Leaders and Their Stories

Richard Lowe (00:02.67)
Hello, I'm Richard Lowe and this is the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. Thank you for coming. I'm the writing king and the ghost writing guru. And I'm here with Doug Hallowen, who is an expert on AI and has lots of good things to say. So Doug, why don't you introduce yourself?

homeland.

Doug Hohulin (00:22.412)
Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. So I worked for Motorola and Nokia for 33 years. worked on various aspects of AI throughout my career. I was go to market engineer by training and then go to market strategy, business development, account management. And so I went from one G technology to six G technology of cell phone industry. And then, but I got involved in digital health.

projects. was involved in Thomas vehicle technology and connected vehicle technology. So I touched throughout my career at different aspects of AI. so my focus right now is to save a billion lives using AI.

And how are you gonna do that?

Well, I believe AI is an incredibly powerful tool and if it's used right, we can save a billion lives. It can be an AI assistant to help both the doctor, the clinician, and the patient be as healthy as possible. Right now, this year, according to the United Nations, 63 million people will die. How many of those deaths are avoidable? How could AI, this very powerful tool that's supposed to change the world,

How can it save lives? And also there's 1.3 billion people that are disabled. How can we use not only to save lives, but to make healthy lives so that people are not disabled?

Richard Lowe (01:47.662)
Well, I did an experiment on that subject recently. Um, went to the doctor and the doctor gave me all the doctor speak gobbledygook very fast, 10 minute thing. It was supposed to be a physical, it was only 10 minutes long. So I took all of my health stuff. Um, the tests, drugs I'm on, the supplements, um, my lifestyle took me about four hours, put it in chat, GPT loaded it up. And I said, okay, if I continue on this path, what does my life look like? I did not like the answer.

And then I said, okay, Mr. Chat GPT or Mrs. Chat GPT, depending on my mood, what do I need to do to fix that? And it said basically to sum it up, eat better and take walks.

Wait.

Yeah. cause I'm pretty sedentary, you know, do this all day long. And that was it. And that changes life from being miserable to being having a good, you know, a good end of life. Just that. And it had a couple other suggestions, but it was interesting to me that, that that was the Chetchi PT gave me far better advice. Cause it gave me a diet and everything. Then the doctor even came close to, and it was, it wasn't that hard.

Exactly. Yeah. In fact, I was doing a project. I, after retiring from Nokia, I got involved. I was an adjunct professor at the Kansas university school of nursing. I'm looking on immersive technology and virtual reality to help with, you know, the nursing program. but, we were working with, one project looking at a men with prostate cancer, especially in, in, you know, areas like I'm living in Kansas city. And so, you know, black community.

Doug Hohulin (03:30.926)
right? And how do you have a healthy diet? And so, uh, you know, there's this, this, uh, chat GPT where you can say, okay, give me a list of five ingredients, actually 30 ingredients that are healthy for, know, that would be good for men with prostate cancer. Um, and you know, like tomatoes is good lentils is good and you know, that kind of stuff. Okay. And then say, okay, what are five, you know, so here's this list of 20 things.

what are five ingredients that you know, you like, you know, like, because some people don't like rice, but they might like beans and whatever. and then you can say, okay, now create a, a recipe that takes only five minutes to create. I'm a big believer in fives. And, if I think the recipe.

And that someone can make to be a healthy dish that they would enjoy and then create an image of that dish. Right. So it's a simple recipe and here's the image. so rather than eat, you know, something that's unhealthy to eat something that is healthy.

Yes. Yes. It's amazing what you can do with this tool. You if I did the same thing for my finances and for my marketing and it produced some, well, the thing that I noticed is it tends to produce too much data. got like the marketing got this overwhelming amount of stuff. Like I'm not going to be able to do that. so I had to tone it down and I had to talk. basically can interrogate it and you can talk to it like a person. was able to tone it down to something that I can do. Same with the diet, same with everything else.

It's amazing, life-changing, actually.

Doug Hohulin (05:02.942)
Exactly. Well, so I'm a big believer, you know, it's what problem are you trying to solve and then how can you solve it? And, you know, so and again, going back to this five category is like what five things can you focus on? Because it's like juggling. You know, if you try to juggle two balls, it's easy. If you juggle three.

You know, if you get a little bit of practice, you can do that, but you know, unless you're really, really good, you can't juggle more than four or five balls. Um, likewise, you know, okay. What five things can you focus on for me? The important ones are sleep. mean, the number one thing out there from cognitive ability, get sleep. Uh, you know, your immune system is boosted up.

