AME: True Stories

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[00:01:58] Alan Mead is a dentist with too much time on his hands and too much recording equipment in his basement. Armed with an obsession to bring entertaining and informative content to the dental world in a way that's never been done before, I give you the Alan Mead experience. Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Alan Mead experience. I'm your host, Dr. Alan

[00:02:22] Mead. I'm a dentist, podcaster, and occasionally I'm a storyteller. I've been thinking about what I was going to talk about, trying to put it in a form that felt right. This one's been kind of something that's been brewing in the back of my head for a little while. It's really funny. I wasn't

[00:02:46] going to record it at all. Then I was on Instagram, guilty as charged, which is a lot of the problem with this particular episode. But anyhow, I was on Instagram and I saw like three ads in a row. One was like for a knife sharpener. My algorithm is very finely tuned for a 50-year-old dude.

[00:03:12] I see a fair amount of just 50-year-old dude kind of things. A knife sharpener ad came up and the first thing was, whatever you do, don't buy this knife sharpener. And I'm like, I see all these things on social media where I'm going to return this product. It's not because it's not the most amazing thing in this world. It's not because of this. It's because it's being sold for even less.

[00:03:39] I'm going to return it and I'm going to buy it for cheaper or whatever. And like, so I didn't, I see this everywhere. And I thought this morning, I'm like, that's so annoyed. This is like the most annoying thing in the world. Like you can't even look at an ad where someone's telling you not to buy the thing or not, or I'm going to return this thing or whatever. And, and so you see it so often, you know, it's a come on and it's irritating to me. I just, I find, I find honestly almost everything

[00:04:03] irritating these days, like this sort of thing. So I go on Gemini and I describe the problem. Like, what is this? What, what are we doing? What, why is it that everyone is doing this? And it turns out that, uh, so funny. Gemini says, uh, okay, I'm going to read, I'm going to read, uh, that formula dominates platforms like Tik TOK, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts. Guilty bingo. It's the Instagram

[00:04:30] reels for me because it weaponizes a few specific psychological and algorithmic levers in the direct response marketing world. It is known as a negative hook or an anti-selling pattern interrupt. Okay. So what they want, they don't actually want to promote their product or explain to you why it's a good product. It might fit your life. What they want is to give you something super negative so that you'll stop scrolling because they know every one of us is on a phone scrolling and just looking. And so

[00:04:58] what, what's more important than, than selling their product in a, in an, you know, an authentic, genuine, like, like real way is, is to lie about it or to, or to, to make you feel negative about something. And then, yeah. So I'm like, great. So like how, how, how many layers deep do we have to go on everything anymore? I'm just so tired of it. And basically it goes on to, it's even worse.

[00:05:22] It goes on to say the algorithmic reward for retention, uh, platforms like Tik TOK and meta did not distribute views based on whether the viewer likes the product they distribute based on hook rate. And the hook rate is just the percentage of people who watch past two to three seconds and watch time. So they're not, it's not even about whether they sell the product. It's, it's, it's how well they're measuring your attention and how long you're staying on. And so these negative ads,

[00:05:47] the negative hook, uh, keeps you for longer than two to three seconds. And, and as I think about it, I'm guilty as charged. I don't stick on many of those things for very long either, but this is, this is what it is now just for a lot of reasons. I, I really need to, I need to get serious about getting off social media, social media for years. I've been saying this. I've never really done it, but for years I've been saying it because one of the things is

[00:06:14] that we're the product. We are definitely the product more so than any other media type that delivers people to it. Like, you know, when you're watching TV back in the day, the ads we saw were TV ads and they couldn't really, they couldn't really send an ad to, if I was watching, you know, the Charlie Brown, uh, great pumpkin special. Well, they probably knew I was likely a kid and likely

[00:06:42] Dolly Madison would, uh, with a Dolly Madison was like a, they're like a, a sweets company. They make, I never saw Dolly Madison branded stuff in the stores, but in any case, Dolly, man, it's like Twinkies, like hostess there. And Dolly Madison was always the, the, uh, the advertiser for the Charlie Brown specials when I was a kid. And of course for the Charlie Brown specials, you remember you only saw them, you like, they advertised them for weeks in advance and you knew at, you know,

