Mike's Newsletter | Driverless Cars Expand. Device Tracking Gets More Aggressive.
Welcome Orthoprenuers!
Every week, we bring you the latest in practice management, marketing, profitability, and next-level ortho techniques so you can work smarter, grow faster, and build the practice you want.
In this issue:
🚨 News Update
🦾 Mike’s Prompt
✨ Astro Outlook
🗓️ Plan Your 2026 CE Calendar
📢 Juan’s Marketing Tip
🔥 Trending in the OrthoPreneurs Facebook Group
🎙️ The Orthopreneurs Podcast
✨ Final Thought
🚨 News Upadte
🎰 Nevada Approves Up to 8,000 Robotaxis in Las Vegas — Tesla, Waymo, Uber Get Green Light
Nevada's transportation regulator gave unanimous approval on August 20, 2026, to three applications letting Tesla, Uber, and Waymo offer paid robotaxi services in Clark County (Las Vegas region). Together, the permits allow as many as 7,000 self-driving vehicles to be deployed countywide within the next year. Tesla received the largest allocation — up to 5,000 robotaxis. Waymo was authorized to operate up to 1,000 driverless vehicles. This marks a massive jump from Tesla's previous interim cap of just 10 vehicles on a limited stretch of the Las Vegas Strip. Amazon-owned Zoox also received separate federal approval to charge fares for steering-wheel-free robotaxis in Las Vegas under a temporary NHTSA exemption covering up to 2,500 vehicles.
Why it matters: Robotaxis are no longer theoretical. Las Vegas is about to become America's largest robotaxi deployment zone, with potentially thousands of driverless vehicles on the roads within 12 months. This signals regulators' confidence in autonomous vehicle safety and the speed at which the industry can scale. For the broader economy: if robotaxis work at scale in Las Vegas, it changes the timeline for autonomous transportation everywhere — including logistics, delivery, and last-mile mobility. The jobs question is real: this deployment will displace tens of thousands of ride-hailing drivers over the next 5-10 years if it succeeds.
AliExpress Caught Using Silent Audio to Fingerprint User Devices — Brave Exposes Hidden Tracking
Brave browser exposed on August 22 that Alibaba's AliExpress was using the Web Audio API to play silent sounds through users' computers and measure how their devices processed the audio — a technique called audio fingerprinting. The discovery came when a user with Bluetooth headphones noticed their headphones were unexpectedly playing AliExpress's silent audio instead of music from their phone. The scripts were obfuscated and ran at zero volume with no user prompt or notification. The audio measurements were combined with other device data (canvas rendering, WebGL, hardware specs, WebRTC, mouse/touch events, automation indicators) to create a comprehensive device fingerprint sent to Alibaba's servers. Alibaba claimed the technique was part of anti-fraud and security tooling. Brave noted it has protected against audio fingerprinting for 6+ years and blocks the specific scripts used in this case by default.
Why it matters: This is the concrete version of the invisible tracking problem. Alibaba didn't ask permission. Didn't announce it. Just silently measured your device's audio processing to profile you. For practice owners: this reinforces why using privacy-focused browsers (Brave, Firefox) matters for your team, and why Chinese apps and services on work devices are a data governance problem — not just because of government access, but because the tracking techniques are aggressive and invisible.
🌎 China Is Building AI Models of American Voters to Test Election Influence — New Research Revealed
An exclusive investigation by Natalie G. Winters revealed that Chinese institutions have moved far beyond polling American voters—they're building detailed AI models of the American electorate to test political messages and simulate election outcomes. Researchers have constructed artificial versions of U.S. voters, assigned political and demographic labels to more than one million X users, simulated state-by-state presidential elections, and conducted experiments on synthetic voters in Pennsylvania. In one project, a Fudan University-led research team collected 171,210,066 posts from 9,596,198 X users during the 2020 election period, developed classifiers to infer users' age, gender, race, ideology, and party affiliation, and created simulations that can forecast political behavior and test how synthetic voters respond to political messages. Chinese universities and government think tanks are developing increasingly granular, interactive models that can be used to identify the domestic forces shaping U.S. policy toward China.
Why it matters: This is beyond traditional election interference. China isn't just spreading disinformation—it's building computational models of American voters to understand, predict, and test influence campaigns. They know your political leanings, your demographics, and how you might respond to messages. This is intelligence gathering at scale. For practice owners: this is context for why data security matters and why tracking, profiling, and surveillance from Chinese companies (the apps, the devices, the silent audio measuring your hardware) aren't coincidental. It's part of a larger system of understanding and influencing Americans. And if you have recently been questioning whether a data center moratorium in the US is necessary, congratulations, you’ve been successfully influenced by a Chinese psyop.
🦾 Mike’s Tip of the Week: Turn AI Into Your Investment Research Partner
Do you play with a stock account? Most people use AI for investing by asking something like, “Is it a good time to buy Nvidia?” There’s a much more powerful way to use it.