Um, you're so much healthier. So focus on getting sleep and I struggle with that. mean, I, I, you know, I want to look at the smartphone or the iPad and watch videos, you know, I, but I got to turn things off. got, know, cause like focus on getting good night's of sleep, you know, work on what I eat, you know, you know, don't know, caught caffeine after a certain time. So these kinds of things, anyway, sleep, um, sugar, you know, if it's, if it was easy to be thin, we'd all be thin, but you know, that's hard. I, know, it's like, how do I get excess sugar out of my life?

I'm focusing on that. I do, I play tennis and, you know, walk and bike, but I don't stretch and I don't do strength training. So those two things I need to focus on as well. and, so then socialization I'm single. so, you know, making sure I'm interacting with people and I tend to be an introvert as well. So, you know, for me, it's really important for me to engage with people. and because, you know, your chance of dying.

It's it's equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes if you're, if you're lived by yourself.

Richard Lowe (06:46.2)
That's why I joined the Metal Group.

Exactly,

people who basically to socialize with and there's business opportunities there too. I found it also is a great social group, just people to talk to.

By the way, there's 14 things according to the Lancet. And in fact, I've written two books with my co-author who's an ER doctor by training. but, the Lancet says here's 14 things you can do to reduce your risk of getting dementia. by 50%, like 7 % of it is socialization. Another set, you know, percentage is sleep. but the other one is being a lifelong learner. You know, if you don't use your muscles, you won't.

You know, you'll be physically unfit. In fact, they did a study in the sixties where they took a bunch of college students and put them on bed rest for a month. what they found is they aged by 30. They had the muscle strength of a 50 year old. they developed, they were 30 years older. Right? So if you want to age someone by 30 years, you know, put them on bed rest.

Doug Hohulin (07:53.408)
If you want to cognitively age yourself, stop learning. Stop being a lifelong learner. Just do doom scrolling on your social media. Post never learn anything new. Don't stimulate your brain.

One of the reasons why I do this podcast and one of the reasons why being a ghostwriter is so much fun. Cause I, I get into subjects that I don't know darn thing about get to write about them sometimes.

I mean, you're constantly stimulating your brain, you know, so.

Sometimes it's a memoir, sometimes it's about AI, which I do know about sometimes. A client of mine just published a digital transformation book. He's very happy and it's selling very well. you know, all these things are a stretch. Actually, I like to confront things that I, that I have neurosis about like, going to high places. So I go up in a hot air balloon every few years. I don't like small spaces.

So every few years I put on the boots and things and go spelunking. That's cave going, crawling through caves. Now caves is interesting because if you crawl through a cave, sometimes you're hanging from a ladder. So that's the high places. And sometimes the little creepy crawly things crawl all over you in the middle of the super dark. And you don't know what they are. Exactly. And it gets very interesting, but it does help confront some fears. and then I was

Doug Hohulin (09:07.18)
Ha ha ha!

Richard Lowe (09:15.224)
super shy so I confronted that fear by picking up the camera and photographing people until I wasn't shy anymore.

and write stories about their life, you know, and be a ghostwriter, you know, and.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. That helped a lot and get overcoming shyness and the grief of the wife passing away. Just, just going out there and photographing people until that was all gone. it took 1200 photo shoots and stuff to do that, but what the hell, you know, and it worked very well. so yeah, lifelong learner is a big one.

Exactly. You know, and one area too, I'm very passionate about is disabilities. Like 1.3 billion people are disabled in this world. And so the question is, how can we have a healthy, not only live longer, because I don't want to live longer if I'm going to live in pain and be very sincerely disabled, but how can I have a healthier life as well? yeah, 1.3 billion people are disabled. What can we do to reduce disabilities?

And that's an area that AI can help as well.

Richard Lowe (10:20.174)
Well, you know, you mentioned quality of life indirectly and we're all going to the same destination. That's a given. Yes. But you can go the hard way or the easy way. And I've watched like my parents do the hard way and they just, they had miserable end of life for 20, 30, for 20 years. And then other people have a very good quality of life at the end of their life. And what's the difference? Well, it's some of the things you're talking about. Fix your diet. I don't, I've never drank, never smoked, never used drugs.

Never, never gambled. So those kinds of things that have severe side effects in life or can, I haven't done. I don't need to worry about those. I have other things that I've had to work on, but not those.

Bye. Go ahead.

Doug Hohulin (11:07.242)
Exactly. Yeah, each of us have our five things. Now, like my mom, she has type two diabetes. So making sure she's taking her medication is really important. And, you know, so there's that, you know, so, you know, each person has their five things that, know, and once you solve that, know, so let's say I lose my 20 pounds and I really am doing well without as much sugar, then let's find out the next thing. And when I start

The two things I'm probably failing as much with is my stretching and especially my strength training. I just do not like weights. So that's what I need to work on. got socially actually with metal socialization and that's a great men's group. Actually, by the way, there's a great women's group that I know of that's equivalent. for those who are interested, there's these groups that, and then there's groups that both have men and women in it as well.

