Beauty, Aging, and the Truth Nobody Wants to Hear- with Dr. Ben Talei

The facelift internet loves a clean fight: SMAS vs deep plane, one “best” method, one winner. But what if that whole debate is a distraction from the only thing that actually predicts a great result: whether your surgeon can see how faces age in three dimensions and reverse it with intention? I sit down again with Dr. Ben Talei, Beverly Hills facial plastic surgeon, educator, and relentless anatomy nerd, to talk about what technique labels can’t capture and why most studies miss the parts patients care about most. 

We dig into how surgeon “vision” shows up in real outcomes: jawline clarity, midface shape, eye area youthfulness, skin quality, and even how the smile moves after facial rejuvenation surgery. Ben breaks down the logic behind planes, fixation zones, tissue glide, and why “ligament release” has become an oversimplified story that can block real understanding. We also get practical about neck contour, parotid-related volume, and why small three-dimensional corrections can beat big two-dimensional pulls when you’re chasing natural, durable change. 

From there, we go wider: pricing outrage and why elective cosmetic surgery behaves like a luxury market, the ethics of “profiting from insecurity,” and how social media and AI filters are driving unrealistic expectations for facelift results. We close with high-signal rapid fire on what’s underrated (nanofat), what’s overrated (biostimulators), why fillers can’t “defy gravity,” and whether hyperbaric oxygen or light therapy actually helps healing. If you want a clearer way to think about facelift technique, facial aging, and what excellence looks like, this one is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts so more people can find the show.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Ben Talei

06:00 Passion for Cars and Personal Interests

10:07 Balancing Education and Practice

16:10 The Debate: SMAS vs. Deep Plane Facelifts

24:04 Understanding Aging and Surgical Techniques

31:41 The Frustration of Misunderstanding in Aesthetic Surgery

33:39 The Evolution of Surgical Techniques and Patient Expectations

35:59 The Value of Cosmetic Surgery: Price vs. Quality

39:18 Addressing Insecurities: The Role of Cosmetic Surgery

43:13 The Impact of Social Media and AI on Self-Perception

49:29 Advancements in Facial Rejuvenation Techniques

56:21 Understanding Facial Anatomy: The Key to Effective Surgery

01:00:57 Understanding Surgical Challenges and Techniques

01:01:18 The Impact of Crevasse Technique on Aesthetic Surgery

01:03:28 Innovative Approaches to Facial Anatomy

01:07:23 Exploring the Causes of Aging

01:09:09 The Complexity of Aging and Surgical Outcomes

01:15:28 The Role of Genetics in Aging

01:16:28 Cellular Biology and Aging: A Deeper Dive

01:19:12 The Future of Anti-Aging Science

01:25:00 Exploring Post-Operative Care Techniques

01:29:42 The Efficacy of Light Therapy in Healing

01:32:29 Exploring the Efficacy of Anti-Aging Treatments

01:33:03 Rapid Fire: Trends in Cosmetic Procedures

01:34:46 Underrated and Overrated Anti-Aging Interventions

01:35:48 The Importance of Patient Education in Cosmetic Surgery

01:37:04 Personal Insights: Balancing Surgery and Self-Care

01:37:49 The Intersection of Passion: Cars and Cosmetic Surgery

01:38:55 Market Trends in Classic Cars and Investments

01:41:05 The Future of Car Values and Investment Strategies

01:43:01 The Joy of Car Enthusiasm and Personal Connections

Dr. Ben Talei Links:

Website: https://www.beverlyhillscenter.com/dr-ben-talei/

Cupid Lips: https://www.cupid-lips.com/

IG: @drbentalei, @muybenno

Tweet me @realdrhamrah
IG @drhamrah

Transcript

Welcome Back And Car Talk

Speaker 0:01

Alright, welcome back to the Daria Hamrah Podcast. We have today a returning guest, the one and only Dr. Ben Talei out of Beverly Hills, facial plastic surgeon, car lover, speaker, author, educator, legend, whatever you want to call him. Thanks for coming back, brother. I really appreciate you coming back. It means a lot to me, especially since you're all over the world, all over the place. And every time I call or text, you answer. And this is the second time I invited you on this podcast, and you didn't hesitate and you said yes. Means a lot to me, brother. I just want you to know that. I must. You're Daya Hamlet. Nobody, nobody must. Oh, come on, man. Come on. By the way, how do you do this? Like every time I love following your Instagram, by the way. If you are not following Ben, you're missing out because it's not just about plastic surgery, it's about everything. And I can't remember your handle on top of my head is what Dr. Ben Tele. D-R-B-E-N-T-A-L-E-I. Okay. Yes. And also you have another page, Mui Benno, right? Yeah, Mui Beno. Mui Beno. Not Bueno, but Benno for Ben, right? Is that correct? Yeah, exactly. I just stumbled on it and I don't know why I stumbled on it so late, but I'm obsessed with it because I'm obsessed with cars. So I'm so jealous, first of all, for the cars you have. And I always wanted to ask you which one, I know what my favorite is, I'll tell you, but which one is your favorite?

Speaker 1 1:38

The well, if I had to pick one. Only have one before so last year that question would have been impossible to answer. This year, I can tell you without a doubt, it's the uh Mercedes McLaren SLR HDK roadster. I said that one. There's nothing more beautiful than that. It's like perfect sound, it's fast, it handles, it's like it's because it's it's about almost four inches wider than a standard SLR. It's pretty crazy. It's a it's a wild-looking car. So how do you decide which car you drive? I rotate whatever's on the bottom. I have four cars that are on bottom, three on top, and then I'll have ones in other storage places, like my office or the house next door to my brother's house. And then whatever's on bottom, I rotate that week. And then usually at the end of the week, if I can flip them or switch them, I rotate.

Speaker 2:32

Now you have you have sold some in the past, right?

unknown 2:36

Yeah.

Speaker 2:37

How's that feeling? You know, the compared to the excitement when you first get it, right? It's like you got your new toy, something you were like looking for, that you got the perfect spec and everything. You were chasing it, hunting it, and then you got it. And then a year later, a couple of years later, you have to say goodbye. How to tell talk to me a little bit about the goodbye, how that feels.

Speaker 1 2:58

Well, there is certain cars that you get, and they, you know, once you have a certain number of cars, they kind of rather than being independent, kind of experience by itself, you're comparing it to all the other ones. So there's a few, like the 550 Marinello that I always wanted, but then when you drive it compared to my 512M, there's no day that I would rather take the 550 over the 512. And you only have so many days to drive them. If you just have a collection, then it doesn't matter. But I drive them, so I have to figure out which ones, and then I'm a dealer now, so it's like I've I'm gonna be buying and selling and moving things along. And so sometimes I buy a 550, keep it for a while, and then sell it.

Speaker 3:39

Well, if you ever want to sell any of them, can you please shoot me a text? Yeah. Before you put it before you put it on cars and bids, okay. Now you got it. Thank you. Well, I could tell you what my favorite is. Uh it it's it's based on where I was born, where I grew up, spent most of my life, which is which is Germany. So you have a wild guess? The career GT. Yes, sir. Yeah, that was I mean that I would sell my house to get that. If I didn't have kids, if I didn't have wife and kids, that's what would have happened. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 4:18

Exactly. Yesterday I drove the uh the 964 Turbo 3.6. That one is another one. Yeah, it's phenomenal that's another one.

Speaker 4:29

I have a regular 993 and I love driving it. It's just the more the rawest feeling of driving. We just took it down. I'm I'm a part of a group of Porsche guys. We pick a week and a year, and then we drive to amazing areas. So we went to Asheville this year, and from there we went to Trail of the Dragon, Tale of the Dragon, um, which is the famous 11-mile with 300-something curves, and we were like 10 or 11 Porsches of all generation, all specs. It was amazing. We had all the way Porsches from the 80s to the latest Turbo S. And we were driving like Mad Men behind each other, and we had like walkie-talkies and everything. We drove them out for a whole week, and then after that, we went to the Porsche experience in Atlanta, which was where you do the yeah, and it was, I mean, for a week we were like little kids, we were like boys back in the playground, and so that's I think I I feel like as men we're very simple. We we love the simple things in life, and and so for me, I share the same passion with cars as you do, so I totally relate to that. So I'm a big fan.

Balancing Travel Teaching And Business

Speaker 5:43

You too. I'm a psycho. Yeah, so tell me now, the other thing that you do, you love educating, and uh you you basically all over the world, not just all over the country, all over the world. How do you reconcile that with your responsibilities? You're also running a fellowship, so you're training fellows, you have a busy, successful practice, you have another business called Cupid Lips that you're expanding. I saw you're building out uh spaces. How does that work? I mean, how how how do you that I mean my day has only, let me check, 24 hours. Yeah, just uh multitasking. So do you have P do you how much do you delegate? Are you are you a micromanager or are you one that has figured out how to delegate and work efficiently? How do you do that?

Speaker 1 6:33

I have to do most of it myself, unfortunately. I for most of the things I do, nobody's able to help me. My my assistant is like out to lunch and probably doing, I don't know, God knows what in the day. So I kind of have to do everything myself and the education stuff I'm trying to slow down. I was doing a few years ago 52 lectures, then like two years ago I did 42, then last year I did 25. This year is already at like 15, and I'm trying not to do any. So next year I've been saying no to everything, and hopefully it's just like six remaining. I like teaching because it helps me in my thought process kind of figure things out, but it also is hard for me to say no to people when they ask me and they want me somewhere. But now it's gotten to the point where I think they're kind of taking advantage and just trying to promote themselves and using my name to do it, and it's getting it kind of annoying because the crowd that they draw in some of these places is like not the most advanced or intellectual people, and I'm not there to babysit them through grade one of face. I'm like very advanced in what I'm doing relative to other people, so it's uh painful. You know, I go and I try to teach and I talk about things that it's just like right over their head, and that even the most I even that some of the top guys in the world, they just don't get very basic logical anatomic descriptions, and they just like believe in it's make-believe a lot of this stuff. Or I start talking about smile dynamic, and they think it's hocus pocus, they think it's fake, but it's very real. It's just they can't wrap their minds around it because they're so stuck struggling, trying to understand lifting, how to get that to happen. Whereas lifting is like I can explain it, I can teach it, and I do it so reproducibly. All I care to talk about is the things that I'm you know discovering myself, which now is like smile modulation and you know that kind of stuff. So I'm I'm really trying to cut back on that and then focus more on my like primary practice. And Cupid, we're building, we we've had West Hollywood for two and a half years now, and then we're building Newport Beach. And I wanted to jump into Dallas, Miami, but I may do something more locally here for the for the next one. And then we have the hair group, but the hair group I don't really spend a lot of time on.

Speaker 8:50

It's kind of runs itself away from and that's run by one of your former fellows, right?

Speaker 1 8:56

Yeah, Hetty is there, she works with Fabian, who's our manager over there, and they do uh hair transplant, but mainly non-invasive hair stuff with injectables and other ways to like stimulate hair growth.