[00:07:07] seven 30 on, on Tuesday night, there was the Charlie Brown special was coming on. And this was, you know, I was born long before even VCRs, man, you couldn't even record it. So you were going to see it when it was on and that's what you're going to see. So an advertiser knew that there were going to be a lot of little kids there. So they're going to, they were going to advertise toys. They're going to advertise, you know, sweets they were going to advertise, but that, that's a still a pretty blunt instrument. Now the way it is now, my algorithm on Instagram is,

[00:07:36] is nightmarish for what, how well, like, okay. So I baked bread a couple of days ago. I haven't baked for probably more than a year. I baked bread. It was really fun. I enjoyed it. I must've, I must've searched for something at, on Google or something somewhere or ask Gemini something. I don't know. Now my entire algorithm is completely covered with bread stuff. And to be perfectly honest, it's stuff I'm interested in. I would be interested in buying it. Uh, I'm not as interested in the,

[00:08:03] the ad that tells you that they're going to return it because now it's cheaper. First off, if you return something that you bought and like, and you just see, you get it cheaper. I think you're actually a terrible human being. That's a really horrible thing to do. Uh, for a business, like returns aren't expensive. It's like do overs in dentistry. It's like having to remake something. It's the most expensive thing in the world. You have to read in any case, but that's sort of the, the shtick. I I'm perfectly fine being marketed to in a direct way where you're not telling a story

[00:08:32] about, about returning it or, or, you know, or why you shouldn't buy this or whatever. I'm fine with that. So that, so that's what kind of got me thinking about the whole storytelling thing. And I go way back with storytelling. I'm, I, uh, okay. But in the early two thousands, I was obsessed with an author by the name of Seth Godin. He's still around. He, he was a marketing guy, but he was a marketing guy before all this crap existed. He was a, he was a marketing guy talking

[00:08:58] about, well, I remember at one point he said the very best marketing a dentist or doctor or, or professional could do would be to just have a website and write authentic blog posts about what you do for a living. And it would, you would, you would crush that because there were not messages, authentic messages of things on online was still a relatively new and there wasn't an easy

[00:09:24] way to market necessarily. And I took that to heart and I started blogging in 2008. I think I sort of remember, I remember that because I think I got my first digital pano in 2008 and I, we're, I think I wrote a blog post about it even. How funny is that? Um, that was a long time ago. It was almost 20 years ago. Um, blogging was pretty hot in the, in the early aughts, you know, writing, just writing

[00:09:48] posts. It was before video is before sub stack. It was before Instagram influencers. It was before tick tock is before all this crap. It was just, and, and I actually, I actually made some, made some headway in the, in the blogging space. Um, I had a, it was my office blog, the meadfamilydental.com website was just a blog, but it wasn't re it was more for kind of more for patients. And, but what I got was a bunch of dentists that read it and liked it and commented and stuff like that. I didn't

[00:10:15] get a lot of patients that did it. And it wasn't really, I didn't really orient it to local like patients in Saginaw, Michigan that might want to come see me. My, my, I got some notoriety from it, which is not particularly important at that point in a different way than, than you would from Facebook or Instagram or Tik TOK or whatever stuff has changed a lot since then. But Seth Godin was, his message was about all about storytelling. And he had a book, he had a book, uh, one of the early

[00:10:42] books that he wrote or that I, that I saw was caused all, what is it called? It was called all marketers are liars. And it was later subtitled all marketers tell stories, but, and his thesis wasn't that you should lie about your product, but, but let's be perfectly honest, right. Titling a book, all marketers are liars is, uh, attracts attention because you're like, wait a second, I'm not a liar. You know, one of these things. So the reality is it's even that,

[00:11:11] even that was sort of attention grabbing, but his point was that human beings don't make decisions based on spreadsheets or, or just piles of data. They make decisions based on stories on people's worldviews, talking about their, you know, how, how things are resonant with them emotionally and, and how they identify themselves. So a brand story was supposed to be a coherent promise, a framing that honored what the customer already believed about themselves in the world.

