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Each episode of GAIN Momentum focuses on timeless lessons to help grow and scale a business in hospitality, travel, and technology. Whether you’re a veteran industry leader looking for some inspiration to guide the next phase of growth or an aspiring executive looking to fast-track the learning process, this podcast is here with key lessons centered around four questions we ask each guest.
GAIN Momentum episode #96: The Dawn of Dental Longevity as a Lucrative Hotel Wellness Pillar | with Dr. Jonathan B. Levine
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Adam Mogelonsky: Welcome to the GAIN Momentum Podcast. We have a very special episode today focusing on the future trend of dental longevity. I'm joined today by Dr. Jonathan Levine, founder of Smile House, Dr. Levine, how are you?
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: Oh, I'm great and thank you so much. Adam for having me here.
Adam Mogelonsky: It's a absolute pleasure to have you on because this is a immensely important topic to discuss, as well as an incredibly lucrative topic to discuss. So first, let's start with the elevator pitch for smile house. What is this? Uh uh, new dental, new type of dental clinic, and how does it tie into this term dental longevity?
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: Yes. Well, we believe that oral health leads to overall health. What we believe is that dentistry needs reinvention from a standpoint of our diagnostics using new technology, the experience of the patient, that patient journey, and we're very focused on creating an environment that will exceed any expectations and put patients in a mindset.
A relaxation. Let that parasympathetic mode hit where that they, in intake the information that we can figure out for them through our diagnostics that we call mouth mapping. So the elevator pitch, that was a little bit long, but what I, what I would say, if you ask me what do you do for a living, what I would say is that we create the most beautiful, healthy smiles for people, and that's what we're focused on.
Adam Mogelonsky: And, uh, as part of the overall why care? I, I'm a, I'm a busy teller. Why should I care about this? Can you give us a quick summary of how dental health relates to overall health?
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: Of course, you know, the, the mouth is part of the human body. And for way too long, it's been disconnected between dentistry and medicine really for political reasons. Because of that connectivity through the superhighway called the circulatory system, and even the digestive system that when the mouth has the issues of either gum disease or breakdown of the teeth, the demineralization, there's a direct connectivity to, uh, the rest of our body.
And so what does that mean? These microbiome of the mouth, just like the gut when it goes into a disease state called dysbiosis versus symbiosis, which is that great, nice healthy balancing act. Once that gets thrown off by the environment that we put our body under that inflammatory disease, because of the colonization of these bad bacteria will wreak havoc, havoc.
Our body and we see it in these systemic inflammatory diseases like cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, leaky gut, on and on. In fact, 57, everyone you could name today, 22 years later of science shows direct connectivity to inflammation of the mouth. So it's really so important to get on our oral health game because it's so preventative, we have complete control of this.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, and I love you. You, you're using the term preventative because a big part of the growth of hospitality is investing in preventative medicine and partnering with these longevity clinics that can supply those diagnostics to give people the early warning signs to correct problems before they materialize into something that is potentially life threatening.
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: That's exactly right. that's, that's exactly right. You know, the hotels as, as discussing earlier. It creates that environment for, for people to just kind of calm down and in that temperance mode, that calming mode, you're open to learning how can we live longer? How can we have healthier, better lives?
And so it really works so well in that integrative approach.
Adam Mogelonsky: Uh, well, on the note of calming, you also mentioned another important term here, which is the parasympathetic nervous system. Can you tell everyone who doesn't have a, uh. a undergrad in pre-med, what the parasympathetic nervous system is and how that relates to stress and, uh, how you approach anything in a more state of mind.
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: Yeah, well, you know, you gotta go back a long time. You gotta go to the stoic philosophers and listen to Marcus Aurelius about this because the truth of the matter is temperance and calming is the way to solve issues. We, we like to say in my family, it's not the problems we face, it's how we face our problems.
