Oskar Moore: The global dental service market is right now worth nearly $400 billion and it's projected to double over the next decade as we become more people but also more oral disease happens. And, Miguel, from where you sit, what's the biggest structural weakness in the industry right now? The lack of standardization between diagnostics, therapeutics, supply chain. Basically what you have is an industry that literally has no benchmark. And that's a problem. That's a good answer. Interesting. I don't think the dental industry knows what it is. I think that it's the business of fixing teeth. But how, how deep is your diagnostics? What is your offering? And right now it's limited to what each current individual clinic can offer. Hi, you're listening to the Business of Longevity, a podcast exploring the future of the health industry. I'm your host, Oscar Moore, and I build strategy for several longevity companies such as the global functional medicine company, Nordic Laboratories, and the Danish nutrition brand Functional Future. Each other week, I'll sit down with pioneers who through their business endeavors are shaping how we live longer, and healthier lives, from founders to CEOs to investors, all building the next generation of health companies. We'll unpack real business strategies and explore the experiences they've encountered along the way. Each episode is going to explore the vision, the science, the strategy and the grit behind building the future of health. So welcome to the business of longevity. Miguel Stanley, welcome to the Business of Longevity. It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast. And I'll be honest with you in this one because it's kind of hard to introduce you because your career spans from clinical excellence to education, but even building these, these companies. But I'll try. So you're the founder of White Clinic in, in Lisbon, a clinic that's helped redefine dentistry from fixing teeth to managing whole body health. And you spent over two decades pushing the profession forward and delivered more than 200 keynotes globally. And more recently, you've co-founded Missing Link, using AI to service surface hidden oral signals with systematic health impact. Now I'm really looking forward to unpacking what it takes to build a business at the intersection of oral health and longevity. It's an interesting one. So for someone hearing about You Miguel, for the first time, how do you describe what you do today? Are you a dentist, clinician, entrepreneur, or someone trying to redesign how oral health fits into modern healthcare and longevity? It's a great question. So there's different Miguel's. You have the Miguel surgeon, the Miguel entrepreneur, the Miguel scientist, mad scientist thinking about stuff, ⁓ and speaker. teacher, also student. And then my father and of course the other stuff, but within the realms of what we're doing here. I'm a surgeon. ⁓ I'm a doctor. I practice every day. This is a lot of people don't know, maybe don't know about me, but so I'm right now at the White Clinic. This is my office in the clinic. It's 500 square meters. Got about 40 people on the team, full-time staff. uh, 13 or 12, 12 or 13 doctors in our lab, everything. So I operate inside the White Clinic. This is where I spend every day. And I know it might seem that I'm out lecturing and doing stuff, but that's usually on weekends. So I work every day. So I like to treat patients every day, diagnose and work with my team every day. That's my number one job. And I think it also lends credibility to my lecture circuit because when I'm on stage, I'm actually talking about frontline understanding of the problem. I'm in it every day, I'm living it. So, you know, I'm not a, it's not theoretical what I'm doing. It's very tactical, very practical. And I'm blessed because here at the White Clinic, we have so much technology that in my profession, it's very tech driven. you know, a lot of other ones that I'm actually, I would argue jokingly living in the future. And so I've been seeing things that a lot of traditional dentists might not see. So I'm very curious about the future. I'm a futurist. like creating simple explanations for very complex problems in my field, connecting the mouth to the systemic axis. So oral systemic access. That's my passion, helping people. get healthier through advanced dentistry. That's it. at what point did you start thinking like that and stop thinking of dentistry as just being teeth and in the mouth, but actually as a whole and preventative health wise? I funny. So it's a good question. I think I've always been close to it. As a child, I wanted to be a ⁓ cardiac surgeon because I was born in South Africa and there was a very famous heart surgeon called Christian Barnard. did the first heart transplant. I was quite fascinated about that. A doctor can take a person's heart out and put a new one in. was like, ⁓ my God, that's amazing. I was nine, maybe eight when I first heard about that. then, became a dentist and I thought I'd have to stay in the mechanistic orbit of fixing people's teeth. But I've also always been a surgeon. So as a surgeon doing