Speaker 0 | 00:03.901
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Technology with a Beard Extravaganza. My name is Phil Howard. Yes, I am the most bearded man in telecom. That does not make me qualified for anything. It’s my years of experience that do. But today, we have a very special guest with us, Paul Sagnier, author of The Fourth Wave. Paul, welcome to the show. I will get to… really why you’re such a big deal here in a second, but welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 | 00:34.153
Well, thank you, Phil. It’s a pleasure to be on.
Speaker 0 | 00:36.874
Now, I don’t even know how to introduce you because, well, let’s just say that I was reading an article the other day by you, and it mentioned the fusion of the human genome with ones and zeros, basically technology. I don’t know how… You want to explain that, but it’s really so mind blowing because a lot of people are talking about artificial intelligence nowadays. And whether that’s, you know, how far off that is. Everyone’s posting this viral video of the 12 year old kid that got hired by Google for 1.2 million dollars. Everyone’s seen that. Right. But what you’re proposing is literally made me imagine. a human brain on a machine and we have fused the human genome with you know literally the machine so it’s it’s mind-blowing to even think about but i’ll let you describe it because i’m sure i’m really taking it off into science fiction uh you know actually everything you’ve described is accurate and already happening um so
Speaker 1 | 01:51.743
the latter point you made though about the human mind uh brought to my mind uh the brain computer interface which people like Elon Musk are working on, I think Facebook is working on, there are a few other companies, Colonel Brian Johnson, which is to really read thoughts and connect that with computers, connect that with exoskeletons and other augmentation devices, robotics, to enable people, especially people who may have… disabilities things like that but but when I talk about digital health and the fusion of genomics with the digital revolution the ones and zeros I’m referring to something J Craig Venter who was one of the first to sequence the human genome in 2001 he published along with a government effort also published in unison the first sequencing of the human genome he sequenced his own actually so So basically our DNA is made up of a code, a digital code. It’s not ones and zeros, it’s a chemical base, ACG and T. So it’s a four base code that Craig Venters talked about actually converting between the two. He’s developed a digital biological converter. So this is the science fiction that you’re alluding to where you can convert between ones and zeros and ACGs and Ts. and basically do things like create synthetic life, which he’s done. But more importantly, you can identify viruses. Basically, you can find a flu virus that’s becoming a pandemic, like we had the H1N1 flu virus years back, and rapidly sequence that and develop a vaccine for it and produce that when perhaps in the past it would take several months. before that could happen because typically during the flu season we know which viruses may become pandemics but sometimes in the case of h1n1 the bird flu we didn’t know until the last minute and then we had to react and that’s why i think the number of deaths were estimated in hundreds thousands uh ultimately as a result of it so the point is is that the digital code for computers uh ones and zeros is the same essentially as the digital code or it can be converted between the digital code for our DNA. And that’s why we see things like CRISPR coming along for gene editing of our DNA, and that’s being used in medicine right now. The FDA has approved a couple of treatments for that. So it’s a fascinating time, and science fiction is now reality.
Speaker 0 | 04:44.661
I would really need to pause, and our entire audience would hear blankness, for the next 10 minutes for me to comprehend everything that you just said.
Speaker 1 | 04:54.773
I will move on.
Speaker 0 | 04:58.346
I mean, I get it. Code. and a, you know, what do you call it, like a four-digit sequence for the human genome?
Speaker 1 | 05:07.448
Correct. So four base pairs, so there’s billions of them in our genome, and there’s about 20,000 or so coding genes, and these are the ones, you know, when we talk about 23andMe and companies like that, that are basically doing analysis of our genetics, our genomics. and can impart value to consumers for things like looking at their disease risk based on other full population of other people who have been sequenced and we can correlate what that population is experiencing as far as certain diseases with the genes that they have the expressions and any uh variations in these themes and look at your own genes and say well Your likelihood, based on what you have compared to this other population, is a 50% higher risk of having heart disease or diabetes or certain types of cancer. We can also look at what you may pass on to your offspring. So you can do parental planning, you know, which is basically a Mendelian inheritance, which we’ve known about for a very long time. So this conversion. fusion of the digital world and the genomics world is really what I’ve defined as digital health and the impact that that’s having on our health, healthcare, living society is rapidly becoming this fourth wave building upon Alvin Toffler’s third wave, which he was talking about the digital revolution and how that’s transforming society. So now what I talk about in my new book is this fourth wave, and that is the fusion, as you pointed out, of genomics and…
Speaker 0 | 06:56.979
the division revolution so when i was in college they had not mapped out the human genome and that was not a long time ago i mean i’m 41 so i guess some people would say that’s a long time ago and i can pigeonhole a bunch of millennials into some hole here probably and talk about millennials which i think is a ridiculous topic but what do you remember when the human genome was completely mapped out and is it Is there a code for every aspect of DNA? Is there like it’s 10012 for this chromosome or something like that? Am I even in line here with, I mean, was that like a big thing for you when that happened?