[00:11:38] So, and this was, this made a ton of sense to me because like when you told a story about how something fit into your life or you told a story about how something happened, you know, it wasn't all about piles of facts and evidence. It was sort of took piles and facts of piles of facts and evidence and turned it into a story. And the story is a lot easier to swallow and understand, and you can simplify things with a story and all that stuff. So I really appreciated,

[00:12:04] I really appreciated the idea of storytelling. And it was what I did with the blog for a long time. And to be perfectly honest, the podcast started from a place of storytelling. Um, and I like to, I like to think that, that even now, uh, particularly when I'm doing interviews and stuff like that, there's a fair amount of story. It's about the story. The dental hacks podcast started with me thinking about how the kinds of conversations I had, I used to go to, I'd go to meetings and stuff

[00:12:32] with my dad all the time. And so we'd have friends of mine and friends, my dad's, we'd all go out for dinner and we'd sit around a table and everyone would basically tell us because they're all dentists. They'd all tell stories and every, everyone's got different stories. It's really interesting because dentists have different experiences, but they all, they're very relatable because, you know, a lot of us, we all kind of do the same thing just in different ways, whether it's, you know, I use a different, uh, instrument for this or a different burr for this, or my practice

[00:13:02] is no insurance and all fee for service, or my practice is, uh, you know, in the country or in the middle of the city, or, or I've had this experience with patients and all this stuff. And, and to this day, even like literally lunch at the vetter society meeting this, this, uh, this fall, bunch of us sitting around having lunch talking about dental stuff, you know, some of it was actually less about patients and more about practice ownership and how I, it's interesting. One guy was talking about how he got in trouble.

[00:13:29] I'll tell you this. Some of the stories that you hear, you realize that dentistry can be done a lot of different ways, a lot of different ways, which is an interesting thing. I think that's kind of cool actually, but anyhow, that's one of the reasons I like storytelling because everyone kind of has a different experience, even though we have a lot of similar backgrounds of it. I love that stuff. And I, so I feel like that's where it's storytelling, uh, which is literally when you're sitting around at dinner, telling stories about what happened in your office, you might, you might embellish them

[00:13:58] a little bit, or you might oversimplify. You might make yourself look a little bit better than maybe you were, or, or something a little bit worse than it was or whatever. But the reality is human beings are drawn in by a story. And for the most part, these stories are relatively authentic, or at least they're authentic from the point of view of the person telling the story. And those kinds of stories are not necessarily based on evidence or based on, you know, they're, they're that person's experience there. And, and it brings with them a lot of worldview stuff, all that sort of thing.

[00:14:24] Well, and so I think authentic storytelling is literally the core of entertainment and the core of like this podcast. I, I kind of love that the idea that you're telling something that really happened to you. I think social media in particular, and maybe the internet in general has kind of, kind of wrecked that a little bit. Like it's kind of, I think what happens is that everyone

[00:14:49] sort of took the storytelling effectiveness to heart and decided that, decided that they were going to use that to their advantage. So it's, it's a story to me right now that involves AI. It's a story that involves all social media. It's a story that involves the algorithm. And it's a story that, that involves, you know, who's interacting, where the different kinds of social media, the different kinds of interaction online. I'll say, I say this right now.

[00:15:20] Podcasting is much closer to that sitting around the table, having dinner with humans, interacting directly with humans. It really is. Even though, you know, I can, I can lie all I want on the podcast. I generally don't, I don't, I don't feel like I do. Uh, and I, I feel like I mostly talk about things that have happened to me or things I've heard about it. So I feel like on some level, I don't have a big motivation to, to, to come from a particular angle. I just kind of,

[00:15:45] kind of come from how I experienced things and maybe how I experienced things is not exactly how other people would experience it. But for the most part, the story feels authentic and it feels pretty real. It feels relatively true. Is it always 100% factual? No. You already know Crazy Dental has practically unbeatable prices on everyday dental supplies. But how do we make that deal even sweeter? Free shipping. Jump over to crazydentalprices.com,

[00:16:11] fill your cart and enter promo code VERYSHIP, all one word at checkout. That's VERYSHIP, all one word to wipe out shipping costs on every single order. Even better, using that code directly supports the Very Dental podcast network. Stock up, pocket the savings, get free delivery and help back the show. Use VERYSHIP, all one word today. But I'm, I feel like storytelling has been sort of

[00:16:36] taken hostage by people who are trying to sell stuff and do stuff. And whether that's, uh, whether that's a knife sharpener who says, whatever you do, don't buy this thing because blah, blah, blah. And then they're going to tell you how now it's on sale and how it's the greatest thing ever and blah. That's one way. Another way is, uh, to have an entire Facebook group that you run and you, and, and it has you as the leader of it and you get to talk to people directly. You've got thousands of