And, but what can stimulate your mind, what engages you, develop friendships. Those are absolutely critical to help make a healthier life.

Yeah. Yeah. Now I ghost write, like I said, and one of the things that I found is people who ghost write, who get their books written, whether they write it themselves or hire a ghost writer or co-author or whatever, they, that book becomes an, an attractor for people that they can socialize with. So I just finished a book called the ghost writing advantage, and it's basically a mind dump of everything I know about being a client of a ghost writer. It's 400 pages long and talks about everything from

the idea to publication and beyond. And that helps my business. helps me, that help, a book will always, if you use it right, will always help your business. It'll help you get speaking engagements and all other stuff, help you get out there. Whereas not having a book, you're just the same level as everybody else. A book kind of raises you up. Like you got two, you know that.

Doug Hohulin (13:02.316)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like I'm an engineer by training. So I think more in in engineering terms, you we use too many words and so forth. But yeah, my co-author, Dr. Harvey Castro, he's written 25 books. He's an ER doctor by training, but focusing on AI and helping AI. And so we wrote Tech Powered Healing, the Future of Medicine in the AI Age. And then 2030.

is a blueprint for Humanities Exponential Growth that was actually published by the University of Toronto Press. So kind of went through a self-publishing and then having a publisher with that and the pros and cons of both. But the one thing I found with writing, because I wrote six chapters in the 2030 book, and one of them was the history of disease and avoiding avoidable deaths and then how AI and this AI feature can look at that.

Right. So, you know, these concepts that, you know, the best way to learn something is to teach someone. The best way to learn anything is to write a book about it and try to explain it. And you'll develop so many more concepts that you didn't even know you had by the art of writing.

And the beauty of a ghostwriter is you can have all the ideas and the brainstorming and stuff, but you don't have to do the writing. That makes it beautiful. You mentioned the history of disease. know, back when the pandemic hit, people were complaining that they were forced to wear masks. Well, they should read about the history of the eradication of smallpox. It was brutal.

Whoever the powers that be decided smallpox was gonna be gone and believe me if you know what smallpox was that was a good decision

Doug Hohulin (14:51.342)
Yeah, 300,000, 300 million to 500 million people died because of smallpox.

It was a brutal disease. the, the eradication was absolutely ruthless. They would take babies out that had smallpox and they would, people got stifed, you know, quarantined and there were probably even executions involved because they were serious. We're getting rid of this disease. We're not, just talking to United States, the whole world. Right. And, yeah, every time you, if you think, now we have it hard today. They hadn't made me have to wear a mask in the store. How dare they.

Yeah, how do you like to your babies ripped from your arms and you put into a quarantine camp because you got smallpox? I mean, that's a little bit higher grade value. I mean, not to to minimize the freedom and stuff. I people have valid points, but it's just interesting that the things that we had to go through to eradicate these major diseases. And now we take it for granted that we don't have those major diseases. And now we have the luxury.

It took hundreds of years to develop cures for this. I have a friend who has chronic myelogenous leukemia and she would be dead now if it wasn't for this pill that was invented or was FDA approved in 2002, I believe it was.

And now her life expectancy is the same as any other person. Um, you know, and so, you know, like, how can we, you know, there's according to a doctor at two of Gawande, there's 13,000 ways the body can fail and about 9,000 ways we don't know how to cure for it. We don't have a treatment for it.

Richard Lowe (16:23.85)
A lot of the main cura is just what I said. Eat right and exercise. Maybe stretch.

Yeah, no, but it's so yeah, there's, know, but at the same time, you know, like for my friend, I mean, she could even stretch all she wants and exercise, but she didn't have this, you know, Gleevec. She would not, she'd be dead. So sometimes medicine is absolutely critical. I would say, you know, in general, like, in fact, this author, my favorite author, John Green,

He wrote everything is tuberculosis and in it, he talked about the history of treatment of tuberculosis and the good and the bad. you know, so I would say like, like cloth masks, what we found is they did nothing for COVID social distancing, maybe not so much either. So, you know, there are some things that, that, you know, in hindsight did very well and other things didn't do as well.

I would also say personalized medicine, know, like the elderly really needed the vaccine, the younger people, you know, there's a number to treat versus the number to harm. You know, these are the nuances that, you know, sometimes just pounding away saying you must do X, maybe harm some people. Now, do you harm some to help others or can you target the help to the ones that you need to help versus not harming those that you don't need to help?

And back in the days of smallpox, didn't have much choice because they didn't have all the options we have. This was in what, early 19, 1910, 1920, 1930 up through 1950.