Speaker 9:08

Wonderful. Yeah, I mean, uh you you're onto something when you said everything you said about communicating or trying to teach people that are too stuck on their ways, it's almost like I call it cognitive dissonance is you're you're trying to teach someone a new concept and no matter how much proof and evidence you bring, because they're so stuck in their beliefs, it's almost like they're trying to intentionally reject the new concept because it causes pain when when you realize that all these years you might have been wrong and someone tells you otherwise. And so cognitive dissonance is is real in in in anything in life. It's in politics, in religion, and in even in in science itself and basic science. But the one thing that to me is still in 2026 somewhat not strange, it's almost disturbing when you just

Why Technique Wars Miss The Point

Speaker 10:09

said there's a lot of prominent surgeons out there still stuck in old ways and trying to defend old ways. And I don't want to beat a dead horse and go back into the conversation of Smash versus D-Plane. I think that topic has exhausted itself on social media already, so I don't want to bore the audience. But my question is contextually related to that. We don't have to go into the nuances of it, that's not the purpose of this podcast. Is why is it that, and like you said yourself, these I call them old guards, so-called prominent, whatever that means in today's world? I think that's changed because of social media. But they still they publish even an article I saw 2026 an article got published, apparently a meta-analysis comparison between SMAS and D Plane stating that there's no freaking difference. Like so, so does it mean like what we see doesn't exist? Like, how could you ignore that?

Speaker 1 11:14

And how could Yeah, so the the the conversation between the two is is a pretty stupid one overall. It's and I'll I'll tell you about that article, but the the conversation between the two, let's just say your approach or your vision of what you're trying to do, or your understanding of aging, when someone's droopy as they get older, do you care at all about how that happened? Do you care at all? Yes or no? And if the answer is yes, then your goal would be to figure out how that drooping actually happened, in what plane did this happen, in what layer did this happen? Is it drooping that happened from tilting of volume loss? Is it a shearing movement that happened? What kind of movement caused this? What kind of three-dimensional change? What kind of segmental attachments are there in each area that cause it to look different from one area to the other? You know, so that's the yes, I do care. And then there's the no, I don't give a shit. I just want to lift them. I don't care how it got there. I'm not trying to reverse it. I'm just trying to lift them. They'll look better if they're lifted. That's in general your if you were to give a logic behind deep plane versus smash playcation as a general kind of term or view, you would say smash placation is I don't give a shit where they came from. I'm just lifting them. And deep plane is I'm actually trying to reverse it in one of the ways that it aged. Not all of them, one of them. But that's not, you know, when I say it's a generalization, it's because you can look at 80 facelift surgeons and 80, 40 of them are doing smash placation types, 40 of them are doing deep plane types, and they get generally the same durability and result, which is what that paper is, you know, saying when they come back to get a uh revision. Qualitatively, when you're looking at the appearance of the face, does it just look like a cleaner jawline, or does the cheek look cleaned up? Do the eyes look younger? These are things that you can't even measure in those studies. They are not measurable. And you have to look at like, if I, as a surgeon, who I have the you know, a lot of capability, did everything I could possibly do in a deep plane versus everything with a placation technique, and I'm the best in the world, let's say, meaning in terms of capability and I'm some kind of whiz, definitively in the deep plane portion of where I went under and released and came over, I'm gonna be getting better results. Definitively. It's like it's not a baby, same exact person. But you can't do that study, it doesn't exist. So you go back to the split face study in you know 1990, and they read the results, you know, four or five years later looking at durability, and they were the same because it was kind of older technique at that time by those specific surgeons. So the studies don't make any sense. They do not represent actually what's happening. It doesn't help the conversation to say which one is better. Ultimately, if you're looking at a hundred surgeons, most of them suck anyways, realistically. So, like the conversation is a dumb one. It doesn't make any sense. These guys couldn't achieve greatness if you handed them the recipe for greatness. So you have to think about application, practicality. What can we actually teach these people that they can go out and give people some benefit? Maybe not full reversal or maximum or whatever, but they give them some benefit. So that's the real conversation is the practicality of it for the majority of the population. Now, if you say we're at the top of our fields and we want to push this as far as we can, different conversation. But that's not the conversation people are having at all. They're just saying whatever is best in your hands, whatever you can do in your hands. That's a conversation.

Speaker 15:00

Think of that. I what if one if if I hear that one more time, someone says whatever works in your hands, you know, I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 15:06

But it's a realistic, you know, me too, but it's a realistic application.

Speaker 15:10

So you so you have to look at it as but it sounds like an excuse, a justification.

Speaker 1 15:14

It's not real science, man. I mean, that's reality, though, because these surgeons go out and they can't do better. So, you know, you do have to look at it that way, unfortunately, in two ways. You got to separate it in your mind of what's gonna benefit the majority of surgeons who just don't have it in them to understand this stuff or grow this stuff, and it is in your hands. How can you get away with it without fucking somebody up? That is, you know, I have to look at it, and then versus someone you know like me, where I'm just like, I just want to get the best possible out there in the world. You know, that's that's a different game, though. And you can't mix the conversations.

Speaker 15:49

So, how confusing how confusing is it for young surgeons that are trying to learn? Because they understand, you know, I teach as well, just like you. I have fellows, I do cadaver courses, I see surgeons from all generations from all over the world, and I have fellows, they come, they all come curious, they want to learn.

What Patients Should Look For

Speaker 16:10

But then what I've noticed, and I'm sure you have too, they some they're not risk takers, so they they're very risk averse, and they quote unquote don't want to get in trouble. And there's still this notion out there that there's a high chance of nerve damage with one versus the other, which has it that that conversation is even stupid. Yeah, yeah, there's no so how do you teach someone that is biased towards one or the other and then tries to justify that, and then ultimately then that trickles down to the consumer, which is the patient that is trying to figure out what's the best, who's my who's the surgeon I should go to, what's the best techniques? Because now social media has in one aspect it has educated the public, but also then with that comes the confusion because this is such I don't know, such a controversial topic, and the patients get confused. So how like like where do you see that even going? Is it is it always gonna be like this?

Speaker 1 17:16

Yeah, it will. So and it's because people get side railed pretty often by the technique, and including I'm watching Harvey Levin on TMZ yesterday talking to Janice Dickinson, which is funny, and he says, Well, I thought it was just, you know, all surgeons go and they learn how to do it, and that's it. You get a facelift, you get a facelift. I didn't know there were such nuanced differences between them. Again, the focus is on technique. Smash, deep, how much do you do, how far do you do? Realistically, that's not what you're looking for unless you're going blindly into something. When you don't go blindly into it, you could actually just look at what the surgeon understands and sees. It's about their vision and understanding of the face. And when they can see things and understand things, not just in your face, but in everyone's faces with aging, they will be able to fix them to the greatest extent possible using their knowledge of anatomy. And based on their knowledge of anatomy, they'll say, in this area I'm placating, in this area I'm releasing, in this area lifting, whatever they need to do to maximize the reversal of aging. So I don't think anyone will ever be able to focus on something like that because they can't understand it. It's something that is doctor-dependent to say, can they see it? Do they understand it? And most people just basically can't. And then so you look at it more from a consumer base or a business base of let's say these younger guys, they're coming out and they want to learn what to do. So there's a guy who owns a pizza shop for like, you know, 20 years, and his pizza shop's been running for 20 years, and it's fantastic. And he's got one pizza shop, maybe two, and he's successful in life and does well. And this guy comes out and he's like, I want to do what this guy did. And he just follows his recipe and of opening a business and running it. And at the same course and trajectory, he improves, which is over about five to 10 years, a very average type of thing, and he ends up in the average realm. Or someone else comes and says, Well, I don't really want to learn from the pizza guy. My goals are a little higher. I want to see how the CEO of Dell Computers did it. I want to see how Bill Gates did it. I want to see how whomever, you know, the people that own the chicken tender store did it. Like I want to see how they scaled it so rapidly and so well with such a good product. How did they do it? So I'm gonna ignore the 99% of the businesses out there, and I want to see how the one outlier really did it, getting these crazy, crazy type of results. But not everybody looks towards that, right? They look at what's in front of them and they come out and they take advice from everyone, and everyone in general is average, right? This is like, it's not like every surgeon is exceptional. That's an impossibility that that breaks the rules of fucking math. It doesn't happen. So there are averages, right? So most surgeons are average and they come out and they learn from most surgeons. And the thought leaders, just because they are considered thought leaders because they're popular, or because they were in an academic institution, or because they've been promoting themselves from egomania, does not make them the clairvoyant. It doesn't make them the smart, you know, intelligent. They're probably also average. And you see these guys who are the old guard, they are extremely average. That's why they're old guard. Why else would they be old guard? They're old guard because they don't have the ability to grow, change, and understand.

Speaker 20:40

Well, why do you think that is? I mean, the the reason why they got became the guard back in the days where they were the new guard is because they were just as curious, just as I guess, scientifically inclined or approached this, I guess, and they were they're educators to themselves. Did it stop at some point, or do you think it has never been that? I mean, I I don't know what's going on. Like, are are we one day going to be like that?

Speaker 1 21:05

No, so go back to your politics thinking about that. Think about how many people in this world are so wrong about what they do, yet how fucking fervent and committed and dedicated are they to understanding everything and doing everything they possibly can. And they're spending all their energy in absolutely the wrong direction.

Speaker 21:26

So I I get that. I I get that. That's basic human. But don't you, if you see a result, and I'll tell you a little bit my evolution, maybe the question becomes more clear. So uh when I trained, this was in 2007, eight, when I did my fellowship, you know, pretty much we're doing smash lifts. You know, there was like a hundred different articles about how to plicate the smash, imbricate, placate, I mean, you name it. And then this big question was like how

Cognitive Dissonance And Surgeon Growth

Speaker 21:55

can we address the neck? How can we uh improve the lower neck? It was this. Whole debate, and for me, I was a fellow, I was just learning everything, taking everything in. That's what I was doing. Five years into practice, I just I liked my results. I thought they were good based on the standards that I was taught and I had. But then once I saw better results, I was like, what the hell? Like, how how can I how how can this how can I do this? So that's when I went down the rabbit hole. And then through social media, then I, you know, because before social media, you either had to go to a meeting or a textbook that was written like five or ten years prior, or maybe uh DVDs back then we had these educational DVDs that we learned from, and or whoever your mentor was. So we didn't have this global access to all surgeons around the world that do an excellent job, right? So that's when I realized holy shit, there is more to this, and that's when I became curious because once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it, and then I realized how much my results suck. And the very results that I thought are badass. So my standard shifted, but that uh evoked this curiosity to learn that, and then it took several years to mastering that. So my question is, and that comes from genuine love for just doing better, getting better results. It's it's almost like I was competing with myself. So my question is for for the quote I call them quote unquote high profile people because you know there is there, I feel like there's two different worlds. There's high profile in some ac uh fictious academic world, and then there is the real world, and they're they're so separate. But how come those those ones that they they're not that eager to improve their results? Like, is it because they don't see it? They don't see the difference between their results and the better results, or they see it, but then they don't feel like evolving anymore. It's almost like, you know what, I'm just riding into the sunset and resting on my laurels. Well, what is it? Which one is it to you? Because you know those you know those people probably better than I do.