Speaker 1 | 07:45.122
It was at Boeing at the time. So my career has been in technology, digital technology, aerospace, mobile devices. I worked at Motorola. I’ve worked in wireless medical devices. So I don’t have a life sciences background per se. And that’s the interesting thing that you’re actually highlighting via your question, is that traditionally genomics has been part of the life sciences. And now that we’re seeing that it is this digital code and that the cost of sequencing have gone down thanks to computers and thanks to the fact that DNA is digital, we’re seeing this. amplification or this acceleration in the field of genomics that wasn’t possible. So when Craig Venter sequenced the genome, he used computers to do that. And now we’ve got companies like Illumina and others who are reducing the cost and creating really this Silicon Valley type approach to what has traditionally been a life science. So I don’t remember it actually when that happened, but the light bulb came off for me when I saw that these two are very much. one and the same. They’re both digital. A computer code and our life code, essentially, are both digital. And so that brings forth a world of opportunities. And that’s what we’re seeing happening.
Speaker 0 | 09:07.084
So if we come back, I mean, for me, coming back to Earth on a daily basis, on a daily basis, what do you do other than give talks and blow people’s minds? What do you do on a daily basis to give back to the world of… Digital health or the healthcare industry. What do you do on a daily basis?
Speaker 1 | 09:27.317
Well, I consider myself an educator I was a still trying to show her an educator and an evangelist if you will so I got interested in this space focused mainly on wireless working at Motorola here in San Diego in 2009 and I was part of an organization industry group here called calm Nexus at the time and they had a special interest group called healthcare communication and really what they were looking at is this convergence of computers and wireless Qualcomm was here in San Diego too. and was a big part of this organization and Healthcare and health and fitness so sort of very I wouldn’t say narrow focus but very specific and When I found out about this I got excited. I said this is fascinating and I created a group on LinkedIn called Wireless Health San Diego. I figured you know, there must be a lot of people Talking about this already and I saw people from around the world starting to join my group and I thought that was interesting to see And I noticed that people were using a bunch of other terms to talk about essentially what I was talking about as well, mHealth and eHealth, health IT, telehealth and telemedicine. So a lot of these terms were out being used by different stakeholders. And fast forward a few years, and a book came out by Dr. Eric Topol called The Creative Section of Medicine, How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Healthcare. I thought that’s interesting. So he’s talking about the digital revolution and what that’s doing for healthcare. And I thought, well, basically all these terms I’m seeing are fundamentally digital. And he even had genomics in his book. And I said, well, OK, that’s interesting. And he talked about how the computer revolution, digital revolution and automation and robotics has accelerated the field of genomics. So I said, OK, well, if all these other things that are happening are digital and genomics. being accelerated by the digital revolution well why not call it digital health expand my focus beyond just wireless and I renamed my group in 2012 I had several thousand members at the time and now it’s up to nearly 60,000 and basically said hey everyone I think everything what we’re seeing now all these terms you know really fall under the banner of digital health and and also genomics is part of that which no one had thought about or recognized or stated publicly. So I rebranded my group, renamed it to Digital Health, and basically started promulgating this definition. And this was 2012, early 2012. And so fast forward to 2016, and I was preparing to do a keynote presentation at the end of the conference. And I realized that it’s much bigger than just health. healthcare, but really living in society or being impacted by the digital revolution. You know, as you and I see every day, right, we’re on our phones constantly, you know, there’s even the negative consequences of cell phones, smartphone addiction, but also the positives of the digital revolution, right, where you can connect with friends and family more easily and, you know, have social networks. And genomics, like I mentioned, is really starting to impact medicine. It also has huge applications for agriculture. And so I thought, well, this is interesting. And I recalled Alvin Toffler had written a book called The Third Wave in the 1980s. And I didn’t read it then, but I come across it subsequently through the work of Steve Case, the one person who was talking about him. Because he also wrote a book called The Third Wave. And he talked about… third wave of the internet and he paid homage to alvin toffler in his book he wrote the original third wave which was about the digital revolution and so basically what toffler speaks about is this at least three great waves of socio-cultural evolution or human progress wherein technology major technological changes impact society so you don’t have major technology taking place in the world and industry and in our lives, it’s not also a major impact and change in society. So he talked about the agricultural revolution being the first wave, the second wave being the industrial era, the first and second industrial revolutions, and then the third wave being the digital revolution and its impact on society, of course. But he also mentioned, and this was interesting to see, subsequent, was he talked about the genetic revolution. He called it the genetic revolution and how that could change the world and how the combination of that with the digital revolution would be the fourth wave. So lo and behold, you know, there was something even bigger than just digital health and digital health was analogous to the fourth wave. And so he had actually, you know, he didn’t write the fourth wave, but he had alluded to it. And via the work that I had been doing these last several years, observing what was happening, hearing what I learned. I came across really what I’m calling the fourth wave, which is digital health. And it’s creating a new era in progress. It’s definitely a wave. A bunch of big concepts again, I apologize.