And so when we're, we're faced with something that can excite us, and in the old days, maybe it was a dinosaur running at us, fight or flight kept us alive, and that's the sympathetic mode. We go into fight mode right away, and the cortisol and the adrenaline is pumping. But what we're forced to do to get into more calming and, and not as reactive, but more creative, where we really think through whatever we're facing so that these problems are more of challenges and they're really exciting to solve them because we can solve them not by being knee jerk reacting, but really by sitting down and having the temperance and the calming mode to think through it that.
As we take a long exhalation, puts us into parasympathetic mode, which through the vagus nerve drops, our heart rate, allows us to think clearly because we're not in that fight or flight mode because it's the two systems, parasympathetic and sympathetic of our human body, of how we can react. So it's up to us.
It's just up to us.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. And hotels these days, they don't specialize in the patient experience. They specialize in the guest experience. But what you've essentially done is take elements of hospitality and the mission of bringing guests into a hotel and bringing them into that parasympathetic state and applying those principles over to a dental clinic.
Can you discuss some of the, uh, features and amenities you've applied from hospitality into the dental space?
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: Absolutely. We talk about it all the time, and we talked about it as we were designing and thinking about this. Having been in dentistry over 35 years and built multiple offices and started different companies within oral health, it was so obvious. I've always been a clinician that. When a patient walks into a dental office, the five senses are so critically important to think about and address.
So if the smell of eugenol, if the look of scary equipment, of the thought of a drill and a needle of people at the front desk with their head down that doesn't acknowledge you on and on and on. All these visual and, and all these different sensory cues are negative. By the time you get to the dental operatory, you are looking for the window to jump out of.
And so the truth of the matter is we have to create an environment that flips the script that all of a sudden the five senses. And what I told our team, and my team starts with my family, I don't know if you know this, but we started Smile House with my family because they watched me in the profession and I'm in different aspects of it.
And I was very fortunate to have two sons who decided they're gonna go into the family business. My wife's helped me start two companies, ghost Smile and Glow Science. And so she understands branding, marketing, and really the whole profession. So everybody was on the same page. Let's do something different, something transformative.
Something's reinventing. So when you walk into Smile House, you feel like you're walking into a great hotel or a member's club. We all read an amazing book, unreasonable Hospitality, evidenced by the TV show The Bear as he held it up and read it. But 11 Madison and Will Guro wrote that book. Um, really, really set.
All these industries on fire where we think about all of these little details that changes people's, not only their expectations, oh, but oh my God, they're amazing experiences. Unreasonable because it's so far out there, nobody would've even considered it. And that's what we wanted to do. We thought about the patient journey and it's so interesting.
Think about the environments we go into, you know, epigenetics, the environment we put our body in. Well, the visual cues are just like that. So with Will Guidara's book, unreasonable Hospitality, just that experience that goes way beyond anybody's expectations, beyond anything that they would even think would happen in a restaurant. That's what we wanted to happen in, in our clinic. So we look at our smile house on, on, on three legs of the stool, we'll call it.
We look at it. Unreasonable hospitality. We're creating this incredible environment so that it brings everything down, any angst that they might have all of a sudden. Parasympathetic kicks in. Now they're looking around. It's like a whole library with great books to read. They're received. Nobody's behind a desk with their head down in front of a computer, just like a cool hotel or a member's club, and you're.
You are sitting down on these comfy couches and you're just taking it all in. The ceilings are 17 foot high. It feels like a cool kind of warm. The colors are amber, and that sets the stage. It sets the stage for what's about to happen with an aesthetician and jaw release massage that every patient gets as they walk.
Through that area to, let's say our, our tour of the space. We can explain who we are and what we do, but the environment has allowed us to put people's mindset just in the right place.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. You know, it's, it's so tremendous how you're, you're, talking about the treatment around the treatment and that creates just something so magical where it's almost like five years from now, people will say, oh, I'm looking forward to, I have a dental appointment. Oh my God. Yes. Like, it's like a highlight of their week sort of thing. Right?
