Using AI to Prevent a Billion Avoidable Deaths

Doug Hohulin joins Richard Lowe (The Writing King) on Leaders and Their Stories for a conversation about using AI to keep people alive and well.

After 33 years at Motorola and Nokia spanning 1G to 6G, Doug now focuses on AI in healthcare, co-authoring books with an ER doctor on preventing avoidable deaths and improving quality of life.

Doug Hohulin spent 33 years at Motorola and Nokia working across cellular generations from 1G to 6G, and later as an adjunct professor at the University of Kansas School of Nursing. With co-author Dr. Harvey Castro, an ER doctor, he has written two books on AI and health, including Tech Powered Healing.

For more conversations like this one, see the Leaders Hub. Richard has ghostwritten books explaining complex technology for general readers.

DISCUSS YOUR BOOK

Full transcript of the interview follows.

Richard Lowe: 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 ghostwriting Guru, and I’m here with Doug Hallwen Houlin Doug Houlin, who is an expert on AI and has lots of good things to say. So, Doug, why don’t you introduce yourself

33 Years From 1G to 6G

Doug Hohulin: Oh, pleasure to be here! Thank you so much. So I worked for Motorola and Nokia. For 33 years I 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 6 G technology of cell phone industry.

And then, but I got involved in digital health projects. I was involved in autonomous vehicle technology and connected vehicle technology so touched throughout my career different aspects of AI. And so my focus right now is to save a billion lives using AI

Using AI to Save a Billion Lives

Doug: 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, and be as healthy as possible. Right now, this year, according to the United Nations, sixty-three 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: Well, I did an experiment on that subject recently went to the doctor, and the doctor gave me all the doctor speak, gobbledygook very fast 10 min thing. It was supposed to be a physical. It was only 10 min long, so I took all of my health stuff, the tests, the drugs.

I’m on the supplements. My lifestyle took me about 4 h, 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 Yeah, cause I’m pretty sedentary, you know. Do this all day long, and That was it, and that changed his life from being miserable to being having a good, you know, a good end of life.

Just stop, and they had a couple other suggestions. But it was interesting to me that that that was the chat. Gpt gave me far better advice because it gave me a diet, and everything than the doctor even came close to. And it was it wasn’t that hard

AI, Nursing, and Immersive Technology

Doug: Exactly. Yeah. In fact, I was doing a project. So I, after retiring from Nokia, I got involved. I was an adjunct professor at the Kansas University School of Nursing, looking on immersive technology and virtual reality to help with the nursing program. But we were working with one project, looking at men with prostate cancer, especially in in, you know, areas like, I’m living in Kansas City.

And so you know, black community right? And how do you have a healthy diet. And so, you know, there’s this, this chat. Gpt, where you can say, Okay, give me a list of 5 ingredients, actually, 30 ingredients that are healthy, for you know that would be good for men with prostate cancer.

And you know, like tomatoes is good. Lentils is good. And you know that kind of stuff. Okay? And then say, Okay, what are 5, you know. So here’s this list of 20 things. What are 5 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 recipe that takes only 5 min to create, to create. I’m a big believer in fives and 5 thing a 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. And so, rather than eat, you know something that’s unhealthy to eat, something that is healthy

Richard: Yes, yes, it’s it’s amazing what you can do with this tool in your life. I did the same thing for my finances and for my marketing, and it produced some. Well, the the thing that I notice is it tends to produce too much data. I got, like the the marketing, got this overwhelming amount of stuff like, I’m not gonna be able to do that.

So I had to tone it down. And I had to talk. You 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.

The Five Things to Focus On

Doug: 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 5 category, it’s like, what 5 things can you focus on? Because it’s like juggling, you know, if you try to juggle 2 balls.

It’s easy. If you juggle 3, 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 4 or 5 balls likewise, you know. Okay, what 5 things can you focus on for me?

The important ones are sleep. I mean the number one thing out there from cognitive ability. Get sleep. You know your immune system is boosted up. You’re so much healthier. So focus on getting sleep. And I struggle with that. I mean, I want to look at the smartphone or the ipad and watch videos.

