Welcome to Real Talk on AI and I care with your host, Dr. Scott Morris. And I'm co host, Dr. Rehan Ahmed.
In each episode, we discuss current news, adding a little AI education, and debate innovative AI tools and topics that will change the industry. Well, in today's episode of what now I'm now starting to call the Knowledge Bite, B-Y-T-E, which is kind of the session where we spend a minute or two learning a little bit about the different terms of AI. We're going to break down the difference between large language models and small language models also called SLMs. SLMs are kind of a really hot topic right now.
LLMs, the challenge with them, of course, is they take a ton of compute because they use massive amounts of tech state. I mean, hundreds of billions of words. And these are models like GPT-4 or Gemini, and they're designed to understand and generate language in kind of a really advanced way. They can write essays and answer questions or generate code or even hold full conversations.
But all that power comes at a cost. They're very resource intensive. As I said, they take a ton of compute power and a lot of memory. So what we're starting to hear more about is what's called small language models or SLMs.
And now they're just scaled down versions of language models, and they're optimized to run on less powerful hardware, like laptops or phones or other small devices. Well, they're not as capable of LMs. SLMs can handle many tasks like summarization or simple Q&A or on-device chat. And they're biggest advantage.
They're cheaper, they're fast, they run, they can work offline, they can live on your phone. And they're great for privacy and accessibility. In short, these LLMs, the LLMs are like really high-performance sports cars, powerful but really expensive. SLMs are more like our EVs.
They're efficient, they're practical, new easy to maintain. Choosing between them kind of depends on what your needs are. Do you need raw power or do you need sneak convenience? Hopefully you learn a little bit on our knowledge bite today.
If you have any questions or topic suggestions, please hit us up on social media. Or you can reach me at SCOT at AI and I care.AI. Hello everybody. Today during Real Talk, we have a special guest, Dr.
Harp, my friend, Dr. Harp, who's the acting president and CEO of the New England College of Optometry. Howard has done, I don't know if any of you have listened to him in our video series. Howard's done pretty much everything there is to do in the industry.
He is one of the most popular speakers. And he's just a wealth of information about where are we? And where should we maybe think about going? Today during Real Talk, we're going to kind of hit reimagining what education should be for the I care industry.
So how we're welcome to the show, we're super happy to have you. I'm looking forward to our conversations. We always have so many interesting thought provoking conversations and I hope this is just one more of those. I'm sure it will be thanks for having me.
Scott, look forward to it. So let's kind of break it down. I mean, when we think about the education system, you know, we, there's, whether you're OD or MD or D.O. or whatever the case may be, or even if you're an optician area, you, you start out in undergrad and then you're probably in neither med school or optometry school.
And then some of people go do enough time to go to residencies, maybe in some do fellowships and ophthalmology. You know, you do residency and then you do an ophthalmology fellowship and maybe do a subspecialty thing. And that's been kind of the course of action. We've been following that traditional educational model that was set, you know, 400 years ago or whatever it was, sitting a classroom, just beat down trying to learn everything you're supposed to learn.
But I always think about this is in the world of AI, it's all about to change because no longer will you need to be the smartest person in the class to be the physician. Because the reality is most of this knowledge is going to be at your fingertips. It's going to be provided to us as physicians, not something we need to take out of our brain. And then apply it as necessary and there's all kinds of challenges with that.
But you know, it makes me wonder like, what does education really need to look like in the future? And that's an easy one start start with the softball. Thank you. Yeah, just yeah 99,000 hour fastball right there, buddy.
Well, as you know, I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I really want to prep us my comments first by saying we have amazing people in optometric education who give everything they've got to making sure they're preparing and best preparing our graduate. We just had commencement on Sunday and graduated another 130 students and I admire what they do. So I don't want anything I'm saying to be taken as criticism or an indictment of what the current system is. It is what it is, but it is what it is.
It is what it is. But here's the reality. It has to change. There's just no question.