[00:17:02] people looking up to you being amazing. And, and, and when in reality your life isn't really like that, that, that is, I suspect much of dental social media is like that. I probably experienced it first on dental town. I had to, to this day, I still am, I'm a little bit, I think there's times when I have felt like, um, you, you learn to know what you can believe from people or not believe from people over

[00:17:30] time. It's easier to learn that when you know the person in person in, you know, like, like I know what to expect from a patient I've seen for 28 years. I know exactly what to expect from that patient. And if it's different from what I'm expecting, probably something has happened to that patient, whether that's, I mean, I got another thing I've just seen lately, just incredible that the, how I've known these patients for so long. And just like every other human as they get,

[00:17:57] as people get older, we, we start falling apart. And I've seen that a lot lately, whether it's their dental condition or their mental condition or whatever, but like knowing someone for 28 years in person lets, you know a lot about a person, even if it's someone that has been a patient, not necessarily close friend or anything like that. Knowing someone online, you don't really know anything about that person. I'd love to, I want to believe that all of these online friends that I have, I know them really well, but you know what? It is really easy to not

[00:18:24] be real online. And that's, that's kind of what I'm talking about. The storytelling, the whole concept of a, of an influencer where people are following you and, and, and buying things on your, on your recommendation and, and see how you're living your life online. And when, all of that is fake, the assumption should be that none of that is real. Nothing is real. Nothing is real in Facebook groups. Nothing is real on Instagram. Nothing is real on TikTok and less

[00:18:52] proven otherwise. Maybe there's amazing things that they're, you know, that of real people, but I wouldn't believe him for a second until I saw him in person. Cause I just don't, I just don't believe anything anymore. Am I cynical? Yes. I'm very cynical about this. And I feel like we should be because this comes out a day before an election. I mean, what a frigging perfect, perfect way to talk about this. I'm not saying anything about anything about elections. I'm going to say nothing political here, except for the fact that we have TVs in all

[00:19:21] my operatories and they're usually running, you know, they run all kinds of TV stations and every TV station from, from, uh, you know, stations showing reruns of the love boat. And I love Lucy, which frankly, we've had a lot of that lately in my office. And it's, it's hitting well with me because I don't have to think about right now, occasionally you get someone who really wants a news channel on and you're just, but all of them have ads, political ads of all kinds. So funny how they have literally

[00:19:50] one person running for one office telling a completely specific story about the other person. And literally the next dad is the other person that they're telling the story about telling us a similarly awful story about the first person. And in the reality is, is both of them cannot be true. Both, both ads, whatever, whatever they're saying is true and real in one ad, the other ad is saying the exact opposite. So they both cannot be real. And I have to tell you my, my, my take is that neither

[00:20:19] of them are even close to real and all of them are lying about everything all the time. That's, that's how I feel about politics. I'm, I'm, I'm not, I'm, I'm pretty blackpilled on politics. I kind of don't care what happens at all on Tuesday. So I guess the good news for that is it doesn't like, I'm not going to be sad or happy for what happened on Tuesday. I don't think any of it makes that much difference anyhow. Uh, that said like perfect example of, of what used to be,

[00:20:44] you know, what used to draw me in with storytelling. Now it's just all negative storytelling. So storytelling doesn't have to be true. That's the thing. And Seth Godin was always, he was okay with you telling a story that wasn't true in the sense that he wanted to lie. It's, but the lie was the mental model or the narrative that the consumer adopted, the value of what he was talking about still had to be real. So in other words, like the, the,

[00:21:13] the, the lie that the all marketers are liars are, you're telling a story about this thing that makes it easier to understand and easier to fit into your worldview or whatever. But the, but the underlying product, the underlying thing you have to talk about, it has to be real. That's, that was his thing. So in other words, it wasn't about going out and lying. It was about telling a story to make something more understandable, more easily understood or fit into a lifestyle.

