Recording:
Extraordinary.
Innovative.
Integrity.
Honest.
Courageous.
Curious.
Thoughtful.
Brave.
Unafraid.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
There is a place where technology and art meet, where work and play are one and the same. When the threads of curiosity are pulled in this place, the spark of innovation ripples across industries. Those who make this place their home are giants, titans, who pursue creative passion while leaving their mark.
Recording:
Creative.
Flexible.
Brilliant.
Clever.
Confident.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
They are courageous thought leaders set on changing the practice of dentistry and their corner of the world. More than the sum of their parts we deconstruct the traits that bind these uncommon innovators.
Recording:
Humble.
Daring.
Disciplined.
Playful.
Principled.
Spontaneous.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
To discover what makes them Contrary to Ordinary, where we explore the extraordinary.
Hi there. I'm Dr. Kim Kutsch, host and founder at CariFree. I'm fascinated by what makes the paradigm shifters, world shakers and art makers tick. Let's embark on a journey. Extraordinary is a place where ordinary people choose to exist. Together we will trek the peaks of possibility, illuminate the depths of resilience, and navigate the boundless landscape of innovation to discover how some of the most innovative dentists and thought leaders unlock their potential and became extraordinary. On this season of Contrary to Ordinary, we'll continue to explore the motivation lives and character of the innovators who see limitless potential around them. In this episode, we're going to head back to dentistry and talk to someone I really admire. But before I start, I'd like to ask you a question. What do Albert Einstein, Coco Chanel and Thomas Edison have in common? During their studies, they were all seen as difficult students.
They looked at the rigid systems that they were part of and rejected them. Now we see them as innovators and pioneers whose achievements ring through history. Questioning education paradigms is something that today's guest, Dr. Graeme Milicich is all too familiar with. He's practiced dentistry for over 40 years and began challenging existing practices during his time in dental school. Today, Graeme is known around the world for his pioneering work in minimally invasive dentistry. He's an expert in the fields of minimal intervention, carries risk assessment and management of minimal intervention, restorative techniques. He's a diplomat and founding board member of the World Congress of Minimally Invasive Dentistry, the WCMID. He's also a fellow master and board member of the World Clinical Laser Institute and a founding board member and honorary lifetime member of the New Zealand Institute of Minimal Intervention Dentistry. I had the pleasure of interviewing Graeme in his native New Zealand and we began our conversation back where it all began, his childhood.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
My father had a concrete factory, and so when we were in our early teens, we got put to work in that place and that was just hard labor. And one day I was having a chat with my dad and he said, "You've got two choices. You can earn money with your back or you can earn it with your brain. I'm just trying to prove to you that earning it with your back's really, really hard." I was very artistic as a kid. We were building lots of model planes and boats and model yachts and flying them all and carrying on, and so getting into dentistry, which was just a little bit more detail, it was just an extension of what I was already doing and loving.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And you were pretty curious as a kid as well.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Oh, very much so, yeah. Got given chemistry sets as a youngster. I was lucky we didn't burn the house down, but had a ball playing around with all that sort of stuff as well. Yeah, I was just inquisitive. A little task my dad pointed me at, he wanted some little pluggers to take out lawn plugs for Mercury Bay weed, and so I designed and built two of them. At this stage, I would've been about 13 or 14 and I'd already learned how to weld and use all the heavy tools and equipment at the concrete factory, so he just put me to work and it was fun.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So that was one of your favorite things to do as a kid was kind of just build things and create things. You would look at a problem and go, oh, I've got an idea.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
How do I solve that? Right. We were in our very early teens, we're already rebuilding car motors and stuff, and so it was always mechanically inclined.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So did little six year old Graeme want to be a dentist or when did the whole dentistry thing come into your life?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