You know, I got to turn things off. I got you know. It’s like focus on getting a good night of sleep, you know. Work on what I eat, you know, you know, caught caffeine after a certain time. So these kind of things, anyway, sleep sugar, you know. If it’s if it was easy to be thin.

We’d all be thin, but you know that’s hard. It’s like, how do I get excess sugar out of my life? I’m focusing on that. I play tennis and walk and bike, but I don’t stretch, and I don’t do strength training. So those 2 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. 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 is like is equivalent to smoking 2 packs of cigarettes. If you’re if you live by yourself

Richard: Well, that’s why I joined the metal group. Who who who? basically to socialize with. And you know, there’s business opportunities there, too, with the I found it also is a great social group. There’s people to talk to that. That are

Fourteen Ways to Cut Dementia Risk

Doug: By the way, there’s 14 things according to the Lancet, and, in fact, I’ve written 2 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 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.

you know, and what they found is they aged by. They had the muscle strength of a 50 year old, so 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. If you want to.

Cognitively age yourself, you know. Stop learning. Stop being a lifelong learner, just, you know. Don’t just do scrolling on your social media posts. Never learn anything new. Don’t stimulate your brain

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

Doug: Stimulating your brain, you know, so

Richard: A memoir. Sometimes it’s 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. And you know, all these things are a stretch. Actually, I like to confront things that I that I have neurosis.

He’s about like going 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 these little creepy, crawly things crawl all over you in the middle of then 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 super shy. So I confronted that fear by picking up the camera and photographing people until I wasn’t shy anymore.

Doug: Write stories about their life, you know, and be a ghostwriter, you know, and

Richard: Yeah. yeah, 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 1,200 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.

Designing Health for Quality of Life

Doug: Exactly. you know. And one area, too, I’m very passionate about is disabilities like 1.3 billion people are disabled in this world like. And so the question is is, how can we have a healthy not only live longer, because, you know, I don’t want to live longer. If I’m going to live in pain and be very sincerely disabled.

But you know, how can I have a healthier life as well? And 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: Well, you know you mentioned quality of life indirectly, and we’re all going to the same destination. That’s a given, but you can go the 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 2030 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 kind of things that have severe side effects in life, or can. I haven’t done. I don’t need to worry about those

Doug: Exactly. Yeah. Each of us have our 5 things now, like my mom, she has a type, 2 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 5 things that you know, and once you solve that, you 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, Finch, I’m the 2 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 why I need to work on. I got socially, actually with 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. So for those who are interested, there’s these groups that you know. And then there’s 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

Why He Wrote Two Books

Richard: Yeah, yeah. Now I ghostwrite like I said. And one of the things that I found is people who ghost right, who get their books written, whether they write it themselves, or hire a ghostwriter or co-author, or whatever they they that book becomes an an attractor for people who that they can socialize with.

So I just finished a book called the Ghostwriting Advantage. And it’s basically a mind dump of everything I know about being a client of a ghostwriter. It’s 400 pages long, and talks about everything, from the idea to publication and beyond and that is, that helps my business. That 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 that 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 2. You know that

Doug: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like, I’m an engineer by training. So you know, I think more in in engineering terms. You know, 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 humanity’s exponential growth that was actually published by the University of Toronto Press. So kind 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, you know, I wrote 6 chapters of in the 2030 Book, and one of them was the history of disease and avoiding avoidable deaths. And then then how AI and this AI future can look at that. And so you know this, 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 So many more concepts that you didn’t even know you had, by by the art of writing

What History Teaches About Disease

Richard: And 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 that makes it beautiful. You mentioned the history of disease. you know. Back when the pandemic hit, people were complaining that they they were forced to wear masks.

Well, they should read about the history of the eradication of smallpox. It was brutal. They, whoever the powers that be decided, smallpox was going to be gone. And, believe me, if you know what smallpox was, that was a good decision

Doug: Right? Yeah, 300,300 million to 500 million people died because of small pox

Richard: It was a brutal disease. So, but the the eradication was absolutely ruthless. They would take babies out that had smallpox, and they would. People got, 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 the United states the whole world right?

Right? And yeah, every time you if you think Oh, 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 have 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.