The real question is the speed of that change. So I'll answer your question. And I guess really the big topic here is sort of reimagining optometric education, but we could say education in general. I think there's sort of the today stuff and there's the tomorrow stuff.
And we could talk another time about how quick tomorrow is coming. But for now, I'll just say sort of what's happening today and what needs to happen today. And I'll couch it around that. And then perhaps give you my view of where we're going.
I think today what you're seeing is more and more customization and individualization of education. You mentioned it. We assume that people all learn best when they sit in a classroom. They have a PowerPoint program presented to them.
They go home and they memorize everything they can possibly think of. They take a test and we assume that is the best way everyone learns. Well, and then some people just flush and go, OK, make space for the next test. That's not learning.
That's taking a test. Exactly. And that's the point. And there are, by the way, some people who learn best that way sitting in a classroom, listening.
There's a note taker. You know, the traditional way that many of us remember our optometric education. But the reality is that not everyone learns best that way. And students are screaming that to us every day.
Most academic or most optometric education institutions provide a videotape of the course. So this is not educating online. And we'll be. Yeah, my college keep my son's very college.
You're both taking some summer classes right now. And it is 100% completely taped. There's no not going to lectures. So that's one way another way of educating.
And I bring that one up because that's current. That's today. But really what you see is students who say I'd rather do that than sit in a classroom. Why?
Because I can fast forward a little bit. I can slow it down where I want to. And they're telling us basically I learned differently. But what we know, Scott, and you know this is just a videotape or using PowerPoint and bringing that to an online environment is really not the way to optimize that approach to education.
And what we can get into more of that. But what I'm what I'm seeing today and what we're trying to do here is to continue to modernize the curriculum. And by the way, let me pause there for a moment and just say that we have the scope of optometric practice as advanced so much and it's amazing and it's fantastic. And we all love it.
But I think we often don't think about the implications that has to optometric education. We're easy to critique. And I was one of those who critiqued up to metric education before I was part of it. But think about now my dad went up toometry school in the 50s.
It was a four year program here at NECCO today. It's still a four year program. And so the pressures and all that amount of information. We have to think about things like cognitive load and stuff, you know, discussions perhaps it haven't been had as much as they should be.
How much can a student really absorb in one sitting. So anyway, we've got to look at modernizing the curriculum and we've done that. There's been good efforts made there. With all the pressures on the faculty.
They've done a good job of that. But today we really need to begin to offer more customization of education. We need to be able and we're doing it today. We're providing AI tutors for individual students so that they have that feedback that's basically developing a textbook for them that they can engage with and learn from.
That's just one example of what's kind of today going on. Some of the efforts we're seeing that what we really want to do here in the today world is create an agile campus. And I'm happy to define what that means. But essentially I've been talking about that.
How do we create a campus by which you can choose the path that you're best suited to learn in. And we can offer those different opportunities and environments for you, which by the way also enables us to solve another challenge, which is do we really need to open a million more schools about top entry or the 29 states who don't have an optometry school. Can we find ways to use the amazing people who support up to metric education today to support that. And that's the direction we see us going.
So that's sort of the today I'll pause there. And then I want to talk to you a little bit about the tomorrow as well. Yeah, well, before we get into that, you know, I have two big subjects that always kind of and I agree with you. I'm not trying to bash any of our educators.
I mean, oh my gosh, they would they do they have an impossible task. You know, we talked about that in our video in on our innovators talk. They have an impossible task to educate all of the knowledge. I mean, our medical knowledge is doubling every 90 days.
I mean, what I just, you know, you're some of the people you talk about just graduated came out of my program. I had some amazing students from your school come through my program last year. And you know, I mean, I just think about from the time they walk in the door to the time they leave what they need to know basically doubles. And that's a lot to ask in a four year program for optometry, ophthalmology doesn't matter.
You know, I mean, there's just so much information. No, but what makes me worry more about this is before we get it when I think about reimagining education. I think something that's become and I kind of led this in saying that in the future, I don't think we're going to need to know from a memory bank. All of that information because it's going to be accessible because real is we get further and further into precision medicine and we're looking at we're prescribing based on phenotype, genotype.