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: I have to tell you, I just left a few patients and, and, Tara's here who is our aesthetician, and and I have to tell you, it's just on a Friday afternoon to get a stress release jaw massage, and we do extraoral and intraoral and it's just so incredibly calming with the oils that they use. And, you know, we hold, so much stress in into our masseter and our temporalis frontal muscle.
And it just, it just 20 minutes of that, oh my god. It's as good as any spy you can consider going to.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, you know, it's interesting. Before we hopped on the call, uh, you mentioned the relationship between, uh, dentistry or mouth health and sleep. And this is a huge growth area for hotels, and now you're talking about getting people into a parasympathetic state, as well as just any sort of jaw massage that would bring them even deeper into that parasympathetic state. How does mouth health and dentistry relate or potentially positively influence sleep?
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: Yeah, so today because of our technology, we see things we've never seen before. So as we look at these pillars of, of oral health. Which is aesthetics, structure, function, and biology. When you look at those four pillars and this technology ladders up to each one, I could break it down for you, but let me start with sleep.
Structurally, what happens with sleep is that we can't breathe. We can't breathe because we're either breathing through our mouth, not our nose. Our nose was designed for breathing. By breathing through our mouth, we dry out our mouth at, but most importantly is we can't get into deep reparative sleep.
Drying out the mouth doesn't allow saliva as a buffering agent to put the right environment for the good bacteria to thrive. And drying out the mouth doesn't allow the saliva to keep things neutral so you don't demineralize the teeth 'cause it's either demineralizing without saliva or remineralizing with saliva.
So let's go back to sleep. If you're breathing only through your mouth, you can't get into this deep regenerative sleep. If you can't get into deep regenerative sleep, you can't fight the oxidative stresses and the environmental toxins and everything. We put our body on body through during the day. And that's why these sleep trackers are amazing 'cause it allows us to look at Rem sleep, light sleep, and deep sleep.
So anything we can do to get into this deep sleep and get the right amount of sleep, but the quality of the sleep is critically important. So now we look at nasal obstruction, which stops us. From not breathing through the nose forces us to, breathe through the mouth. And then we look at jaw size. The tongue lives in our jaws.
What happened if the tongue cannot move forward when we sleep? 'cause that's a normal posture. That's a myofunctional position. The, the tongue could be up and forward, which is the correct place to be. It almost happens naturally when the tongue lives in. Let's call it like where we would live in. We hope to live in a penthouse, but we don't wanna live in a studio apartment.
It's tight. Those small jaws forces the tongue backwards. Also, myo, functionally the tongue could be in a low position, low tongue posture. Another problem that you can't get your your tongue up and forward. Now, why is that so important? The tongue when it moves forward, opens the airway. So we look now at the circumference of the airway.
Uh, part of sleep disorders is upper airway restricted syndrome. You are so between the nose, the mouth, the jaws, and the airway. Guess what? Us maxillofacial prosthodontist. That's my specialty. I'm a prosthodontist orthodontist. General dentists also who understands sleep. Sleep dentists need to work collaboratively with our sleep doctors, sleep tests to understand are their structural issues.
40 million Americans have sleep problems, except those are the people who know they have a sleep problem. There are so many people, we think almost 80 to 90% of all adults have some form of sleep issue, whether it starts with a little bit of snoring or slight to moderate sleep apnea, but it's sleep disordered breathing, or is it breathing problems that create disordered sleep.
So Roger Price in Australia, who's been studying this for 40 years has an amazing, amazing book, gets it right, so it's breathing disordered sleep. Breathing, disordered sleep, BDS, and not sleep. Disordered breath. And when you think about it, it's right because the structures of our, from the top of the nose to the airway will determine how well we get into this deep sleep and we can regenerate our body, which is really a huge driver for longevity and why we call what we do the Center for Dental Longevity. We believe that the mouth, the health of the mouth and the structures around the mouth will lead to overall health.
