Matt Allen | Photograph by Adam Williams
Overview: Matt Allen, D.D.S., is a formerly practicing dentist who now is the CEO and co-founder of DifferentKind, a tech venture focused on making healthcare more human.
He talks with Adam Williams about how, having been the valedictorian of his high school class in Prescott, Ariz., he almost dropped out of Pepperdine University only months later, to dive full time into his band in L.A. They talk about the relatively safe choice of becoming a dentist like his father, and then the risk of leaving it behind to start a tech company.
They get into the wisdom of Father Richard Rohr and other philosophers, and talk about the “two halves of life,” which leads them into talking about how they see their roles as dads.
They also talk about how Matt views DifferentKind as a force for good in the community. And Matt tells about the one thing he misses now that he’s no longer actively practicing as a dentist.
Or listen on: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), We Are Chaffee is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio FM in Salida, Colo.
Matt Allen & DifferentKind
Website: differentkind.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/differentkind
Instagram: instagram.com/imdifferentkind
Podcast: “Kinda Different,” on Apple / Spotify / YouTube
We Are Chaffee Podcast
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
We Are Chaffee Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
We Are Chaffee Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:00:12): Welcome to the We Are Chaffee podcast, where I have conversations of community, humanness, and well-being with amazing people who are rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams. Today, I’m talking with Matt Allen, DDS. He’s a formerly practicing dentist who now is the CEO and co-founder of DifferentKind, a tech venture focused on making healthcare more human.
(00:00:36): Of course, he’s much more than that too. So we talk about how Matt, having been the valedictorian of his high school class in Prescott, Arizona, almost dropped out of Pepperdine University, only months later to dive full-time into his band in LA. Almost. We talk about the relatively safe choice of becoming a dentist like his father, and then the risk of leaving it behind to start a tech company.
We talk about the life-changing experience he had while in Spain and the church-like experience of being a Liverpool fan. We get into the wisdom of Father Richard Rohr and other philosophers and talk about the two halves of life concept, which I love, and also, which gets us to talking about how we see our roles as parents.
(00:01:18): By the way, as a pseudo-correction here, later I describe Richard Rohr as a Franciscan monk. He’s actually a Franciscan friar. There is a distinction. You can Google it, but for all intents and purposes here, you get what I’m saying.
(00:01:33): Matt and I also talk about motivational interviewing, which is a compassionate approach that lies at the heart of his dentistry and DifferentKind. He’s also one of only three dentists in the world and the only one in the US with this specific training expertise. We talk about how he sees his company as a force for good in our community, and Matt tells us about the one thing he misses now that he’s no longer actively practicing as a dentist.
(00:02:00): The We Are Chaffee podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health. Go to wearchaffeepod.com to see show notes with photos, links, and a transcript of the conversation. You can subscribe to the monthly email newsletter there as well, and you can see more photos and connect with the podcast on Instagram, @wearechaffeepod. Now, here we go with Matt Allen.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:02:29): You grew up in Prescott, Arizona, and I’ve heard this name a number of times lately. Actually, we’ve had a couple of other people on the podcast. They went to college there. I get the impression that Prescott is known for a particular kind of vibe and it’s related to the college. Do I have that right? What is that vibe? What is it that it has a reputation for that would reach me?
Matt Allen (00:02:50): Yeah. So I think that there is, for people who would know the college, it has that element for sure, which is really cool and certainly was something that as a young person growing up in that town, certainly I think shaped me in a way that like go to the natural food store and whatever. And Prescott has a very big contingent of retirees, and especially at the time that I was growing up there, a lot of people moving from California because California was getting expensive and whatever. And so it’s really dichotomous place in terms of, hey, you have a lot of old people who, for lack of better terms, are pretty strong NIMBYs in a lot of ways like, “Just I want to be by myself. I want to do my own thing,” not very interested in maybe community or some of that kind of life, I would say. They just want to be in a relatively warm place that’s relatively safe and whatever at the end of their life.
(00:03:49): And then you have this very liberal element with the college there that creates some really interesting ways that people interact with each other and who can show up there and feel at home and whatever. So I think I probably relate to that in some ways, just in terms of I feel like I can be at home in a lot of different places in terms of different groups of people and whatever. And so for me, it was fun because it had different elements that I appreciated about growing up versus a very uniform kind of town of everyone does the same thing.
Adam Williams (00:04:27): Yeah. I think it’s such a fascinating idea the way our environment shapes us. And to come from a place that has a particular vibe and it has a reputation that people go there for these particular reasons, you said it shaped you. And that’s a question I was getting to is, well, how does it shape a kid who grows up in that kind of college town? You mentioned going to the natural food store or things like that because there’s that element of, well, I don’t know, is this old hippies from the ’60s and ’70s coming in and saying, “This is we want to make this kind of place.” What else? What are some other things? How do you think it influenced you as a kid who’s witnessing these people coming from all over? And maybe especially because of the college and I guess you’re saying retirement.
Matt Allen (00:05:15): Yeah, totally. Well, I think most people probably know it now. For anyone who’s in the mountain bike community, there’s the Whiskey 50 Off-Road and there’s some pretty big endurance type of events that are down there like that. So I grew up doing that stuff as well. I grew up mountain biking. I grew up doing a lot of that hiking. And so I can definitely see a lot of those different elements that I think come into play in terms of how it shaped me.
(00:05:39): And I think about it a lot from the perspective of Prescott’s not small. So Prescott was 30,000 people when I was growing up, and it was certainly growing in the way that Boulder’s growing because Prescott itself is in the mountains itself. It’s different than some of our topography here in terms of there’s a lot of mountains within the city limits almost, almost more like an East Coast town in the Appalachian Mountains or something like that where you just have a little bit more rolling topography. But so it was growing on the outskirts in the same way that Boulder does, where you’re like, oh, Lafayette and Erie and whatever. Those weren’t places when people who were growing up in Boulder in the ’70s or ’80s were experiencing. And so it was changing.
(00:06:26): But I think about it from the perspective of I certainly appreciate growing up in a place where there was one high school. People knew my name at the coffee shop when we would go. You would just have this sense of, oh, there’s a shared understanding, I would say, in terms of how life looks almost in a certain way. Because yeah, it is a little different in terms of some of the different flows that are coming into that overall river, let’s say. But we all understand what those all are, whereas if you’re in a big city, you can isolate yourself to a specific section or whatever. You always hear the stories of people who live in New York City who are like, “I never go seven blocks past my house,” or whatever. And that’s just, yeah, you can really isolate yourself in that way.
(00:07:14): So I think about it raising kids now where I’m like, man, that did something to me. It put something in me that made me want to, after going to college and outside of LA and then living in Denver to be able to say “Oh, when I first came to this valley, it felt a certain way to me and that resonated and it almost felt like home. And it made it really easy for me to move here,” and now to raise kids here to say, “I hope that whether they leave or not,” which we can talk about how we’re hopefully creating opportunities for people to stay here and not have to leave if they don’t want to, but that hopefully it’s building something into them that they don’t even recognize right now, that they’ll recognize later in life when they show up in a small town or come back here and be like, “This is an amazing place because I grew up in this way that shaped me that I didn’t even realize at the time.”
Adam Williams (00:08:12): You did leave to go to school. And I wonder if that was because at the time, you didn’t recognize there’s this specialness here where you, like so many of us where we’re like, “I’ve got to get out and see something different.” And for kids who grew up there, was it expected, do you think, or common at least, that you would’ve stayed there and gone to college? And was that something that you’re like, “No, I’ve got to get out,” or what led you out to the LA area?
Matt Allen (00:08:41): Yeah, I think for me, I never felt super known in Prescott. It’s almost like this to me, I always say this, and apologies for people who love Prescott, but it was the worst size of town. It’s not a big city so you didn’t have the big city amenities, you didn’t have the concerts. We’d drive to Phoenix to go to concerts and things like that. It didn’t have that, but it didn’t have the real small town kind of community feel in terms of what it is here in BV and what it is in Salida where you’re like, “Oh,” you just show up and you see all the people. You don’t have to make plans and whatever. So it was just that in-betweener where you’re like, “Oh man, I wish it had been one or the other in some ways.” It still gave me glimpses of what a small town could be compared to a big city, but it wasn’t one.