implant dentistry, complex extractions, bone regeneration, and if you want to have better outcomes, you start thinking about immunology, you start thinking about, you know, biology, the interactions and then all of this compounded by the zeitgeist, I guess, of the wellness longevity space. mean, now it's amplified thanks to podcasters like yourself and all of these companies that have been working really hard at helping make complex medicine more user friendly, more relatable. And a lot of companies now bypass the complex doctor interface and interface directly with the consumers because Patients are also healthcare consumers and that's very evident in dentistry because usually it's an elective thing. I should go to my dentist. not, because most, it's not life threatening. You it's like you're going to die if you don't fix your teeth. In some cases that's possible, but very rarely. Making it very interesting profession. And so I've been doing it for 30 years, Oscar. So there comes a point in time when you start looking at certain problems and certain failures you had and certain issues you have. and just start zooming out a little bit and saying, well, how is this going to impact my patient's systemic health? How is my treatment going to impact my patient's systemic health? A, so I can get better outcome and B, I can ⁓ also help them heal better. And then you just start connecting some dots. So it happens over time, just asking more questions every day. If you just start having this mindset, like a startup mindset, what if, what if. What if, what if, and every day it's what if, what if, what if. So what if this is doing that? Let's look at it. Let's study it. Okay. What if we did that to stop that? And then it just becomes a very complex game. You almost gamify your curiosity and I don't play video games, but I'm very curious about the, you know, how we can truly look at diagnostics, therapeutics, and what we can do in between to really enhance people's health. And I'm not there yet. I don't think anybody is. And I think we're just going to stay really, really, really curious. So at end of the day, to answer your question, I'm profoundly curious, very passionate and driven because I don't think we've reached terminal velocity healthcare, which means there's no singularity. There's no entity on earth right now, even with advancements in AI, that can say they've figured it out, that there's this understanding of all the collective silos in healthcare that can create this human interface that people can understand where they are in their health journey. And so I want to contribute at least with what I'm doing in dental to that ecosystem, if that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. I think you're absolutely right with the statement to say that no one's got it right yet. And I doubt personally that anyone's ever going to get it right by getting the everything involved, the whole human body, every aspect and optimizing it. think we're seeing that these sometimes longevity and the word of longevity is taken perhaps too extreme. We've got people out there claiming they're never going to die. ⁓ I'm actually a big fan of Brian Johnson because he creates a conversation, but everyone following that, claims they're not going to die. I don't believe in that, but I do believe in these people. pursuing ways to have a healthier life and that we can push the one's health span and definitely push one's lifespan into the hundreds over the next few decades. to say that someone's going to get it all right, it's just, it's going to be... I agree 100 % with you Oscar. And recently I was at the Buck Institute for Aging in Novato, California. So was just about an hour north of San Francisco. With Eric Fridin? Yes. We also, got to meet and I shared the stage with Peter Diamandis, who's Tony Robbins' co-founder of Fountain Life and a bunch of other, you know, and so they're all working with super intelligence based in San Francisco. can only imagine how much brain power and money is there trying to look at the problem of longevity. And he said something really interesting, which is he said it will be under 10 years before we've reached terminal velocity longevity and unlocked, thanks to the exponential growth and intelligence of AI to unlock human, I wouldn't say biology, I'd say atomic, subatomic understanding of what it is to be human. And he said, look, just don't die of something stupid in the next 10 years. Just don't die of something stupid. In the next 10 years, there will be something that we can take or do to reverse aging and to end sickness, which makes it very interesting discussion. But to go back to your point that no one's got it right and that the longevity conversation is a big one and Brian Johnson does start a conversation. But then it comes down to, at least from a clinical perspective, there's two types of people, I guess there's more, but there's the ones that have the time. So you need money and time to go into this full on. Unfortunately, not everybody has money to invest in everything like Brian Johnson has. So Brian Johnson's got a lot of money and a lot of time, right? And when