Adam Mogelonsky: No, it's, it's, it's tremendous. And you know, to put it in the statistic, like 80 to 90% of adults have some form of either airway obstruction or a uh, breathing related disorder that would tie back to overall mouth and nasal health. Right? It's tremendous. It's scary at the same time, but it also opens doors for you as a trend center, as a dental longevity clinic to say, well, uh, your one clinic right now, right now, uh, is in New York. Um. What are the opportunities for hotels to partner with you so that way when guests are flying in to an, uh, to a city as popular as New York, uh, they, you, the hotel could say, listen, as part of our wellness services, we partnered with Smile house and we, wanna send you over there for a mouth mapping exam.
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: Yeah. Well, you know, we love partnerships and this new technology and what I was describing. I want your listeners to understand this technology. The CT scans, we call 'em CBCT, computerized tomography. We see so much and it's equivalent to about seven dental x-rays. We see things now we've never seen before.
This will be a standard of care in dentistry, at least within the next 10 years. Right now it's some of the specialists. The endodontist root canal specialist, the people placing implants, oral surgeons, and periodontists. But for us, for the last seven years, it's been a standard of care. So instead of taking all these 16 x-rays, which is much more, uh, rads, greater radiation, we're just seeing so much with this new technology. And these are the type of things that are gonna work its way into dentistry and healthcare in general. You know, adoption they say is, takes about 17 years. So it just, it's just the way it is. It's human nature that people could be slow on adoption. And then you have, uh, the, the Canadian word I have to tell you 'cause I'm very friendly with Canadians.
A knucklehead like me. That wants to adopt all this new technology because I know that if we do, and if we start using it, we're gonna figure out what is this all about? How do we improve our health and outcomes? Our health, health outcomes for our patients?
Adam Mogelonsky: And this is all, uh, in your proprietary done to integrate, uh, these scans as well as other tests, um, into one overall score or health risk profile for, for your patients.
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: That's exactly right. We, we roll it all together, it's biomarkers and we have aesthetic biomarkers, structural biomarkers and biological mar biomarkers and functional biomarkers. We, we put these all together. There's about 80 of them, and we look at it from a perspective that anything we could measure is really this biomarker.
The biological ones people understand. We're now looking at inflammatory markers from saliva and we're. Two months away from, based on whether somebody has high risk for some of these inflammatory markers, like MMP eight, Metallo, uh, proteinase, um, that if you, that's high, we then wanna say, Hey, you know what?
You might have inflammation in your body that we need to really check. And so now we're looking at additional biomarkers just with some finger pricks and some of these. Um, smaller machines that at point of care in 20 minutes we can get some answers. This is very exciting. This is called DMI, dental Medical Integration, and I'm working closely with a company called Henry Schein, which is the largest dental medical company, uh, outside of hospitals with, with, uh, David Kotchman from Henry Schein.
And what we're looking to do is to bring this to the profession. So we're testing this in a few offices in the United States to develop these protocols. The company that's testing MMP eight and Salivated Glucose and also pg, the bacteria that is the inflammatory pathogen. The, the Bad Boy is a company called Oral Genome, CEO.
Tina Sa, she's an amazing young dentist. I put together an amazing team of people. I'm, uh, one of their advisors. I'm working closely with them, and that is the type of technology that will absolutely change a profession. Quickly we can detect these things. What that then says, okay, you're at high risk for this.
Let's look deeper. Let's unpack it more. Let's get the root cause and let's get upstream and prevent us from being silly and waiting too much to be a sickness healthcare model, but to get more of a wellness healthcare. model We believe the dental office can be the tip of the spear to get ahead of diagnostics for these systemic inflammatory disease because people go to their dentist more than they go to their primary care physician.
So as dentists could play such an important role in early diagnostics and wellness.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. And uh, it's, it's interesting because dentistry as well has, has always been disconnected, as you said, from medical care. And as we see this integration of. Medicine and hospitality with all these concierge services, longevity clinics, preventative medicine. Now we're adding in this incredible new angle of dental longevity where, uh, where you're bringing in elements of hospitality and then I imagine hospitality will want to bring in elements and partner with, uh, with Intrepid, uh, and futuristic organizations like Smile House in terms of what you're doing. So I mean, It's It's amazing that way.