(00:09:30): And so I think for me, it felt like there was a lot of people who never wanted to leave for the wrong reasons. And by the wrong reasons, I mean just like, “Oh, this is comfortable and it doesn’t challenge me,” and whatever, and I don’t feel that ever here. I feel like there’s a lot of things that are challenging people and a lot of things that people are striving for here. It felt just like the safe, default option. And so for me, I didn’t apply to any schools in Arizona. I didn’t even want to go to ASU or U of A or NAU where it’s people that I knew where close. I was like, “I just want to go out and experience the world differently.” And so for me, that was how I approached it. And I do think that there is some of that just in young people in general. You want to go explore and you want to-
Adam Williams (00:10:16): For sure, yeah.
Matt Allen (00:10:17): You want to see the world, even if the place that you grew up in happens to be the most amazing place in the world. We’d literally drive down County Road 140 every day and look at Shavano and Tabeguache, whatever, and you’re like, “This is the most beautiful place in the whole world.”
Adam Williams (00:10:31): Teenage angst is just like, “This place is so boring. I can’t stand it.” It doesn’t matter where you are.
Matt Allen (00:10:37): Totally.
Adam Williams (00:10:37): Right? And I think there’s good in that too, that we want to get out and we want to experience something else. And it sounds like that you now in reflection, looking back on this, you’re like, “There is something special about that place, and it did shape me.” And that’s something that even if you never go back and live there again, you are carrying with you, and you have that sense of yourself and understanding about what that part of your life meant.
(00:11:03): Let’s talk about where you went to college because you went to Pepperdine. Now, you say that was outside of LA. It’s in the Malibu area. I had no idea where it was. I knew that I recognized the name of it, and probably just from watching men’s basketball and college NCAA tournaments or something over the years, I think I would’ve put it on the East Coast. And in looking it up, I’m like, “Wait, Malibu?” That’s an extraordinary place, location to be able to go be a college student. So I’m curious about the change from Prescott to that area. And yeah, it’s within reach of LA if you want to go do cool things there, the big city stuff. What was it like going there and how did you decide to go there? What drew you there?
Matt Allen (00:11:43): Yeah. I think for me, it felt like I applied to a lot of schools that were small liberal art schools from the perspective of I was from a small-ish town. It didn’t feel like a huge university that I might have more kids in a lecture class than where in my whole high school felt like something that I really wanted to do. I didn’t want to put myself out there in that way. So it was known but unknown, I would say, of like, “Oh, this is still relatively small. I understand how it is, but it feels very different than where I was.” So yeah, I looked at University of Portland and University of San Diego and a lot of places on the West Coast because it was like, “Oh, they’re close enough.” I could get home and see family and whatever without feeling like I’m a big plane flight away or something.
(00:12:34): So those were some of the things that I was looking at. And yeah, it’s hard not to be a 17-year-old kid and show up on the Pepperdine campus for the first time and just be incredibly wowed where you’re just like, “Holy… Whoa, this place is amazing. It’s incredibly beautiful.” Talk about the most beautiful places in the world. I always think back to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and you think about the part in that book where he talks about the mountain people versus the ocean people versus the desert people. Definitely feel a very desert person growing up in Arizona in a lot of ways, even if I wasn’t in the real desert. But it’s hard not to stand on that campus and to be impressed by the vastness of the ocean standing on these mountains, and it’s very beautiful.
(00:13:23): It’s really interesting place though. And I think even just talking to you right now about it, it’s interesting because I don’t know if I’ve ever thought of the through lines for some of those things of Prescott was this place that didn’t quite have the community that I would say that I was looking for from the perspective of it was just a little bit too big. Pepperdine felt like this really weird place. It’s in Malibu. They were gifted this land, granted this land. It used to be in terrible part of LA. They moved in the ’70s, I think, and Malibu hates it. Malibu hates Pepperdine. So you always felt like an outcast. You always felt like I never fit in with the community there. And the community there is weird because it’s all these very, very rich people who talk about they’ve got gates on their driveways and they don’t want to interact with you in any way, shape, or form.
(00:14:13): Pepperdine, the community itself there is pretty decent in some ways, but I also feel like California in general just has a different vibe. It’s cool and it’s laid back and it’s West Coast in a lot of ways, but it’s very, at least in my experience of it as an 18 to 22-year-old was, it’s very showy in a lot of ways obviously, people buying expensive cars that they can’t afford. You got to look a certain way and whatever. And the analogy that I always use to highlight that was you could be having coffee with someone at a coffee shop, and somebody comes in the door and everyone looks to see who that person is. Is that a famous person? Is that somebody that I should be talking to is whatever. And that just feels it’s this unconscious thing that you feel less than in a certain way because maybe there’s somebody else that that person would rather be interacting with.
Adam Williams (00:15:12): It’s interesting.
Matt Allen (00:15:13): Yeah. And so that just whole vibe, you can be the most like, “Hey, I want community. I want all those things.” But you show up and you’re like, “Well, why don’t I drive a nice BMW and why don’t… Yeah, maybe I should do that.” You just do those things because you’re in that environment even if you don’t want to. And so it’s interesting that all of my friends that I still stay in touch with, we have a lot of really great friends in Denver that we still see multiple times a year and whatever from Pepperdine, but none of them are from California. They’re all either from Colorado or Washington for the most part. And so yeah, it’s an interesting place in a lot of ways. And I think, again, it’s just Prescott taught me something of what I didn’t want and gave me glimpses of maybe what I did. And Pepperdine also taught me some of more of what I didn’t want as well as maybe giving me glimpses of what I did.
Adam Williams (00:16:04): And that’s what so much of our early years I think really are for, in hindsight, I think, these learning opportunities. Now, I probably didn’t understand it that way when I was younger. But I’ve been up and down the Pacific Coast Highway many years ago. I don’t recall there being a town per se of Malibu that I drove through, not a downtown or some place to park and walk around. Did I just miss it? Is it off the Coast Highway or what?
Matt Allen (00:16:32): No, it is right on the Coast Highway right there. And yeah, you didn’t miss it. Pepperdine is the thing there. If you’ve driven through Malibu, people are like, “Oh, yeah, I remember seeing Pepperdine up on the hill.” There is a little commons area that when we were there at least, it was kind of cool. It was a whole bunch of famous people playing with their kids on the playground and Pepperdine students. Just there was a little place called John’s Garden, and it was hippie and so it reminded me of Prescott and whatever, but now it’s super high end stores and whatever. So if you go there now, you’re like, “Oh, I don’t…”
Adam Williams (00:17:04): I’ve never stopped there, I don’t think. I think I’ve only driven through and just thought, “Where’s the stuff?”
Matt Allen (00:17:11): Totally.
Adam Williams (00:17:11): Maybe, but-
Matt Allen (00:17:12): Yeah. Or if you go up to north, you’re at Zuma Beach and some of those things, and then you recognize, “Oh, all the commercials are filmed…” Any beach commercial is filmed up there. You just start to recognize those things. But for the most part, there’s very little in terms of if places shape us, which I totally think they do in a lot of ways, that’s a very strong example of there’s no community gathering place in Malibu, really, that would lend itself to a whole bunch of people knowing each other that way.
Adam Williams (00:17:42): It seems like it’s a place where the elite of Hollywood, and whether it’s models and actors and whoever with a lot of money, they are drawn to, or even if it’s just to participate because their life and career and creativity comes from that area of LA that they get something that’s extended outside of it a little bit, maybe a little more solitude and the beauty and the whatever. I think maybe they just want quiet.
Matt Allen (00:18:07): 100%, which is a great thing to want.
Adam Williams (00:18:09): They’re not wanting me to stop and look for a sandwich or necessarily a bunch of college kids, right?
Matt Allen (00:18:14): Totally, yeah.
Adam Williams (00:18:15): So part of the reason I brought up Pepperdine is because I know that faith is important to you, and it is a faith-based university. And not to connect dots where they might or might not be, I’ll ask you, was that a reason that you went there? Was there some sort of interest in that sense of community and why you chose Pepperdine ultimately over something like University of Portland or wherever else?
Matt Allen (00:18:39): Yeah. I think for sure. A lot of those schools have a faith-based background. Small liberal art schools often do. And so yeah, University of San Diego is Catholic, in some way associated with, I don’t know if it’s Jesuit or whatever, but Pepperdine is Church of Christ. I’m not Church of Christ. And so there’s some very interesting things about that. The most interesting thing that people know about Church of Christ is that they don’t use instruments. So it’s all-
Adam Williams (00:19:07): What do you mean by that?
Matt Allen (00:19:08): During their singing portions of their services.
Adam Williams (00:19:11): Musical instruments?
Matt Allen (00:19:12): No instruments.
Adam Williams (00:19:12): Oh, okay.
Matt Allen (00:19:13): No musical instruments. So all of it’s acapella, which is really interesting.