I got to the point I had to make a decision. I was going to university and what am I going to do with it? I knew I didn't want to work in the concrete factory. I didn't want to be in an office on my own. I wanted to be with people and I looked at medicine and in New Zealand here, you could see it coming. The government was going to own all of the doctors and were going to dictate how you lived your life basically. Whereas in New Zealand, dentistry is totally private. The government has nothing to do with this, basically apart from treating school children. So I opted for that, not quite knowing what I was getting into, but because I've got a very strong artistic bent as well. It was actually a really, really good fit with dentistry because you could express your artistic side with the quality of work you were doing.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Looking at dentists and having been a dentist, I think dentists are all artists at heart, right?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
There's a great deal of, when we talk about the art and science of dentistry, there's truly an art there. There's an art form. So you were curious as a child, you were creative, you were a visionary, and you would see things and start to build and create stuff that describe you pretty well?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Whenever new technology came along, I would look very, very, very, very closely at it. I was minimally invasive dentist right from the day I graduated. In fact, one of the companies kept complaining because I kept ordering these cork around carbide, slow speed bursts. They had a pinhead on the end of, and I ordered some once and I says, "Oh, what's happened to my order?" They said, "Oh, we've got to indent them. You're the only dentist in New Zealand that uses these." And this was back in the seventies. And so I was constantly hunting for technology that would let me do quality, minimally invasive work, and it really wasn't until I ran into one of my earlier mentors, Tim Rainey and air abrasion that the moment I saw it was like they've solved my problem. That was one of the real moments. There was a dentist, Stuart Rosenberg came out to New Zealand and he was talking about it and you were out talking about it and it was, oh man, I found people to follow.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Well, you found people that thought like you did.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
And suddenly it was like you could have a conversation and then they weren't looking at you like you had two heads.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So you mentioned Tim Rainey. Any other mentors that have had kind of a profound influence on you and?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Yeah. Well, I'm sitting opposite one of my best mentors. Thank you very much.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Well, thank you very much Graeme for that compliment.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
I did a lot of hard tissue laser research and I couldn't find answers for most of the questions I had, and so I went back into all the old dental textbooks and there was this professor, Jeff Osborne kept coming up in all of these old anatomical textbooks, and so I hunted him down on the internet and he was working at Alberta, Canada as a professor there. So I contacted and he says, "Well, who are you?" And I explained it, and then I sent him some of my SEM images and he was going, "Oh my God." I said, I want you to teach me what I'm looking at here because I don't understand it. That was a fascinating journey with that gentleman. And you find people that have this knowledge base are really kind and sharing and all they want to do is help. And all of my mentors have just been helpful people. Once I got a knowledge base, it was really cool being able to then share that with other people.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And mentor other people as well.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
And mentor other people. So I was really enjoying working with the younger graduates, getting them up to speed on what you got taught. A dental school actually isn't the whole story.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Graeme was very lucky to have generous mentors who weren't driven by money or fame. They were motivated by something more. Maybe it was the need to help people or to contribute positively to society. I suppose at the end of your life, you can't take the knowledge that you've gained with you. All you can do is pass it on. Moving on. I'd love to know what motivated Graeme at the start of his career.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
I just loved dentistry. It was something I really, really enjoyed and I just wanted to share that with as many people as possible, and I'd come to some crazy conclusions. This isn't working. That's when my brain kicked into gear and I started hunting around looking for answers, and there weren't a lot of answers out there before I even started clinical dentistry. I could see stuff that doesn't make sense to me, and no one else seemed to be questioning it. That was the frustrating thing. No one was saying, is there another way of doing this? And that's where I got into trouble.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So what do you think makes you the way you are Graeme? I mean, were you born that way or, I mean, it's something that's innate to Graeme Milicich such as how God wired you or was it something that you learned? Did you learn it from your father or that inquisitive, creative, visionary nature that you have? Do you have any idea where it came from?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
