Mark Thoreson, DDS - Inventor of the Inflatrix in Gillette, Wyoming

Eva Sheie (00:03):
Whether you're visiting a dentist for the first time or considering a new one, the more you know about who's behind the chair, the better your experience will be. I'm your host Eva Sheie, and on Meet the Dentist, we feature professionals sharing their expertise so you can feel confident about who you trust with your smile. Thank you for listening to Meet the Dentist. I'm Eva Sheie, and my guest today is Mark Thoreson, and he's a dentist, but also an entrepreneur, and he's based currently in Gillette, Wyoming, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Thoreson (00:33):
Thanks very much, Eva. It's a pleasure to meet you, and I look forward to a wonderful chat.

Eva Sheie (00:38):
Why don't we start with how you became a dentist in the first place?

Dr. Thoreson (00:41):
I come from a medical family, father, general physician in North Dakota for 44 years. My mom was an RN for 25 years in multiple formatted institutions for the RNs, levels of skills. I was raised around the entire environment, so I learned how to speak the language and I learned to use my Scandinavian, it's been said maturity, but

Eva Sheie (01:09):
Is that what they call it?

Dr. Thoreson (01:11):
That's, that's what I was told. Wow. He's mature for 14. But yeah, the North Dakota upbringing and the mindset of the clinicians there, medical, dental chiropractors, there was one at the time. And optometrists, I dabbled with a potential optometry career. Let's see, but motivational.

Eva Sheie (01:40):
This is a small town, right?

Dr. Thoreson (01:42):
Yeah, this

Eva Sheie (01:42):
Was your dad, the only GP in the town?

Dr. Thoreson (01:44):
No, there were four. Four. And there's even a hospital in Mayville, North Dakota still is, but they pull in specialists now for 25 years. So 30 years. They've pulled in specialists from Fargo and I think Grand Forks on a regular basis now to provide extra of the specialty type care. But the hospital is functional and four physicians in the same clinic that's served this basically a 50 mile radius just touching the borders of good old Fargo and good old Grand Forks. And so I saw all of that, but I also saw the mentality before all of the distance medicine that could be done now and has been done in the rotational satellite type activity. Before all of this, these four physicians, they were the cowboys, they were the leaders. They were what you could do. And I watched my dad handle trauma from, he would drag me along as a teenager into the ER necessarily, but it was the guy came in holding his arm way above his head with his own belt wrapped around his arm, that kind of stuff, to trauma injuries. And if it wasn't for them,

Eva Sheie (03:03):
Farm accidents, car accidents, things like that?

Dr. Thoreson (03:06):
My dad rotated through with all the physicians as county coroner. That's all they had. There was no medical examiner. It was just those guys. And I say that with great love and affection. My dad was in the military. He was a flight surgeon in the Air Force back in Vietnam. And because of all those experiences, added a significant amount to what that crew of four doctors could do. So I'm infamous for a 10 minute answer to a ten second question, but I got to see all of that. I got to witness all of that. And in dentistry, as much as it's a complete departure from medicine, it's fascinating. And the amount of technology that back in the eighties growing up and finishing high school and getting into college, there was not digital anything but the advanced nature of what the restorative dentistry could do. It's one thing to see my dad splint and cast and help a broken arm or to take planters warts off of somebody's foot. Okay. Is that bad? No, because it fueled a lot of what I was looking at, but in dentistry, it was rebuilding the functionality of the mouth and taking away pain. And as much as it's still, dentistry is still associated with pain and that's just is what it is. And there huge

Eva Sheie (04:36):
I like your illustration a lot because it also sort of suggests to me that your dad wasn't above anything. He just did whatever needed to be done.

Dr. Thoreson (04:44):
And there was even routine veterinary services that he provided because there was,

Eva Sheie (04:48):
I was going to ask, and then I thought, no, there's no way he did animals, but he did animals too.

