these pieces that that fit into the equation. And I think dentists pretty that most of them pretty notoriously make the same mistake, which is that they focus on trying to tr you know, trying to squeeze out more from what they can save, you know. I'm gonna squeeze out you know, and I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. You should. You know, but but but let's be real. Getting one percent, you know, squeezed out of your consumables vendor, like not really gonna make a difference. You know? You could

1:36:19Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. No. I don't not. In fact it may may completely screw up your relationship with them too, which should be a l a healthy long term relationship. But if you blow up the top line, guess what?

1:36:37Grey Bonin Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Now things yeah now things get interesting. So s you know, spend your spend your time spend your time doing what actually makes you the big bugs, you know. If I were a dentist and I wanted to make more money, I there were two things that I would that I would be focused on. Getting more education so I can offer more specialty care and filling my chairs so that I can perform that care. You know? Dentists go to dental school to be dentists.

1:37:05Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm.

1:37:11Grey Bonin That's why they go. And it's not just so that they can come out and treat dental cavities. You know? If I'm a dentist, I want to be placing implants because I'm gonna wake I'm I'm gonna make way more doing one implant than I'm going to be, you know, treating an MO or a DO on a tooth.

1:37:30Dr. Jim Arnold Absolutely. And and you know, it it's it's interesting, Gray, because this all crosses over into all the things that we don't learn in dental school, you know, related to leadership, communication, business acumen, all those things. But but these kind of tools can kind of bridge that gap in so many ways, I think, and make us more effective at a lot of those things if we harness them in the right way.

1:37:53Grey Bonin Yeah, no, you're you you are absolutely right with that. And I actually love that. Make yeah, I I want the audience to hear this. Make an investment in yourself. You guys are awesome dentists, okay? You're amazing. Make an investment into your leadership so that your staff can can benefit from it. You know, we I think oftentimes most dentists end up owning their practice. Actually eighty two percent of dentists actually end up coming out and owning their practice. but that was never the intention, right? Like you you never intended to become a business owner and all of a sudden you've been thrust into into having to manage a business and I get it. That's frustrating. That sucks. I hate it. But you know what? It doesn't mean that you can't be amazing at it or get really good at it or or choose to delegate it. But you know, regardless of w which decision you make, you're still the leader of your of your practice and You know, if you're like me, you want to create exceptional teams. Well having an exceptional team starts at the top. It does. Yeah.

1:39:00Dr. Jim Arnold Yes, it does. Yeah, no question about it. If you don't have, you know, that that kind of self awareness to recognize where where your shortcomings are and then invest in bridging those gaps and or you know, having people who can take care of some of those things or AI that can take some care of some of those things that you're not so good at. But you you refer to the complexity tax. And I think that fits right into this whole conversation. Tell tell me what you mean by complexity tax.

1:39:32Grey Bonin man. I you know, anytime that we anytime that we are introducing something new into our workflow, anytime that we're overcomplicating things that should really be simple. You know, like you you you said earlier, like we're people people get more out of pictures than they do, you know, for for us just talking to them. I agree with that. It's why it's one of the reasons why I say

1:39:47Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm.

1:40:00Grey Bonin I need big pictures and bright colors, you know, like hit me over the head with a baseball bat for me to get it, seriously. But you know, we we tend to overcomplicate things that that shouldn't be. You know, example would be like I want to move from accepting insurance to P for service. Well, it's not as simple as just stopping stopping to accept insurance tomorrow. You know, we we know that. But it can be

1:40:05Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. Mm-hmm.

1:40:29Grey Bonin as simple as working with a consultant to create you know to create a plan, you know, right to get you know from end to end, f you know, creating something that you can actually follow, like like an in an instruction manual. but I think that I think that our our current environments just they don't they don't foster that, you know, because every time you want to do something in in your practice, there's a good chance you're logging into another tool is the reality.

1:40:58Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah, no no doubt about it. And that's, you know, again, like the more things that we can connect, the more things that you help dentists connect, you know, the better. And I I think that right now, even even today where where AI is p proliferating everywhere and it's impacting everything that we do, I think there's still a lot of dentists who are just like skeptical of it or i scared or intimidated or whatever. You know, even if those dentists never become like a customer of yours, like what what's the best advice that you could give them?

1:40:59Grey Bonin Yeah. Yeah. well, so I th so I first let me tell you that you're right. it AI is popping up everywhere. it's a little bit scary in the sense of like, you know, I was at a conference last year and I swear there were like twenty voice AI companies and I was just thinking to myself, What is like what is happening? ninety percent of this Yeah.