Adam Williams (00:19:16): So when the congregation is singing a hymn, for example, there’s no one playing piano or organ or something like that. Wow, okay.
Matt Allen (00:19:23): Yeah. So that’s what they’re known for, I would say.
Adam Williams (00:19:26): I’ve been out of the loop.
Matt Allen (00:19:27): Yeah. Well, if people know Church of Christ, that’s generally the one thing they do know. And so yeah, for me again, I think it was shared enough to the perspective of, “Oh, people who generally have a similar worldview probably than I do,” but it wasn’t like, “Oh, I’m showing up with a whole bunch of people who have the exact same beliefs that I do necessarily, or the same experiences or whatever.” You get a lot of folks from Church of Christ like in Oklahoma, there’s some big schools there. So you have very Midwest kind of vibe to some of what the culture would look like for especially those kids.
(00:20:04): So yeah, I mean for me, it was a great opportunity to explore some of that and figure out, okay, this is different than what I… I grew up Catholic and I’m now Anglican. So the through line there for me of figuring out what was important to me and how I wanted to think about both the theological side of the faith as well as the practical applications of what that looks like and whatever. Pepperdine gave me a great place to do that where I didn’t feel like I was just like, “Oh, yeah, everyone else thinks like me here.” So I think that’s important.
Adam Williams (00:20:44): I realize it’s maybe odd that I ask you that question when it’s a faith-based university. The reason being I went to a liberal arts school and you just reminded me, oh, yeah, that’s faith-based because so many of them are. And if our seats were reversed and you were asking me, “Oh, did you choose that college in relation to…” it never would’ve occurred to me for my own story because I didn’t. I just went there because I went there for reasons. People in my family had gone there. I went there for sports and whatever. So yeah, it’s funny because once you started talking, I heard that question coming back to me in a way that I hadn’t thought of it before.
Matt Allen (00:21:25): Which is lovely, right? I love that that is how these conversations go where the experience I just said to you earlier of, oh, I hadn’t even put the through line, maybe through the community development in Prescott and the community development of Pepperdine and ultimately what I’ve sought out as an adult. So it’s amazing to have these conversations and what you realize both as somebody who is maybe asking more questions, but even just in asking questions, asking good questions teaches you a lot about yourself, right?
Adam Williams (00:21:55): I love questions.
Matt Allen (00:21:56): You’re a great question asker.
Adam Williams (00:21:57): Oh, thank you. You became a dentist. So you went to school for dentistry at UC Boulder, right?
Matt Allen (00:22:06): It’s in Denver. So Anschutz, the medical campus is in Boulder.
Adam Williams (00:22:10): Okay.
Matt Allen (00:22:11): Sorry, in Denver.
Adam Williams (00:22:11): Is it part of the University of Colorado system?
Matt Allen (00:22:15): It is.
Adam Williams (00:22:15): And then I put onto it Boulder?
Matt Allen (00:22:17): Boulder, yes. My wife, who’s an attorney who also went to University of Colorado for law school, got to go to live in Boulder for three years, which is a beautiful place and whatever. I was in Aurora. So much different vibe.
Adam Williams (00:22:32): How many years is that? Is that a four year–
Matt Allen (00:22:33): It’s four years, yeah.
Adam Williams (00:22:35): So you had four years at Pepperdine then four years to come out as a Doctor… How do you say that?
Matt Allen (00:22:35): Yeah, Doctor.
Adam Williams (00:22:35): Doctor of Dentistry?
Matt Allen (00:22:45): Yeah. My degree is a Doctor of Dental Surgery, which I actually think is pretty indicative of what most dentists think of themselves as. They think of themselves as surgeons and not primary care doctors, which I think is a disservice to most people from the perspective of we could get real deep into the weeds of non-surgical treatment for dental caries and why that’s been better and whatever. I just visited my friend in San Francisco last weekend, and he has a whole dental practice where they don’t have any drills at all and still treat some pretty difficult cases without drills. And you’re like, “Oh, it’s pretty cool.” So anyways, my degree is a DDS degree, so Doctor of Dental Surgery, but most people just say dentist.
Adam Williams (00:23:24): I did not even realize that’s what those letters stood for, and yet that’s so commonly what follows the name of a dentist. Okay, I’m curious why you chose dentistry as your profession and what might’ve been the influence there? Is that a family thing that was your mom or your dad or whoever? Or what led you to want to work with something that is so specific? And as a lay person on this, I’m like, “Oh, you might see some gross things.”
Matt Allen (00:23:53): 100%, yeah. It’s a great question. I almost dropped out of Pepperdine after my first year or after my first semester even, because I was in a band at the time. And my buddy who was a model and whatever, he’s the typical front man for a band in the early 2000s. He was just good-looking and whatever. So he had moved out to LA too, and we were playing some shows around LA and had some like, “Oh, we could do this.” And so I was like, “Sweet, I’m going to drop out of school and be a musician,” and whatever. My mom had framed an article when I was in high school or an ad from a magazine that had a bumper sticker that said, “My kid finishes his homework so fast, I’m worried he will start a band.” And that was totally me, where it was just like, yeah, school was not hard for me, whatever. I was exploring other things. So it’s like, “Sweet, I’m going to drop out.”
(00:24:44): And it’s interesting because my dad is a dentist, so that is I knew what that looked like. And a lot of my story involves me choosing things that were uncomfortable but not necessarily foreign, completely foreign. There is some recognition of what that thing was, whether that’s where I went to school or faith or whatever it might’ve been. It was different, but not different, not too different. And I think the choice of being a dentist, while still one that I’m very glad that I did, was probably one of the safest choices that I guess I had made. It was either I’m going to drop out of school and be a musician, which that would’ve been bananas. I was valedictorian in my high school and my parents would’ve freaked out and whatever. I think a lot of people would’ve freaked out in my family if I had chosen that route. And it was like, “Oh, I’m just going to be a dentist.” And I think that that was pretty safe.
Adam Williams (00:25:39): This gives a good life. It’s a good career. It’s respected in society. It’s all these things that feel safer.
Matt Allen (00:25:46): Yeah, I think so. And I think I wanted to help people, so there was still that element of, cool, I can help people doing this job and whatever. I would also say my best friend who I just mentioned growing up, amazing dude, but he was always the front man. He was the front man of our band, and he was the good-looking one and whatever, and I was just in the back, the smart one that was the songwriter. But it’s interesting to look at some of that.
And I think some of it was like, “Oh, I hadn’t had a girlfriend ever,” and whatever. I was like, “I want to do something where I’m not going to put myself so far on a limb that it would be hard for me to…” I guess I just maybe didn’t want to put myself beyond what I thought he was or whatever, where I was differentiating myself from that or something would’ve been too hard. I don’t know. It’s this really interesting, I think, time in my life for sure.
(00:26:45): But then I studied in Spain in college and had a pretty life-changing experience just by dating this Mexican girl that I met there who I was like, “Man, she’s so beautiful.” And I’d never had a girlfriend, and it was like she liked me and I was like, “Whoa, what is going on?” And I think that really changed my perception of what I was capable of. So I think in some way it was like, oh, yeah, I can do things that are just very different, and then I could take ownership of that. But I think the dentistry thing was kind still like, “Yeah, it was just…”
Adam Williams (00:27:18): The safety net.
Matt Allen (00:27:19): Yeah, just it’s a good job. And I’m not going to be on call and I can help people and probably have a good life and a nice wife and whatever, and certain-
Adam Williams (00:27:28): Which is all true.
Matt Allen (00:27:29): Which is all true.
Adam Williams (00:27:31): That’s the way it’s turned out.
Matt Allen (00:27:32): Totally. But those are not things that I think if you look at the decisions now that I’m making in terms of starting a company, building a software company and whatever, after being a dentist and not getting paid for two and a half years doing that and whatever, I’ve taken some pretty big risks, I would, say that I had to have realized, oh, these safe choices aren’t maybe the best expression of who I am as a person. I don’t think I would be happy with life if I was just continually making safe choices.
Adam Williams (00:28:00): I understand that. And I wonder if you look back on the decision to not have pursued something a little bit more at least with the band, do you feel like do you have any regrets on that? Do you feel like you should have or wish that you had tried that more then? Do you kick yourself for that? Or do you think…
(00:28:23): Let me put it this way. What I have learned over time was eventually I would get so sick of myself for not doing the thing that I felt so compelled to do that eventually, I learned, and my window of suffering that pain and not liking myself about it, it got shorter and shorter and shorter because I got practice with being quicker to say, “No, I know I want that. I’ve been down this road before.” Last time, I’ll just make up numbers here, it took me 10 years to get up the courage. Then it took me seven years on something else. Then it took me five. Now, it takes me two months or whatever. I’ve learned what that feels like, and I’ve learned that I can confidently step out there and try this thing. And I don’t have regrets about it, but it has taken me a lot of those lengthy periods of my life to be like, “Go for it.”