Speaker 1 24:12

Yeah. Uh so most of the time it is that they can't see or see or understand what they're seeing. And this is you know, a couple different ways to like think about why that happens. But you imagine, like, uh, you know, we we see sort of like in the visible spectrum, and then spiders can see infrared, right? But there is all this other stuff that's going on in the infrared that you never see or understand, even though it's affecting your life at all times. In facelifting, let's just say, simplistically put, people look at things in photos and they only analyze one part of the photo. So let's say they're really looking at like max 50% of the picture, and they're looking at only one dimension out of the different points that you can look around a face and think three-dimensionally. So they're really analyzing a very small part of the face anytime you look at it, and they're unable to completely comprehend the differences that you would see between excellence and average because they're not looking for it. They can't see it. And when they look at your result when you're talking about something, their eye goes to only what they understand, which is that very limited part, and they don't see a visible difference that's detectable to them. So they just say, okay, it's the same. He didn't prove anything to me. Why would I need to change and do anything differently? It's dangerous to add something additional when I'm getting the same result, anyways. And but let me just put some science behind it. There's a paper that was done in 1990 where these two surgeons had the same results, even when they thought they didn't. So, see, I'm right. So I don't need to go anywhere. So they justify it like that. And that's exactly what happens with you know these top guys. And really, what for them, like what's gonna define your success, right? Like my success is defined by, well, one, my patients not complaining and going away and never coming back again. That's one. But my success is defined by me looking at my photos and saying I can't get any more improvements anywhere on any millimeter of this photo, or can I? And I keep going. Most people, their success is based on are they happy enough with a photo? Was the patient happy enough with the photo? And is their business successful? Let's say your business is successful and you're taking academia and the patients are happy. Who gives a shit? Like you think you're top, you know? Why? You make 10 million a year, five million a year, there's your gauge of success, right? For me, my gauge is not that. I have a different one. I'm much more gauge.

Speaker 26:47

Well, my what is what is your gauge? What is your north?

Speaker 1 26:49

Why are you doing all of this? Well, because there's still things that I haven't gotten perfect yet. So with like lip lifting, let's say I haven't figured out a way to get any better. I'm kind of plateaued.

Speaker 27:02

So I lost my what are you not happy about? Because the lip legs, the liplifts look amazing.

Speaker 1 27:08

So I'm curious to see what I just can't find any more ways to improve it. So I'm kind of stuck. And because of that, I lose my interest to kill myself.

Speaker 27:19

Where where is where do you feel in your technique is room for improvement? If you were if you were critical at yourself.

Speaker 1 27:26

Uh well, can you ever get the nasal base to heal perfectly on every single person versus it keeps scarring on like, you know, 5%, 2%, 10%, whatever it is, and you have to treat it. So that I don't know how to completely get rid of that or track marks or little tiny things like that.

The Anatomy Lens Behind Better Results

Speaker 1 27:46

But I kind of leave it at that because I'm not able to pass where I am. And uh, but I I lose my excitement for it. So I don't go kill myself and do I used to do 10 to 12 a week, and I just wanted to keep going and going and going. Now I'm like, well, I'm good. I'm like, I don't need to kill myself for it. Facelifting, though, I'm always gonna see something where the patient comes in and then they're like, what about this? What about this? What about this? And they point to the tiniest little thing. And how do you deal with that? Well, I mean, sometimes I think it is a physiologic limitation where I can't do anything about it, but other times I'm curious and I'm like, okay, well, they didn't have it when they were younger, so it came from somewhere. Am I able to reverse it back to that point, or am I just structurally limited because of so many factors that have changed? I can't correct all of them. So is it can I not see all of them or can I not correct all of them because it's just not practical because their skull is a different size now, right? Like I I always kind of go back and forth between the two. I'm is it me or is it you? Like, I don't, you know, I don't know. But facelifting for me is not just a facelift, it's all facial rejuvenation. Everyone keeps limiting themselves to a facelift, and the talk is all about deep playing this, that dude. Like, I'm so far beyond just lifting. I'm trying to do so many other things. Yeah, and people think my results, they're not real. Like they look at it, they're like, No, you can't get skin quality better with a lift. I'm like, Well, you don't understand then why the skin looks aged, because that's why you're saying that. Oh, you can't get pores better. I had this fucking dumbass in Miami saying my photos are filtered because a facelift can't make pores better, because he's so dumb, he doesn't know that you can actually change the appearance of skin quality. Well, just with your hand, you can.

Speaker 29:33

I could improve my pores just lifting this mess up. I mean, that is common sense.

Speaker 1 29:37

However, is this achievable with a facelift? So I'm so far again beyond where I'm trying to improve reflection of light, I'm trying to improve softness of contours on the forehead. Like, you know, I'm trying to improve array of brow hairs, I'm trying to improve corrugation of the brows, I'm trying to decrease DAO contracture. So I'm trying to reverse everything, and that's where I am. And everyone else is stuck on this conversation of deep plane versus not. And if they're in that conversation of deep plane versus not, they are not the great surgeons. Yeah, the great surgeons are not in that conversation. They're like, why are you guys so fixated on this? It makes no sense. Like, who do you think?

Speaker 30:21

To me, it's a complete concept flaw. That it's it's a complete concept flaw. To me, like there shouldn't be a conversation if one understands, like you said, the concept and the causes of aging. And you have to understand the root cause before you have can even are qualified to enter a debate. And then you realize there ain't no debate. Yeah, there's nothing. There is no debate. Yeah, the debate again is do you care about how the face aged or do you not? Exactly. That's it. And that's that's perfectly put. I could, you know, and and that's really where the conversation begins but also ends. And I I that's one of the reasons, you know. I don't particularly enjoy like I'm when I go talk on a panel, I swear to God, it's me and then another D-Plane face of guy, like we're on the same page, we're all talking the same stuff, and then there's three others showing their smash lifts, and then blatantly and audaciously claiming that they can get just as good of results, and then even posting their pictures in front of a thousand people, and you're like, I would be embarrassed to put that stuff up.

Speaker 1 31:32

Yeah, but that's the lack of the vision. Yeah, that's the lack of the vision.

Speaker 31:36

But but I I just can't understand because typical stuff uh that SMAS stuff can't address, which is the mid phase. I mean, the SMAS ends at the zygomatica, so you then they end up injecting the shit out of it with fat or fillers afterwards just to you know improve the mid phase, just because it's so there's so many things that that's patients. I feel patients see more than some of these people because patients come and say, Hey, what's what's going on with here? Why is it so flat? Why is it drooping? And then they get a phase diff, and then this doesn't change at all. And then they get these curtain uh like and then it's like how is that then better? So anyway, so for me it's very frustrating. So I don't blame you if you're sick and tired of doing these courses and giving these speeches, as you said, it's like it's you you're at this point you're speaking a different language than 90% of the audience can understand. So, where do you do you see ever in our lifetime, our careers, let's say before we retire, things changing, the pendulum swinging, going from 9010 to 1090?

Speaker 1 32:46

Well, the the pendulum has swung for sure, it already has. You know, there's people fighting it for whatever reason and you know, celebrating when they get little tiny things that go in their direction because they think it's some kind of like team versus team. The pendulum is swinging towards better results, and to get better results, you have to realistically address the anatomy better. And so that that's happening more, anyways, and it's gonna keep going slowly in that direction. And ultimately, again, you know, well, who cares? Like, if they don't want to, I don't care. Like, let them have shit results, you know. Mine stand out a lot more, and that benefits me. So I I don't care anymore.

Speaker 33:30

Well, the the consumer cares, and I think we never had in in the past this this dichotomy between these or differences between what people are willing to pay for a facelift today compared to 10 years ago. And uh I see this outrage out there on social media. How could you charge this much? I mean, I have patients like the ones that obviously don't come to me is like, oh, your prices, why are your prices so much higher than uh Dr. Such and Such? I'm like, because you're comparing apples and oranges. I mean, I'm not doing that surgery. It's called facelift, but it's not the same surgery. But the patient, I I can't, I don't expect the patient to understand that because even if a surgeon, like an old guard, doesn't understand it, like how could we expect a patient to understand that, right? So that's my first thing. But the other thing is there are a large amount of patients who are willing to pay that top dollar price because they can see the difference between the results, and their face is the most important thing to them, and they're willing to pay for it, and that's okay for someone else to be outraged by it and out of shape about it. Forget about it being silly. It's like, what is it to you? I mean, uh, people obviously have different standards, you know. Just like someone goes buys a pair of pants at Walmart and someone else goes to Gucci and buys and pays 10x that and argues that this came from the same factory or was made in the same country. What's I mean, there's so much more that goes into these things. So, how do you see that? What's your sentiment and how do you respond to these people?

Speaker 1 35:13

Yeah, well, the the there's no more value for clothing yourself in Gucci than Walmart, right? So you can have either one and be fantastically happy with it. You know, you pick who you want to go to and you go to them and you pay what they want to pay or where they want to charge, and that's that's about it. It's we're we're not real doctors, you know. I don't think people understand that. We're we're we're cosmetic surgeons. Like this is a purely elective, luxurious field. If it were something that were life-saving, and we were the ones who are the gatekeepers, and people would die if we didn't treat them, I hundred percent agree. It is completely wrong ethically to do that, because then we're real doctors and there's no one else that has they have access to. And realistically, there's so much access now that even the real doctors don't take insurance and they charge a lot if they want to, and that's how they want to live their lives. And nobody complains. So the, you know, for people out there who complain about it, it's ridiculous. It's like just don't go to that person. It's like I don't have to, nobody's forcing me to go buy a Ferrari. And if I don't buy a Ferrari, I'm not gonna die. I'm gonna be totally fine if I don't buy a Ferrari. I can still get to work, I can still do whatever I want to do, or I can just walk. Like so, there's there's other things you can do. So it's a ridiculous conversation. And for surgeons, there are surgeons who comment on it. Obviously, it's the surgeons who can't charge more or can't do more. There are a few out there who just don't care to, and great, I love them for it. That's fantastic. The ones you know who do charge more, they have their everyone has their own reason why. I have my reasons why. It's because people have made

The Crevasse Technique And Neck Lift

Speaker 1 36:57

my life miserable, and I want less of them in there, and I want to just focus on fewer patients and give them more time, and that makes me happier. And I don't know how to limit myself because I say yes to everything. So I just do the dumbest thing you possibly can do, which is I mean, dumb, like you don't have to think much. You just take your price up. You're like, okay, it'll slow people down. That's it. And that's why I do it, and that's why I want to do it. And if I want to do it for someone for free, I'll do it for free. Not for the asshole who's complaining about charge about the charges. You know, I'll just it's it's it's I'll do whatever I want. This is I'm a I'm a luxury item. Nobody in this world needs me. They're not gonna die without me. I don't owe anybody anything, I'm here for fun. And this is what it'll cost to have fun with me. That's it.