1:41:37Dr. Jim Arnold Mm. Mm-hmm. At least. That is some red ocean competition right there, man. You're swimming in the blue ocean.

1:41:57Grey Bonin Yeah. I mean I I can't I just couldn't even imagine. ninety percent of those companies won't exist anymore. And so my warning to dentists today, what I would tell them is be careful be careful who you partner with because you don't want to you don't want to jump in with somebody who's not gonna be around in a year and you've made them an integral part of your workflow and now and now their product no longer works because their servers shut down. you know, that's that that that part's not not good.

1:42:21Dr. Jim Arnold Mm.

1:42:26Grey Bonin so what on the on the front of whether or not you should adopt AI, yeah, do it. Don't be late to the game. I'm saying that because if you're late to the game, your patients have already left. You're good, you're gone. You know, you're you're probably you're probably on your way out as a dentist if you're not adopting AI. The the consumer expectation has shifted. You know in America, we have something called

1:42:47Dr. Jim Arnold Mm-hmm.

1:42:55Grey Bonin It's a pretty big problem actually. Something called instant gratification, you know? and and AI has only made it that much worse. And so, you know, the expectations are shifting for for our patients, and we need to be agile and flexible to to adjust so that we can continue, you know, not just treating that patient, but also earning their business. Yeah.

1:43:21Dr. Jim Arnold Mm. So, you know, five years from now, if process succeeds like you and I both know it's going to, you know, what's different about the average dental practice?

1:43:32Grey Bonin Hmm. the the average dental practice would be more focused on care and less focused on completing mundane business tasks. Yeah. And five in five years, people who don't touch the patient will not work in a practice. That's where we're going with our product. you know, we want you know, in our in our orchestration layer for AI, you know.

1:43:42Dr. Jim Arnold Oof.

1:44:00Grey Bonin there's really gonna be one person who does business within an office. you know, but even they will even they will touch patients. You know, my hope is that is that from growth marketing, you know, to patient recall, prescription drug monitor monitoring, even the even the the RCM side, what we do with insurance, that it will all be automated. Because it can be, like I'm telling you, vote like you wanna know why we have so many agents that are getting that are getting built in the background. it's because they absolutely are well underway to to a fully automated practice. You know? I see a future where patient walks in and they're no longer being asked the question, Hey will you felt this form? You know? It's the most frustrating thing in the world for me. I can't I so I I Jim, I had a kidney stone I probably like two months ago. And I walked into the ER, an ER that I've been to before. Okay. I've been there before. Poor kidney stone. And I'm s and I'm like at the front desk right, you know, right there. And I'm like crying like you know, because I'm in so much pain. And lady just she hands me this form. And I just looked at her and I was like, I need you to give me drugs or something, you know, like give me put me on something before you have me put fill form, please. yeah, yeah.

1:45:21Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah. My God.

1:45:26Grey Bonin So, you know, and I do the whole sh I do the whole spiel with her. I give her my insurance card and you know, she's gotta do her thing and I have to fill another form and like I like there's so there's so many gaps created by the lack of connected intelligence. It's so fr it is so frustrating for me. It's the reason why we're so passionate about about you know about fixing it, because of it's it's possible. The technology is there, it's possible. Somebody

1:45:54Dr. Jim Arnold Yeah.

1:45:56Grey Bonin Who understands the gaps just has to create it. And that's what we're doing.

1:46:01Dr. Jim Arnold I love it, man. I love it. I I think you know, it's a brave new world. It can be overwhelming, it can be scary, but you did a great job in this conversation, like really clarifying a lot of things. And I think giving a lot of dentists and a lot of people kind of a a better path forward in terms of how to lean into AI as opposed to being afraid of it. And So man, thanks for sharing like your vision with process and you know where you see dentistry going. Thanks for having an impact and and actually caring enough to to do all of this stuff. I'm excited about it. I'm excited to see where things go. I'm excited to be a small part of that with you. And hey man, looking forward. people want to get like more information about process, prognosis, invisible payments, all that good stuff. We'll we'll have all the links in the show notes, but thanks again for being here, man. I really appreciate you giving me so much of your time today.

1:46:56Grey Bonin Yeah, thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed this conversation.

1:46:59Dr. Jim Arnold Been my pleasure. So thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time on the Foundation Dental Podcast.