Matt Allen (00:29:13): Yeah. I think that, I look at the band specifically and I actually think I made the right decision in a lot of ways because I look at a touring musician and I’m like, “Man, that’s a hard life.” And I don’t think I had the deep love and passion for it. I think I have always needed a creative outlet in whatever I’m doing. So whether that’s in dental school, I started a wedding photography business and I was doing that. And so I’ve always needed this creative outlet and way to have something to be a part of the creative process, but I don’t think that I deeply love music and it shapes me as a person and how I listen to it and all of those things. And I love playing. Now, my sons are playing music and it’s fun to play with them. And so I still do music in certain ways, but I just don’t think that the actual expression of being a touring musician would’ve been a good fit for me.
(00:30:08): So in that way, I actually think I made the right decision, but I totally agree with you from the perspective of, yeah, you want… I definitely feel like now, I have been able to take risky decisions from the perspective of I will regret this if I don’t do it. I want to go down this road even if it’s hard and challenging and whatever, and I’ll regret it if I don’t do it so let’s go. Now, how I learned to go from like, “Oh, I’m going to maybe choose a safe career in dentistry,” to like, “Hey, here’s a very risky decision that I might be making,” that, I don’t know. Maybe mine isn’t as linear as yours description is here in terms of, and maybe yours isn’t super linear as well, but just the like, “Oh, yeah, this time it took me 10 years. This time it took me seven years. This time…” I don’t know if maybe there is that through line and I just haven’t explored it yet, but-
Adam Williams (00:31:03): I think what I grew up, I grew up in a very vanilla, straight lace, narrow focus sort. That was the upbringing for me. There was no risk. It was the whole thing of go to church, go to school, go to college, get married, have kids. There was nothing exciting about that so I had no model showing me live these amazing dreams. Take risks. It’s okay. Live the unconventional life. It’s okay. So it took me a long time of probably stifling that and saying, “I know you want to do this. Dang, Adam, but just don’t. Just don’t because you can suck it up and you can live this straight and narrow and everything’s going to be great,” but it would eat at me.
(00:31:47): So it took me a really long time to gain experience and age and all these things to be like, “There’s a reason this keeps eating at you. And the one model you were showed is not the only one. It’s okay.” And so it just took me time, I think, to experience a willingness to heed the call, to heed those feelings and be like, “Man, you can’t just eat it yourself the rest of your life,” for whatever it is.
Matt Allen (00:32:14): Yeah, 100%. And I think that we probably share a similar experience in that of, yeah, my childhood looked pretty normal in a lot of ways and not a lot of risk and whatever. And I didn’t have a lot of great, I think, mentors and models in that. And so the fact that I think I was able to find those over course of time and to see, yeah, it is okay, and then to ultimately be that for other people as well now, whether that’s my kids or other people as well. I look at a lot of my friends and maybe, so there’s a Richard Rohr book who’s a… He’s a… Are you familiar?
Adam Williams (00:32:56): Yeah. No, I’m familiar.
Matt Allen (00:32:57): So Richard Rohr, for those who might not know, is based in New Mexico, is maybe is a spiritual guide, let’s say. That’s probably the best way to describe Richard Rohr, a spiritual guide.
Adam Williams (00:33:09): Well, he’s a Franciscan monk, but to me he does feel like it’s much broader than this religious context. He is more of this philosophical spiritual leader.
Matt Allen (00:33:20): Yes, for sure. And so he has a concept in one of his books, I think it’s called Falling Upward. I actually don’t remember the title.
Adam Williams (00:33:28): It is, Falling Upward. Yeah.
Matt Allen (00:33:29): Yeah, Falling Upward, where it’s like the first half of your life, you build a box, and the second half of your life, you can deconstruct that box and go outside of it essentially. And the first half of your life, you build the resume virtues if we’re talking in David Brooks language, and then in the second half of your life, you build the eulogy virtues. So all the things that you want to be known for. And so I think there’s some normal-ness, whether we just felt it was like, well, our childhood was normal, and then we got outside of that, or that’s just the natural progression of humanity, let’s say, that we would figure out who we are so that in the second half of life or whatever, we can eventually deconstruct that.
(00:34:06): I think it is, to me, that is an important construct I think in a lot of ways to say, who am I? And I think we’ve lost some of that in our culture, not to pontificate here, but I do think we’ve lost some of that in our culture from the perspective of throughout all of history, human history, kids were growing up learning from a small culture, a small clan. This is who you are. This is your name. This is… Let us tell you, let us build into you who you are. And I think some ways in modern culture now, it’s like, well, who do you want to be? And it’s like, that’s actually, I think that’s stifling for kids when you’re like, oh, you don’t have any place on which to base. You don’t have walls to take down. You just never have walls to begin with. And so you’re like, “I don’t really know.” To me it feels like it creates a lot of wandering without maybe a direction and some of that.
Adam Williams (00:34:58): Do you think that’s tougher then, this idea? Let’s say, okay, you grew up in Prescott. I grew up in this rural town in Northern Missouri and wanted to get out, wanted to experience more in the world. The framework of the way I just described this, very vanilla, my parents were teachers and preachers, and it was all very conservative and very narrow, and everybody was doing the same thing, that gave me a basis to then say, “Well, I want something different,” and have that comparison-contrast experience.
If we are teaching our kids… For example, my parents wouldn’t know the concept of Falling Upward. They wouldn’t know the two halves of life. So they did not mentor me in this idea of as you move forward in your life and you explore these spiritual questions, you’re going to discover who you are really, and you’re going to carry that for… Nobody gave that to me, but now I have that language like you and I are talking about.
Matt Allen (00:35:47): Totally.
Adam Williams (00:35:47): So I could be, and probably to some extent do, speak to my two sons in that sense. And what you’re suggesting maybe is that by trying to instill in them when I think I’m giving them this great mentoring, this great coaching as a father, what I really might be doing is not helping them build the walls that they then have the foundation to go against.
Matt Allen (00:36:13): Maybe. But I do think even in some ways to say, to have that framework of, “Hey, we’re going to construct something.” And I think that there’s just the modern conception of our role as parents. To me, my job as a parent is to form my child in some way that eventually they’re going to push back against, because that is a differentiation perspective and whatever. They’re going to have to push back against something. But you need an equal and opposite reaction to push. If you’re pushing against nothing, you fall over.
And so I think about that from the perspective of I’m a huge Liverpool fan. We watch games together. And to me, it’s this quasi religious thing where it’s like you’re singing these songs. You go to Anfield. It feels like this big church, this outdoor church where we’re all having this shared communal experience, very church-like, and a lot of the original soccer teams where came out of Bible studies actually think about, you probably heard of Sheffield Wednesday because they met on Wednesdays to have Bible study, and that’s just where their team came from.
(00:37:17): So to me, essentially saying to my kids, “Hey, you can choose whatever soccer team you want to choose,” doesn’t feel as helpful as, “We are Liverpool fans. You are an Allen, and that means that you are a Liverpool fan, and that means that you’ll forever be a Liverpool fan.” And to me, they might eventually go, “You know what, Dad? I like Chelsea.” And I’ll be like, “Man, that’s a bad choice.” But even if they do that, I won’t feel like I’ve failed. It’ll just feel like I’ve given them something to push against in a helpful way to create their own box.
(00:37:51): So I think to that end, you’re a very intentional person. I think you’re doing that with your sons probably in a lot of ways. But that just the do whatever you want, be whoever you want to be misses the mark, I think, in some ways of who were you meant to be? Who were you? How can we call that out in you as adults? And it feels almost lazy in some ways, be whatever you want to be. And it’s like, well, that just means I don’t know you as a person, as a child, especially as my child, because I know your unique characteristics and qualities and how can I curate and cultivate those in you so that you can be the best version of yourself that you could ever want to be.
Adam Williams (00:38:29): I think that’s interesting nuance, and this is definitely something that I’m going to take away and think about. I have the good fortune of getting to play back and edit and work with this stuff so I get to get more intimate with these conversations actually than probably anybody else does.
Matt Allen (00:38:44): Totally.