Speaker 37:42

What what do you yeah, I totally agree with you, and and uh it's choices we make, so we can't you know blame someone for making choices based on what is important to them. How do you how do you see what we do in terms of enabling human behavior? Uh you know, you see on social media people commenting that hey, uh I don't appreciate what you do, you're taking advantage of people's insecurities and you're making money off of people. Have you read those comments? Yeah, yeah. So there's what what do you what do you what do you have to say to someone that that accuses you of something like that? Taking advantage of someone's insecurities, shame on you.

Speaker 1 38:35

Yeah, yeah. I mean, good for them, let them believe that it doesn't matter. Like they were not in a on a trial that we have to prove something, but let's say you wanted to give them an answer, you never will because to have that thought is is very, very narrow-minded, and it's it's ridiculous because the reason we exist in the first place is because people want to make changes. So, you know, Ferrari doesn't create the desire again, like the you have it's it's not nicotine, you know. So nicotine, I get it. Yes. That's a good, that's a good um like nicotine, you're trapping people and you're taking advantage and you're creating a desire and you're doing all this and that. For us, the desire exists, which is why we exist. So the in essence, when you look at the evolution of it, the patient created us. It's not the other way around where we created a need. People want to do something. Now, if someone came to us who's beautiful and fantastic, and our intervention can't help them, or our intervention is not going to help how they feel about something basic, or their problems are more deeply rooted than something aesthetic, then yes, there would be a problem there. So there might be a situation where somebody could take advantage and take advantage of someone's insecurities. That can happen for the majority of it.

Speaker 39:58

It does happen.

Speaker 1 39:59

I mean, we the majority of time the people that we're treating are seeking us. They want to feel better about something very you know simple that's been bothering them, and it'll allow them to get it out of their minds. Whether it's for vanity and for beauty, whether it's for an advantage in the workforce, whether it's for getting over a divorce and feeling better looking when your husband or wife is going out and banging younger people, there's a million materialistic reasons you might want to do something like this. Then we're here for it. And that's our job to judge who we can do it on, who we can't do it on, who needs it, who doesn't need it. And ultimately, if there's somebody who is completely unhappy with life in general, teaching them that an aesthetic surgery is not gonna make them happy. So I I I I don't think, first of all, responding to those people is very wise because they don't get it, but that would be the response that they will never understand. Yeah.

Speaker 40:56

But I see it, I see it the same way as you could argue that the makeup industry is also taking advantage of people's you know, insecurities, you know. That that's so why why sell makeup and you're basically taking advantage? It's the same thing. Yeah, you know, exactly. And I like I like Stephen Dayen's perspective on that. And I did a podcast with him several years ago, and he said, you know, we're we're he considers himself a self-confidence doctor. He said, Well, we're self-confidence doctors, because we treat, we help people with their self-confidence and self-esteem by making them uh feel uh look the way they want to feel, by enhancing their beauty, their aesthetics so that they can feel more confident. So it's to me, it's the other way around. I think in in a way we are therapists more than anything.

Speaker 1 41:52

Yeah. Yeah, and you see it's uh some people you can help, some people you can't.

Speaker 41:56

So so how do you feel that social media and AI has, do you think it's it's helped us or hurt us? Do you think I mean obviously it has altered uh the way people see themselves, but do you think it's a how how much of it do you think is good and how much of it do you think is bad?

Speaker 1 42:16

Well, um people are more aware of how they look, which is the first issue, you know, let's say like 40 years ago, not an issue, because unless you're taking tons of photos of yourself as an actor or something like that, you're really not staring at yourself in the worst lighting versus, you know, like in the morning you go in the mirror and there's light flashing on it, reflecting you get you're not in the worst lighting. When you start taking more and more photos, and you see yourself on social media more, you see yourself in Zoom, on Zoom more, in weddings, you know, wherever you are, you may see you're the worst version of yourself because you'll catch those bad angles with bad lighting and in a bad strained smile position or whatever it is. So certainly, you know, patients have come out more and more over the past 10 years, especially saying, Hey, I've noticed these things I wouldn't have noticed before. Can you help treat them? So, in one way, it kind of sucks for patients because they see those photos and they want you to take their worst photo ever and then make it look like their best photo ever, right? Whether it's filtered or not, they just want to make it you know look like the best photo ever. So, in a way, it kind of has increased self-awareness and you know, judgment. So not so great for people. In other ways, it's helped out a ton because they're able to go find help for it when they need now, because it's

Aging Mechanisms And Tissue Quality Limits

Speaker 1 43:41

all over the place. It's like, you know, the plastic surgery on the internet is much more now than all the famous chef TV shows and stuff that came out that we all used to watch and reality housewives and all that. Then you have the whole like AI in the industry itself. You know, AI and And morphing and all that has created unrealistic expectations for people because they think that they can achieve what you see on a filtered photo realistically. And the photos become so realistic, also, that you can't really tell the difference. So people say, oh my God, so and so had a necklift, so-and-so had a facelift, so had a nose job, they had a radio frequency, whatever. And look at them in this photo, they look like they're like, you know, little baby eye five-year-old adorable face. Oh my God. But it's all, you know, AI. So it does set some unrealistic expectations. But at the same time, now we're using AI to help us out in our own surgeries and help with other stuff. So for now, the AI is misleading for most of it, where you say, okay, let me like, I can make an AI version photo of you of your face, but it's not real. You know, to say like to sell you something, which is very misleading. But on the other hand, I know there's going to be a benefit because I've already created one for like the Cupid lift with the lip, where I have now, as part of our video library, you get access to the app. And the app is almost published where you can use the calculator. You take a picture of yourself as a patient or as a doctor doing it for their patient or a dentist, and you say, Show me a five millimeter lip lift, four millimeter, five, six, whatever, using the Cupid algorithm. And it'll actually show the realistic change you can get using the Cupid lift, an incisive display, and all this and that. So AI has helped me specifically with that. But if I try to apply this to the whole face, there's no way you can get an accurate representation of course. So it's it's good and bad. In general, AI for the world is gonna cause more problems than good. That's for sure. Like, sure, it'll cure cancer pretty soon. It'll find a way better than we can at an accelerated rate. But as you cure cancer, you also at the same time destroyed everything else in the world and led to like five world wars and made people, you know, uh hate each other and you know they can't even talk to each other anymore. So it's got its good and bad. I think AI ultimately the bad is gonna outweigh the good stuff. The good stuff is gonna be in people's faces, which is like I can push a button on my phone and my whole house gets cleaned, you know. Like there's gonna be cool stuff for sure, and then cancer goes away for a large part, and uh, they even get a treatment for like herpes, you know. There's gonna be some good stuff that people visualize and see, but there's gonna be a bunch of other fucking chaos that's happened that's gonna be negative. Same application towards facelifting.

Speaker 46:36

And I think at the end of all of it is us humans, uh, we're the ones ultimately in control and deciding where it's gonna go. And to me, AI and social. Not for one more year, yeah. Yeah, it's AI will take over. Yeah, I I don't believe that, you know, because as long as we are still in trouble, we can turn it off anytime we want, unless it knows how to turn itself back on, then we're in trouble.

Speaker 1 47:01

Yeah, why wouldn't it? Why wouldn't it know how?

Speaker 47:04

If we know how and we've taught it, I know we figured it's uh it's it's kind of scary. I that's one of the reasons I don't want to go down that rabbit hole because I don't want to scare the shit out of myself. I I I always like to believe in the good in people and good in things. That's just my nature. And I I just don't I just don't believe in doomsday. I I I don't understand how humanity could have come this far to then destroy itself and you know, but that's a different conversation. You know, what I want to know, where do you see now you're still I would say you're at the height of your career, and you you're not probably not gonna hang up your cleats anytime soon? Where do you still see the improvements that I guess are possible when it comes to facial rejuvenation, but also facial aging? Is there is there how much room for improvement does Ben in 2026 exist for the next, I don't know, 10 years, 20 years?

Speaker 1 48:04

Well, for facial rejuvenation, the stuff I'm doing now eclipses by far like the stuff I did like two years ago or a year ago. For me, it's like so much more finely tuned, and there's so many things that I don't miss anymore that nobody understands, that nobody understood, nobody could have explained to me. There's areas out here where people call it a zygomatico cutaneous ligament, and I have now realized exactly what that is, exactly what the depression under it is in some people and not the others, which is not even what other they're not even it's not even referred to. Would you mind sharing? I'm curious personally. Well, so that specifically is there well, so there's no such thing as a bony category.

Speaker 48:51

I know this might be boring for the audience right now, but this is me right now geeking out from nerd to nerd.

Speaker 1 48:57

So so so first there there's definitively in this world, there's no such thing as a bone bone skin ligament. It doesn't exist. Agree with you. You can't go from ectoderm to endoderm. It doesn't embryologically exist, it doesn't exist in a human, you can't show it on a cadaver or a person when you flip the skin over. There's no attachments there. There's none on the bone either. So like you can peel off the bone on any skull and see there's none. So what are people seeing is the question over there. And it's actually two things. One is what they're focused on, which is right under the zygomaticus, and then there's actually another area just inferior to that as well, which is similar but different that they completely ignore. So this area over here, there is a difference in tissue density from above it and below it because the structures are different above and below it, not because there's a ligament there. This area over here has a muscle, this area over here has a muscle, this area over here has buccal fascia with a deep muscle, and then parotid. This area has a bone, this area has no bone. It's hanging open in front of the mandible to the cheek. This area has underlying adhesions towards the bone where layer five of zygomaticus is. This area has attachments towards parotid or floats away from parotid. So, with all this, you end up with a gliding plane here, a gliding plane here, fixation here, gliding plane here. So if you're going through this gliding portion, you can elevate. If you're going submuscular or supromuscular, you can elevate. And then through here, it becomes variable based on the person if they have dense tissues in layers three, four, five, or if they don't have dense tissues there, depending if they're white, black, thin white, thick white, whatever it is. Nothing that would have to do with the ligament, however, different density and tissues. And there's no glide plane because there's no muscle there. So that's what they're seeing as a ligament, is because they create a glide tunnel above it, a glide tunnel below it, they retract upwards and they see vertical striations because they're retracting tissues that haven't been released. And then magically, when they release the one portion that didn't get released, it moves. Wow.

unknown 51:05

Wow.

Speaker 51:05

It must be a ligament.