[00:21:39] I loved that about him. And now I really feel like it's just, frankly, we, it's just all weaponized. There's tons of storytelling everywhere. And now no one can believe in any stories because none of them are true. That's, that's the, I, I, the, I looked at Gemini, Gemini helped me with this a lot, actually just throwing this in here. I asked, is there a dark side to storytelling? And it says, absolutely. And it operates on a few distinct levels. This is so great because I kind of understood

[00:22:08] this in my mind, but I couldn't put it in words. Storytelling hacks, human cognition or cognitive architecture. When we hear narrative, neurochemicals like oxytocin and dopamine fire triggering empathy and lowering critical defenses. Wow. That says a lot. Dark side emerges when bad actors realize they don't need a better product to genuine expertise or clinical integrity. They just need an emotional hook. And that is so true. That's what we're talking about here. The story stories work because

[00:22:35] they work on our human emotions. And it used to be that you'd tell the story and I don't know that it used to be, that's not even fair either. Listen to me. Everyone's been telling lies about stuff and stories, but the reality is, is I see so much of social media and, and what's being fed to us as a really negative storytelling experience. And I just, I, what I want to say is like, man, it'd be so much better to live, live our life in positive storytelling. I know that sounds so,

[00:23:03] so Pollyanna-ish to say that, but like, I don't know. Narratives aren't reality. That's another thing that it says, the narrative, what happens. And I believe that's where politics get really messed up because on some level people are less interested in what actually happened when it comes to a story and more about how well it fits a narrative. And that's, that's left, right, or center are all the same. It's crazy. It's just, so I feel like storytelling was this,

[00:23:29] like a new way to tell stories in the early 2000s was using the internet to tell stories. I'll say that. And now with social media and, and, you know, the way that we consume social media, you know, doom scrolling rather than, you know, sitting down and reading or watching whatever. Um, we just stories, storytelling is used against us in a really bad way, I think. So I'm going to

[00:23:54] forward this by saying, yes, I think it would be better if we all used social media a lot less. And there are, I know a lot of people who don't use social media at all. And I'll say this, if you're the person I used to go, I used to think maybe like I got, I have like employees. I don't, I don't really do social media. I have one employee says, I have a social media account, so I can go and play, play a fake slots. I just had to have a Facebook login to be able to

[00:24:21] play this slot thing, this fake slot thing. Now in Michigan, of course, there's no such thing as fake slots. I'm sure they'd be paying, playing for hundreds of dollars to spend, but back in the day, it was just slots and you had to have a Facebook login. So that's all she uses it for. It's not a Facebook person. She doesn't go on Facebook looking for stuff. And I'm just thinking to myself, that's really awesome. Like the person who has been unaffected, my, both of my kids actually are uninterested in, in any of the typical like, you know, TikTok or Instagram or Snapchat,

[00:24:49] or they're not interested in that. They are both wildly interested in YouTube. They watch lots of YouTube videos as does my wife. I don't watch a ton of YouTube, but YouTube is its own special kind of, of it is essentially a social media platform, but it is, it's a little, the delivery is a little bit different. They, they have comment sections. So there's enough, you know, there's enough negativity that you could have there, but it is a little different. It's not maybe direct. It's not as direct. And in a lot of cases, they're not posting. They're mostly just consuming. It's an interesting

[00:25:19] thing. I'm an Instagram guy and Facebook some, but I, I probably, I do a fair amount of just dissociating from life by scrolling on Instagram. I'm not proud of that, but here I am. I've bought a lot of things. Probably the things that I will get for Christmas will come from something I saw on Instagram, probably a bread knife or something stupid like that. Cookware, very 55 year old white

[00:25:46] dude stuff. Sometimes bicycling stuff, sometimes stuff like that. But I also saw on social media, a new phone. It's coming out allegedly in December. I am an early adopter. It's called the clicks communicator and it's a, it's going to run on Android. So it's going to be an Android phone, but from all of the looks of it, it looks like an old Blackberry. And I was never a Blackberry guy.