Great value. I mean not to not to minimize the freedom. And I mean, people have valid points. But it’s just interesting the 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

Doug: It took, you know, hundreds of years to develop, you know, develop cures for this, like 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. You know, FDA approved in 2,002, I believe it was, and now her life expectancy is the same as any other person.

You know. And so, you know, like, how can we? You know there’s according to a doctor Atul Gawande, there’s 13,000 ways the body can fail, and about 9,000 ways we don’t know a cure, for we don’t have a treatment for

Richard: And a lot of a lot of them. The main cure is just what I said. Do it eat right, and exercise be stretched

Doug: Maybe it’s stretch. Yeah, no, but it’s so. Yeah, there’s, you know. But at the same time, you know, like for my friend, I mean she could eat and stretch all she wants and and exercise, but if she didn’t have this, you know Gleevec. of course 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. and you know, so I would say, 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, you 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

Richard: And back in the days of smallpox they didn’t have much choice, because they didn’t have all the options we have. This was in the the what, the early 19, th 1910, 1920, 1930. Up through about 1950, they didn’t have

Doug: 80 is when we cured smallpox. Yeah. And the last smallpox

Richard: Up through there. But the brutal period was a little earlier Yeah, 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.

Doug: Yes, yes, he he did. The. It’s not vaccination. There was a term cowpox. Yeah, no, no, but but vacillation there. right? Right? Right? But and 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 into Washington State, but the risk of not getting it was so much more

Richard: Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean, that’s that’s probably what ended most most wars or battles was disease. Hunger and disease were the 2 things that ended battles in the past. Not not so much fighting

Doug: If you got to the fighting phase you were lucky exactly. How do you keep your your soldiers healthy so they could fight

The Spanish Flu and the Cost of Hygiene

Richard: Right right. In fact, the Spanish flu back in 1918 is possibly what ended World War one

Doug: Yeah. Yeah. In fact. Well, I was just at the Eisenhower Museum, and they like, right in World War 2, 60 60 to 80 million people died in World War 2 and and that was 3% of the population of the planet. That number in World War one. 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, or actually the h.

1, and I forget the variant, and actually the that flu was not from Spain, it was because Actually Kansas, Kansas. Yeah. Yeah. Fort Riley, Kansas, which, because of the war, you know. You know, they were trying to send all the men to the camp right, and you know they were more vulnerable. And then they got the flu, and then it spread everywhere

Richard: 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: Yeah, they’re not good in hygiene. Yeah, hygiene is also important factor, too.

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

Keep the Human in the Loop

Doug: Yeah, yeah. So appreciate this opportunity. I just, you know, it’s like focusing on you know, how do we make the world healthier place? And you know what how to avoid avoidable deaths. I believe this AI tool is something we can do. The thing is is a lot of people.

You know why. I believe you know I 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 probably use it.

And 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 searching for anything. That’s AI, you 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 is, there’s, you know, 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 the tools of technology. And that’s kind of what my next book’s going to be about. In fact, the title right now is, everything is AI saving 1 billion lives and human and humanity using AI.

And the last line of my book is everything is not AI, because so I’m going to be talking about all the possibilities of these tools to live a healthier life and helping humanity have abundance. But in the end we have to humanity. We need our social relationships. We can’t have our AI girlfriends and boyfriends and Yeah, we need to focus on real people, even though they’re sometimes a real pain.

And they tell us things that you know we don’t want to hear sometimes they make us mad. AI, you know, if you program the AI, they they won’t. They’ll tell you everything you want to hear. But in the end we need to, humans need to. I’m pro team human and so use how you learn the tools to use AI, 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

Richard: Well, excellent! Well, thank you for coming

Doug: Well, thank you.

Richard: This has been the leaders in their stories. Podcast I’m Richard Lowe, the writing king and ghostwriting Guru. One thing I wanted to ask you before I sign off is, how can people get hold of you?

Doug: Yeah, Linkedin. I’m Doug Doug, Hohuulan, HOHU. lin@linkedin.com. I write a lot on Linkedin, and I have a couple books, actually 2030, a book.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. So you know, if you and if you have a kindle account you can, or an audible account, you can get it for free the tech powered healing book.

So 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 is a for media entertainment, leadership, technology and and learning our 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

Richard: Appreciate it, and we’re signing off. Now. Excuse me.

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