Speaker 1 51:07

Oh my god. I released here, I released here, I didn't release here, and then when I release here, now I get my movement. Oh my god, how did that happen? It's so crazy. It must be a ligament. Versus, I'm like, okay, well, what if you just release that and not above and not below? Well, nothing happens. Then what are you talking about? What you're saying essentially is that everything needs to be released up to where it doesn't to move your tissue plane, correct? And they're like, no, there's a ligament, whatever. So either way, that's one portion. The second portion they're missing is, as I said, directly inferior. As you see, people get a larger depression that goes inferior to McGregor's patch. What is that? That is your layer three buckle fascia that when you're younger is approximating your anterior border of your parotid gland, migrating away from it, and you actually create a gap in layer three. So if someone says this mass is not contiguous in layer three, they are correct. There are places, first of all, it overlaps, orbicularis overlaps, zygomaticus, zygomaticus overlaps TP fascia, orbicularis overlaps Tp fascia. It's not a direct plane, it's like this.

Speaker 52:13

Yep.

Speaker 1 52:14

Yeah, we get that. But there's also gaps there as it migrates away. And you end up here with a buccal fascial gap from the parotid. And you have to reapproximate this in surgery, not only to fill that gap, but to move your modeolus back, to move your soft tissue back and to recreate

Hyperbaric Oxygen And Light Therapy

Speaker 1 52:31

fullness in this area because you've hollowed. And it's partially because of the migration away. And it's this is reproducible, and I can show it over and over again. But those are the things I'm seeing. You know, those are the things I'm seeing, and I'm fixing that. So, but other surgeons are like, no, there's a ligament there. I'm like, show me one fucking embryo. Show me, show me where this comes from.

Speaker 52:54

Well, I I don't I don't blame them because they get their information from textbooks, from articles, and then that's when cognitive dissonance kicks in, right? They it now it's a fact because it's written everywhere, everybody talks about it, and then you come and say this. It's almost like Galileo coming saying, Hey guys, I think the earth is round. I just looked under uh through a telescope and it's not flat, and then you get uh you know put in jail.

Speaker 1 53:18

Yeah, but the so sadly, this whole so I don't even do technically a full deep plane. I'm kind of like manipulating that plane, which is layer four, as much as I possibly can. I'm deep plane focused, I'm not a full deep plane surgeon, right? Hamra was the only, your hammer was the only uh I know, but he was the only real deep plane surgeon. I don't even do full deep plane, I do manipulation of it as much as possible segmentally differently to be safe and take advantage of different parts. I segmentally treat these guys think that deep plane surgery is based upon the idea of ligament release. That's what they think it's about, which is purely ridiculous. It's about planar release and redistribution or you know, replacement or repositioning of layers composite as much as possible. That's what it's about. But they were taught that it's about ligament release, and ligament release has now become synonymous with deep plane surgery, even though there is it would make in what world, so like a ligament is a stabilizing structure. So why would you want to do the thing? Yeah, exactly. Why would you want to release it? Yeah, a ligament would not be drooping, nor would it be drooping more than the tissues around it. So why is that the important thing to release? It doesn't make any sense, but they do exist in the face, they're just looking at the wrong place. And when you look at facial aging, you see where they exist, they exist here and they exist here. That's it. And when you smile as you get older, everything bunches towards here, everything bunches towards here. That's where your deep attachments are, and the separation in planes where you see that. That's where your deep attachments are. So they do exist, it's just they're important, and you need to maintain them and you need to lift everything that drooped onto them off of them and tension them back up. So when you you see where my focus is going in my evolution, is now optimizing the position of the SMAS, all of the SMAS. So when people talk about SMAS, they're only talking about surgical SMAS. Surgical SMAS is layer three. The SMAS is not one layer, it's multi-layer. It's three and it dives down towards five. Okay, so that's your actual SMAS. You have diving down and you have deep five, which is Rhizorius and Zygomaticus major deep belly. So it's a multi-layer system. The aging portion is layer three. So when people say SMAS, they mean surgical SMAS, meaning the part we're operating, not all of the rest. So I am optimizing the tension on my surgical SMAS, my volume under, my volume cushioning. And when you look at my smiles, they do they dynamically have changed dramatically, all of them. They don't bunch towards the mouth, they don't bunch towards the eyes anymore. Now they're neutral and the mouth lifts towards the side. Everything lifts towards the side. And I'm able to do that because I go segmentally and make sure I get rid of laxity in every portion of the face.

Speaker 56:15

And I've noticed that on your before and afters. And actually now, because I've been listening to you and and you help me really dramatically, I'm a big fan, and always like hearing you explain these things because it makes total sense and it requires a really in-depth knowledge of anatomy, though, to even be able to follow the things that you're saying. And I think also certain narratives like ligament release and all of that are in the way of people understanding the very things you're trying to explain. You know, I feel the narratives are in a way for us to understand a more simple explanation. And everything you're saying makes sense. It's very simple, it's very logical, but only if you understand anatomy. So it's like I can't talk about someone how the car feels when you drive it at certain speeds or certain RPM if they have never driven a car or or or if they don't even have a driver's license. And and I think again, these narratives around these old uh schools of thoughts and old teachings are in the way of people breaking outside of our shell uh their shelves and uh giving themselves at least a chance of understanding the very things that you're explaining. And I can now see how frustrating it must be for you talking in front of a thousand people where you already know before you even started your talk that probably 98% are not understanding anything of what you're saying.

Speaker 1 57:47

And it does yeah, it does get in the way. Like you have cervical retaining ligament, if you believe in that it exists, number one, if you believe that it is the platisma on the anterior border of the SCM, number two, which is untrue, you're never gonna actually get to a reproducible endpoint of what it takes to recreate the contours and the lift in that area, because you're focused on something that doesn't exist and you don't actually see the anatomy that's there. The true anatomy that's there is the platismal, the platisma, the parotid fascia, and the parotid. And if you understand that, then you can now manipulate that anatomy. You can say, Well, the parotid is an anchoring structure, layer five. I have to take layer three and four off of it until it's released from it, roll over it, and push it back down. That's how I get my lift. So if you know that, then now you have reproducible results versus you're like, okay, this fake thing exists, you don't know how much to lift it, where to stop, what's your endpoint, what guarantees the lift, right? They don't care what guarantees the lift. They say if you release it, you lift it. No, there is an endpoint that will allow you to actually lift. What is that? Some people say it's palpable movement, it's not just that. You have to actually release the prod or else it rolls with you. Or else what happens is every once in a while you're like, fuck, why is it still full under there? Man, I don't know why that happened. I don't know why that happened. And it's and they just stop at that. They don't say my understanding of it's wrong. They say it doesn't work. It just happened. Something just happened. Oh, you can't control it, it must be scarred tissue. Not that my understanding of the anatomy was wrong, so I manipulated it incorrectly. That's like, but whatever.

Speaker 59:32

And I think I think uh one of the on that topic of the product, one of the I feel for me, how it changed my results personally in the past, I would say, two years, your crevasse technique that I initially thought it would improve just my gonial angle, which for the audience it's the angle of your jaw right underneath your earlobe, is that little corner there. And to

Rapid Fire Takes And Car Market Chaos

Speaker 1:00:02

me, the genius of the crevasse, which I use almost, I would say in 80% of the cases, you know, unless someone freely already has their gonial angle, is already sticking out pre-op, has significantly improved my lower neck. Because now I'm able to transfer all that distance further from vertical to horizontal, all the way, tuck it back, and it's really improved the lower neck, the sternal notch area. And that's something that I noticed after the fact trying to get a nice gonial angle, but from a volumetric perspective, and your article really shows it beautifully with those lines, it makes total sense. And so to me, that was probably one of the biggest, even though it's a small technique, very easy to do for anyone that does a facelift. And it's uh it's just it's not the the genius, is in its simplicity and its conceptual uh logic, and it it just helps not only the jawline but also the neck all the way to the sternal notch and the clavicle. So that I I have to give you give you huge credit. And for any facelift surgeon that is listening and either doesn't know what we're talking about or hasn't read it the article or watched your video, uh it will be a game changer, but of course, only for the ones who see the problem. If you don't see the problem, you can't understand the solution.

unknown 1:01:36

Yeah.

Speaker 1:01:37

So how did you how did you come up with that? I just want to be in a put put me in a time machine back in the operating room where you go when you went. Let me try this.

Speaker 1 1:01:48

It was on revision cases where there had been placation in this area that and you couldn't see a ramus anymore, and you couldn't see a gonial angle anymore. It was just a bunched up tissue over here, and I was scared to keep trimming it because the greater Rick is in there. So you could just trace it up, but it was hard to find on most of these people because they've been so placated. So instead of doing that, I trimmed it a little bit and I said, okay, let me inset it a little and push it down. So I would try to cut through the tissue on the mastoid where I knew it was safe, and then I'd kind of keep compressing it. After a while, I started, and I was still doing myotomies at the time. After a while, I started to see posterior myotomies or medium. Yeah, right over there, posterior myotomies. And then I started to see the changes, the problems, and I started to focus on the parotid and understand the gland and understand its protrusion over time and how everything moves away from it. And so then I started to find ways to recompartmentalize it. Then I started to look at the actual line of the mandible relative to the hyoid mastoid line. Then I started to look at the position of the ear canal relative to the mandible, and I started to understand all these things and why on some people you can get the improvement and why on others you can't. So I just started seeing it slowly with all that, and saying, okay, how come on this patient my hyoid goes up behind the mandible and the entire submentum disappears, whereas in that person it's still obtuse and below the level of the mandible. And it's because of my vector of movement, my suspension point of the platisma. So ultimately, I found that universally, if you want to improve the plateau under the mandible, recompartmentalize the post-mandibular volume, which is where the parotid is, to show your ramus, because the ramus disappears in everybody. Yeah. I want to show the ramus, show the gonial angle, lift the hyoid all the way up, horizontalize this entire area behind it and create a plateau, create a parallel between the mandible and the hyoid mastoid line, and ultimately lift the entire platisma back to where it was. It was going pretty much taking the platisma and parotid fascia, where you release it off the parotid in the tail of the parotid and suspending it as high up and deep and far back posteriorly as you can. And it's super easy to do. It's a centimeter cubic movement. And this fell into the understanding that I was getting with the rest of the aging face is that if you treat a three-dimensional problem, so what we see in the face with all we see massive amounts of skin excess on some people, it's not it's not skin excess, it's three-dimensional changes that compound on each other. And so you see these bigger changes visually. But what I was seeing with the rest of the face and here is I make smaller movements in three dimensions rather than big movements in two. And I was getting bigger changes with less movement. And for me, that was logically more of a reversal of aging. Whether or not it's true, I didn't know yet until I started looking at the face everywhere. Afterwards, I'm like, oh my God, it is. Everything is just compound three dimensions. And when you look at my photos of these like old ass ladies with crazy amounts of like neck and skin excess and wrinkles, and then you look at a young lady I did, I'm removing the same amount of skin. Like, how do you explain that? Right. Other than it's three-dimensional things, volumetric things, size things, expand, you know, it's not planar issues that are causing all these all these changes.