[00:26:11] I will say the very first smartphone I ever got was a, was a, a Motorola Droid 2. The Droid 2 was sort of a flat, had a screen, a flat, you know, like a phone screen, but you could slide it and there was a hardware keyboard to it. So you could still type on it. I miss hardware keyboards, which everyone listening to is, oh my God, you really are 55 years old. You might be 70 years old. It's true. I miss a hardware keyboard. I still, I still cannot type on a phone,

[00:26:38] a phone screen without making constant mistakes. It's, it's so irritating as to be, well, it's distractingly irritating to me. And so I, I, I, I interact more on my laptop or my computer, maybe my tablet, but mostly on my laptop than I ever do on my phone because I can't stand typing on the phone. This new clicks communicators, what it's called allegedly drops in December. I've already bought mine. I can't wait for it. A couple of things. First off, uh, it's going to be a less

[00:27:07] fun experience for all of the, the, you know, the kinds of social media that I find so destructive, Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff. It's going to be less fun. It's a smaller screen. I will say that the phone is really well engineered. I probably will be able to doom scroll as, as effectively as ever. But secondly, it's got a hardware keyboard. Third, it's got something built into it that I'm very excited about. My excuse has been, and we shall

[00:27:32] test what this excuse is. My excuse has been, I have a lot of friends on social media. I like to stay in contact with them. So I use the messaging apps within these, you know, I use Facebook messenger. I use Instagram messages. I love it. Instagram messages are great. There are some people that I only talk to on Instagram messages because that's, that's the only, I don't know their, their, you know, their texting number or whatever. This thing allegedly has a messaging hub where you can put all your stuff in, but you don't need an extra piece of, of software to do it.

[00:27:58] It just does it automatically. So I could potentially interact on messenger, which messenger has its own app now. So you can do that on a, but, but Instagram doesn't like, I can't just go to the messages. I have to, I have to go into the app and then go to messages to use it. And that's, that's the, you know, I literally don't have enough self-control to even keep from using the stupid, stupid app if I just want to check. So I'm kind of excited about this phone is the hardware is

[00:28:23] actually going to point me a little bit away from, from, uh, from this. I'm hoping, I'm hoping we're going to see, I don't know. I'm not positive. I'm not positive. It's going to work, but I, I, I'm hoping that it is. So that's coming. That's coming soon. A gift I've gotten for myself is potentially a hardware solution to some of this, uh, this short circling, but I am curious if you guys feel my, my, uh, my cynicism towards storytelling. And it's sad because I used to really think it was an important thing. And I still think it's an important thing.

[00:28:50] Telling stories, podcasting more or less is about telling stories. Uh, and it's more, it's a more pure form of storytelling than anything on social media. So I guess I'm, I'm still, I'm still a believer in true stories. I'm still a believer in this stuff, but I, I feel like it's been hijacked and I don't know. I don't, I think the way that the world is now, I don't know that there's any getting it back. I think it's, it is what it is. Anyhow, just curious to see

[00:29:17] if you feel this, or if I'm just screaming into the abyss, which is okay. Screaming into the abyss is all right too. If you, if you felt anything about this or you have comments, go ahead and you can private message me on Facebook. You can, you can go to the very dental Facebook group. If you're not a member, all I ask of you is go to, go to Facebook, look up very dental, and it's going to ask you for a password. You can use one of many passwords. I got Timmerman, Lipscomb, McQuethy, Papa Randy, Frank, Gary, BioClear, Hornbrook.

[00:29:45] Any of those will get you in. I've got a lot of them and they're like a Tiff. Tiff is one of them too. There's just lots of them. Anyhow, come join. We can talk about this. I'd love to know if you think story storytelling has been hijacked by, by social media. And more importantly, how can we get it back? That's the question. How can we get it back? I think more podcasts, less social media. That's how we get it back. Uh, I'm, I actually, I have some interesting stuff going on with the podcast. I may be bringing on some, if, if you are a creator, someone who you think

[00:30:13] that a podcast, there should be a podcast that you make of something that you believe is, is missing in the world. I want you to message me and let's talk about it. I've got some potential other people that are coming from different places to, to join, join the network. So you may be seeing some more shows show up here in the new year kind of thing, just because the network's already here and I've got an audience people are interested in. If you'd love to, uh, if you'd love, if you think you'd like to start something, I've had people start something that didn't go anywhere. I've had people start something that didn't. Uh, I'm down for whatever. I think

[00:30:41] podcasting is, is really where storytelling is happening. And I think it's a better way. I think it's better than social media. I really do. It's a better place. I'm trying to do less social media, more podcasting. That's, that's my, that's my 2027 outlet. Thank you all for listening. Questions or comments, go to the Facebook group or text me directly or whatever. And we'll catch you next episode.