Dr. Thoreson (04:53):
Way because his dad, my grandfather, whom I never met, through a family story of his own death from leukemia, in fact, a form of leukemia that is easily fixed now. He died a month before I was born. So in the womb I heard his voice, but that's as close as I ever got to my dad's dad. But he was a classic country veterinarian, finished at Ohio State in 1921 and a thousand stories. But the perfect illustration is literally that, which is a photograph that I saw of his model, A converted by taking the front wheels off, adding them to the back, the whole axle differential and everything to the back, wrapping a canvas strap around, a homemade canvas strap around both back, all four back, and then hand carving six foot oak skis mounted on the front. There's a legitimate photograph of this. So he was out with stripped of the waist and zero degrees birthing a breach cow, and my dad got to see all of that, so I was dragged along for those. I was introduced to giving an injection to a dog, my dog. But in terms of that stuff, people would come to my dad about this horse and he would be able to handle some of it, some. So again, foundational concepts and experiences for me to put me in the mindset of, okay, I've chosen dentistry because it's frankly, nobody calls a dentist at three in the morning to solve their problem.

Eva Sheie (06:33):
Was there also an element of being able to see the results of your work instead of things that are internal inside the body that are never visible?

Dr. Thoreson (06:41):
Yeah. Yes. Because well, hopefully, and if things go well, the patients come back for their cleanings, ies, and then you get to talk some more and you get to continue with the record process. In dental school, I really got an itch for antibiotics, root canals. And became very proficient and enjoyed that a lot because that was higher tech. But the detective work, this is true. This is a good way to put this. The detective work of diagnosing what's wrong with this tooth? Is it alive? Is it dead? Is it in the middle somewhere? Is it going to come back? If we provide these procedures, try to think of a way to do this more comfortably, cleaner, faster, smoother, so that the ultimate result, and this carries over to this day, is better experience for the patient. Yes, pain is solved. Yes, problem is solved, not bandaid, not this pill for this symptom. And that's a two hour discussion by itself. But do it. Fix it because I'm responsible and I take that on myself.

Eva Sheie (07:55):
This particular example you're giving, I have a recent personal experience with, which is that the detective work you're describing is so you get a root canal, it's probably fine for a long time. At some point, some of those root canals,

Dr. Thoreson (08:13):
Fail.

Eva Sheie (08:14):
They fail. And so then what? Well, now we're doing detective work. Again, when I found myself in this situation, I didn't actually believe, well, let's say that the information was presented in an extremely fuzzy, vague way that left me what the decision that I could not make because I don't have the education, the experience or the information to make that decision. And so it set me on a journey that ended in losing number 19. It is not in my mouth anymore. It's probably a whole episode just because I've been working in patient experience for so long. I overanalyze every single piece of it. But the theme that recurred throughout all of it was the trust piece and what builds it and what erodes it when you're the patient and somebody is an expert in front of you and making me make decisions I'm not capable of making is not the way that you build trust.

Dr. Thoreson (09:14):
Not at all. And trust is a multimillion dollar word, and it's not just the dentist who's in responsible for that. It's the entire clinical team. And in fact, the front office team, which builds that familiarity, the comfort, I don't want to restate what you've just done, but whether they say it or fully even recognize that the word is important to them in a dental experience, trust is king. Because if you break it, and in the previous podcast I said, I was speaking about dental assisting at the time, and I still have great love for dental assistance and I will turn myself inside out to make one of them better and help make them, but they have a huge role in that patient by patient, hour by hour value building and education with the patients is a huge part of that. And as doctors snap off their gloves and walk away to go do something. Next thing, as you as know as a patient and all patients that have had experiences like this, the doctor sees or spends something like 20% of the time of the scheduled visits with the patients, otherwise they're with the rest of the staff. And when the doctor walks away, it's super common for the patient to turn their head and say to the dental assistant, what the heck did he just say? And so it's super important for the dental assisting professional, because they are, be able to relate on human terms because that's how the patients see you. You're not a doctor, and they don't mean to say it negatively, but doctors are intimidating. They tend to talk fast. They tend to blizzard people with information that is not necessarily understandable because it's 400 syllables in 86 words that takes 38 seconds, seconds because we say those things over and over and over and over and over again. It's all loops. It's all tapes that we have just created and we have to land on the stuff that gets the point across and not necessarily as on the boss, on the leader on the doctor, shut up a up and do what I say. It is human.