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: It's exciting. to think about that and, and I love the idea of merging the two because we're doing it on our own. We're not, we're clearly not experts in hospitality, but, you know, dentistry is so nascent and dentistry, you know, there's so much fear around dentistry and angst and, and, and just, you know, just experiential cues that are so negative that if we could just change a little bit of, of the patient's experience, we really can move the needle. And for us, we're really looking to do a lot of things together to change that environment and change the experience. And then people really, then they become open to it.
You said it before, you know it's possible that, oh, I had a great appointment. I'm looking forward to going to my hygienist. I love my team. And they're learning things. You know, you, they learn things that they never really understood before because it was like, you know, okay, yeah, I gotta go, I gotta get my teeth clean.
All right? No, this is part of my longevity, this is part of my health. This I'm doing for me. I wanna do this for me, for my health, right?
Adam Mogelonsky: I mean, I mean, and, uh, you know, the whole idea of looking forward to it, uh, in hospitality, we look forward to our. To our trips to hotels, and this is yet one more thing to look forward to by embedding true hospitality and following a lot of the tenets of, uh, what Will Guidara wrote in, uh, his book on, on his tenure at EMP.
And, it's just amazing that way that, that we can see this crossover and then a potential collaborations, um with between dentistry and hotels and, uh, whether that's structured as a head lease, or as, as we discussed, uh, putting a, putting a dental clinic in a, in a resort down in, uh, down in the Caribbean somewhere. So somebody who may be, you know, they live in New York, uh, as you are. And then, let's say it's, uh, you know, 20 degrees Fahrenheit outside in January and a little bit gloomy, and they say, listen, rather than get my appointment here in Midtown, I'm gonna, uh, I'm gonna fly down to, uh, to The Bahamas or to, uh, Barbados and have my treatment there.
And then you have. All you have the same sort of, um, experience there with, uh, great information transfer and everything. That would be, that's such a future opportunity of, that's completely untapped, completely untapped, and, and it really will, will be so amazing to see.
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: I agree. I agree. I, I think I we're gonna have to explore that one together.
Adam Mogelonsky: Uh, well, I mean, happy to make introductions to make it happen. 'cause I'm a huge believer. and now you, you think about this, so we discussed the parasympathetic and getting, uh, doing any sort of dentistry work in a de-stressing cognitive environment. And there's per, perhaps nowhere more commentative than a resort when you're on vacation. So now imagine you can get a dental appointment where it perhaps is something a little bit more cosmetic. And therefore a longer period of time while you're in a, an incredible tropical, uh, destination like that. So, what would that look like to make that happen? And also let's also talk about some of the cool new, uh, emerging dental, um, dental treatments that are available like enamel regenerative technologies, or keratin building gels something cool like that.
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: How do you know about carrot in building gels?
Adam Mogelonsky: I have.
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: There, there are a number of such interesting technologies coming out. Well, you know, um, peptides and a fantastic researcher named Dominic Lasek started about 20 years ago with regeneration of enamel that then, um, turned into a company called Radon that now is in the profession. Um, and it's very exciting novartis has, has cured on now. And what we're looking at is early incipient lesions. These just when enamel is starting to break down and instead of it preventing it, instead of it moving towards that pathophysiology, that progression and turning demineralization the hardest structure of the human body of tooth into mush, we are regenerating enamel um, with these, with these new peptides. And, uh, it's just the beginning because then you have people and then there was, um, there's a group that, uh, we're working with with the keratin building. So it's funny you should mention that one. Um, out of, out of England, and there's a number of people that are really looking at these preci precision targeted approach to go after.
These pathogens. And also for rebuilding and rebuilding in a way that's, um, fairly inexpensive. The inexpensive part is very exciting because we also have a, a foundation where we take care of people. In these medical and dental missions, and we started in the Lutheran of The Bahamas where people did not have any access to care, no training of, of oral health or all of the habits.