you read his findings and all of a sudden you feel guilty and ashamed that you can't do those things. It's almost pornographic what he's showing you. like, who doesn't want to live forever? Who doesn't want to spend an hour a day comparing hyperbaric oxygens and I want to do that. I can't do that. Right. I have a hyperbaric oxygen in my clinic. I don't get time to do it every day because I don't have time to do it every day because the opportunity costs of me spending time in my hyperbaric versus, you know, doing a night surgery for somebody just, I can't do it. I'm not retired yet. So, ⁓ it's like having a swimming pool in your backyard. spend all the, I don't have one, but you build one and then you never use it. And I was like, ⁓ I'm going to build a tennis court in my backyard. And then nobody uses it. Right. You need someone to play with to start with. There's like those people that say, I'm going to pay the entire year of my gym because I really committed January motivation, right? Then come when, come March and you're like, I'm just, I'm not going to gym. So it's a very challenging thing. And obviously you've got sick care and healthcare and our common understanding of hospitals and clinics and medicine up till now, if you were a Gen X myself and a baby boomer. You go to the hospital and doctor when you're sick. You very rarely go when you're healthy and to promote health. So that's an entire new set of people now that are saying, look, I'm healthy, but I want to be even healthier and I want to live longer. And which is really smart. I think that's something smart, but it's interesting to see the change. So earlier you would talk a little bit about the white clinic that I want to get into a little bit more because you've got a staff of 40. You've got a really healthy. company, you've got lots of customers wanting to come and have a treatment. And personally, I sit in the engine room of multiple businesses at the same time. ⁓ And I wear lots of different hats across from strategy, hiring, growth, and even considering capital raises. And I find that all of that tension in there is, it's all consuming for me. And this is where I'm in awe because you're a highly technical clinician while also running and scaling these companies. So how do you balance that staying clinically sharp, always finding new knowledge, being hungry for new knowledge while having to lead a business, lead people and systems? Do you have some form of strategy behind how you allocate that time and attention? Great question. The first answer is I'm. Always on. My on button starts at about 5 a.m. and then I turn it off at 7, 7.30 p.m. Then I go into my family time and my rest time. I love working, but I treat my job as athletics. So I train at it every day and I practice it. So think of yourself as a, ⁓ know, sometimes I'm six hours doing surgeries with super focus. So a lot of brain work, a lot of brain ⁓ focus. ⁓ And it's team Oscar. I mean, I don't follow any guidelines of other readers, but sometimes I'll read, you know, that Sam Altman at ChatGBT banned meetings. He said, you don't want everybody to come to one big meeting. You want lots of spontaneous little meetings when they have to happen. So here under my leadership, I guess here at the Y Clinic, there's never a lot of big meetings. There's 20 small meetings a day. super tactical, super focused, these little huddles that happened with the stakeholders of any given issue. And there's a bunch of them throughout the day. People are on point. And we have systems created, operational systems here, so the clinic can work in my absence, which is great. So I can go do my stuff and it's, you know, I've got some doctors on my team now, Oscar, for 25 years. My orthodontist has been with me for 25 years. My IT guy has been with me for 26 years. So we've got a very robust team. Moreover, I don't have multiple clinics yet. That's another story later on maybe, but I'm still building this. We started opening with that there's no benchmark. So I'm trying to build the benchmark for what an ideal dental clinic has to be where it's not just about fixing teeth. It's about fixing everything through the mouth. What can we get at the mouth? And so I'm not off point in my other businesses because it's all related to that core question. so any solution for my clinic in a clinical workflow immediately transposes to my lecture circuit and what I'm doing with that in investigation and research. And so it's all pretty much central to the same questions and answers that we're doing. So it's not like I'm doing a clinic and then running a restaurant. ⁓ which would be completely different. So most of the stakeholders are the same. I have a very good management team. have, you know, my general manager has been with me for 18 or 19 years now, which is quite a lot. So there's a lot of Bluetooth thinking going on and I'm really hands on Oscar. don't, I don't, this is my hobby. It's my job and my hobby. So I'm very passionate about it. It's a really exciting time to be in my business. Interesting. And I think. Credit is due also to recognize the ability to hold onto staff for so long because the