Eva Sheie (11:29):
It's human.

Dr. Thoreson (11:30):
And what I've learned in my patient relationships and my intentional goals of finding out what do patients think? What do they want? What's up with you? Because patients, yes, they must trust us to some extent. Otherwise, why would they sit in our chair voluntarily, open their mouth, voluntarily, give their consent to touch them in places that are the most heavily guarded mentally, emotionally, psychologically in the body. So we have to propagate all of that and keep it going that way. That's part of that in the dental team is a gift. Part of that is skill part of it, believe it or not, my dad used to say it too, medicine is an art. It's science. It's a bunch of skill, but it's also an art form and that it's true because not everybody can be trained to do these things that interact with people in every conceivable spectrum of comfort, discomfort, fear, not fear, verbal, not verbal, all of that. And so what I've boiled it down to is, and I say this in my infl pitch, patience wants three things. Please do a really good job, please do it very efficiently, which in their mind means fast. And please, please don't hurt me. Money is out there somewhere. But if money was a major issue, they just don't come.

Eva Sheie (12:59):
My entire experience, I would say 90% of what the staff was talking to me about, if not a hundred percent was insurance doesn't cover this. It's your problem. And I understood that before I even showed up. And so as a whole, through, I actually went through five different offices in this journey. I felt like if anybody had made empathy, the primary thing we talked about, like, I'm sorry you're going through this. We're going to help you figure it out.

Dr. Thoreson (13:35):
Not wrong. You're not bad.

Eva Sheie (13:36):
We do this all the time. We're really good at it. There's a million things they could have said, except for you're out of network. Here's all the work you're going to have to do to get this paid for. Well, I actually knew all of that before I showed up. Why didn't they say, how much do you know about how insurance works?

Dr. Thoreson (13:55):
Right?

Eva Sheie (13:56):
That would've been a much better way to start. And so I've thought about this a lot because that's what I like to think about. I want to get to the Inflatrix because you've mentioned it a couple times and I'm super curious about what it is.

Dr. Thoreson (14:13):
Yes. Okay. Inflatrix came from my idealist, young newbie, rookie dentist who wants to save every possible tooth. And the methods we were taught are still being taught with only minor variations in what's known as restorative dentistry. Everybody else says fillings, how to put fillings in people's teeth, what materials, how long does that take? What are the techniques? What variables? And that's all goes back. Honestly, the technique itself goes back more than a hundred years, and there's only been very little modification that's positive of those techniques, systems, the items, the supplies you have to buy, the filling materials, this quote, silver filling, silver amalgam or some say silver alloy, et cetera, silver fillings that are half mercury, and that's three hour discussion by itself.

Eva Sheie (15:08):
I've had that one.

Dr. Thoreson (15:09):
They work, they're cheap, they're fast to work with, and they do the job that has been described for them for a hundred years. I'm not saying they're bad. Well, then why the heck are doctors moving away from them in droves? Because there's better. And the bondable, some people call them plastic fillings, and the assumption with word plastic means if somebody melted down old toys and made 'em all white to match tooth colors and now we melt them on your teeth, it's not the case. Plastic is not the right word, but it conveys the concept. Composite resins are what they are, and they are. That's it again, I trained this so I could go in great detail. The point is they match tooth color. The bigger point is that they also, because of the chemistry that's involved in getting them to stick to the teeth, is so good and so strong that they add strength to the teeth when they're in place and done right, they strengthen the tooth. Silver does not do that ever. Never has, never will. That's why doctors are moving away from silver. But in the places where public dentistry, free dentistry, public health, the military, I have kids in the military, bless them.