Adam Williams (00:38:44): This is great stuff for me. I’m also going to have to acknowledge that the only thing I really understand about soccer is comes from Ted Lasso and welcome to Wrexham, and I love both of those shows, one being a docuseries, one scripted, and that’s how I’ve learned about Sheffield Wednesday. So very cool. I feel like there’s a Slumdog Millionaire kind of thing for me sometimes, if you’re familiar with that movie, where these incidental experiences in life, and then later, I didn’t know I was going to ever have any use to understand Sheffield Wednesday, and here it is.
Matt Allen (00:39:20): And there you go. Exactly, yeah. Today, now you do. So I love it. It’s fun. To me, it’s really is the quintessential sporting experience. I know a lot of people. So I went to Pepperdine. We had water polo. No one’s going away. We didn’t have a football team, so I had no experience of going to a stadium with 60,000 people or going to the big house in Michigan. And it’s like, you watch that and you watch them sing Mr. Brightside and all of these people together. I think that’s probably why people love college sports, is because it’s this very communal experience. Whereas pro sports to me seem very soulless in a lot of ways.
Adam Williams (00:39:58): I agree with that, yeah. Well, in watching what you’re talking about with English football teams and stuff, and that’s one of the things I keep commenting on. The family at home and whatnot, it’s like I love that they sing together. I would love to be in that crowd. I want to go to Wrexham, Wales now to participate because there is such a communal experience. I also would love, and I’ll never get this experience, to be one of those players that has an entire stadium chanting for you in a way that feels different than the way it happens with, say, NFL football games here in the US and so on.
Matt Allen (00:40:33): 100%. And yeah, so we have a great youth development program here in Chaffee County. JV County United is really wonderful and great coaching and great all of that stuff. And one of my big wishes for JV County United is that we just sing more songs just because it is the best part for me of football in that way, is just the let’s sing together. It feels very special and very cathartic, and it feels like something we all need. We talked about you being a dentist a while back. That’s the best compliment anyone ever gives me. I would’ve never known you’re a dentist. I’m like, “Great.” That means that I’m not just very pigeonholed into talking about that. So yeah, we did talk about that a while ago. Let’s go back to it.
Adam Williams (00:41:19): Well, you clearly are so much more, and I had no idea about being in a band in LA, and I really would love to pull on that thread and unravel some things and talk. I didn’t even ask. What do you play in the band or what did you-
Matt Allen (00:41:29): Guitar, piano, harmonica, and I was a songwriter.
Adam Williams (00:41:31): And you still play?
Matt Allen (00:41:31): Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:41:33): You all of that, more or less. And I would love to talk about that, but I am going to carry us forward here because you did become a dentist and you were, at some point here, director of dentistry at… Was it a health center in Denver?
Matt Allen (00:41:33): Yup, mm-hmm.
Adam Williams (00:41:49): And that was for a particular population with particular needs. Describe that for me. And you talked about wanting to be of service to people with these skills and this knowledge, so it seems like there’s a big overlap there.
Matt Allen (00:42:02): Yeah, for sure. So yeah, and federally qualified health centers are essentially the safety net of our healthcare.
Adam Williams (00:42:08): Is that basically a government public health?
Matt Allen (00:42:12): It’s not government necessarily. So there’s government grants that go to those specific organizations. So we have one here at BV. So Valley-Wide has a dental clinic here and I think a medical clinic as well. And that’s a part of a bigger federally qualified health center that’s based out of Alamo. So I think their headquarters is down there. But yeah, so they have to take by receiving this grant money from the federal government, but they’re all just essentially nonprofits. They have to take public insurance, so Medicare or Medicaid, those kinds of things, as well as have to have a sliding fee scale for folks who don’t have any insurance. And so you’re generally seeing a lot of underinsured and uninsured people. And that in Denver, North Denver, Boulder, large Hispanic population so I was speaking Spanish 75% of the day probably. And we had clinics up in Boulder and whatnot too, where they had a much larger homeless population.
(00:43:00): So yeah, definitely for me, that was a huge decision. I did want to work when I was in dental school, I was like, “I want to work for Colorado Coalition for the Homeless,” which is an amazing clinic down in Denver. The world had other plans for me, which was great, and I love the organization that I was at. It was called Clinica Family Health, and really great leadership and had a lot of great mentors there that have certainly led me to where I’m at now. But it was always built on I want to go and serve people that really need help. And it’s interesting because I think I learned so much more about myself. You always talk about that when people go serve somewhere across the world or whatever and they go do some trip to build houses or whatever it is.
And I got more out of it than I left. And I think that that’s totally true. I think I learned way more about myself getting to sit in those situations with people who had really challenging lives that I’ve never had to experience, but got to sit face to face with and share, I would say, in some of that difficulty, and ultimately joy, there was so much joy in their lives and in those interactions as well.
Adam Williams (00:44:09): The people that you are helping, just the gratitude for your being able to help them help feel better, deal with the toothache, deal with whatever they were dealing with.
Matt Allen (00:44:18): Totally. So my specific expertise is in something called motivational interviewing, which is a evidence-based communication methodology that helps people make behavior changes. So it started in addiction therapy and came to primary care. So I’m one of three dentists in the world who’s a member of the motivational interviewing network of trainers. And so I was doing a lot of consulting and now helping dentists learn how to communicate more effectively with patients.
Adam Williams (00:44:39): I’m sorry, how many did you say in the world?
Matt Allen (00:44:42): Three.
Adam Williams (00:44:43): That’s not very many.
Matt Allen (00:44:44): That’s not very many, no.
Adam Williams (00:44:45): Wow, okay.
Matt Allen (00:44:46): Yeah. But when I was using that clinically, one of my favorite stories is I had this person who said to me, “This feels better than therapy. Can I come here every week?” I’m not doing anything. I’m not taking a tooth out for anyone. I probably was. I don’t remember exactly what we were doing, but this person, this woman, felt heard, felt listened to, felt seen in a way that I think especially in dentistry, there’s this very normal, oh, yeah, it’s pretty transactional. It’s a lot of surgery. It’s not like something where my dentist goes and listens to me well.
Adam Williams (00:45:21): Well, there’s a stereotype that it’s a bad experience.
Matt Allen (00:45:23): Right, yeah.
Adam Williams (00:45:24): That whether it’s physical pain or for whatever all the reasons are, this, for someone to say, “This was therapeutic. It was cathartic. I was listened to. I felt like there was a human connection,” sounds extraordinary.
Matt Allen (00:45:35): Yeah, exactly. So for me, that is something that when people ask, because I don’t practice clinically anymore, if I miss it, that is the big thing that I do miss, is having those conversations in that way where it’s like, oh yeah, my person would drift away in those moments in terms of the best way where you’re just like, “I’m a total mirror for this patient and they’re seeing themselves in a new way and we’re guiding them somewhere, but I’m not thinking about myself at all.” And it is really cathartic for yourself to like, “Oh, I showed up to work today and didn’t think about what I need or any of that stuff.” We’ve talked about listening and how important that is and asking good questions and all of those things. And I feel like when you get to do that well for somebody, it is so freeing for yourself because you’re like, “Oh man, I didn’t have to think about my insecurities or my garbage or whatever I’m worried about. I just got to be present for somebody else, and what a beautiful thing that is.”
Adam Williams (00:46:31): I’m always curious about motivation, and so I’d like to understand a little bit more about why it was so important for you to be of service in this way and to choose these opportunities. Because I also think of it, and this is no shade on the dentist my family sees on the front range, but as a matter of fact, the guy that we see and we appreciate and he’s very kind, he also is very clearly into the stuff that his career affords him and his family. And that includes my boys are each time we go, “What car is he going to have now?” Because it might be a Ferrari. It might be a Porsche. It’s all about-
Matt Allen (00:47:14): The cyber truck. My kids love cyber trucks, right? There’s-
Adam Williams (00:47:16): It’s all the fancy external sorts of accomplishments that he takes pride in. And again, no shade on that, but I’m using that as a way to establish contrast with someone who really says, “Let me help the people who need the most help who might not be able to afford this,” and who maybe, given the therapeutic nature of listening, might need you on a level that the typical patient doesn’t.
Matt Allen (00:47:48): Yeah, shoot. In terms of motivation, we could unpack some of that in terms of where that goes back to and whatever. I think for me though, the wherever that motivation comes from, and honestly, I don’t have a specific moment in time where I’m just like, “Oh, this has just always been a part of who I am,” and whatever. But I would say what I look at are, I’ll give you a story maybe to explain at least where I am tended to.