longer time you spend with an individual, the better you know their strengths and weaknesses and it's easier to manage as well. When you have to be bringing in new staff and there's a high staff turnover, that would take much more time out of your time if you have to teach them the mechanism, the structure, the strategy that you're working towards. It's so consuming to onboard new people, but I also have to say I was good. AI has just changed everything, at least to us in leadership, because when you're working out a system or a new protocol, like imagine I now want to onboard a new diagnostic test and I want to onboard a new therapeutic as a result for that diagnostic test, there's a chain of command between who prescribes it, who interprets it, who executes it, who... Right? So, and then what do do with that information? How do you process that information? And there's an opportunity cost of doing that. Like if I'm doing that test, what am I not doing? How many people are involved in communicating this test? Above and beyond just the profitability, the business of this test, this exam and or therapeutic. If you know how to communicate properly, so imagine if a young kid's watching this or young students watching this or young doctors watching this, learn how to speak. Learn how to speak your ideas properly, fluidly. Learn how to articulate the vision of things fluidly. So, because if you can do that, you're generating super intelligent prompts to a good AI that can then all of a sudden turn something thought into a visual presentation. And then you can bring your team, the stakeholders, everybody curates the presentation with super clever prompts. And within an hour from ideation to you having a system, an hour later, you can have a new protocol that everybody agrees to. And it can even understand the financial applicabilities of that, the opportunity cost of incorporating into your business, the profitability of it. Moreover, how time consuming it will be for you to explain the outcome. And risks and rewards of that and, to generate consent to your patient. So AI really has, and sometimes just kills the idea. Just kills it. Saves time. Just like, okay, that's stupid. Let's not do that. So it's really cool. Just quickly to interrupt there. I'm kind of curious because you're talking about a, an AI, but is there a specific one? Because now you're talking strategy, so you're communicating with it. What do you prefer? What works best for you? With a few, I'm, you know, of course everybody's got their own things. My master AI is ChatGPT. I have of course the business premium top of the level account, so we can pump in loads of data. It has, I'm not an AI expert, but it has the capacity to remember things. So if you ask it and you open different projects and you ask it to remember things within that project, then it will remember it across sandboxes, know, different conversations. That's something very useful, but it's that would help you with your thought process. Then for the graphics and visuals, I started working about four months ago with one called Manus, M-A-N-U-S, Manus. And it just got acquired by Meta and which shows that it's going places, right? And I was like, ⁓ man, I thought I was doing something unique here. And yeah, so Meta also premium account. Fortunately, the more you pay, the easier it gets and the better it gets. It's fair. It's fair. This is an agentic AI. This can link to your outlook. It can link to your websites. It can link to a bunch of different things. It's amazing. You should check it out. It's really, really cool. That's what we use to then make things visual for us. Also, if you want to do some deep research, I'll get my prompt from Chat Minos. And then let that work overnight. It can generate websites and it's really cool, but you can't take your hands off the wheel. You've got to keep controlling it. It's like having an extra employee that doesn't sleep with a hundred PhDs, which makes it useful. Also then every now and again, if I'm not, if the back of my head gets activated with chat GBT, I'll jump on Gemini at Google and I will police chat GBT if I think it's hallucinating. again, that means you have to know what you're talking about. If I asked it about astrophysics, I wouldn't know if it's hallucinating because I know nothing about astrophysics. But in my business, I know because I've studied. Young kids, study, know your stuff. Don't delegate all of your knowledge to AI. No matter how clever it is, everything has to be uniquely tailor-made. So Gemini, chat, GPT, redundancy there, I'd ⁓ use plaud. P-L-A-U-D. Have you heard of that? So, Plaud's great for recording long meetings with patients. So, with my patient's consent, I said, do you mind if we record this conversation? They say yes. And then our initial consultations at the White Clinic had been for about two hours, for 25 years, Oscar. So, very long, because we get a lot of data. We take CT scans, X-rays, intraral scans. We measure active MMP8 with saliva, vitamin D testing. So, and plus, you know, all the queries and questions and health questionnaires of the patient. It's a lot of data, very time