Eva Sheie (16:24):
I asked my dad about this recently and he said, why do you think my teeth are so bad? Pastor's kids? My dad was a pastor's kid, and the dentists all did the free dental work on the pastor's kids. And my dad is in his seventies now and his teeth are a disaster.

Dr. Thoreson (16:41):
So, okay, my angst stemmed from the requirement of when you put a filling into someone's tooth, and I'm going to do this as cleanly as possible. I have a whole video about this, but not the point. That place between our teeth where we're supposed to floss, and there's a cavity there on the side of the tooth that meets the tooth next door, the doctor has to cut a specific hole in the tooth, very, very particularly, and with the great intent and requirements, they have to get rid of all the decay. Cool. But when that's done by bonding, or even if they have to shove silver in the tooth, and I say that purposely because that's what it's, they have to put what amounts to a stainless steel neck tie around the whole tooth, and then a terrifying looking multiple screw stainless steel device that holds onto the band, tightens it in two different directions. But the major point is that wall, the definition is and artificial wall against which new material is to be condensed. Who cares? The point is that we want to shove the material into the beautiful hole and have it scooch out the bottom, because if it does that, it's a dental word, by the way, scooch.

Eva Sheie (17:57):
Yeah, that's the technical term.

Dr. Thoreson (18:01):
But we have to create a seal, and that's done by wooden wedges, plastic wedges that get up to the clinician, how many, because then the filling goes in, and if it's silver, it's just crammed in. And if it's the composite resin, it's put in various very elegant ways. And then those of you patients, you've seen the super blue light, super bright light that they have to have all the shielding. It's super intense. Some are even have lasers that cure it instantly, but that's hardened right there. That process pulls the tooth together. Here's the problem. The methods of holding said band, and it's not always a whole band anymore. It's a partial band that gets wedged in. And then there's this ring clamp, and I use the word clamp on purpose because it hurts. Shoving the wedge in between the teeth hurts. It hurts. And if you're numb, well, a lot of dentists sleep well at night because I do beautiful anesthesia, and my patients don't feel that you're right at the time.

(19:03):
They don't feel that. They feel pressure. We sleep at night because we say, is it pain or is it pressure? And the answer is, it's a hell of a lot of pressure and it's placed pressure at a very rapid pace by forcing a wedge between teeth and making a move. Is that a crime? No. It's been done for over a hundred years and it's still done every single hour today in dentistry. That was my problem. My patients, when I called them afterwards, they were not numb anymore, but they were still sore. I don't like that. I don't want that. Patients don't want that. And they'll say that in a heartbeat. If there's a way to make it less painful, sign me up. Okay, the answer is Inflatrix. It is a two piece. I have this, I'll do my best to keep it in focus two piece poly. The actual material science is something that I vaguely understand, but try to explain it as a waste of your time. It's soft, it's stretches, and the other end of it connects to a little syringe that's filled with water that every single dentist possesses and has hundreds of them.

(20:08):
That twists in that goes between the teeth. When the filling it, the hole is done the right way, then the little pressure on the syringe fills the device with water, it expands and holds itself in place. No wedge, no band, no ring one thing. And when you're all done, you've created a seal and you've allowed the material to go and build that contact again. So it'll floss, snap floss. Then the most beautiful part, throw it away. Thank you. The fun part, and this is true evil. You'll love this. I'm a huge James Bond fan, huge.

(20:48):
And I was watching goldeneye a few years ago. If you're a bond fan, goldeneye and Bond and Q were in the basement at MI6 or looking at gadgets, as they always do. Q was scolding bond about pay attention, or don't you dare break this, or whatever it is. But in the background is a telephone booth. And as they're going through their bond queue, repartee, a hapless, MI6 employee walks into the phone booth, picks up the receiver to make a call, and a huge airbag explodes inside the phone booth and forces him into the corner of the phone booth.

Eva Sheie (21:24):
I remember that.

Dr. Thoreson (21:25):
And my remote control went flying up in the air, and I ran out of the room. My wife got, what's the matter with you? And an hour later, I came back with a first drawing of Inflatrix.