Speaker 1:05:27

Now, on that um, on that topic of aging, have you this is a bug that I got several years ago that took me down the rabbit hole. Uh, but I want to ask you have you ever thought of the causes of aging? I know we do age, but we also know that people age at a different pace and differently. And we as facial surgeons, we see it in the face all the time. We see a 45 year old that has aged like A 60-year-old and a six-year-old at his age, like a 45-year-old. Have you ever thought about other than what we used to be told, like, well, it's genetics, that's it. It's genetics. And the second follow-up line was people are different. Okay. Have you ever thought of what that means? Has it ever bothered you to find out the root cause of that and address it in a way to maybe in a way to be able to predict your results long-term, the the long-term, your long-term results, but also help patients post-operatively to better maintain their results almost into perpetuity? Yeah.

Speaker 1 1:06:42

Well, do you know what I mean? No, I I I do. So I have a better understanding of aging and why it happens more indifferently on some people than others for sure. Skipping to the last part, can you use that to get a better result? Yes. Can you use that to make sure that somebody who's hyperelastic or something else doesn't need a facelift sooner than somebody? Like a longer lasting result. Maybe not, you know, but the better results you get, the better they're going to last, anyways. Now, the techniques that I have now sort of treat universally everybody, whatever their problem is. Now, for somebody who's droopy in the neck at a young age, this happens for a few true like real visible anatomic reasons. It happens, well, sometimes because they're just massively fat, that can happen. Sometimes because they have prominent teeth. If you have very prominent teeth or low-hanging, clockwise rotated maxilla, your mouth can't close properly and you're constantly contracting, you're bringing your chin to a higher point, you're depressing it, you're compressing this area, getting fat loss, and you're getting strain in the neck, so it makes it obtuse. That's a realistic thing you see. You see patients who have structurally from a young age a horizontal platisma on the side of the face, even though they, sorry, vertical platisma on the side of the face, even though they're horizontal down over here. And because of that structure, and it's structured like that because of the position of the mastoid relative to the mandible and neck, it's just all kind of one plane, then they start to evulse at a much younger age than somebody else who is horizontally suspended forever and their muscles contract against their mandible instead of against it, instead of away from it, pulling it down. So you see these things that happen. And then you have hyperelasticity, of course, which it's varying degrees, and it's not a dermal issue. Hyperelasticity is translated through all planes. So it is hyperelastic soft tissues. They they have different connections, different amounts of elastin, you know, different amounts of collagen, different contents. So it's more stretchy tissues overall. And those tend to exaggerate any rate of aging that we see, because part of what we're seeing with aging is gravitational effects on the face and gravity effects on the face, two types of drooping. One type of drooping is planar shearing, which is within layer four. Fixation is also within layer four. So planar shearing is not a glide plane that's open. It's if you find neutral, let's say you go all the way up, all the way down, find the middle point. Okay. Your areolar fascia is going to be able to let you move a centimeter up, a centimeter down, a centimeter forward, a centimeter back in a circle. Okay, that's your plan arm movement that you can get within layer four. And layer four is an infinite series of fascial connections. It's not an open glide plane that it glides over itself. It's an infinite series of fascial connections, and every single one of these connections has one degree of movement. Yeah, it's like a croissant.

Speaker 1:09:45

Imagine for the audience, like a croissant, the layers inside the croissant that these diff has multiple layers that interconnect. By the way, just for the audience, real quick, we talked a lot about layers. I just want for the audience, maybe they don't know what the layers are. Quickly go from layer one to five and explain just briefly what those are.

Speaker 1 1:10:04

So for most of the face areas that you want to just generally understand the skin organization, it's the three consistent layers are layers one, two, and three, which is your dermis epidermis, which is two layers, but it's considered one. It's your skin. So layer two is your subdermal fat fascia, which is fascia in some places, like here, areolar, and here it's fatty. And some places where all the blood vessels are, where glands are, etc. The the sweat glands fall into the floor. Sweat glands, not the real ones, yeah. And the then layer three is gonna be the superficial layer of the superficial muscular ponyuritic system. So it's the super smash, basically. And that's where the muscles that move your skin are located versus the deeper muscles that cause flexion are attached down to periosteum, and they're usually in layer five or layer four and five.

unknown 1:10:59

Yeah.

Speaker 1:10:59

Layer five, the definition for people.

Speaker 1 1:11:02

So layers one, two, and three is what you would perceive as your skin and your movement. Layer four is the layer that it moves over or locks into. So it's the glides over, and then layer five is your deep structures. The deep structures can be your parotid gland, your periosteum, your masseter, your temporalis, muscle, including both layers of fascia, your temporal fat pad, include so you can get multi-layered here if you go down, you have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So like yeah, multi-layered if you go into a place which crosses zones. So that's layers one, two, three, four, and five. But anyway, that layer four is it's like a yeah, potato agratin. So like exactly. Yeah, if you slide, yeah, and each one locks here, locks there, locks there, locks there, and you get ultimately this pendular movement. And it's important to know that because layer three has much more movement than the bottom of layer four. The bottom of layer four locks to periosteum, has very little to no movement. The top of layer four has a lot of movement. Yeah. So that's layer four, that's your shearing planar movement. That's one kind of kind of tosis that you see with gravity when you go back and sit up. And the other is tilting tosis from volumetric distension, which means let's just say simply, you have multiple layers, but just make it layer five and layer, let's say bone and skin. If they're expanded volumetrically, then the amount of tilting you would get within this when you lay down and sit up is very little. If it gets deflated, now you're here when you sit up and it goes back when you lay down. So you have a tilting movement. Then you have fixation points, fixation zones, and more mobile zones. Again, it's gradients. So when you look at these stuff, it helps explain why you get this plane arm movement that comes forward, you get a tilting movement that comes down, and then you see these pyramids on the face. Pyramid is a three-dimension. You can see that three-dimensional kind of stuff, accumulation of pores and all that. So most of the drooping is explained by that. And when you look at someone who's hyperelastic, they have all of that to a greater degree than somebody who's not hyperelastic. And there's nothing you can do for that tissue quality. There's not much. What are you gonna do? You can try to tighten. Yeah. The only way to reverse it, there's no way to reverse it. It is that's the way that's those are their ratios. So those are your ratios. Like when you look at them, they have a greater extent of you know, less collagen, less elastin, whatever it is, they have different ratios than we have. You can't change those ratios. That's what they're born with, that's their genetic makeup. So it is their that's sort of a genetic thing, whether it's it's not caused by necessarily a genetic marker specifically, but that's their genetic makeup.

Speaker 1:13:49

You know, you know, whenever someone tells me things like it's not possible, I I become more curious. Like, yeah, is it can can we really not do anything about it? So I went down that rabbit hole uh several years ago and tried to understand, you know, I come from a cellular biology background, so that's why I was wondering if, from a cellular biology standpoint, from an epigenetic standpoint, are there things, what are the things that are occurring as part of the aging process from a cellular standpoint, which is our epigenetics, which really controls 90% of our phenotypes. 10% obviously is going to be our genotype, what happens to us, but 90% of what happens to us over the periods of our lives, and we have that on twin studies showing the epigenetics of twins, how dramatically and drastically it changes based on lifestyle, etc. Sleep, diet, nutrition, sun exposure, smoking, stress, all of those things. So from a cellular perspective, different things can happen even to twins throughout the aging process of their lifetime. And part of it is skin quality, connective tissue quality, all of those things. So if that is true, that means there should be ways to either slow that process down, and now we have the science from the anti-aging science, which is not the word anti-aging that we hijacked in the aesthetic world, which is you know exosomes and fillers and that. That's not true anti-aging. I'm talking about anti-aging from a cellular perspective. That's in its own specialty that evolved in the 90s in a lab in MIT, where they described the hallmarks of aging from a cellular perspective. So now we have science from a cellular perspective that we can reverse aging, we can reverse the epigenetic clock. And so if that is true, couldn't we use that science and implement it on what we are doing, whether it is preoperatively to improve surgical outcomes, improve tissue composition, and thereby make our surgeries more effective, but also postoperatively improve the longevity of our results and need for revisions earlier rather than later. So these are questions that today I'm asking myself. I spend a lot of my time diving into, and I've really stumbled on really fascinating data and trying to connect these two worlds together in just improving not only our results, but also their longevity. So I believe that this is possible based on science that already exists since the 90s. Yeah. So none of well, so let's very simply put, very simply put, you're the collagen composition of our skin.

Speaker 1 1:17:01

No, no, no, it's not like that. You can't do that, though. It's not simply put. So like the the only way to end world hunger is ultimately to like destroy the world. Like there's not gonna be any other good way to do it, but that's the definitive way to do it. When you look at cellular aging, there has been no it's so complicated. And you being you being the genius you are, and the other guy being the genius he is, put everything you know together for the past hundred years, and it's still not one one millionth of what's happening with aging, not one one millionth of what's happening. Yet we look at a study from Israel and say, hey, the telomeres are longer, and then they get shorter slightly when we do hyperbaric oxygen. That's one of a million things that are happening, yet we saw it change and we saw it get longer with aging. Does that mean at all in any way that reversing that and shortening it reverses aging? We don't know that. We don't know that. But I'm saying, so the only way, let's say, to do this reprogramming of global cellular data global, it's not one.

Speaker 1:18:10

Absolutely, it's every cell in your body. What's good for your skin is good for your heart, brain, lungs, everything.

Speaker 1 1:18:15

Yeah. So to achieve that, you'd have to pretty much destroy the world, or you would have to go back so far in the past at this point with what we know, you'd have to go so far back to pretty much when they're a fucking neonate or you know they're an embryo and reprogram them at that point. Are you willing to go reprogram a cell of a baby in case they're possibly gonna get older faster cosmetically and look a little older? No. Is there anything in between that can reprogram cells at a local level on the face? How would you ever achieve that unless there was something causing the changes other than this lifelong genetics? So, how would you go and achieve that? To say, I'm gonna reprogram your cells to do something different, your fibroblasts are very specifically gonna go back and change the ratio of elastin, collagen, and the crosslinking that they're putting in. So, not that little things are not impossible to improve.

Speaker 1:19:20

Well, to that to your point, have you heard of the Yamamoto factors? You know, Yamamoto is a this Japanese scientist, he got Nobel Prize, I think, in 2017 or 18. No, so it's basically, I think he discovered uh four genes, like a four-gene cocktail that he used directly uh used to directly program adult cells in bone forming cells, and he basically was able to reverse and uh cellular aging through reprogramming the cells through these four genes that are called oh sorry, Yamanaka, Yamanaka factors, and so and and so there's a lot of it. This is sounds like science fiction that is actually happening.

Speaker 1 1:20:11

So I don't know where all of that ends, but I think you can do directed stuff, directed, directed things to reprogram an area. Even definage technically does that. Definage, you know, goes and sort of redirects the base of the follicle to make every set of hair skin. So yeah, the little direct things, yeah.