consuming to talk about it. And so we don't want to lose all of that verbal data. So recording it is critical. And then I think, I believe that connects to GBT, which can then create a master transcript. And then that helps my management team then say, look, this is what we spoke about in the meeting. Then I have another team doing treatment planning and pricing. And so we're using AI to accelerate existing protocols, which allows us to forget less, do more, and just be smarter, I guess. And one last thing we're trying to learn how to use is just this week is Notion. So Notion is a project manager interface so you can keep the timeline of things. So it keeps the whole team on point. I'm still learning about it, but I'm loving AI right now because having done so much for 20, 30 years in the business space without it, it's like that perfect employee or collaborator that just makes some mistakes, but man, it's changing everything, Oscar. It's amazing. It's just amazing. So I'm really excited about the future. I completely agree. I love AI. I think every employee that I hire. before they, they're hired, I tell them that if they don't use AI in this job, I'll be very, very disappointed. Now that doesn't mean that actually, let me, let me rephrase that a little bit. It also makes it difficult for me to sometimes hire because if they're working on a little project to show what they're good at, suddenly I'm going, well, this is just chat GBT. And that's where you have to learn now to see through it, to say, okay, we're going back to what you said. Someone's been studying something. They understand the fundamentals. to challenge them on that and see have they used AI in the correct way and then are they able to do that in a job? agree 100%. I mean, you have to look at like AI is a gun. You can use it for great good or you can use it for great evil, right? It's the brain behind the power that matters. And obviously that's a very nuanced expression or sentence I just use there. You know, or I would argue like a surgeon, you have a scalpel, you can do amazing surgeries or you could really botch things. Your brain is in charge of it. So I would argue to your point that using an AI correctly only shows your intelligence and your skill set. Right? So, you know, some people might take five days to come up with what I can do in an hour. They can come up with that, which is, it's good. But if you are the boss, like in your case you are, you want people that know what they're doing so they have foundational wisdom and knowledge to accelerate their capacities through AI, not letting AI just do the job for them. I think that's what you were trying to say. And yes, it's a, I think, I don't know, Steve, we revisit this, this interview in two years, you'd be like, ⁓ look, shame. Look how innocent we were. think, I think so too. It's evolving light at lightning speed. Oscar, let me ask you a question. Yes, please. I was in Miami recently and in Boston and I got to see the Optimus robot from Tesla. And I'm looking at this thing and I'm like, bro, this in three years time is going to do brain surgery. Okay. It's going to be. It's going to. You you're going to have this robot at home to do your dishes and your washing and your laundry and your gardening. But guess what? You have an aneurysm and you fall on the floor. This thing will save your life. This thing will it within seconds because if you have a heart attack within seconds, it's giving you CPR. It will, I don't know, the third generation will have an air pump in it and be able to do CPR. Maybe no one's thought about that. If anyone's seeing this, use it. Elon Musk, you're welcome. You heard it first here on the business of longevity. And I started thinking about this. Imagine in the future, everybody has a mini pharmacy at home that's locked and only the robot can open it, right? Or under special condition because it will have life-saving medication in there. And all of a sudden, you you've broken your arm. You've had a, you're getting stabbed or I don't know, whatever. You've got a gun wound, anything. You had a bad problem. The robot. unlocks this cabinet is performing a life-sick interventions in seconds. You have a 3D printer in the garage, it's 3D printed, a cast for your broken arm, it's set the bone because it's got x-ray vision. And now all of a sudden think about how that changes the ecosystem of healthcare. When you have this best, all the best doctors in the world of all speciality, pediatrics, geriatrics, internal medicine, gynecology, women don't have to go to that embarrassing or whatever dentist, it's all there in your home. Yeah. I think this is happening within the next five years, Oscar. And I will trust that robot more than my doctor who's seeing 60 patients a day in a windowless room, just looking at data. I mean, and he's worried about his daughter's wedding or she's worried about, you know, whether they're, what's she going to cook for dinner tonight? Because humans make mistakes. And I think we really need to dance with this ecosystem and, and it's scary, but it's exciting at the same time. What do you think about that? No, I completely