Eva Sheie (21:37):
What an amazing story.

Dr. Thoreson (21:39):
It was a true spark. It's true flash, and that was quite a few years ago. Several years ago. But since then, and three years of Bootstrap Capital, full-time attention by me, and we're in our fourth and very close to final prototype now with clinical proofs. We're going to go to market by the end of the year. I have a marketing team. I have a consultant that has launched more than 200 dental products with startups, some of his own. I have a funding outreach underway for Angel Capital because the biggest challenge right now is producing the first bunch of devices that go out to my influencers. And I dare say I was invited to go to Florida one week from today for a dental influencer bootcamp being led by dental influencers, so I can elevate Inflatrix by having myself more recognizable. That sounds like a total boast, but that's what's going to be the, when investors talk to me and talk to anybody frankly about investing, giving money, they want to know, and my engineer has put this most succinctly, but also nicely, which is investors really want to know if the horse is something they should bet on, but they're most interested in the rider.

Eva Sheie (23:03):
Well said, yes.

Dr. Thoreson (23:05):
I thanked him for that. I've used that dozens of times. And apparently I'm a rider. I'm a CEO. I'm someone who's lived this, who is passionate about this inflatrix.com. If anyone is interested to go look, I-N-F-L-A-T-R-I-X.com. I have a webinar that's reachable by way. I have a monthly newsletter that's going out fairly soon, goes out to thousands of dental personnel around the country, and we're, again, soliciting investors. If anybody's an angel investor, I'd love to be in touch. We're looking for something on the order of 400,000 ballpark

(23:48):
That'll get us production. And I have really positive feelings about having the device actually built in Wyoming. Gillette will be the world headquarters because we will go international by the end of say, 24 months, but we have 36 months of projections. We have dollars and cents, figures, expenses, team building. I have an advisory board, eight professionals that six of which are absolutely pure dental and have raised their own processes and businesses. So validity is something I'm hoping to present here along with the absolute passion for the fact that I think I can make restorative dentistry better for patients because the comfort factors of the patients who have been surveyed after the use of Inflatrix, myself included, I was patient zero year and a half ago. I had the first filling done with this.

Eva Sheie (24:46):
You're not just the president.

Dr. Thoreson (24:49):
No. Yeah, I'm passionate, and sometimes I've had to learn to reign myself in and stay on the playing field here, but I love it. And not only is it something that's a passion, but it's also my future. It's the culmination of all the work that I've done as a clinician, as a teacher educator, as a course creator, as a sales professional in multiple companies in the dental vertical market. We have two patents on Inflatrix. I have a trademark on the word. The FDA says five 10 K exempt status. It's a class one medical device. Let's build this thing.

Eva Sheie (25:32):
You know what I like about your James Bond story is a lot of people, I would say the majority of people who have big ideas, that's where the whole thing ends, is the idea. And then they'll tell everyone the idea, but they don't actually move forward to make the ideal something real. And so you're also not going to quit because that's the other thing is that success comes from just being unwilling to quit.

Dr. Thoreson (26:00):
Right? Yeah. Quits a four letter word. Stop that. It's ironic and kind of silly to say, stop quitting.

Eva Sheie (26:08):
Yeah, just don't quit. Right? It's inevitable. So did you leave Washington for Wyoming?

Dr. Thoreson (26:15):
Yeah. And because the Pacific Northwest business climate is terrible. It's terrible.

Eva Sheie (26:22):
It's not good,

Dr. Thoreson (26:22):
And it's restrictive, and they don't want you to do business really? They want you to do business their way in their format, under their circumstance. No. Okay. Just like I'm not developing or having anything built in China. I've seen and talked with people who have said that some of the output of their product is phenomenal. Yes. But it's also stolen, and I know it. So be that as it may, here we are. We're going forward. We have goals, we have everything set, and I'm thoroughly grateful for your opportunity that was presented. My Travis Rogers, my mentor and consultant gave me your name.