No, I don't. So I think I must have been born with it and my brother's the same. When you look at it from that perspective, there is probably a family overlay from how mom and dad worked with us and dealt with us and taught us what was good and what was bad, what was right, what was wrong, and we were allowed to question, which makes a big difference. If someone shuts down a question, well, eventually people will stop asking the questions. We never felt like that in our family. You could ask the questions and then if someone didn't have an answer, then we worked out how to find the answer.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
The more people I speak to, the more I realized that being extraordinary originates somewhere different for everyone. It's the age-old question of nature versus nurture. I think it's probably a little of both. One of Graeme's extraordinary qualities is his approach to time management. He seems to have it down to a fine art. How does he manage to fit it all in?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
A lot of my friends would say, where do you find time? I was running a full-time practice and I was doing laboratory research on electron microscopes, on hard tissue lasers and stuff, and they said, where on earth do you find the time to do all this stuff? And I said, "Oh, you just don't look at the TV." There's a heap of the day when you get home. You can do a whole bunch of other stuff without just sitting down and blobbing out and wasting your day.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
That's one other trait that I find common too in extraordinary people is that they're very effective at how they organize their time, how they prioritize it. They find a way to get things done without being the workaholic type A that's just at the grindstone day and night, but they actually are able to accomplish and get things done like that. And that's not normal, right?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Well, it felt pretty normal to me. It just seemed normal.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
I'm sitting here, Graeme listening to you and I'm thinking like, okay, you're a general practicing dentist, and then in your free time you are doing research and SEM work on hard tissue lasers, and I know you've done a lot of work with a lot of other technologies and stuff, and I'm sitting here thinking like, you are not normal. That's not, the average dentist doesn't do that kind of stuff. And so I can understand your colleagues looking at you and going like, number one, what are you doing? And number two, are you doing that? And three, how do you ever possibly have time to do all that stuff and get all that done?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
And it is just efficiency, pretty much. It's like juggling balls. How many could you get up in the air and how long can you keep them there for? Every now and then I'd suddenly hang on, this is just going to get a little bit silly. Let's back off a little bit, leave this bit alone for a while and get some sanity back in my life.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And that's a really good topic you bring up too. I think that the concept of work life balance is something that I don't know that anybody has a good handle on that.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Yeah. It's very easy to lose focus of what you need to be doing to keep a balanced life when you're buried in the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day grind. I made a point that the weekends were free. I never, ever, ever attacked the weekends with any of my workload. That was family time. We were out skiing and went surfing and fishing and hiking and doing all the other stuff. I mean, you've got to not lose track of your children because you're just bogged down and work.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
If you're just fully present wherever you are at that moment. If you're fully present for your family or you're fully present at work and sometimes you have more things that you have to get accomplished at work, you have demands there. Sometimes you have demands that your family really need your time and attention. And I think being able to juggle and just find what I would call appropriate balance.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Yeah, it's never going to be perfect. That was something I struggle with very early on in dentistry. I was trying to do perfect dentistry and this patient still comes to mind, sat down in the chair, he had the ugliest set of molar amalgams that you've ever seen, hangovers everywhere. It was a mess. And I looked up and I said, "I can in fact do better than that." So whipped out, lucky I only started on one tooth. Normally I would have that tooth restored in about 20 minutes, an hour later what I'd finished putting back in there looked worse than what I'd taken out because he was just impossible to work on. And once I realized that, I stopped mentally criticizing colleagues' work, I was doing that to myself. I was saying, "Oh, that's a crap job." And suddenly I realized, hey, I can do exactly the same as that and I'm doing my best.