Speaker 1:20:34

So so so my quite that but but my point is this. But my point is this we don't necessarily have to destroy the world. My point is there is some science that right now sounds like sounds fiction, but it is happening. So I think there's so much more to be explored, and I'm just uh trying to understand and learn more. And to the very least, I think we can improve patients that are not let's just say quote unquote healthy because without diving deep into what not healthy really means. I mean, this could be anywhere from bad nutrition, bad sleep, stress, uh low vitamin D levels, anything, what whatever that is that actually hurts tissue, where we know from studies, and a lot of the studies are in the burn literature, they're in the orthopedic literature, and how those things affect healing, tissue quality, tissue composition, etc. I'm just uh right now in research mode trying to identify what do we know currently in basic science that we haven't really considered applying. And I understand it's hard in our field to conduct this type of research because it would be unethical. And you can't even do a split study, split face study, because it's a whole organism. And using different population is also there's so many variables, like you said, that are involved. But yeah, I just wanted to pick your brain, see if if if you ever considered or even went down the rabbit hole, even for yourself, because that's how it started for me. I just wanted to see what I can do more for my health without without listening to this uh noises from the wild west with all these uh peptides and these all these gimmicks that they try selling uh and promising people anti-aging and reverse aging and that stuff.

Speaker 1 1:22:25

Which is curious about I'm curious about all of it. It's just the body tends to not want to be fucked with.

Speaker 1:22:33

So that's you know, so I I I just I just finished writing a book on this topic. It's about 300 pages, and I just got a book deal, so it's gonna be published next fall, unfortunately, not anytime soon. But I'll give you an early manuscript because you're one of the people that I trust your opinion dearly and just to you know hear your opinion about it, because I need people to not try to please me and tell me what I want to hear. I want people to ask me tough questions and be critical because I think only that way we can solve problems and rather than tooting our own horn or each other's horn.

Speaker 1 1:23:15

Yeah, I'd love to read it. Yeah, so I'm always curious about it. And I'm always curious, I'm curious about these peptides, and I'm curious about people taking growth hormone, and I'm curious about hyperbarics, I'm curious about ozone, I'm curious about all this stuff, and I read about it. Ultimately, it's like so much just genetic. Not that it's impossible to fix things, but then you see like like the body has a tendency just to correct itself when it wants to. Yes, it does. Doesn't mean we don't find a you know cure for cancer. So there are gonna be things when you know that does happen. So 100% I'm curious about it and want to learn about it and read about it, and I think it's gonna have to spend cancer, preventing cancer, is much easier than curing cancer.

Speaker 1:23:55

I devoted two years of my career in cancer research and I got frustrated, it didn't make sense to me. I'm like, why don't we just try to prevent it? Because preventing is is much easier than trying to cure it. But what's your take on hyperbaric oxygen post op, other than for a patient that has obvious vascular compromise, meaning necrotic skin? Like, let's say for a facelift that went really well, a non-smoker, you don't anticipate any problems. I I know people uh patients ask me about it because people advertise it on their social media, on the internet, that hey, we do hyperbaric auction for all our patients. What's your take on this? Well when you science.

Speaker 1 1:24:43

Well, science is different than what I think, but I'll tell you both. Or experience. What's your experience? Yeah, every facelift is ischemic.

Speaker 1:24:52

But does it require intervention?

Speaker 1 1:24:55

All of them do. It's like they're all ischemic surgeries, it's just as a clinical ischemia or subclinical ischemia, they're all bad.

Speaker 1:25:02

No, my question is because the body knows how to adjust and adapt, yeah, do we need to does it require an additional intervention or extra help from us in form of hyperbaric oxygen, for example?

Speaker 1 1:25:15

Yeah, need no, should you, probably. The data or research is more on you know 2.5, 3 atmospheres. Yeah. Uh and that's you know, for for for and you do get vascular, faster revascularization of tissues. So that does happen. What we're using is 1.82 atmospheres. And what I'm seeing is for most patients, not everyone, most patients, do tend to heal from what it looks like for the patients that didn't, a little bit faster on average. And if they have any little bits of congestion on the lateral flaps, they tend to just resolve faster. And it's, I don't really get it's not like a ton of congestion, but there's little changes that you see or exaggerated cap refill where you see you know a little bit of hyperemia and it's just shouldn't have even been there in the first place if you had good inflow and outflow. So I feel like that resolves faster. So as a requirement, no, I don't require anybody to do it because I don't think it's make or break. I think they'll survive fine without it. But it it for healing purposes of speed and then that little bit of congestion and whatever else, and maybe decrease remodeling in the future, maybe. I like to do it for that reason. And when we do it, we usually do five sessions minimum, two atmospheres, and then they can continue and do more than that. How do you space the sessions out? They do it every day or every other day, or you know, if it's Saturday, Sunday and it's closed, they just go back on Monday.

Speaker 1:26:46

What do you think about photobiomodulation like LED light therapy, whether it is post-stop or at home for patients that want to use any anti-aging modality?

Speaker 1 1:26:57

So, yeah, I so most of LED light emitting diodes are gonna be in the visible light spectrum. And as you get towards the red spectrum of longer wavelengths and towards the 700s, let's say, you can get some photon energy passed in through the skin because it's a taller wavelength. Realistically, if you wanted the best, it would be infrared. Infrared light, which is the what the original studies were done using diodes. So you they were using diodes, whether it was light emitting or not, they would use diodes and place them on like a rat who had a stroke or a mouse that had a stroke transcranially, and it would show faster healing of the stroke or regeneration where the other mice still had deficits. It increased cochlear blood flow, it helps chronic back pain. So those are like the data for evidence for it. Most of the panels are not infrared, unfortunately, but they're in the high red spectrum or red and orange, but they're high red spectrum. And I think what you You do see is a little bit of a skin glow that happens with it. What that translates to, I have no idea. There's nothing wrong with it. And at the very least, let's say you're doing full body panel, it relaxes people. And when you have more, and it does relax people, it's interesting how it does that. I don't know how, but it relaxes people. And when it does, you have somebody who's more relaxed and healing and feels a little more peaceful. And I think it's good for that very vague reason. Blue light for acne and you know, all this and that makes really no sense, but it's not harmful at all. So they can go ahead and use it. It's not like ultraviolet, it's just blue. So they can use it, it doesn't matter. But if they're gonna really use infrared, you have to have it contact your body pretty much, because otherwise the light, the amount of energy they put into it's not gonna be strong enough to really have to be very close to contact to actually penetrate through the dermis. And that's why they're using infrared, is because it's taller wavelengths. I don't know if most people understand that. It's not like the people who thought about the blue stuff for acne, like I don't think they're getting why infrared is used. It's not that every spectrum of light has a benefit, or else you just shine light on the face. That you know, that's such a crazy thing. We're like, well, blue is used for this, green's used for that, red. No, you could just shine a whole light if you want all of them. Broadband light doesn't help you. It's infrared, which has a taller wavelength, which is able to actually penetrate into the skin and deposit energy. Now, well, it whether it's affecting what they thought in the past was like neuropeptide Y or certain other direct things that it can like hit, who knows? The data wasn't very strong for those things. The the mouse study was the best one.

Speaker 1:29:41

Yes, I I saw that one. And again, a lot of these studies are on animals, so it's only extrapolated to humans and also on really compromised organs and cells versus we use it a lot, not so compromised. We're just trying to reverse aging. So I think there's a lot of research to be done there. Well, a couple of we'll finish it off with a couple of rapid fire questions. So this is kind of like more fun. So you ready? Yeah. All right. One procedure you you perform more today than five years ago. Oh, rapid fire. Well, TOSIS repair for sure. TOSIS repair. One procedure you perform less today than five years ago. Lift. Lift coming from that's for a good reason.

Speaker 1 1:30:30

Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1:30:30

We talked about it.

Speaker 1 1:30:32

But it's not just because I don't like it, it's because I have more contraindications.

Speaker 1:30:35

By the way, have you seen uh Teo's Scarless Liplift? Yeah. What is that?

Speaker 1 1:30:40

Is that he does it intra-orally, or how does he uh he's keeping it top secret because he they tend to plagiarize you a lot. Even my friends plagiarize me all the time when I like teach something and then they want to feel very relevant, and so they take it and go publish his classes. Like, oh yeah, I have my friends doing it right now, you're like renaming stuff and like oh my god, going buckwild worldwide, trying to like talk about it before I publish because he just like is so excited to be relevant. Are you serious? Yeah, it's fine. So he doesn't talk about it, but what he does is makes an intranasal incision from behind the sill, releases the muscle from the skin, hikes a stitch down, and compresses the top part of the muscle, lifting it up, which then widens the nasal base, so yes, and narrow the nasal base somehow. So that's essentially what he's doing. And I don't know about mobility sensation. My assumption would be they don't have too much of a negative effect if he's just grabbing the top five millimeters if he's limited on what he's doing. So it might be a cool thing if it's not causing bunching either. So uh he just won't talk about it yet. So we'll wait till he talks about it.

Speaker 1:31:50

Interesting. Most underrated anti-aging intervention. Nanofat.

Speaker 1 1:31:57

I agree with you.

Speaker 1:31:58

Because I don't think people understand how to use it either, and they don't know the it's it's bizarre even though it's been out for years. I mean, it's almost almost a decade. Like I've been doing it for a decade, so that's that's the one thing that's bizarre. And everybody oh, anyways, most overrated anti-aging intervention. You knew that was not common. Yeah, the like biostimulators. Biostimulators for people, yeah. I mean, I think gosh, that's a whole can of worms here. If if should we go into it real quick? Yeah, all right, let's forget it, guys. Don't worry about it. Don't do whatever when people talk to you about biostimulators, say thank you, no. It's biostimulation, not regeneration. But but that's another concept flaw in itself. There's so many concept flaws in it. They treat them as the same, they're two different things. Exactly. One thing every surgeon should learn outside of surgery.

Speaker 1 1:32:58

The well, I would say there's so many things I'm learning right now, but it would be like longevity for your body. So like stretching and trying to do that kind of stuff. Because I'm going downhill fast. So I would say that.

Speaker 1:33:13

Well, you yeah, I'm sure you're not sleeping much, uh, all the stuff that you're doing. Yeah, um one thing every patient should stop doing tomorrow, please. Public masturbation. Okay, tell me tell me another thing other than public masturbation. Yeah, so uh now you gotta tell me two things.

Speaker 1 1:33:34

Yeah, stop doing tomorrow is I I I I would say trying to fix every little tiny thing on their face with fillers. Like fillers are great, they are not meant to fix everything, and if you keep doing that, you're just fucking yourself up permanently, permanently. It can't be fixed. Like, they gotta calm down. Fillers are great, it's just calm calm down, it's only for little tiny stuff. I agree with you, it's a gel. Like I agree with you 100%. It's a gel, like even doctors don't realize it's a gel, like it's a gel.