Doug Hohulin (17:59.342)
80 is when we cured smallpox. That's when the last smallpox.

up through there but the brutal period was a little earlier. Because then they had a vaccine and then it became less brutal but before they had the vaccine and did you know that a small there was a pseudo smallpox vaccine back in Washington's time?

Right, right.

Doug Hohulin (18:17.462)
Yes, yes, he did the vaccination. It's not vaccination. was a term. Calpox. No, but, but, vacillation. was a term for it. Right, right. the problem is, is people would get smallpox, but it would be a milder form of it. So there was risk getting that vaccine too, back in the Washington state, but the risk of not getting it was so much more.

yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's probably what ended most, most wars or battles was disease. Hunger and disease were the two things that ended battles in the past. Not, not so much fighting. You got to the fighting phase. You were lucky.

Exactly.

Doug Hohulin (18:57.271)
Exactly. How do you keep your soldiers healthy so they can fight?

Right, right. In fact, Spanish flu back in 1918 is possibly what ended World War I.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, well, I was just at the Eisenhower museum and they like right in World War II, to 80 million people died in World War II. And that was 3 % of the population of the planet. That number in World War I, it was about 1 % of the population died. But the Spanish flu was between 2 and 5 % of the population died because, you know, so there was a death from the war.

But the deaths from the Spanish flu are actually the H which H one. And I forget the variant. And actually the, that flu was not from Spain. It was because it was actually Kansas, Fort Riley, Kansas, which because of the war, you know, you know, they were trying to send all the men to the camp and you know, they were more vulnerable and then they got, the flu and then it spread everywhere.

Well, when you think about being in a trench with the rain coming down and dead bodies all around and sewage and everything else, it's not actually a very good place to be.

Doug Hohulin (20:12.284)
Yeah, and that good in hygiene. Yeah, hygiene is also an important factor too.

Yeah. Yeah. Hygiene is very important. Well, we're coming up on time. If you had a couple of sentences that you wanted to tell our listeners to go ahead.

Yeah, yeah, so appreciate this opportunity. just, you know, it's like focusing on, you know, how do we make the world healthier place and you know what, to avoid avoidable deaths, I believe.

This AI tool is something we can do. The thing is, is a lot of people, know, why I believe, you know, I'm in this crowd that everyone's talking about AI, like over 50 % of people, like what is AI? They don't even know how it is. Only 10 % of people really use it. And that's fine. Actually, you're probably using it you don't know you're using it, right? When you use Google Maps.

you know, that driving is using AI when you're doing a searching for anything as AI, know, so you're using AI your entire life. If you have a smartphone, everyone has a smartphone. and, that's packed full of AI. So the thing is, there's, you know, there you're using the tool. The question is, can you use it properly and making sure that you don't lose your humanity as you're using these, the tools of technology. And that's kind of what my next book is going to be about.

Doug Hohulin (21:29.646)
In fact, the title right now is everything is AI, saving 1 billion lives and humanity using AI. And the last line in my book is everything is not AI. So I'm going to be talking about all the possibilities of these tools to live a healthier life and helping humanity have abundance. in the end, have to, humanity, need our social relationships.

We can't have our AI girlfriends and boyfriends. Yeah, we need to focus on real people, even though they're sometimes a real pain. And they tell us things that we don't want to hear. Sometimes they make us mad. AI, if you program the AI, they won't. They'll tell you everything you want to hear. But in the end, need to, humans need to, I'm pro team human. so use how, learn the tools to use AI.

come on.

Doug Hohulin (22:27.938)
but realize that in the end, what is important is our humanity and how we can be better humans to each other and not just focus on technology.

Well, excellent. Well, thank you for coming. This has been the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I'm Richard Lowe, the writing king and ghost writing guru. One thing I wanted to ask you before I sign off is how can people get hold of you?

Well, thank you.

Doug Hohulin (22:53.452)
Yeah, LinkedIn. I'm Doug. Doug Ho Hoolin. H-O-H-U-L-I-N at LinkedIn.com. I write a lot on LinkedIn and I have a couple books. I'm actually 2030book.com I believe it is and that's one book and then we also Tech Powered Healing is another book on Kindle and on Amazon. you know, if you have a Kindle account, can or an audible account, you can get it for free.

the Tech Power Healing book. yeah, yeah, I encourage you to reach out to me. And, you know, there's different groups I'm involved in, like one of them being MENTAL, which stands for Media, Entertainment, Leadership, Technology, and Learning, or Leadership at the end. So Media, Entertainment, Technology, Arts, and Leadership. So that's another group I'm involved in, great group.

And in fact, that's how you and I met. So that would be another group to be involved in. So again, thank you so much for your podcast. I really enjoyed listening to a couple of your other episodes and so much. It's very critical for this leadership and learning. So.

Thank you for coming. Appreciate it. And we're signing off now.