That was a very humbling moment for me. The hardest thing of all is learning how to say no to some requests. But I remember over the years I was a continuing education junkie. We had to do something like over four years or three years, we had to do 80 hours and I was putting in 400 or 500 hours in a year. But I got very careful at what I went to because after a little while I started realizing someone won't show me how they got as good as they are because they're up there showing you their beautiful work. Show me your mistakes because I'm going to be making those, show them to me so I can avoid them. That was one of the things I used to say to my kids, you haven't got enough time to make all of the mistakes that you need to make, learn from other people's mistakes. You haven't got the time to do it all yourself.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
You brought up the point. You were doing a lot of CE. Would you consider yourself a lifelong student, Graeme?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Oh yeah. Still. Even now.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
What kind of things are you studying today?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
I still keep poking around in dentistry. I just can't help myself.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
You can't let it go.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Just can't let it go. Even though I was forced into retirement through a serious back injury six years ago, that was so traumatic because suddenly my life was cut in half. And yeah, there's a lot of research I'd quite like to still be doing, but I just haven't got access to the clinical phase anymore, which is really disappointing. We've replaced it with other stuff. We now spend hours and hours and hours on our mountain bikes. And I mean part of all of that exercise stuff is the mental health side of it, because dentistry is actually is very easy to get yourself down a little dark rabbit, a black hole in dentistry if things aren't going well at your practice or you're struggling to cope with stuff. And keeping a mental equilibrium is really, really important in the industry.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
I think it's really important for us to keep our eye on what's important in life, but also I know just how important it's to be outside and to keep your body moving. That seems to be really important in mental health, I think for all of us.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
And dentistry is the absolute opposite. You're sitting there stacked, doing micro movements, destroying your body.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Not being able to do what we love anymore is tough. Shifting focus and realigning ourselves takes time. It's not about getting over it. We gradually just move to a place a little closer to acceptance every day. As Graeme reflects on his career, I wonder what does he see as his proudest achievement?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Probably the thing I'm proudest of is this concept that we started teaching several years ago on the compression dome concept and how it completely changed adhesive restorative dentistry. It just tipped it on its head. Suddenly we were trying to teach people that you should never ever prep a full crown prep ever again. There is no need to.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
I want to talk about that in a second. Graeme, I'm want to talk about the compression dome listening to you. There's so much joy in your voice as you talk about dentistry. It's palpable. I mean, I can feel it. Did you ever feel like you had a job?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
It never felt like I was going to a job. I was going to have fun and play. It was the patient interaction that was always so rewarding when we started out with our Cari's management program, when we started working with you guys and brought that back to New Zealand and started incorporating into my practice. And then you get a patient that walks through the door after they've been on it for a couple of years, and I can remember this day she came, the first thing she did before you even said hello was gave me a big hug. I says, "Oh, what's that for?" She said, "You know what? The last three years since you've shown me how to care for my mouth properly, she said, I've gone from spending a thousand dollars each year to spending nothing." She said, "Thank you."
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah, that feels good. It does.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
I mean, that was an actual fact. That was the reward for me for dentistry is the patient feedback, how grateful they were for what we were doing for them.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So you really sincerely what drives you is just helping people.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Yeah. That was pretty much.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
It was never about money or fame or?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Well, with regards to money, money was never the driver though that happened as I was mentoring the young bucks and women and men as they came through, trying to point out that if you get really good at what you do and look after the people because patients don't care what they want to know that you care. And when you get the hang of that, you will never run out of work. And if you understand how we'll teach you how to do the business side of things, the money is actually, it just happens. And that's what happened at my practice. I never had goals or targets. I just did the very best I could do all the time and the money happened.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
But I know that you published some of the earliest work on the DIAGNOdent.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
There was an article I wrote for the New Zealand Dental Journal. I'd had the DIAGNOdent for about six months. There was nothing really in the literature that taught you even how to use it properly, let alone what it was telling you. I did an enormous amount of research because at that point. I was using micro abrasion and operating microscope so I could record stuff at 15 times magnification. And when you showed people this stuff, they really almost didn't believe you. And the paper I wrote for the New Zealand Dental Journal, they came back with six points that they wanted me to take out, which meant the article was then just a piece of toilet paper. It was just a waste of time.