agree. And I think that's the way we have to be thinking. mean, we at Nordic Group, we invested into a company called Disruptive a few years back that does microchips for humans where we implant a size of a grain of rice. You know what I'm talking about. ⁓ And where we're working towards getting more and more data internally on the go, real time, without having to charge batteries or these kinds of things. And if that can start connecting even to a robot like this that understands exactly how you're doing all the time and checking in with you, I mean, we have to embrace this because it's going to make our lives easier, easier, more healthy, more affordable care, affordable care. you, you know, one of the greatest challenges to any modern economy from Copenhagen to Lisbon, from Los Angeles to Sydney is the overburden on our hospitals from people that show up in emergency care that don't really need that. right? mean, any mother, I know because I've got two kids, any mom whose child 38 degree, they rushed to the hospital. And of course, imagine how robotics are going to just change all of that. That's, it's going to revolutionize healthcare without a doubt. It's going to be unbelievable change in our ecosystem. But I do want to comment or at least my concern around it lies more in terms of, we going to create a bigger distance between the wealthy and the poor? Because the wealthy are going to be able to afford these robots at home, et cetera. And this is always an ambivalent one. I've spoken about this on this podcast before about how sometimes I struggle with the cost of some of the products that we are selling because it requires a certain disposable income to be able to purchase it where this... There's an entry ticket to everything. Look, we are different generations and you, first of I think it's beautiful you think about that. But that's an ancient problem. When I say ancient, since the birth of civilization, things have had better care than the slaves. then nowadays, that's just the... And we're very fortunate to live in Europe where we have... socialized healthcare. I'm not a socialist. Let's get that straight up. However, I believe that tax applied to primary care and helping those that need it is a critical human foundation. But to answer your question, think about this. If the wealthy get their robots, first of all, the first generations will be for the wealthy. Okay. Middle-class, upper middle-class. But very quickly, you will have, you saw this with the iPhone. Within five years, you had something that looked like an iPhone that was a fraction of the price coming out of Asia with all of the things on it. Every person, poor people have a smartphone today. That's the first thing. The second thing is maybe communities will have robots, meaning they won't have a family one, but governments will be able, by taxing the wealthy, to insert community robots that will endeavor to perform the same things, like private aviation and easy jet. All right. So it's the same concept, but everybody has access to it. So I think something like that might happen, whether you have these community robots that are generous donations from the wealthy or tax driven, but I think access to robotics in this regards to healthcare will be, you know, imagine Tesla or whatever, you know, you're making a million robots, you make 1.1 million and that extra, you know, ⁓ 100,000 is taxed to whatever goes to the poor. don't know, something like that. So I don't think that that will be an issue. And in regards to the testing, which you're talking about, you know, I'm a big fan of your company, of your tests. I've been using them for over a decade now. Big fan. It is something that's expensive. ⁓ But you guys cracked something quite early on, which was you made it almost democratic by speaking straight to the end user, the patient. You put it into a language that made it easy for the end user bypassing the need for that expensive second appointment at the doctor. That is quite unique. That's quite magic. Right? And so I think... That's the right mindset. So your question is answered in your own business strategy. And I think that patients aren't just paying for the test. There's a whole logistical supply chain there. There's the people that have to process all of the information, but you guys have your IP. Once that IP goes into a robot, imagine now the robot can scale that test in every home by taking somebody's hair or taking somebody's feces or ⁓ urine or saliva or blood. Imagine that the robot can do a phlebotomy. All of a sudden, it's got Nordic IP in it. Now everything's more affordable. So you have your business strategy scaled globally through the robot. I don't know. just think there's an inevitability of robotics in healthcare and it's going to be very democratic and I think it will make everything more affordable. My conversation with Miguel has been such a fascinating conversation that we carried on for much longer than we had expected. So we've split this episode into two, meaning that we'll be coming out with part two next time. So thank you very much for listening and I hope you're excited for the second part.