Speaker 0 | 15:08.728
No, no, it’s definitely a wave. And while you were talking, I was thinking of how many people are going to, you mentioned surfing when we were talking earlier before doing the podcast. How many people are going to drown in this wave? How many people are going to crash in this wave? Because from my perspective, and I’m a wireless guy as well, I used to do a lot of fixed wireless stuff. a lot of microwave, long-haul microwave, back-haul stuff. And then I worked for a company called Airband for a while. We actually did a lot of hospitals, either backup internet connections or hard-to-reach internet connections. The wireless inside itself is just a whole other animal. But even today, looking at all the various different EMR companies, there’s just so many software products out there. I see there being an issue with just communication between all these various different software products and something’s going to culminate and come to a head at some point. I was reading an article the other day about someone saying, let’s just be able to take our medical records. Let’s have like a like everyone, every human being has some sort of password or something. They’re all their medical records are stored in the cloud that you can take your medical records anywhere, which I thought was amazing. How can we do that right now when this doctor’s office has, you know, one patient software, another doctor’s office has a different software, one has all scripts, one has amazing charts, one has, you know, XYZ, I go to the dentist, they have DentFix, this other one has EagleSoft. And a lot of times just migrating from one software to another, if you’re even coming off an old software, it’s not an easy process. And it’s, you know, it’s a six month, it’s a six-month process for some doctor’s offices to move from one software to the next, let alone paper charts to digital. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that. I do know that you had a post the other day that talked about, you know, some doctor losing her medical license because she refused to accept the digital error.
Speaker 1 | 17:17.002
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, a lot of great points in there. So interoperability is the key word or buzzword. describing the big issues that really these EHR companies have created by not having their systems having a common communications method you know for that data sparing right so we’ve got these silos and this is healthcare right but really I mean you could even look back to you know the computer software revolution Microsoft and others where you have proprietary software there as well so you know we’re seeing that in healthcare as well and the government uh i forget how many years ago high tech act uh provided incentives to healthcare systems and doctors practices to digitize right because as you pointed out this transition from traditional paper records to digital records can be expensive and costly so the government provided incentives for that and i think those may have expired recently but I think a large percentage of healthcare providers are now digitized, but still there’s an interoperability issue. So certainly, you know, even broader than just healthcare, there are going to be those who are left behind either by choice, like you pointed out the news about this physician in New York, I think he was, who refused to go digital. And I think that created issues around opioid abuse tracking. And that was one of the major uh and i think also as far as christians uh uh and how the doses and things like that so it’s pretty interesting you know so i you know there’s there’s obviously a whole story to why she lost her license it wasn’t just saying no to digital uh although maybe that was that was that was her principle and so everything that flowed from that was the reason um but it’s an interesting story and i’m sorry say that again well i mean yeah just writing scripts alone
Speaker 0 | 19:22.322
My father, he’s 81. He’s retired twice. Like most or like a lot of doctors probably just couldn’t stop being a doctor. He told me one day, he’s like, Phil, well, people look at me and they ask me how old I am. And even though I can still do surgery, they’re a little bit nervous that an 81-year-old guy is doing surgery on him, so I have to retire. But he still has you can still write a paper script. You can still take a piece of paper, write And it’s It wouldn’t be that hard to counterfeit probably, you know, write down, give me this much, bike it in and send someone off with it.
Speaker 1 | 20:01.828
or print it up on a computer so you know i think they’ve cracked that you know i’m not an expert on that system but uh but you know there are benefits too to having a printed copy because you don’t need a digital device to be turned on or working you can just have that and go to a pharmacy but
Speaker 0 | 20:17.917
i think that they do check with the physician officers and say did you prescribe this uh no they definitely do but there’s even as a retired physician you can still renew licenses and do things like that i’m just I can just see it being an issue if you didn’t have an office anymore or you didn’t have anything digitized and everything was on paper. Are you giving any talks anytime soon?