My reply back to them was twice the volume of the paper I'd written just to get these six points kept in. Luckily, they kept them in and they published the paper. And then the crazy thing is from there I started building an education CD on how to use the DIAGNOdent, which KaVo then picked up and they used for the next, I don't know, 10, 15 years, it might still even be available because the information in there has not gone out of date. It's just pure observation, clinical observation tied to what the DIAGNOdent was telling us. And then we just started to correlate it. And I made this big CD and it's been out there since '96, I think it was.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
One of the things I've identified is innovators, disruptors like yourself kind of end up walking this fine line between being a visionary and being a heretic. One of the things that when you try and change existing paradigms and you're leading that process, you become the target. So you end up with challenges that you have, but then you also end up with a lot of criticism and your best term, arrows in your back.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
There is a phrase I use when I'm lecturing. When I first started with micro abrasion and the DIAGNOdent, yeah, I had that many arrows in my back from my local colleagues because they didn't understand what I was doing. Eventually I made the offer and they accepted it that I did a full day lecture to our branch and they pretty much all came along and I took along my operating microscope, air abrasion system, and right at the very end, I'd kept two molars that we'd extracted, that looked perfect. I put the DIAGNOdent on them, and these were both bombs. And I handed it around 120 dentists with the probes, and it came back 120 dentists agreed. These were decay-free teeth, heart and mouth. I turned on the operating microscope and said, here we have this 10 foot tooth up on the projector as I'm opening it up live. And they were bombs, and everyone in the room went, "Oh my God, look at that." And I said, "This is what we're missing with our diagnostic tools that we've got at the moment. Don't work at this level."
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So how do you deal with those challenges, Graeme?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
When I do my lecturing and teaching, the first probably two hours, I'm destroying dentistry. I'm tearing it to pieces, showing all of the things that we're doing wrong, why the teeth are fracturing. But if you do that, you can't stop at that point because then you do have all the arrows in your back. So I spend the next six hours giving better options and showing people what's available and how we can use our modern adhesive technology and stuff. And if you give them a logical alternative, some people will go back and run with it. Others will sweep it under the carpet because it's too hard to assimilate. But I try to make it as simple as possible, so I keep it at a conversational level. There was a university in the States I got invited to because I was on a CAD camp forum teaching this compression dome concept and the almost flat top crown, not quite.
And I did this presentation because one of the professors was on this forum and he's seeing what I was doing, could you please come and teach us at the school? And I get an email about three weeks later and say, and the dean had been sitting in on it, and they said, "We've completely revised our restorative program. We no longer teach full crown preps as the first option. The first option now is a CAD/CAM onlay." And so that was probably one of the nicest moments in my life. I changed the school.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And changing the school, you change-
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Everyone that goes through it now has been shown a new way.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Albert Einstein once said, "If you can't explain it simply, then you don't understand it well enough." Graeme helped his students learn by visualizing things, breaking it down into smaller chunks. That's his legacy, passed on to the next generation. Graeme has experienced lots of success over the years, but is there anything in his career that he regrets?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
I could have built a bigger practice. I could have built an empire and all that sort of stuff, but that wasn't my forte. Managing a big team of people, because I'm a bit of a wussy, I tend to see the best in people. And we had a few incidents where we had staff that were an issue because I accepted them at face value and thought that they thought like I did. And then you discovered a lot of people don't think like you do, and then you can run into some hiccups there.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So you're a trusting and optimistic individual, right? Graeme, I think that's an admirable trait. So I wouldn't describe that as a wussy, I would say.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
No. But I got burnt by, I trust patients would say sometimes. And I got burnt because they didn't follow through on what they promised and all that sort of stuff. But I always took people at face value. Don't judge people.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
What kind of goals do you have for the rest of your life, Graeme? I mean things that-
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Just to keep my health going so I can just to keep enjoying what we're doing as much as anything. And the little bit of teaching I can help with still, but that's getting more difficult as time goes by because I've lost clinical contact.