Speaker 1:34:11

You realize we're talking about gel. Yeah, you realize you're telling me. So, what you're telling me, you can lift the face. In other words, you can divide gravity and tension with gel. With gel, yeah, with water-based gel. You realize that what you just said, yes, yeah. It's it's yeah, anyways, we could I could talk to you for this maybe on drink or a beer or something when I'm over in California. We can uh rant over it. Last question Porsche or Ferrari? Uh Porsche. Oh, thank you.

unknown 1:34:45

Thank you.

Speaker 1 1:34:46

That's an easy one. Yeah, for Ferrari classically, the beauty is nuts, but the classic days of Ferrari are, as you see, far gone at this point. Oh my god, did you see that electric thing?

Speaker 1:34:57

What the hell?

Speaker 1 1:34:58

It's beyond, but it's not just that, it's also the past like eight cars they've made are just they've lost it. The F8 Tributo and the maybe the super fast were the last two, but really the the F8 Tributo was the last one, and then after that, just downhill. Like do you think someone's gonna get fired over this? The whole company needs to get replaced. Like, what kind of morons would be there allowing this to happen in Ferrari, which was one of the leaders in beauty of cars, and they don't make beautiful cars at all anymore. They're just like fucking bulky and ugh, they're weird, and people like it because of the badge and because they're gaudy and big, but like that's not sexy, and same with like the new Lambos, like it's not sexy to have a giant blocky jet fighter event out there. Those days are over. Like the little jet fighter change they made on the Kuntash, that was it. You did it, it was cool at the time. Don't get stared away.

Speaker 1:35:52

Yeah, don't get stared away. But I feel Porsche is is going down the same route, then which I don't like. I don't like how big the 9-11s have gotten. I think they're getting too big, and I feel they're losing a little bit of a character. What do you think of the new ones?

Speaker 1 1:36:07

Yeah, I mean they're they're they're cool. I know you're classic, I know you're a classic guy, but yeah, um, I think it's fine that they're getting bigger just because we have the classics. That's so you know, you appreciate the classics for that. Like I have my little 964 and my 356. I could park them into like one parking spot. They're so small, yeah. So we have the classics, it's fine. You know, the the the new ones are getting this big fat ass on them, so it's kind of you know nice that it's but the price-wise, they have they kind of have to also get more of a substantial look to the car because they are getting into close to Ferrari territory now. So it's like you do have to have a substantial looking car when you're doing that, and it can't be a little dinky.

Speaker 1:36:47

Yeah, true. Did you know that 70% of all Porsches ever made they're still alive? Yeah, I wouldn't doubt that. 70% of every 9-11 ever made is still on the road.

Speaker 1 1:37:01

Plus, because up to you know, up to 93, 94, I said, Oh no, even 95, they're they were all you know, from 70 till then, they're kind of like not that different and interchangeable, and you can back up. Until 98, they're all air-cooled, same engine concept. And it was cheap to redo them. Yeah, the 993 kind of took a different direction before, even though it was air-cooled. But the rest of them are all very similar and also cheap, they're super cheap. Even a 993 is cheap to work on, it's not expensive.

Speaker 1:37:30

I know, I have one.

Speaker 1 1:37:31

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:37:32

It's you can always fix it, you can drive it in perpetuity as long as you fix it, you can rebuild the whole engine. So, are you gonna be when are you gonna are you ever gonna choose between plastic surgery and cars? Like if if the if the car dealer thing, trading thing ever becomes more attractive. Do you think it's ever gonna become more attractive as far as lifestyle or just yeah?

Speaker 1 1:37:56

I mean, I'm I'm I'm kind of at the point where I'm happy with the cars that I have, so I don't have a need to develop like a bigger collection or anything, and all my cars are kind of the best drivable ones, anyways. Like, let's say I wanted a Maserati MC12, which is like my top dream that I don't think I'll ever be able to get. Why can I even the prices are astronomical, and like I'm I I can't do that, so but would I be driving it every day, you know, all the time? No, probably not. But the dealer thing is fun because a door ding on it. Yeah. Being a dealer is cool because then you can experience these cars for a little bit. Like you know, you can have it, stare at it, look at it, and while you're you know, while I'm getting the car dialed in, it's me driving it. It's like so you you drive it, see what's wrong with it, go fix it up, drive it, see what's wrong until you get it dialed in, and then you have that car sitting there for a while, and then you sell it for more than you bought it, and then you go on to the next one for the ones that you don't have to keep, you know, forever. The ones you have to keep forever, then no, those aren't gonna be dealer cars, those are gonna be like your regular cars that you just have as part of your collection. But yeah, I would love to. I've always wanted to have like some kind of exotic dealership or something, just like stereo cars.

Speaker 1:39:09

Where did that come from? You ever since you were a kid, or where did your passion for cars came about?

Speaker 1 1:39:13

Car obsessed from childhood.

Speaker 1:39:15

Me too.

Speaker 1 1:39:16

That's it's it's it's unhealthy. It is unhealthy, but it's fun. It's it's really my mom has been my mom. My mom says, Benny, Benny, go and said buy a house, buy a house instead. I'm like, mom, the value of my car has gone up to a much greater extent than your house has, and my car did it.

Speaker 1:39:34

Ever will, ever will.

Speaker 1 1:39:37

Oh yeah, yeah. But my did it in five years, hers has been 20 years, and mine went up faster. And I gotta drive it and stare at it. I think COVID, how much do you think COVID helped with those car values? Substantially, but also now there's a big move being made in the watch world and the car world, and I'm pretty sure it's it's side parts of these big banks as part of diversification strategy. Yeah, so what they're doing is they're buying up a ton of the stuff in the watch market, and they're they're pretty much bidding up everything maximally and taking it at the max bid. And what that's doing is setting the standard higher so that what they're doing essentially is seeing what the market will tolerate. They call it bringing things to market value. So they would bring these cars. Let's say someone, you know, you didn't know that someone would pay an Enzo because out there the market is set at three mil. You didn't know someone pay $10 for it because you have to be a psycho until you get to that auction and you push and you push and you push and you see where that breaking point is. And the next auction you do it. You do that for two auctions, three auctions tops, big ones where everyone has their eyes on it. You've set the new market price. So these guys come in and they see how far they can push it. And in doing so, they've set the new market price. And then they'll it'll just keep going up after that, depending on how many cars are floating. You know, like you can't necessarily do that with an F40 because our 1400 people are gonna pay four or five million for that car at this moment, probably not.

Speaker 1:41:08

Yeah, you can do on one on one of ones or one of one of two. But who knows?

Speaker 1 1:41:12

But they're doing it with Enzos, F-50s, so they're doing it with all the main main cars. I'm hoping they do it with a mirror.

Speaker 1:41:18

So the banks, so the banks are doing it? I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 1:41:21

That's that's what I've heard. That's what I've heard is the it makes sense though. I mean, it uh it private equity or the side funds of someone was telling me which ones because definitively they were doing it in watches, and then they said that's probably what happened. There was a big auction, a meekam auction last year, where all these prices were like two, three X of what they should have been. And then the next auction went kind of high too, and that sets the new standard. Now, why did that aberration happen? Well, the nothing else changed, production didn't change, or you know, the the amount in flotation didn't change, circulation. So, like, what else changed? Nothing is the strategy of these guys to come in and bring everything to market value, basically. Meaning everything to the tolerable level of the market.

Speaker 1:42:06

So that answers my question, which was is this bubble gonna burst or gonna crash? Based on this theory, it will not because this is what now the true market value is. Like the consumer decided this is how much it's worth.

Speaker 1 1:42:22

Yes, but but it depends. So if there's a thousand cars and only five consumers that would pay that much, then you're gonna burst five of them. So, well, after five of them that were those were so they'll watch who's bidding, right? You'll see who's bidding on that watch or who's bidding on that car. And if there's five people bidding, you know the market has at least five people, five more people that are gonna pay that exact amount for an enzo. So now you know you can do five more sales and profit five million dollars each sale based on that one auction.

unknown 1:42:52

Wow.

Speaker 1 1:42:53

And you know, that theoretically, that's what you're thinking. But there's only one person bidding against you, that's not a great market. But they can see that. So hopefully it bursts because otherwise I can't buy anything.

Speaker 1:43:05

Yeah, what I love about classic cars is that it's an investment if you buy the right car and you get to use your investment because you get to drive it too, so you get to have fun with it, as opposed to buying some real estate or buying a bunch of stocks that's sitting there and you can't do anything with it. So but personally, I mean, I mean, how I mean, what do you live for? I think you have to ask your question, you know, what do you live for? Are you gonna put money into your grave or are you gonna enjoy it while you can? And so that's why, you know, and for those of you who want to see Ben's cars, go to at mouybeno, m-y, double y B E N N O, right? Uh and I love the fact that you give every car a name that has the word Ben built into it. That's hilarious. How do you come up with that? How can you come up with the names?

Speaker 1 1:43:58

I have a list in my phone of Ben license, it has to be seven letters. Uh oh, it has to be seven.

Speaker 1:44:04

Why seven?

Speaker 1 1:44:05

That's all.

Speaker 1:44:06

Oh, because of the, yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it.

Speaker 1 1:44:08

And so those were on my plates before I came a dealer. Now that I'm a dealer, I have dealer plates, but before that, those were on there. And so now I just have it on the rim of the plate, on the plate frame. But yeah, there's yeah, muy veno, benissimo. I love it. It's hilarious. Penetrate, pendejo, there's yeah, and it matches the character of the car.

Speaker 1:44:27

That the it matches the personality of the car. So if you're a car enthusiast, you're gonna have a blast going on this page. Ben, thank you so much for everything you do. I really uh appreciate you coming on and spending so much time. Your first podcast with me was one of the top three most listened to podcasts. And and even though we're always geeking out, many people like to tune in. And your charisma, your curiosity, your straightforward shooter, and it's very inspiring to me. I learned so much from you. And I I'm I'm so fortunate to I hope I can call you a friend and uh and mentor, and so still have to come and visit you in Beverly Hills. And thank you so much, my friend. And yeah, and uh excited to see what you're gonna do next. My pleasure. Thanks.

Speaker 1 1:45:20

And yeah, the definitely come over here and you'll see the the updates. I put some of the updates on the Cupid Compendium, the video library. So some of the updates are there anyways, but like you gotta come.

Speaker 1:45:32

And I have to see the cars, I want to see every one of them. Right here. I know. I know, okay, buddy. Thank you so much, my friend. Have a good weekend, and um, yeah, everybody, thanks for listening in. Sorry we geeked out a little bit on the facelift stuff, but um that's what happens when you listen to me and Ben. And um uh hopefully you got some value out of this conversation. And if you have any questions, just put it in the comments on Spotify. And please don't forget to leave me a review on uh Apple uh iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and also you'll be able to uh view the podcast on YouTube uh as we have uh as Ben demonstrated a lot of uh nuances in uh facelift surgery where we used a lot of terms, but uh he was showing it, and so you will get more battle watching the YouTube video. Thank you everyone, and until next time, bye bye.