There's no way a human brain can access and remember and do all that information. So what makes me concerned though is is that I think that was we start thinking about reimagining education. We really need to think about what are the soft skills. And how are we educating people about that?
You know, because you can't learn that in a classroom. That's simply one on one. Gotta do it. Gotta spend time being human delivering human care to another human and AI is never going to think, well, I'm not sure never is a good word, but maybe not in our lifetime, never going to fix that.
So I wonder how do we fix soft skills number one. And then I do want to talk more about like, how do we actually learn. We'll get that in a minute. What do you think about the soft skill talk?
Yeah, and that's where I, you know, you and I've had this discussion before and that's where I was going with sort of tomorrow. And I would point your listeners and yourself. I think I've mentioned you before to a book written by Joseph Fowney is the president of northeastern university wrote a book called robot proof and the essence of the book. And I think it's very relevant to what we do is to say as you just articulated, do we really need to teach everything, memorize every disease ever known to man all the side effects of every drug when that is going to be literally right in front of us at any moment anytime we need it.
But it's just great coming soon to the doctor's office near you. Right. And even more I think that's less than five years away. That capability.
Right. Absolutely agree with you on that. So if that's the case and you're calling them soft skills, call them whatever you want. But the idea and robot proof is essentially to say, how do we prepare our graduates world world where bots and all the things that go with that are going to be able to do certain tasks perhaps better than we do.
How do we prepare our graduates he's talking more in a global basis, but I'll bring it to optometry. How do we prepare our graduates to be empathetic to be good observers to to build trust. Right to build trust with the pace of you think about this. You could be the world renowned expert in glaucoma, you know more back glaucoma than anyone in the world.
If you can't convince me to put those drops in my eyes just as one example, you fail. Change management. I mean, it's the single most important skill we have as a as a provider is can we make them change their behavior and where does that get taught, you know that that and because there's a bajillion different types of personalities. Yeah, everyone you might have to approach slightly different.
That's what we currently call experience, but how do we provide that experience and I think the AI will help that right will have different models that we can go well, you know, and there'll be a virtual avatar that we can try to talk through and convince and they'll pros rejections and that kind of stuff, but and those are soft skills that can be helped with software. But I still think it's the most important part and AI isn't going to be necessarily be able to do that. And hard to disagree with that, but I do think in the end that doctor patient relationship that we build is about trust. And I think that is a skill calling a soft skill call it whatever you like, but it's an important skill to build no matter what your knowledge base may be.
And I'll tell you know you think about it today. Why aren't we really moving into it even faster because we talk about it a lot around here and a lot of it has to do with the way we're testing these students to talk about national board exams, et cetera, you know until that begins to appreciate and change. It's going to be hard for the academic institutions to change because what's tested there, the students need to have an order to practice. So this is a partnership.
This is an evolution that will take place. It's scary to think about it in some ways for a lot of people, but as you really start to dig in a little bit more and make so much sense to think about. You know, how do we manage that? I mean, think about a completely unbiased performance assessment that could be done a national board.
Well, because today, my opinion, the national board has its challenges will just, just leave it there and it's not for. I'm not going there too politically charged right now, but yeah, and believe me, I appreciate that the people there work really hard at what they do and it's not an easy job and I get that, but obviously there's opportunities for improvements there, but the imagine it's not hard to imagine, especially in the world you live in that you could have this on unbiased performance assessment of a national board exam, just as an example. I think perhaps a better job and gain more confidence could lower cost. I mean, there's a lot of different ways that it could impact on things.
And so that's another piece of it, but road by proof. I recommend to anybody that is interested in this area to read it because it's very insightful. It was been like five years ago. He updated it fairly recently, but real visionary.