The high performance habits you have to have to keep your mouth healthy, and what are the foods you need to eat and to drink. So modern diet, sugary foods look very acidic drinks. Processed foods, it's a cocktail for, um, both oral health problems and of course that will drive hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.
We went into Eleuthra, um, with the invitation of Lenny Kravitz. He's our business part, our foundation partner, um, our Glow Good foundation and let love rule. And it's great when you have technologies that are gonna be inexpensive that we can help people in these dental deserts because now instead of having to have expensive restorations, it's much less expensive and we could be preventative.
With the children and with the adults, you know, for them with both periodontal disease and decay. So technology and, and breakthroughs are happening. It's a very exciting time in medicine and in dentistry. And I will say that we're finally coming together a little bit. We've had this opportunity to work with these integrated medicine groups and from the foundation we brought doctors and dentists and nurse practitioners and hygienists together all under one roof.
And for me, that was the, the inflection point that I said, we can do this. So I have a clinic uptown in New York for 35 years, and that was really the genesis of why we decided to open up Smile House downtown in Tribeca. And so I have to thank the, the fact that we started that foundation mission and the invitation by Lenny and we started this foundation.
We started in East Africa, but by going there. And seeing what happens when these professions work together, these disciplines was, is absolutely groundbreaking. And that was the genesis of Smile House, which has taken us down these very interesting roads.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, uh, you know, you mentioned something in the beginning there about, um, dental health has a causative effect with cardiac and other circulatory diseases. Am I correct in using a strong word as causative?
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's 22 years later. Moise, Devereaux, uh, invest Studies started 20 something years ago. And what did they test? They looked at P Gingivalis, pg, the pathogenic bacteria, number one, bad boy. There's seven of them, and they found it in the car. In the intermediate of cardiovascular patients. Then they started doing more studies, and what they found was that as a patient who has cardiovascular disease and periodontal disease, as they lowered periodontal disease, cardiovascular disease measured by inflammatory markers and the inflammation in the arteries goes down. That was cardiovascular disease, and that's been 20 years of invest studies with Devereux Group. Then you can look at the same thing with rheumatoid arthritis and rheumatoid Factor done by Dana Orange and Rockefeller University. Then you could look at Andrea ER's group that started and saw that that BG ends up, or the ging pains, the proteases of pg. In other words, the breakdown byproducts of these bacteria from the mouth, these bacteria, the PG lives in the mouth. What is it doing in the amyloid plaque of Alzheimer's patients? And what does that mean? That means you're getting inflammation. How did they get there? And now they've done these studies and they found out it goes through the cerebral spinal fluid, so circulatory system through the CSF, and it works its way into the brain.
They find it in interstitial cells of leaky gut, and that's when the cells, the, the membranes, they, they separate in the, in leaky gut, and you're getting these toxins from the gut into the body. Well, guess what? They found PG there. What's it doing there? And so it became clear that when you have chronic inflammation in the mouth.
Think about leaky gut. It's leaking. We have leaky gums. So in my new book I got coming out in a few months, we talk about these leaky gums because it's easy to think about the gum next to the tooth. The endotoxins of the bacteria cause inflammation like a balloon. The wall thins and thins and thins 'cause it blows up from the inflammation, the blood flow. And now you have permeability. Permeability, meaning these endotoxins works its way into the superhighway we call the circulatory system. Where does it end up and ends up in all these different organs? So this, this is the study of about over 20 years that shows this direct correlation.