Recently, I gave AI a watchlist of stocks and asked it to analyze the list the way a hedge fund or quant shop might. I asked it to track upcoming catalysts, earnings reports, and news that could impact each stock. I also asked for probability-based price forecasts and, importantly, told it to keep track of its own predictions so we could see how accurate they were over time and improve the forecasting process.
I also ask for the bull case and the bear case. I want to know what would make the investment thesis stronger or weaker, what events I should be watching, and whether today’s price looks attractive relative to the potential upside and downside.
Try this prompt:
“Act as my investment research partner. I’m going to give you a watchlist and explain why I’m interested in each investment. Analyze them like a professional investor would. Track upcoming catalysts, earnings, and important news. Give me bull, base, and bear cases with probability-based price forecasts. Tell me what would strengthen or weaken the thesis, what I should be watching, and whether the current price offers attractive upside relative to the downside. Keep track of your forecasts over time so we can evaluate how accurate they were and improve the analysis.”
You can keep refining the instructions as you go and eventually turn it into your own personalized investment research system.
✨ Astro Outlook: Leo Season Wraps Up, Virgo Season Gets to Work
Week of August 24–30: the anchor this week is the Pisces Lunar Eclipse on August 28. Eclipses tend to bring things into focus — especially the things you have been avoiding, overcomplicating, or quietly tolerating for too long.
The practical moment: this is a good week to look at where your practice feels blurry. Maybe it is a team role that is not clearly owned, a patient communication issue that keeps repeating, a vendor relationship that needs boundaries, or a process that everyone works around instead of fixing. The goal is not to make a dramatic decision just to feel productive. The goal is to see what is actually happening.
Best use of the week: pick one area where confusion is costing time and name the real issue. Write down what is unclear, who owns it, and what decision needs to be made next. The win this week is not speed — it is clarity.
🗓️ Plan Your 2026 CE Calendar
The Sleep & Airway MeetingFri, Dec 04 | Arizona Biltmore, LXR Hotels & Resorts
THE MOST UP-TO-DATE CLINICAL INFORMATION ON SLEEP-DISORDERED BREATHING & AIRWAY.
The Orthopreneurs CE Calendar keeps every major workshop, congress, and study club event in one place — searchable by month, so you can plan your travel and your team's coverage well ahead of time instead of scrambling the week before.
Whether you're chasing CE credits, looking for your next study club, or just want to see what's coming up before you lock in your schedule for the quarter, it's worth a five-minute look every month.
Bookmark the calendar, pick your priorities early, and stop letting CE planning become a last-minute scramble.
📢 Juan’s Maktering Tip
Stop Letting Your Best Reviews Sit There
Reviews are not just reputation markers anymore.
They are conversion assets.
A parent may see your Google profile before they ever visit your website. They may scan three reviews, look at your photos, check your hours, and decide whether your practice feels trustworthy in less than a minute. If your best reviews are buried, outdated, or never reused, you are leaving proof on the table.
Here’s the play:
● Pull your 10 strongest recent reviews.
● Sort them by theme: patient experience, team friendliness, payment flexibility, convenience, technology, confidence, or results.
● Use those themes in your website copy and social content.
● Add review language to consult follow-up emails.
● Train your team to notice when a patient says something review-worthy.
● Ask for reviews immediately after a positive moment, not weeks later.
The bottom line:
A good review should not live in one place forever. If a patient already explained why your practice is worth choosing, use that language across your marketing.
🔥Trending in the Orthopreneurs Facebook Group🔥
💬 One of the greatest fears in retirement is running out of money, actually more than death!
But there is a bigger risk: what if the money you saved simply buys less? This is actually not a what if because it happens every year!
The U.S. national debt has now crossed $40 trillion. When governments continually spend more than they collect, they must borrow more—and over time, enormous debt creates pressure for policies that can weaken the purchasing power of fiat currency. Can the government run out of money? No, because they just print more at your expense.
This should matter to every American citizen.
You can spend 30 years building a large retirement account and still have a problem if those dollars don’t purchase what you thought they would.
Retirement planning can’t just be about how many dollars you accumulate.
It also needs to ask:
What will those dollars actually be worth when you need them?
That may be one of the most important financial questions of the next 20–30 years, and it needs to be accounted for.
If you are accumulating assets, you fall into this trap; this is why people should focus on acceleration over accumulation!
🗣️Sharing experiences can help make the right choice for you!
🎙️ On the Podcast: “That’s Impossible.” Yeah… For You: The Self-Imposed Limit l 5MF
What if doubling your take-home next year has less to do with working harder—and more to do with removing the limits you’ve placed on your own practice?
Too many orthodontists set goals based on what feels comfortable instead of what might actually be possible. In this episode, I want to challenge you to stop asking, “What do I think I can grow by next year?” and start asking a much bigger question: What would have to change for me to double my take-home, take more time off, and enjoy my practice more?
✨ Final Thoughts: Clarity Is a Growth Tool.
A practice does not need more complexity to grow.
It needs cleaner decisions, cleaner communication, and cleaner handoffs.
The tools matter.
But the system around the tools matters more.
– Mike Vidikan
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