I mean, I'm proud to say I've gotten to know through the years of being here in Boston, and I really try to watch what Northeastern is doing. I don't know probably people don't know a lot about how unique that institution is, but they've had this sort of co-op approach for many, many years where when you graduate from there, you've got work experience and your academic degree today that seemingly is something more and more sought after I think by a lot of undergraduate students. I think that's a wonderful institution, but that said, I think we have to think about it that way and how we get ourselves there. I spent, as you know, a great deal of my time in the industry side, and I have enjoyed the seven years I've spent in academia, but it moves slow.
It's more conservative when it comes to how we teach, how things evolve and change, how traditional pedagogies are adapted and these things are well entrenched, and they're hard to change, and the systems that go behind them are hard to change. But let me say this, we have great leaders in Optometric Education that are talking about these things that are trying to modernize, that are making strides, I could say maybe four or five schools in particular, that are brought in people like learning designers and people who bring expertise in how we deliver education in different ways. We have that knowledge in house, that expertise in house now, so we're working with our faculty to help them adapt their courses to look at different ways to ultimately perhaps put all of our courses would have a component that's been developed and designed to be delivered independently in addition to classroom options. So students would have options in different ways, and sort of the next step, it's going to be really hard to just leapfrog into, we're going to change everything, we're going to go to this empathy and observations, skills and less.
I don't know how hard, you know, I'm going to stop you there. I most change happens very quickly, you know, and so there are the slow, let's prod through it, but there's also, you know, a new tool can come come out, you know, and I'm going to date myself here a little bit, you know, we're going to go back to probably the late 90s and we all have blocked it. We're moving through those and then an iPhone came out within two years, nobody had blackberries anymore, right? And so it can and I think that when we look at education, you know, I've had this conversation with both of my sons who in college and you know about some of the ways they're trying to learn differently and those types of things and different learning styles.
And you know, it that makes me think about the fact that maybe you know, we talk about passing boards boards is a test, right? It's a test to test what do you actually know and the reality is isn't there better ways to test what we actually know because what currently congenial education, that's a whole other subject all to get that's another talk some other time. You and I both spend, you know, hundreds of hours on the podium going there's got to be a better way, but you know, I look at it and go, are we really testing what somebody knows because if we're testing what somebody knows, we should go show them the questions if they get it right, we move on and they don't need to cover it again because they already know that. What we need to be looking for is what's the gaps in their knowledge and the way we do boards and the way we do finals and we do midterms, we do everything that's testing what you know it's really not testing and fixing what you don't know and that's important because in the real world when you go and like yesterday, my first round of students right it was a day one in my office, you bet in my office, it's like during it through a six inch fire hose they're just like oh my gosh, you know, and I'm like it wasn't what they knew it was what they don't know.
And how do we teach them that because guess what they how's a good way to say this, you know, they got all this information and some of the things are looking to go, I know what this is and what they don't know if I didn't teach them they were still not going to learn it right and so I think that maybe we have the way we teach maybe a little backwards in that we're working on what they know and then never really fixing what they don't know because if they don't get a question right on boards or final. Or a midtermer test, do we ever really go back and teach them that or do we just hold dream that someday they're going to learn that material, you know, we're just saying well if you have minimum competency well minimum company is great unless the patient sitting in your chair has that issue and you're not competent, you know, so I look at and go I think maybe education needs to be based on more on what the gap of knowledge is and fixing it than what they currently already know. Now I think that's fair, I think those are good thoughts, you know, we've focused primarily a good portion of our attention on different ways of delivering it so we can be more flexible or agile with the way we deliver it you can't tack everything at once, but I think what you're mentioning and I let me do what you're mentioning, I think is very valid. But we did this year this past year in the fall we offered two of our courses for freshmen for incoming class only delivered asynchronously and what we want to try to see and they still had time with the faculty etc but instead of offering all options we just said for these two courses because all the other courses were delivered in a traditional way we're going to deliver you something we have designed and created to be delivered online asynchronously.