Once you understand that, you say, okay, what do I have to do to prevent it? And that's where the dental profession and the hygienists are phenomenal at, to teach people great techniques, to teach them the tools, the order by which you use these oral health tools. You gotta have game. So you gotta have an oral health game just like, uh just like a backhand. You gotta practice and you gotta have a coach. And the hygienist is the rock star of the dental practice. They're amazing. And they're the ones who are the coaches and they make, they spend the time and make sure that we're doing a great job watching out for the mechanical removal of plaque from our mouth, not allowing it to accrue, not allowing our body that was designed to protect us, our immune risk response to work against us with chronic inflammation and for these bacterial byproducts to work its way in in the other areas of the body.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, you, you know, to tie this back to hospitality industry, any luxury hotel owner or GM or, or CEO and any director of spa or wellness is gonna get it. They're gonna immediately go, I know exactly what you mean. This is the future. We, we need to be doing more here and we can be doing more. So what would you say to any Hotelier in terms of how they can get involved in the dental longevity space?
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: You know, it's all about the environment,
right? We talked about parasympathetic mode. Well, that's already established um, you, you understand this so well. That the partnerships work well when everybody brings their superpowers to the table, the hotel has set up this beautiful, incredible environment.
So what they're saying is, let's invite in an integrative approach, uh, an approach where people. You can get your teeth whitened, you can get your mouth healthy, and you could learn about how your mouth impacts your overall health. And then of course you can have, you know, your, your medical colleagues there also.
But by working together, whether it's you're solving sleep issues or bruxism or grinding your teeth, or you know, your gums are bleeding when you're brushing and you just don't have that great oral health game, um, the, this longevity is gonna happen, but, so it'll happen as, as partnerships, you know, it's like the old days when, um, you know, if I have to go back to one of my first companies, but I was a big observer where the incredible beauty stores of Sephora opened up a store within a store and they went into JC Penney. JC Penney was run by an amazing CEO called Michael Ulman. Sephora was run by David Luciano, the amazing CEO of of, of Sephora at that time. And so that store within a store concept. Worked so well because Sephora didn't have to go build out all the CapEx of a whole store.
JC Penney had it set up already. It's the same type of thing, but even greater because you have this incredible environment with the hotels. So inviting in longevity thinking whether it's the physicians, whether it's the dental specialist. it is fairly brilliant because everybody's, they're ready for that.
And the people who go into hotels, they're interested in that. They're interested in in, in longevity, for sure.
Adam Mogelonsky: Uh, well, one other aspect of wellness and longevity that they're interested in is this submergence of wellness circuits or multimodal wellness journeys where you're taking a guest from, uh, a massage into a red light. Therapy, uh, light down bed into a cryo, back into an infrared sauna, and then, um, you know, some time by the pool with some hot tea. And then, um, could you ever see a point where dental longevity fits into that circuit and multimodal design? Um, you know, you mentioned the, I guess the hypoglossal and jaw massages. That's, that's something that could be integrated with a traditional massage as well.
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: A hundred percent. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, think about you just, maybe you got about 10, 12 touchpoints, maybe touchpoint four, seven, and nine becomes oral health. You know, we, we know the pillars of longevity, right? It's all about motion and movement. It's all about nutrition. It's all about sleep, deep sleep.
And then it's also about mindset. So you, they've created this great environment for stress release and mindset. Well, I always say the fifth pillar is oral health. So I would work into all of those great multimodal steps where if you're having red light therapy, okay, at the same time, we're gonna have stress release jaw massage.
At the same time we're gonna do diagnostics and we're gonna go after sleep. I have to say that the dental specialists and our, our sleep dentists are, are really the best at diagnosing sleep issues today. And from a therapeutic treatment standpoint, we really are doing it the best 'cause we have so many options besides just.
What the medical profession has today, which is A-C-P-A-P. But you need, we need the medical colleagues, the dental colleagues to work together. So I see it work in beautifully. It's just figuring out that patient journey and how to do it in a way that's, you know, super positive but super educational at the, same time.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, the, the the possibilities are endless and you, you tied it right back to those myofunctional exercises or, uh. Laro pharyngeal exercises or for the layman's term, I guess just tongue and jaw exercises, right, to help with sleep and your mouth posture while you're sleeping and you think, uh, if you have a dental longevity clinic in a hotel like New York or London, somewhere like that, somebody flies in, they get a a treatment at the dental clinic as well as an education system in a great inviting place. And then they go ho, they go to sleep and they may have had some jet lag or something like that because they're flying and they're able to better recover and then go off and make a good presentation the next day because they got their sleep score was 85 instead of 45 something like that. Right?