(27:05):
I tout Travis as many times as I possibly can. Travis is on the cover of Dental Entrepreneur Magazine for the 2025 summer issue, and it's worth picking if you're a dental person, go get it. Because he is worth every nickel of what people pay him, and I know because I do it. In fact, he even brought along three of us that are his clients and put articles from us too. So I have an article in that magazine, page 34 and 35 if you're interested. It's called How I Scratched the Dental Inventor Itch, Dentist Inventor Itch, and it tells my story.

Eva Sheie (27:41):
I'll make sure we link that in the show notes, so it's easy to find.

Dr. Thoreson (27:44):
Well, thank you very much.

Eva Sheie (27:45):
And I'll read it too. Well, when I met Travis, I actually looked him up on LinkedIn. I always do, just to get a feel for what people are doing, and he had a first degree connection with my cousin. I texted my cousin and I said, do you know this guy? Sometimes we don't always know the people we're connected to on LinkedIn, and he immediately wrote back and said, absolutely the best. I've known him for decades, so yeah, I can at least secondhand vouch through my cousin for Travis.

Dr. Thoreson (28:18):
Yeah, Travis has an incredible group of frameworks and systems, and not only is it the abilities to meet people and to introduce, which he does regularly, but he hosts a monthly pitch podcast. No, i's not a, I'm sorry. It's a pitch event.

Eva Sheie (28:32):
An event,

Dr. Thoreson (28:34):
And there'll be connection information in that magazine article about ways to connect with him to that. If you want to pitch, show up out of nowhere, and he'll give you three or three to five minutes, but 80 to 90 people, most of which are dental professionals, and a significant number of those are investor mindsets I've pitched every month for a year, and through his coaching and some of the resources he has provided to make me a better pitcher, a better speaker. Invaluable. Invaluable.

Eva Sheie (29:04):
Do you get feedback on your pitch then?

Dr. Thoreson (29:07):
Every time.

Eva Sheie (29:08):
That sounds really interesting. It should be its own podcast. It should be a podcast

Dr. Thoreson (29:14):
He has. Yeah.

Eva Sheie (29:15):
I'm going to pitch it to him. Let's take the pitch contest and turn it into a pitch podcast.

Dr. Thoreson (29:22):
Right.

Eva Sheie (29:23):
You know what I was curious about was your dad, you grew up in a small town in North Dakota, by the way, actual middle of nowhere, right?

Dr. Thoreson (29:32):
Yeah, Mayville exactly in the middle of Fargo and Grand Forks.

Eva Sheie (29:36):
Never heard of it, but I'm from the big city of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and so yeah, I mean, I wouldn't know rural, actually. I do know some of the rural Midwest because when I went to college, our orchestra tours were always to those towns, so there were some North Dakota ones like I have been to Devil's Lake. I have been to have to really look at the map to come up with the other ones, but we spend a lot more time in Iowa than North Dakota, so there you go. In your free time, you're also a musician.

Dr. Thoreson (30:20):
Yes. I'm a barbershop baritone. It's one of my professional goals to create a barbershop chapter here, because along with all of the other incredible things that energy money has built in Gillette is a place called the Cam Plex. It's a place that hosts an annual RV rally where I believe a thousand RVs are held and hosted in the same area. They host concerts there all the time. Huge. The US High School Rodeo finals are held in this facility every other year. Something like 25,000 people show up population of Gillette doubles, but how does that relate to barbershop? Well, barbershop has international competitions. Let's bring the singers in to sing in this incredible facility.

Eva Sheie (31:15):
Why not?

Dr. Thoreson (31:15):
So yeah, a barbershop is one of my passions, and I learned that out in our time in the Pacific Northwest. Huge activities there, but also I fly kites. Imagine there's wind here in Wyoming. You're right.

Eva Sheie (31:30):
Yeah, there is. If we go back to the fact that I've read every CJ Box book, I know because wind farms play a huge role in the storylines of these books.

Dr. Thoreson (31:43):
Yeah,

Eva Sheie (31:44):
Yes.