And actually the feedback to be honest was maybe what you would expect I don't know what you're thinking in your head but I'll read your mind for a minute and it was essentially there was a portion of them who loved it I love the flexibility this I could do it on my own time on I wanted to etc etc so you sort of have the bell current right you have the people loved it yeah the other people on the side and one or two students to say I wouldn't come to neck out if I know when you're going to do that. Always going to be true you know and the middle were essentially we have some good thoughts about how it could be better like we had an open house thing and they gave us feedback it was actually fantastic and we learned a lot from that experience so again it just proves to you not everyone learns in one particular way so we've been focusing our attention on how can we deliver it in the best way so that all ways of learning are offered or multiple ways to learn our offer to high school. So that's what you do best right so that's sort of step on you're on to step five or six I think which is kind of right. Which is kind of like how do we assess and you're right you know the gaps that you have the diplomate process and the academy is a beautiful process and I'm having gone through it and swept through it I can tell you that's kind of what it focuses on in the end you get this oral interview and the interview basically looks at what are the things you didn't do well in because you've reached this one.
Level but make sure you know you're not it's impossible to know everything about everything right so you're a point as well. Take it will be you won't need to soon it's going to be delivered to you all right and that's that's the other part of it but what's exciting is people are leaning into this now and optometry you know I've heard this said before and you said thing you know things happen fast what I hear a lot is that big changes like this don't happen it like Harvard or MIT or Yale these big changes happen at smaller institutions. They do. The nimble and who can adapt and that is echo that's what we are we don't answer to anybody we don't have a university president of provost I'm not knocking those who work in those environments it's great but I love it there's only three of us left essentially that have that opportunity so you know as you said I think this is where some of the change some of that unique thinking not that it can't come from the wonderful other institutions but I think those who can be the most flexible the most adaptable I think are the ones that are not going to be able to do that.
I think it's the most adaptable I think are the ones that can lead this you know leading isn't always the best position either let me just get airs in the back my friend air is in the back sometimes from your friends. That's right but someone needs to do it and I think collectively we're all doing there are many institutions are doing what they can to make those advancements to try to look at unique ways and fortunately our institution isn't a good position to be able to do that we're in an amazing environment here in Boston great stuff all around us. And I don't know you know I'm a big Clayton Christianson fan we talk about books and I really like to in books and real talk because people get people listen to go oh I got to read that book you know so one of my I like a lot of ways what he's written better when he was alive that he wrote I should say and he wrote one called disrupting class and I read that I mean that was one of those I'm going to have that I when I read a book I do it old school with a physical book and I underline and I'm like oh my god these are great concepts and you know then I feed into the eye and it gives me a summary of everything but you you know is that. He taught us about something and I've read in a couple other books now too that say you know maybe we have classroom a little altered we're going to reimagine education what might that look like and I kind of think maybe classrooms should be you know my older son I mentioned earlier he just walked upstairs he's he just graduated from CU and engineering his last year classes they didn't really have class they had independent learning and then they went into their professors when they had got a class.
Professors when they had questions you know that is some meeting time when I did questions to say you know hey I don't get how this concept working well okay and I asked him I said well what do you think about that he goes this was the way I should have learned from the very beginning and it was really impactful to me going huh I wonder if we're not doing this right in the traditional model but that's easy to say because they've already had the first three years of foundation is an engineering that was traditional lecture style right so can you start that from the ground up or is there a place that you've been working. Professors are placed that you pivot now it becomes professors or tutors not right. Displairs of information yeah look there's so much there I want to comment on but I'll start with everybody learns differently and I think we have to appreciate that and if there's one point I want to make it's that I think we have to understand that and adapt to that so couple of things that one who feeds faculty of schools and colleges of geometry number one feeder for that is residents. These are amazing young colleagues who have had an incredible year of learning in addition to their four years of education working with some grape we have 42 residents in NECO so we have we have a lot of residents the challenge then is they are experts in certain areas they're incredibly knowledgeable and then we put them in a position to be teachers and I would say if I'm critiquing a little bit I'm going to critique myself just like I would anyone we need to do more.