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: Right, exactly. Yeah. And then you would have nurse practitioners with IVs and in the IV you, you would. You know, you're traveling, you get dehydrated. Now you're hydrating. Maybe you have glutathione, which is a scavenger, and you're just adding in, you know, your B vitamins and all, and we can just kind of name it. And so that's one piece of that puzzle where you're bringing that person into a tremendous state of health as you hit all those touch points as you hit it. So it's very, it's very 360. very exciting, very comprehensive.
Adam Mogelonsky: Uh, and there's been an, an, an incredibly impactful and comprehensive, um, episode and just discussion to learn about the importance of dental health and how it can integrate and is integrating with hospitality. Um, so Dr. Levine, uh, to close out is, is there anything else important that we haven't touched on that you'd like to mention?
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: I'm, I'm really excited about. This, and I mentioned it before, but I'm, I'm very excited about the dental profession and the medical profession working closely together. That will happen in a very big way when medical schools. Dental schools are both teaching what's called oral systemic health. What is oral systemic health?
It's how the mouth impacts the body and vice versa. Unfortunately, there is no dental school or medical school that's teaching any of that. There's a couple of schools in dentistry that have some classes. It's just like the story when I, I was in medical school for the first two years, and at Boston, you then went over to dental school and then I did a postgraduate.
For three years for prosthodontics. But you know, in medical school, back in the day, there was zero on nutrition. Today there's only 52% of medical schools teaching nutrition today. One of the most important, important pillars.
Tell me, well, we can then look at dentistry and dentistry. And not teaching nutrition and medicine is as bad as not teaching oral systemic health in dental schools.
And I'm involved in, in dental education, um, full professor of NYU ran, I ran a program for decades. This is one of the things that I'm singing and I'm gonna be looking to push that into NYU. This oral systemic health is so critically important because of all the things we're talking about. So, you know, I would say to the people listening.
Get educated, learn how important oral health is to your overall health and demand from your dentist. A high level of understanding. Are they doing oral cancer examinations? Are they doing salivary diagnostics? Are they looking at your microbiome? Do they have a CT scan and understand how to read it? Push them to do that because the consumer patient will push the professional outta their comfort zone because professionals get a little too comfy.
, I'm an old lacrosse player. I coached lacrosse for 20 years. Um, and I, I like pushing people out their comfort zone. It's, it's part of, as you know, Adam, uh, being an athlete, that's what a coach did for us. That's what we wanna do for people. So push 'em outta your, their comfort zone and give 'em a nudge.
And make, make them find out what is the best technology I need to have and how do I continue to learn over, over time in my career.
Adam Mogelonsky: Uh, I mean, and if you look at it itself, the studies on expanding your own comfort zone, you're testing your own boundaries is incredibly important for longevity as well. Um, working on a completely different pathway than oral health, but nevertheless, the end goal of, um, having a sound mind and living, living with, uh, wellbeing and health span, it is connected in that way.
So, um, I would explore everyone to look at what SMILE House is doing in. Tribeca in New York and uh, and then look at it and go, well, this whole idea of oral health and dental longevity is such a underexplored area, and yet it's so vital for where we're heading as a society over the next 20 years. Dr. Levine. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been fantastic, uh, to learn about what you're doing and, um, uh, it's, it's
incredible, uh, what you've built and what you are gonna continue to build, uh, as people catch onto this trend and and wanna be a part of.
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: Thank you, Adam. I appreciate it. As you know. you know. I just say, we're just getting started. Let's, let's go, let's go. We're just getting started. I'm a lucky guy. I got my two sons along the ride with me and my wife, so we're having fun.
Adam Mogelonsky: Dr. Levine. thank you.
Dr. Jonathan B. Levine: Thank you, Adam.