(00:48:23): So there’s a Catholic theologian. His name is Henry Nouwen. That’s the very anglicized version of it. He’s Belgian or I think he’s Belgian, but he… It’s probably Henri Nouwen or something like that, but he, incredible theologian, incredible thinker, writer, has all these books and whatever. He spent the last years of his life and a significant chunk of them at a community outside of Toronto called Daybreak, and it’s part of these communities in general that are called large communities, if you’ve ever heard of those. Essentially, it’s where people that are they are pretty disabled can come and actually live in a community and not just be taken care of, but actually participate really in the community. And it’s a very beautiful communal way of life.
And so he takes care of this guy at the end of his life who essentially is nonverbal, whatever, and you’re like, man, your whole life led to you just being in a one-on-one relationship with this guy in this community. And you had so much to give, it felt like. Now, you’re at the pinnacle of a writer’s career, a theologian’s career. You’ve spent all of your life synthesizing. Now you can really give back. And for him, it was the giving back ended up being this one-on-one relationship with this guy. It’s a very beautiful book, The Road to Daybreak. All that to say he also has another book called Jesus and Downward Mobility, which I think is a really interesting concept.
Adam Williams (00:49:55): Yeah, sounds like it.
Matt Allen (00:49:56): Right, of what is success. I think for a lot of us is up into the right what does downward mobility mean and why might that be actually something I might want?
(00:50:05): And so I think for me, a lot of not that I don’t want to have a nice life in some ways and be able to ride mountain bikes and take my kids on fun trips and whatever, we’re doing a lot of that, but I think there’s just this pull for me and there always has been there of I think there’s something that’s really successful for me that is outside of the realm of up and to the right. And so I want to really wrestle with that in a lot of ways. And I think there’s a lot of beauty in that that’s very counter-cultural. And so yeah, whatever the motivation is, maybe that just gives some explanation to the things that I at least I’m drawn towards, I guess.
Adam Williams (00:50:50): Maybe we are always on this course to that second half of life, like you referred to from Richard Rohr, those of us… Because not everyone ends up being aware of it, as he writes about. Not everybody figures out that there is a deeper meaning. And I wonder if it’s just ingrained in people, either maybe feel it from an early age. You can’t identify it, but it’s there. And I guess I’m feeling the connection here too, when you want to do something that is of service and something of greater value to people, and it’s not just all about me, me, me and stuff, it seems like you were on that trajectory even without knowing it from very early on.
Matt Allen (00:51:30): I think so, and why we would want to do some of those things or how that gets instilled in us. I wish I could… Maybe I haven’t gotten far enough into the second half of my life to finally I can firmly pull that thread through, but maybe a good conversation for therapy, right?
Adam Williams (00:51:50): Well, and I feel like to be clear that the first half, second half of life idea to me is conceptual. It’s not based on numbers. So you could be 80 years old and maybe it-
Matt Allen (00:52:02): In the first half of your life.
Adam Williams (00:52:02): … really clicks.
Matt Allen (00:52:04): Totally.
Adam Williams (00:52:04): Yeah. And maybe you’re 10 years old. If we think of… Oh, I can picture the girl. Isn’t she Swedish, the one who’s been leading school strikes for climate?
Matt Allen (00:52:15): Greta. Greta Thunberg?
Adam Williams (00:52:16): Yeah, yeah. It is such a young age that she clearly is destined to be something more in this world.
Matt Allen (00:52:23): Totally.
Adam Williams (00:52:24): And it would seem that maybe figure it out a second half of life thing rather than just taking the structure and the walls that were built for her and staying in that.
Matt Allen (00:52:33): Totally. Well, I think Richard Rohr, and I’m not going to go deep into this because I’ve read about it but not deeply grappled with it, the eight stages or nine stages of spiritual development essentially of most people get stuck at stage 3, which is still a very me, me, me kind of. We all need that. That’s how we all grow up. No baby is coming out being like, “I’m going to give back.” That’s not what babies need. There is some linearity to that to a degree. But yeah, you can have, I think to be at one of higher stages of that kind of spiritual enlightenment, spiritual development, spiritual formation. You generally, you have to walk through all those other stages first, and it takes time.
Adam Williams (00:53:18): Let’s talk about how you carried this forward. It’s the collection of everything we’re talking about because it is this interest in service, it’s the motivational interviewing, and of course your dentistry. You end up leaving that community, the health center, and you start this tech venture, DifferentKind. What is that about and why did you make that kind of shift?
Matt Allen (00:53:43): Yeah, I think it is a combination of a lot of things that we’ve been talking about from the perspective of I think I always need a creative outlet, and so I think the true entrepreneurial spirit is one of creativity. It’s one of solving a problem ex nihilo, out of nothing, and it’s not never out of nothing. It’s out of experiences and whatever, but you’re like, “No one’s ever solved this problem before, so let’s try to go solve it.” So I think doing some of the… As I was at the health center, I started a consulting business where I was doing motivational interviewing consulting for large dental insurance companies to help them understand, “Hey, how do we teach dentists this so we can actually incentivize this in our healthcare system?” And I just continued to get this, “How do we measure this? How do we…” I think that there’s lots of business wisdom in the if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it type of idea.
(00:54:35): And so I think for me, I saw this opportunity to say, “Hey, my goal ultimately, and I think the through line of the service of whatever that looks like, is how do I help make healthcare in general when it’s not even just dental care necessarily, but how do I make healthcare in general be a more human place?” If you could show up at your dentist, I would feel like I would be successful as a human if you show up at your dentist at some point in your life and it’s a better experience from the perspective of, “Yeah, sure. He has a Ferrari. Who cares?” But you feel seen, heard, understood, whatever that might be.
(00:55:11): There’s a different level, I say this to people all the time, there’s a different level of someone actually listening to you, caring about you, being curious about you, than there is about them just being nice. And I think that a lot of healthcare providers are nice. I don’t actually think a lot of them have curiosity and good listening skills and whatever because they have this very, “Oh, my job is to fix,” and fixing is different than curiosity. Fixing is about having the answers and just doing that for somebody often. Being curious is about being like, “Maybe I don’t have the answers and maybe I can help you discover the answers, or maybe we can discover them together,” but it’s a much more open-handed disposition, I would say.
(00:55:49): So DifferentKind came from that perspective of could we solve this problem and could we do it at scale? And it seems real weird to be like we build software to help make healthcare more human. That’s a weird reality. But it is interesting to see in the data when you have essentially patients who are voicing their experience with their dental practice and being like, “This was not good.” And you hear that again and again, and then you’re able to go to this practice or to this dental insurer and say, “How do we help this practice or how do we help your network of providers in general become better listeners or more empathetic people or involve you more in your decision-making?”
Adam Williams (00:56:31): It’s such an interesting idea to me that people need to be taught, especially those who are in a care profession, that presumably a lot of these people like you, they weren’t in it just to get that car and just to get the fancy clothes and the title. Most of them at least I would imagine are, “I want to help people in some way.”
Matt Allen (00:56:50): 100%
Adam Williams (00:56:51): And yet they’re needing to be incentivized and guided and trained and encouraged and just maybe just reminded. Be human, listen, take time so that it’s not such a transactional experience. I feel like, and this is a conversation within my household, that often with healthcare professionals, we are expected to sit there, not talk, take the fix, trust in it 100%. And we’re saying, “Well, we have thoughts and brains and research capabilities too. We know what we’re feeling. That part you don’t know. Can we have a dialogue and maybe seek out, explore possibilities together?” And we annoy doctors sometimes when they’re like, “Just do what I’m saying. Just do what I’m saying and go away.” And we’re like, “But we want to talk about this.”
Matt Allen (00:57:46): Man, 100%, it is… And I get it. Doctors have all this crazy time crunch and all these things that the system has built-
Adam Williams (00:57:47): The system.
Matt Allen (00:57:54): … that makes it really difficult for people to do that in some ways. And it doesn’t take a lot. And that’s what I try to talk to people about all the time when we’re talking about reflective listening and talking about empathy and whatever. There’s research that suggests that even one reflective listening statement in a healthcare encounter improves your sense of autonomy support. So I feel better about my ability to go manage my disease even if you just listen to me for one sentence in our interaction.
(00:58:19): And so there’s so many little things that people can do. A specific example of this, my son a few years ago had Kawasaki disease, which is a problem with the heart, and it was probably a post-COVID kind of complication. So he’s in the hospital, pretty scary. You’re like, he’s not doing well and it can have lasting complications. And luckily it didn’t. But there was a moment where we were in the hospital and the nurse was in, and this is such a normal thing, “Do you have any questions?” And we’ve been trained to say no, right? This is the answer. That’s the polite way of going out of the room. “Do you have any questions?” “No.” “Okay, cool. See you,” right? That’s just the normal way.