Speaker 1 | 20:41.401
I have one. Since I published the book, I’ve had a number of inquiries to deliver my keynote in Canada, of all places. I have one coming up in Leipzig, Germany. And I think it’s marked the next year at a conference called ExpoMet. So that’ll be exciting, my first time there, there’s gonna be a few thousand people. So the hope is that the book will not only sell well, but generate more interest in my keynote because I really enjoy speaking to audiences and sharing what I’m learning and what I’ve identified. At this point, through my own learning and sharing, I’ve actually identified something that I think is missed, right? And it’s something that’s impacting the whole world. So it’s kind of… fascinating when you think about that but you know also talking to you on this show as a great opportunity to reach a bigger and wider audience that maybe is outside of these these other stakeholder groups like we’re talking about healthcare a lot the majority of my group on LinkedIn comes from healthcare or at least the largest percentage I think it’s 15% are in the healthcare industry you know but they’re also in every other industry group because the digital revolution is impacting every industry. It’s impacting all stakeholders, consumers, policymakers, regulators. The FDA has a digital health group. They’re actually using that term now. And they’re working with companies like Apple and other companies to remove barriers for innovation and digital health to occur, reduce costs, and really bring these consumer digital innovation models to the table. health and healthcare or at least attempt to do that as much as possible while also ensuring safety of patients. So it’s a fascinating time.
Speaker 0 | 22:37.109
It is one of my favorite, I have a lot of vertical markets that I work in but one of my favorites is home healthcare. I’m a telecom guy so unified communications and home healthcare go hand in hand because you’ve got multiple offices or satellite offices. You have, you know, physicians, nurses traveling or physical therapists traveling to locations to people at home all the time. And they have wireless devices with them. They have phones in the office. So there has to be a way to communicate easily with all these patients, all these people. And if you just had, you know, the old school analog phone system, it’s just not going to cut it in that environment anymore. And part of, you know, I don’t people just living a more fulfilling life is to being is, you know, being able to be at home longer. So just one of the reasons why I like home health care as an industry is growing is growing, in my opinion, very fast. I don’t know what the statistics actually are. That’s just what I see. So if people want to get a hold of your book, it looks like obviously we go on Amazon. The fourth wave, just go on Amazon, search the fourth wave and then get your book. Correct.
Speaker 1 | 23:56.656
Correct. The Fourth Wave Digital Health. So colon. And I have a website, fourthwavebook.com. It’s pretty easy to find.
Speaker 0 | 24:07.340
If you had one final message to deliver to people listening to this show, what would that be?
Speaker 1 | 24:15.783
Well, I think I’d touch on what you mentioned about winners and losers, let’s say. So really, you know, we can decide consciously to. to identify solutions that could help us in our health and health care of course but you know also being educated on the impact to our lives right like I mentioned smartphone addiction right so especially when it comes to children writing themes and their issues around depression in themes but I think knowledge is power so I think the message I have to everyone is to really just learn as much as possible become informed and The nice thing is that we have the power, all of us, not just businesses but consumers. and patient. If we become patient, typically we are at one point or another in our lives, to, you know, basically use these tools and improve our lives and catalyze and accelerate this new era of human progress. But, you know, that’s really the message is to see what’s happening, acknowledge it, and and be empowered. to make it happen and improve our own lives and those of our families.
Speaker 0 | 25:36.931
The teen depression and smartphones is a huge issue. I’m going to ask you back for another show. We’re going to have to dig in deeper on that one because that’s actually very important. I don’t know if I’m No, it’s true.
Speaker 1 | 25:50.941
I can point you to some experts on that subject for sure. They’re in my book.
Speaker 0 | 25:54.244
All right. Let’s have them on. Let’s have a group panel discussion on there. I have seven kids. I’m not letting them get addicted to smartphone addiction. And I wrote an article about Chick-fil-A the other day because I was in Chick-fil-A. And there’s a clear differentiating factor between the Chick-fil-A hires, the people who work at Chick-fil-A, and the people that work at every other fast food restaurant. Sorry. Chick-fil-A has it down. They say, my pleasure. But I was in Chick-fil-A, and I’m looking around the room, and it’s a new Chick-fil-A. It’s in Worcester. and it’s act with you know high school kids after after practice I mean kids coming in with their best friends and when I was younger you just didn’t sit down with your best friends and everyone’s sitting at a table and everyone’s on their phone I really appreciate you being on the show thank you so much thank you yeah man it was great and we’ll have you on the show again no I appreciate it Phil it’s great speaking with you and I love your show like
Speaker 1 | 26:58.852
that I heard some of your other programs and you’re doing a great job.
Speaker 0 | 27:03.896
Thanks, man. Have a great night.
Speaker 1 | 27:06.398
You too. Thank you.