What sort of stuck with the people that were looking at my lectures was I was showing only my work and I was showing my mistakes as well as the successes and why I made the decisions I did. Now that I can't generate any more of that sort of imaging, it's a little bit frustrating now. It's just the old stuff from six years ago. But do you know what? If I'd started this journey 30 years ago on the compression dome, it wouldn't have changed. It still would be exactly what I'm teaching now because it's basic mother nature's made all the rules and it's just basic engineering. The Romans worked it all out 2000 years ago, how to build a compression dome. And it survives every earthquake that comes through Rome. And it's still the Coliseum or the Pantheon still there. They knew how to do it. And we worked out, once we got a high speed drill and diamond bits, we worked out how to destroy it in a couple of seconds.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah. Unwittingly.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Yeah, not knowing. We weren't doing it deliberately, we just did it out of the lack of information and materials that were driving us to do things that teeth didn't like. The amalgam cavity is not designed to go in a tooth.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So who inspires you the most at the moment?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Once again, several of my mentors, you included, and Ray Bertolotti. I look back, someone that didn't mentor me but I followed very closely was Pascal Magne. And I can remember a comment he made when I was sort of struggling with all of what I was doing and trying to find the science to support what I was doing. And he says, "Sometimes it's not the science, it's just common sense." And that's how it's always felt to me. I look at this stuff and go, this is just common sense. It's logical. Why can't people see it? And that was my frustration rather than anything else.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And common sense today seems to be pretty uncommon.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Well, no. There's lots of people with it, but it's just they've got common sense somewhere else. And that's just where my common sense locked in.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
I mean, science begins in observation. But not everybody sees it. They look at it and don't know what they're looking at, and so they don't see it. Would you agree with that?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Oh yes, very much. That was sort of what was happening a lot with my laser research. I'd sort of worked out what was going on with teeth when you were using an Erbium laser on them. And I was taking it back to the company that I was doing the research for and saying, why do you think this looks like that? And they, "I don't know", they hadn't worked out what the issue was. It wasn't a problem. It was just physics and you can't change physics. And once I explained it to them, they went, "Oh yeah, that makes sense." Yeah. And so it was funny. I could remember a meeting I was having and I was trying to explain something and they had a new physicist there and he said, "Oh, hang on, I see what this guy does. He's already worked it out. Now he's doing the backwards research to prove what he's already worked out in his head." That's pretty much how I've always been.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So you looked at something and then worked back to try and see?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Yeah, I looked at it knowing what was going on, worked out what had happened. Now how do I prove this scientifically? So that's when I got about 4,000 SEM images of lased teeth now.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
4,000. Wow. What do you think the secret to happiness is, Graeme?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Oh, we're always searching for it. I don't know if I've totally ever found it. I think family and a happy relationship are probably the most important things in my life. And you realize as you get older, I mean your friendships, your friends, that's part of it as well. But I think the core is family relationships and because in the end, when you reach the end, there's probably just your family left.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
I think that's the beauty of life. Everybody gets to make their own definition of what happiness is for them, what success looks like for them. Everybody gets to define that their own life and pursue that.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
And then just to be able to get out, enjoy life and do have fun, go traveling.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
I think we often look for happiness in great deeds and career success, but ultimately it's love family and our friends who are the key to a good life. Graeme now speaks internationally about minimum and invasive dentistry, but he wasn't always so confident in his communication abilities.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Once I got to the point where I could start teaching this whole minimally invasive concept, which really was fired up by air abrasion the DIAGNOdent, I couldn't talk to two people. I was petrified. And I thought, you know what? I had such a passion about this that I thought, I've just got to suck this up and learn how to do it. And I was very lucky. I had a very supportive local branch. I lectured to them several times for want of a better description, cutting my teeth on lectured, speaking to slides and stuff. And I was lucky I started once PowerPoint was around so I didn't have to fluff around with carousels. I don't think I would've done it otherwise. And that was the start of my lecturing journey. And I just persisted and persevered, read how to build lectures without it putting everyone to sleep.
And that's where I learned that humor, I mean with what I was doing, because it was so challenging, we were breaking down paradigms. And when you start to do that, people start to put up a wall. And as you're doing this, particularly the first part of my lecture, when you're doing it, you actually start to see people starting to shut down. And I then learned, this is where you've got to use humor. And so I started injecting a lot of humor, funny videos and all sorts of stuff into my lectures because as soon as you got the audience laughing, they opened up and then you had another 15 minutes or so that you could sort of hit them with some more nasty stuff from want of a better description.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
More challenging things.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
The stuff that was challenging that people would say, "Nah, nah, I don't agree with you." But once we closed that argument and finished off with something funny again, they were very receptive then to the, okay, this is where we're going now. And at the end of it all is the most common feedback I had was, one of the best feedbacks I had from a lecture feedback was the guy just wrote one word on his thing. He just put down "epiphany".