(00:58:57): I had a lot of questions. And so she said, “Do you have any questions?” I said, “No,” because I was just like, oh, that’s my default response. And then I was like, “Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Actually, I do have a lot of questions. Can I give you some feedback?” So here I am coaching this nurse who, whatever. I’m like, “When you say this, here’s how I respond. And I’m guessing those patients will respond to that. If you just ask the question a little bit differently of, ‘What questions, if any, do you have for me?’ and show just a little bit of curiosity that maybe you would want to know any questions if I did, is going to change my whole perception of our interaction.” And so that, it can be really small things that I think change our perception of how our healthcare experiences go.
Adam Williams (00:59:39): I’m guessing she does not know your background.
Matt Allen (00:59:41): No.
Adam Williams (00:59:42): And that she did not respond super well.
Matt Allen (00:59:46): She was like, “Okay.” She was like, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense,” or whatever. And maybe I had to explain to her who I was and what I do and whatever. I don’t remember exactly, but she wasn’t like, “You’re a jerk.” Maybe she walked outside and was like…
Adam Williams (00:59:58): “Who’s this guy to question me?”
Matt Allen (01:00:00): “Who is this to coach me?”
Adam Williams (01:00:00): Right, yeah. It’s amazing, the question. We’ve established I’m a question asker, right?
Matt Allen (01:00:09): A good one.
Adam Williams (01:00:09): I’m always going to have questions of anybody, anytime, anywhere. And certainly when I’m in a doctor’s office with one of my kids and to feel like there’s maybe even condescension rather than an openness to say and an empathy and understanding from the parent’s perspective or the patient’s perspective. “This might be scary for you. You might not have been able to take in everything that I’ve just shared as information or understand where it’s coming from.”
Matt Allen (01:00:10): Totally.
Adam Williams (01:00:41): I feel like sometimes a doctor in particular, maybe because they are the authority, we’ll see a nurse first and then it goes to the doctor because that’s the hierarchy, that a doctor expects us to take what they are saying as if it is the answer. But if we just had a different doctor-
Matt Allen (01:00:59): Totally.
Adam Williams (01:00:59): … it would be a different answer. And that’s where I think there’s a gap that creates room for let’s discuss and explore and understand something together. I don’t want to just take your supposed fix as if it’s absolute.
Matt Allen (01:01:13): Right. Well, and there’s I think a ton of interesting work around this. I have a friend who’s a mentor, who’s the chief education officer at Denver Health, and he’s a very thoughtful guy, philosopher. He has an MDiv. He’s a very, very thoughtful guy. And I think we will have these conversations about the philosophy and the pedagogy, the pedagogical models that are like, how are physicians trained and what does that lead to?
But a lot of people don’t question that because for physicians, I was the smart one and I just went and I did well on my MCATs, and then I just went and I aced the test and whatever. But I’m not questioning, I’m not asking questions of the system that’s teaching me. I’m just accepting it as truth. And so then I’m going out and spouting that as truth instead of saying, “Are there alternative ways to conceive about this?”
(01:02:03): And generally the answer is no for a lot of those physicians because they are so time crunched at that point or whatever. But I think the earlier on that we can introduce some of that in our medical education and dental education in general of you might be wrong. For example, dentistry has a long-standing history. There’s some interesting stuff too with the RFK just getting appointed as the head of health and human services or whatever, and his vaccination hesitancy and whatever. In dentistry, the vaccination issue goes around fluoride.
So if you’re for fluoride, then you’re for science. And if you’re against fluoride, then you’re against science. And you see some of the current stuff that’s coming out about fluoride of maybe this has been too high in our water and maybe we should let people choose. And I think there’s arguments on both sides, but I try to, when I talk to people about fluoride in general, talking to healthcare professionals here of you could be wrong. You might not know it in your lifetime, but you could be wrong.
(01:03:01): So that ability for us to have the humility, I would say, to be curious about other people’s perspective because we could be wrong, I think it’s been too polarized of a world over the last few years of you’re either for science or you’re against it, and you’re like, but science is always changing. So I think it’s a lot more gray and a lot more complex than we make it out to be sometimes.
Adam Williams (01:03:24): It is strange how much we’ve turned it into a black and white absolute tribalist sort of you’re with us or against us in general across a lot of things. And I think at a time when if we look at conspiracy theories and internet information, I can look up, I can Google something and I can find polar opposite answers to my life. And what that really tells me is that we need to live in the gray area and do a lot more thinking and questioning not for the sake of questioning, but questioning for the sake of the interest in learning.
Matt Allen (01:03:55): And other people too, just from the perspective of, yeah, I think vaccines are very good. My kids are vaccinated. I’m vaccinated. That doesn’t mean that somebody who’s not in favor of vaccines if they’re coming into my office, that I’m just going to make them feel like an idiot, because we’re never going to get anywhere if I can’t try to listen and try to understand and try to help them process through that in a way that feels healthy and holistic. And maybe I can. I had some people talking about fluoride who were very anti-fluoride when I was a practicing dentist, but we had years of relationship of me being like, “Hey, let’s talk about this. Curious to how you’re thinking about this, and here’s some of the kinds of treatments we might have that involve fluoride. Are you interested in this?” Maybe now three years after we’ve met versus the first time, if I had just been like, “Well, you got to go find another dentist because you’re just an anti-science, anti-fluorider.” I don’t feel like that’s ever going to further the conversation.
Adam Williams (01:04:54): People are not going to feel like they can trust you if they feel condemned right out of the gate. We’re talking about being listened to. That is an active, maybe even aggressive opposite if they feel condemned actively because of something that is their understanding in the world.
Matt Allen (01:05:10): Totally.
Adam Williams (01:05:10): With DifferentKind, this tech venture that you started a few years ago, which now is it’s your full-time focus. You said you’re no longer practicing. The users of this are actually the professionals. You’re not going directly to patients. You are trying to establish what better practices for the active listening, for establishing relationships between doctors, the medical professionals and clients. That’s the gist of it. Is there more to say about that? As far as do you want to be able to explain more about what your intention is there, how that’s going as this entrepreneurial venture?
Matt Allen (01:05:50): Yeah. I think just the thing that the dentistry part of it is interesting just of like, hey, I think we can change the profession. And I think that’s a very noble goal of how we could make healthcare more human. But I’m a huge Wendell Berry fan. Place matters, and I want to do that here. I want to do that in a way that does something in Chaffee County that helps create jobs and helps to actually build community here. We were able to just, we won a coding prize at a startup pitch competition and we’re able to give it to a kid here as a scholarship. And not to say a kid, he’s almost 30, but younger than me, able to give it to someone here in the community who probably otherwise wouldn’t have been able to go do this, but it’s like, hey, that could change his life and could change the community’s life because he wants to start businesses in the future and do some of that stuff. So for us, it’s about not just doing it, but doing it in a place that is meaningful.
(01:06:49): And yeah, we’re a remote-first company because as a tech company, you kind of have to be in some ways. But we’re always looking for people here who can help us further that mission of how do we build something meaningful here? Because if we can create three jobs in Chaffee County, it’s the same per capita as creating 100 jobs in Denver. And so you’re like, “Man, that matters,” right? It matters if those three people can now go out and buy a house here locally, and it matters if those people who now have a house can actually go and have their kids in school here and do all of those things and stay in the community.
(01:07:18): So for us, it is a more of a double bottom line, triple bottom line type of idea. We’re a B Corp. Not a B Corp essentially, but a public benefit corporation. We could go through the B Corp process, but it’s expensive and takes a long time. So we probably will at some point. But that essentially is, hey, we’re not just here to return shareholder value, which is what a C Corp’s only focus has to be by definition, which is, to me, that’s a bad definition. You can do good in the world and return shareholder value. And I think that continues to be proven. So that is our hope that we can not only accomplish our goals as DifferentKind and seeing what healthcare looks like for the history of human interaction with their doctors and dentists, but that we could do it in a specific place and that will matter to our community.
Adam Williams (01:08:06): This impact on community through what you just… Did you say a public benefit-
Matt Allen (01:08:11): Corporation, yeah.
Adam Williams (01:08:12): So what are some of the maybe more specific or actionable items that you either have taken or you are interested in taking to benefit the community here?