Dr. Thoreson (31:44):
Yeah, energy and in fact, the latest thing is that Gillette has just been chosen as the manufacturing site for nuclear fuel in the latest generation, nuclear fuel and not waste. They had a public event just two days ago at the Plex where they filled the auditorium with locals to give their feedback on what do you like and what do you don't? And because they're going to build 250,000 square feet, 200 jobs full time, it's going to go into production in four or five years because it takes that long. It's nuclear, so the permits and stuff, but outside of the coal industry, which has been here for generations and been one of the cornerstones, I mean, they call Gillette the energy capital of the United States because 35% of the electricity generated comes from coal mind within a hundred miles of me right now, but it's not forever, and they know it, and so hence, wind and solar projects have been put before the legislature, and some of them go and some of them don't, but it would be the number two largest solar project in North America, but now nuclear fuel and uranium, uranium is being mined all over the state. Huge.

Eva Sheie (33:01):
Wow, I didn't know that.

Dr. Thoreson (33:03):
But then it's got to be sent somewhere else to be made into fuel, but this company chose to come here, and so that's the biggest energy news. How does it relate it to Inflatrix? It relates because inflates is an absolute 180 departure from the energy business and to have economic diversity on that scale. That's when I spoke with the governor and the governor said, what are you doing? And I said, dental device. I said, pitch, pitch, pitch. And the governor said, wow, talk to so-and-so in my administration to figure out ways that we might be able to support you. And that's been under the development, those relationships are there.

Eva Sheie (33:45):
Yeah. Jobs and opportunities and growth and all the good things, and when you live in a state where they prioritize that everybody wins. Well, let's go back one more time and let the audience know where they can find you.

Dr. Thoreson (34:09):
As far as Inflatrix goes, it is inflatrix.com as previously spelled. I'm guessing you'll put it in the grateful that you'll put it in the intro. I also trained dental assistants.

Eva Sheie (34:20):
Oh, yeah. Why don't you tell us a little more about that before we,

Dr. Thoreson (34:23):
Well, that separate business, my wife and I have significant skills backgrounds over. That's a whole hour by itself, but we train a dental assistant program. I run the whole thing. It runs on Saturdays and Sundays over six weekends, so it's very much a bootcamp process, but it's basic skills. In Wyoming at the moment. There is no law that stipulates what sort of credential someone must have to enter a dental assistant career. Dennis had been hiring people off the street, daughters friends, church congregation members, fellow students, whatever, and I'm not shaking my head like it's a bad thing because some of them stick and some of them have been 20 years because Dr. So-and-so sang next to me at the alto section in church choir. Fabulous. Okay. They learn on the job. This is a formalized training program, and I've been training for 25 years with some gaps in the middle, but I've trained 108 people to be brand new dental professionals, so that's part of it.

(35:26):
That's WY professional training.com. There's Facebook presence for both of these. Inflatrix is all over social media, LinkedIn particularly part, but there's Instagram, there's Facebook, there's a YouTube channel that we're working to get more coherent. We also offer a business communication and soft skills course for anybody who sits at any front desk anywhere or who just wants to get better at working with the public because we have all those skills, so we train that. That's an eight hour course or a 24 hour course that covers it. I'm super thrilled that you would be so welcoming. Eva, this has been really fun and I hope we can stay in touch. I would love to support you as best I can.

Eva Sheie (36:14):
I do too. I'm going to order you the first CJ Box book so you can read it. Thank you so much, Dr. Thoreson.

Dr. Thoreson (36:23):
It's been wonderful.

Eva Sheie (36:24):
There's no substitute for meeting in person, but we hope this comes close. If you're considering this dentist, be sure to let them know you heard the month to meet the dentist podcast. Check the show notes for links to this dentist's website and Instagram. To be featured on Meet the Dentist book your free recording session at MeettheDentistPodcast.com. Meet the Dentist is Made with love in Austin, Texas and is a production of the Axis, theaxis.io.