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Wow. The light went on for him.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
He saw it.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. And he used humor. And you've got a great sense of humor, Graeme, I have to tell you.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
It gets me in trouble.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
But you have a great sense of humor. And I think that's another trait I think about extraordinary people is they don't take themselves too seriously. They allow themselves to be human. They tend to be very humble, and they also have a great sense of humor about things. They're able to laugh at things and laugh at themselves and-
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
That's critical. You have to be able to laugh at yourself because otherwise life just gets far too serious.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And not being afraid to make mistakes, being able to venture out and go, "Well, that didn't work. I tried this. And so that was the wrong approach. I'm going to", rather than just shut down and quit. They go, "Okay, well that didn't work, but let's try this over here." What are two of the most important values to you?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Love and honesty.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
I get that totally. Your love for other people and honesty. So you're a truth teller. You're a truth seeker. That's integrity.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
If you remain true to yourself and you're honest with what you're telling people, they might not agree with you, you've got to accept that you cannot have everyone agree with you, that's a human nature. But as long as you're honest, believe in yourself, you're honest to yourself and all of those around you, that's the best you can do. There's a young guy I mentored, and he right from the day he got out of dental school. He was in a practice that was doing what we were teaching and he was just a sponge. He absolutely flew with it. He understood it. And the cool thing now is he is now mentoring people, which is, I mean now that makes me feel really good because someone that's grasped it to the depth that he's comfortable teaching it now, that's fantastic in my mind.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah. That's awesome. That's got to feel good, Graeme. So let me ask you a couple just last questions and we're going to close here. What's one thing about you that you don't think most people know?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
I got a sweet tooth. I like chocolate. One thing I'll never be is an anorexic. One thing. Oh yes. I don't know. I don't think I've even got any secrets from myself.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
You kind of live openly, I mean, kind of what you see is what you get.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Yeah. Pretty much.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
You're kind of just, "Here I am, this is me. Love me, or leave me."
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Yep. That's pretty much how I've operated all my life. This is me. I'm not going to change myself. Just because your perception is don't like this trait about me. Those have all been beaten out of me by the family already.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah. No man's a prophet in his own home. Your kids are like, "Hey, yeah, I don't care. Whatever. Go take out the garbage dad." Or "Dad do this or dad do that." Or your wife looks it and yeah, it's pretty funny. And that keeps us humble and human, I think. I think that's a good thing.
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
You have to be very, very careful when you do understand that you've got a knowledge base that's sort of, I mean, it's in a tiny little area, but you have a knowledge base that's different from most to not get full of yourself over it.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yep. So Graeme, in closing here, anything else you want to add in this? We've thank you so much. We've had an amazing conversation here. You've shared all your thoughts and ideas about extraordinary people. Anything else you want to add?
Dr. Graeme Milicich:
Well, yes, because my goal has been to get this whole minimal of intervention compression dome concept out there. If you've listened to this and you don't know what the heck we're going on about, get online and look it up. Because there's a heap of stuff out there now, and there's some very, very good teachers out there that are advancing this whole cause. There's big organizations in America, in Europe, there's a whole lot of organizations out that are really, really pushing minimal intervention dentistry. And I just implore all of my colleagues go out, find out about it and don't discard it because this is where dentistry's going, whether you want it to or not. So you're either on the train or it's left the station.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Well, thank you so much Graeme Milicich for spending this time with us here today exploring the extraordinary. And thank you all for tuning in and listening with us. And if you do one thing today, let it be extraordinary.
I think everyone could be a little more mindful of doing less harm, harm to ourselves, our peers, and to the environment. It's trailblazers like Graeme, who is using his expertise to move us along a kinder path. And we could certainly use more people like that. I'd like to thank my friend, Dr. Graeme Milicich for speaking with me today. The work that you've done in the world of minimally invasive dentistry has and will continue to change lives. And thank you for coming on this journey with me today. Around here, we aim to inspire and create connections. We can't do it without you. If this conversation moved you, made you smile or scratch that little itch of curiosity today, please share it with the extraordinary people in your life. And if you do one thing today, let it be extraordinary.