To help them to be better teachers they're incredibly smart and by the way in many cases most cases and I've experienced incredibly open to it so we've got this group that's saying help me be a better teacher I don't have any past. Being smart isn't necessarily being a good teacher they're not those are not related and that's the point so we have to help with that right we have to find a way to make sure we're helping them to be better teachers so we brought in as I mentioned earlier learning designers people bring expertise to this area and I will tell you the faculty is really rallied around it every faculty members looking at how do I get better at delivering my messages particularly our younger faculty who are now being helped with some of the skills that are necessary to be a good teacher. Not just an incredibly knowledgeable person as you said and I want to get back to the AI tutor for a minute because it does. That's where it goes perfect.
Yeah it does address some of the questions you were you were posing and challenges you were posing because what it does is kind of just that initially learns about you what you know what you don't know it asks you questions depending on those you answer those you don't answer very well how quickly you answer what questions you ask it it creates the answer. It creates this unique and individualized tutor I know the people who develop these things don't even like it to be called a tutor because it's far more than that it really does a lot more but for those of us. They're intellectual agents that's that's kind of worth is becoming that they're intellectual agents I think that's great because tutor is too narrow really for what it is what the capabilities are but this is so individualized that it does enable how you learn best and it does identify getting back to a really great point you made earlier it does identify those areas. That you're weaker in and therefore accentuates more than that will ask you a question in the morning about that those things now these are still being developed we're beta testing some of this we're trying to find what is the best solution for us at our institution but this is a really big component particularly for a private independent like ours who doesn't have this big university with all its resources but I think every student will ultimately benefit from essentially creating a textbook for you but it's a textbook.
But it's a textbook that you can engage with that's interactive that's too dimensional that's 24 seven that is personalized to you and doesn't just say oh I know you don't know the answer it's okay we'll move on they're going to teach a different way to teach you the material that you need to know I I do think that and that's a whole other subject I can't necessarily go into because some other conversations but but I'll just say I think knowledge agents or intellectual agents or whatever I do personally. I do personally think that those are a big part of the future not just for up to metric or up to all the education but education at every level you know if you listen. Salman Khan you know his his new book he's got with from Khan Academy and he's got come ego he developed which is kind of the first real baby version of these knowledge agents with his come ego and you know I look at that and I go oh my gosh I think the way my you know my kids are now one done in college and one. Get ready to law school maybe in Boston next door to you here but you know the other ones are going to be a junior in college and I think okay maybe they missed that but then I look at like my nieces and stuff that are younger and go they're going to learn with a personalized agent that is going to be it's going to be their friend their mentor their tutor I look at that with you know you Larry Dunbar those guys their tutor their their friend is going to be their agent because they're going to help them.
See and visualize the world in a way that you just can't do as a single human individual so I think it's going to be exciting. I was just going to say it's incredibly exciting I say you know I get to meet all of the applicants who get interviews who come to the college and I always tell them think about this world right now with artificial intelligence virtual reality 3D printing tele hell and start putting these pieces together and how they come together I say to them I'm excited for you you're going to be a great. I'm excited for you you're going to be the ones ultimately to decide how we use these incredible technologies to to reach communities we can't reach today to be smarter and have immediate information in front of us to make better decisions for patients I mean so many events and their side about until health care delivery is just I don't think I just don't think we have any concept in any way see perform about like you said how all these tools are going to be used and in the world. I can be used and integrated in all the different types of stuff you know right now I'm listening I'm trying to read a book and listen to a book and read a book and do all this kinds of stuff and so Mustafa Solima and I can never quite say his name he's the guy started deep mind he wrote a book called the coming wave that my friend Jim Tim is just sent to me to listen to and it talks about that like we even though all these different concepts are out there the reality is they're all.
The reality is they're all going to sink in at some point in the very near future and I you know I know you say it's going to take a long time I am always overly optimistic and say okay it's going to be in two years when price can be in five. But I look at some of these some of these kids like I got a high school a young ladies in high school right now saying hey I want to go to time school and thinking oh my gosh by the time you get to high school four years from now the technology you learn with will be so radically different. Then anything that we probably even can can can think about it and as these technology said tell a health and tell a health is tell education too you know you're about the 30 what how many of our states there are 30 something states to know of time for school you know I'm a Colorado Colorado Utah Wyoming Montana the Dakota's the you know there's not enough time the closest one is Oklahoma and then we don't have anything for a long way away you know so all of the folks who come here they're moving they're going somewhere to go to school right now I'm going to go to school. Right.