Matt Allen (01:08:22): So I think for us, we look at some of the things from the perspective of that’s going to happen through our employees in a lot of ways. So it’s not just… I think there’s a dualism that exists in work sometimes of like, oh, my job is to make a whole bunch of money and then just sponsor things or give money away or whatever. And you’re like, “Yeah, that’s fine.” That is a good goal as well. But what if my work itself was meaningful? And what if the job itself, what if doing my job well was an actual gift? And you don’t have to…
(01:08:56): An example, you could build a really successful company, give a ton of money away and treat your employees like garbage, pay them non-living wages and all those things. And so the nice part about being a public benefit corporation is that it’s built into our articles of incorporation where we have, “Hey, we can contribute to public health goals as a part of our…” So if a shareholder ever, an investor, somebody ever came to us and was like, “Well, why did you make that decision? Why are you paying this person this much money?” or whatever? You’re like, “Well, because it helps us accomplish our goal.”
(01:09:27): So the B Corp framework has, I think, a lot of really good stuff in terms of rails, in terms of how you think about the environment, how you think about taking care of your people, how you think about corporate governance, all of those different things, the ESG, typical things. And for us, we have some of those things in terms of how we give money or how we do those kinds of things. But I think for us, it is a I’m trying to make it much more of a holistic versus a dualistic of like, oh, make money, give it away, versus no, we can accomplish the goals through the actual doing of the work.
Adam Williams (01:10:09): You took a sabbatical a while back, and I’m wondering how that might’ve factored into coming to this realization that you could provide a service and a solution, like you said, entrepreneurially, that’s about solving problems. What was that sabbatical? What did you do at that time and did that factor into this shift that you ultimately would do to leave practicing to maybe have broader reach and impact by coaching others into a more human way of caring?
Matt Allen (01:10:39): For sure, yeah. For me, it’s been transformative from a life perspective. I think about it from an agricultural perspective. If there’s wisdom to be gleaned from the earth, then certainly we can take that and apply it to ourselves too. So you think about a field. You rotate crops through fields to keep them healthy, and then you let a field life follow so that it actually has time to regenerate and actually has time to be a better crop producer. And in the same way, I think our culture has always talked to us about up and to the right, and there’s no time for rest. There’s no time for contemplation. There’s no time for resetting to ultimately produce more fruit.
(01:11:20): And so yeah, we took a sabbatical in 2018 and I spent a lot of time with my family. If anyone was ready for COVID, we were, because literally it was middle of 2018 to the middle of 2019, and then we had a baby right at the middle of 2019. So I rolled right from sabbatical into parental leave where I was like, “Oh, I’m just going to raise my kid for a little while now.” And then COVID hit, and it’s like, well, cool. We’ve already established rhythms for not working and for what does the world look like when I don’t have to go into the office or whatever. So if anyone was ready for COVID, we were.
(01:11:56): I did a lot of what I call soft focus time. So I, let’s say on our yard, we have a couple acres, and it was overrun and unkempt, let’s say. And so I was finding these paths and taking all the stones and then re-putting them into where I wanted them to go as building paths, which I think there’s a lot of metaphors that we could go into around that of what that means and how we think about success in life. But for me, the actual doing of that work, it’s not super hard. You’re like doing, you’re picking up stones, and yeah, it’s using some physical strength and whatever. It’s not very intellectually stimulating.
(01:12:32): And so that soft focus time was able for a lot of times it was just like, cool, I’m doing this thing, but I’m able to think about other things. And I definitely would not be doing what I’m doing right now had I not had that time to be like, “Oh, there’s some problems here. How could we solve them?” or whatever. And it wasn’t front of mind. I didn’t go into it with like, “Oh, I’m going to actually solve this problem today or figure out what I’m going to do next.” It was just like, “I’m going to let my mind wander and we’re going to see what we come up with.”
(01:12:59): People tell me to all the time, I do a lot of walking just around our offices in BV, so I’m always walking around Main Street out to Bridge to Bridge, or whatever, and people are like, “Is your car broken? What’s going on?” There’s an old Greek philosopher who there was the Latin saying was essentially, I think it’s solvetum ambulare, through walking, it is solved. And I think there’s just a lot of truth in that of when we let our brain have some space that we can often come to solutions that we never would have had and we sat there and tried to figure it out. And so that was a lot of my sabbatical was just having some space and time and letting the field life follow.
Adam Williams (01:13:41): It’s crazy to me that we have to justify and explain and defend such a practice. I remember thinking, all the way back to when I was a teenager working at a fast food restaurant or at the grocery store, or whatever, people were allowed to take smoke breaks and they could screw around and do nothing for 10, 15 minutes for a smoke break, and they could take however many of those during the shift. But if I wanted to go out and just get fresh air or go for a walk, I was somehow being lazy. I was derelict. That had to be justified. It couldn’t even be justified, right? They’re like, “You can’t. You’re just not working.”
(01:14:16): And I think that that still is the mentality throughout, well, everywhere probably pretty much here that the idea, like you’re saying, up into the right, it’s always grow, expand the busyness of our day. You need to put in 8, 9, 10 hours at your computer or your whatever in meetings, accomplishing nothing, but at least then I know where you are and that there’s an alibi for everything you’re doing. A walk, a simple walk, take a 15-minute walk, just even once a day. And I think for me as a creator, someone who, like you’re saying, I do these creative things and that is essential to me and to how I contribute, that space mentally, spiritually, to move the body moves ideas. That’s a great way to spend a sabbatical.
Matt Allen (01:15:06): I think that we’ve 100% lost the plot when it comes to some of that stuff in terms of our modern way of working, which it’s just glorified babysitting sometimes. You see the everyone has to be in the office all the time and whatever, and I think if anything that COVID has taught us is that that’s not true. And people can have good work-life balance and accomplish a lot, and they’re probably happier in so many ways when they’re not sitting in hours of traffic to get to an office that they really don’t need to be in.
(01:15:39): So from that perspective, yeah, I feel lucky that I can not only do that in my own work, but that I can hopefully, we can create a company here that builds that culture. I can’t change the culture of every workplace out there, but I can control the culture of my workplace, and I want to do that in the most thoughtful and intentional way possible.
Adam Williams (01:16:01): There’s a lot of weight of the world anxiety right now, and something that I keep trying to come back to is do the things that we can do. I can only contribute through connection through this podcast. That might be my best way to have a positive ripple effect. Your ripple effect comes through DifferentKind. You also have a podcast. You have conversations. You are using these techniques of motivational interviewing and teaching other, that’s our ripple effect. And just any one of us probably has pretty little influence to actually change the world through flipping a switch and having some… I don’t have a billion followers on whatever social media channel, but we all need to show up doing the things that we can do and the way we can do them, I think.
Matt Allen (01:16:51): 100%. And it’s funny when you talk about just the ability of going for a walk to also solve some physical problems and just like, hey, not only does it get ideas go and it just gets your body going. I do think I’m such a healthier person because we all feel that way to the world sometimes of this is too big or our country’s problems are too big or whatever. And then you go for a bike ride and you get your heart rate up to 185 and you’re like, “All right.” All of a sudden something is happening in my body where I’m able to now go back to those problems and feel better about them, feel like they’re more manageable, feel like I can just take the step that I need to take. It is amazing to me how that is also just a very big truth.
(01:17:34): And so from a mental health perspective, I think for all of us, just the ability to be in this beautiful valley that we all live in, we’re so lucky. So many people are living in gray skies, all winter and whatever. You’re like, yeah, it might be a little chilly here and a little windy, but I can still go outside and see the sun and do those things. So I think we’re all so lucky here to just be a part of this place that allows us to have that kind of mental health respite.
Adam Williams (01:17:58): Absolutely. You have brought some different perspectives to this podcast. Thanks for talking with me. This has been great, Matt.
Matt Allen (01:18:05): I really appreciate the ability to have these conversations, and I appreciate you for doing the work that you’re doing here to build community and tell stories here. It’s so important, so thank you so much.
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Adam Williams (01:18:24): Thanks for listening to the We Are Chaffee podcast. You can learn more about this episode and others in the show notes at wearechaffeepod.com and on Instagram, @wearechaffeepod. I invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I also welcome your telling others about the We Are Chaffee podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation.
(01:18:45): The We Are Chaffee podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health. Thank you to Andrea Carlstrom, director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment, and to Lisa Martin, community advocacy coordinator for the larger We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative.
Once again, I’m Adam Williams, host, producer, and photographer for the We Are Chaffee podcast. If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email me at adam@wearechaffeepod.com.
Till the next episode. As we say at We are Chaffee, “share stories, make change.”
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