I just want to say we want to take that away if you want to be an optometrist and you live somewhere like the states that you mentioned and you have a family and you're in trench optometries not an option we want to start fishing in new ponds we we have an issue with applicant pool we have an issue with student that I mean we haven't even addressed those and I think they're you know right for another discussion but but you know we have those issues and we have to look at but there are ways that we can help to solve this and to help to bring optometrist into areas where we need them the most if you do your clinical training in those areas you're more likely to stay in those areas so lots lots of lots of opportunities let me say this and I know we're kind of winding down and I want to say one thing to make sure that is clear from me is that I came into this world of academia from outside of it I was an outsider I was welcomed I've been blown away by the commitment that I'm going to do. I'm not a faculty and our administrators have but I also know because I've seen it from both sides it is so easy to critique and criticize and you know what we got a lot of improvements that we can make but here's the thing speak up talk to people of your alma mater if you're here in some you see something instead of posting something that is very inflammatory try to help call us up say hey I don't like what you're doing here maybe here's a better way in hindsight now being able to see it from me admittedly bring you what's critical. I'm not a problem. They're better than those of the problems are start working on the solution.
Help us yeah if there's someone sitting in your chair and they show an interest and you know a kid or you know a young adult and you know they're leaning in they're asking you questions talk about optometrie tell them what an amazing profession so much you can do to help the schools and colleges let's work together we all wanted to be the best it can be and I can tell you there are people in the inside they work so hard at this it's it's their passion look you're not going to make the most money working in an academic institution. You can make more going out and working in a retail environment just as an example but these people do it because they love it and they care but give us your feedback let us hear from you critique or or things you like that you're seeing great you know encourage some of the activities you see that you like it's so critically important to our future and to be able to do many of the things we're talking about that are just their must do these are things we have to do we can't it's not going to be like well we can stay where we are for the next 10 years and everything will be fine and keep raising to we can do it. We can kind of keep raising tuition and keep strut you know struggling with new schools to find students to fill classes that's not sustainable we have to find a better way but we have to do it together our industry collaborative is a wonderful meeting that we do that we love bringing groups together and if people listening this want to have a voice and want to give their input I can tell you ask go which is the schools and college of optometrie want to hear it we want to hear it here at NECCO wherever you're alma mater is let's work together to make optometric education the best it can be and we're at a pivotal time for all the reasons you've mentioned. How are this was a real talk you know this is one of the reasons I this why we call it this is that I love just getting down in the weeds and you know we're not being overly politically correct and we're not trying to say the right things we're really just trying to you know and and I mean that when I say that and I all of you are listening to real talk we're trying to find solutions to problems and there's a lot of problems out there what we do is amazing and providing care across the world.
I know we have a lot of international listeners as well you know all of us are doing our best to solve problems the patients have and deliver better care whether it be from educating young doctors to educating doctors or maybe not as young anymore people like me right and so you know I appreciate your time Howard and we have a real conversation about things that are coming things that could be better and I agree with your statement bring us solutions your job is to be able to do it. You're driving your car you're thinking about something instead of being mad and going oh I wish it was something different spend that time thinking about how it could be better and provide a solution there's going to be people out there we're going to make it make changes and make these things happen so five years down the road we're still not going oh it's the same problems so Howard thank you so much your time as always my friend we have some fascinating interesting. That was great my pleasure by the way can't wait to welcome everybody to Boston for Academy so I hope I'll see you here and enjoy your time in our wonderful city and Purcell H at neco dot edu if you got anything for me I'm all yours I want to hear from you I promise and Scott thanks for the opportunity I appreciate it. Everyone have a wonderful day.
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