Point your smartphone camera at your face for nine seconds and get back 10 biomarkers. No blood draw, no wearable, no waiting room. That’s what JT (Jonathan Thomas) and his team at Algomash are shipping today — and it’s just the start. We get into health monitoring that runs in the background, AI agents that handshake with your doctor’s agents, a FICO score for your health, getting paid for your own data with crypto, and why the biggest thing standing between us and abundance is the outdated structures we keep propping up.
Listen to the podcast here:
Transcript
Warren Whitlock: Tell us, JT, who are you and why are you a podcast guest?
Jonathan Thomas: I’m a podcast guest because you were kind enough to let me come on your show. And I gotta say, Warren, you are kinda like the North Star of abundance thinkers, and you’re very well-known in the industry, and I think it’s a great pleasure to be on your show.
I’m a co-founder of Algomash. We’re a startup. We’re based in San Diego. We launched the company back in 2019 just before COVID hit. A great time to launch a company.
Warren Whitlock: You were the cause.
Jonathan Thomas: Yes. I was the cause.
Warren Whitlock: I thought it was me, but…
Jonathan Thomas: And basically what we do is, we let you use your RGB smartphone camera to record your face, and it spits out 10 biomarkers. Okay. So that’s what we do.
Warren Whitlock: All right. So let me get into that just real quick here. If I put this thing on my, app on my phone, and then take a picture of my face, it’s gonna, or it’s video, a little bit more than one picture. It’s a nine-second video clip.
Okay. And then it’s gonna just, it right there tell me, or does it send it off to a service, or what am I sharing my face with a big database, or is this right on the app?
Jonathan Thomas: It takes a few seconds to monitor your face, and then it spits you out the 10 biomarkers.
Warren Whitlock: Cool.
Jonathan Thomas: We have a kind of a different paradigm. We look at the smartphone camera as a universal physiological interface. And our central theme is that physiological state is massively overdetermined in a facial scan. There is so much data that comes out of that scan, and you can literally train an AI which sees these little subtle patterns much better than humans can ever see them.
And over time, given the right training, it’s able to learn these patterns. So when you feed it a new clip, it spits out the biomarkers.
Warren Whitlock: And do you do this every day, or once a month, or-
Jonathan Thomas: However often you want. My vision is ultimately, I see this as running in the background. I don’t wanna have to deal with an app, but people are staring at their phone all the time, or staring at their computer. Guess what? That camera’s staring back at you. And if your personal data is going to stay resident on the edge device, whether it’s your smartphone or your computer — the camera pops up, takes a scan of your face, and if you’re doing well, it doesn’t need to notify you. But if you’re getting dehydrated, or your glucose is spiking or decreasing, then you should get a notice. The AI notices it and notifies you and says, “Warren, it’s time to get in and see a doctor.”
So let it run in the background. The other area where I see it coming on really strong is robotics. As robotics start living amongst us, I want a robot that lives in my house, it should be able to just come in my office, take a scan of my face, and understand my particular metabolic structure at this point in time and go off and make a beverage for me and make my food that’s tailor-made for where I’m at right now. That’s kinda what I want.
Warren Whitlock: So we’re talking about constant rather than periodically or anything. You describe it as the robot comes into your office, but really it could just be the robot was there for whatever.
Jonathan Thomas: Yeah, exactly.
Warren Whitlock: And the monitor is running all the time.
Jonathan Thomas: Correct.
Warren Whitlock: I’m thinking about, gosh, I stare at this screen for, let’s not try to put a number on it, but it’s two digits of how much time I’m spending daily looking at a screen. And mirror was the first one I came up with. Every mirror should have a camera in it, with of course the privacy controls, but I’m not worried about that. If I’m shaving, I’d like my camera there telling me what’s going on. ‘Cause I’m looking at my face and I’m going, how do I look so old? I don’t feel like I’m 70 years old.
What the heck’s going on here? And I’m planning to live another 80 years, and let’s get into that in a minute. But yeah, I think just constant monitoring. I’m pissed that I have to go to my watch and push a couple of buttons and wait so that it can go from my watch to up my arm to the CGM sensor, communicate, tell me it’s broken half the time, reconnect, whatever, and then spit out what my blood sugar is.
I’m like, on my phone I’ve got it on the lock screen. It’s always on. And uses some extra battery or something. I’ve just adjusted how often I charge to make sure all that works. And yeah, and sleep. I’m pissed when I go to bed and realize my watch is empty and I’ve gotta plug it in, and I’m not gonna stay up for 20 minutes while it charges. I’m gonna fall asleep, and then I don’t have that night’s sleep record. But I want all this stuff to just go in the background, ’cause it ends up taking so much of my foreground thinking right now. And so your tech is gonna work wherever the camera is, right?
Jonathan Thomas: Correct. Or even a microphone.
Warren Whitlock: Oh, really? So right now I’m talking to you. I’ve got the camera on. We’re on Zoom, and that means that if it was in my computer would be cut off from the camera for the time we’re talking. But ultimately, that’ll be something that’s allowed for in the camera so you can share the feed. Yeah. There’s all privacy issues and stuff, and boy, my attitude to privacy is, yes, take care of it. Don’t bother me with it.
Jonathan Thomas: Right. We don’t have any privacy anyway, so get over it.
Warren Whitlock: Yeah, exactly. That’s my thinking. I’d like to think that if I’m walking around naked that there’s not a record of that someplace. And my opinion about if it’s an open window is I close the curtains because I care about humanity. So anyway, basically it’s all there. Maybe not a shower in, a camera in the shower.
Jonathan Thomas: There you go.
Warren Whitlock: But one I can turn on or leave on that I know is just gonna be local data. In fact, it doesn’t even need to take a picture in the mirror. Just it’s there, and I, in a sense, what’s there. And I don’t even think I want that to be, I can go into my home security and look in that room. I don’t need an actual picture, but I need that sensor in there. And we’re gonna learn to trust all that.
Jonathan Thomas: Actually, I’m gonna argue with you a little bit on that. You want the historical data set, ’cause then the AI-
Warren Whitlock: Data. I’m talking about pictures…
Jonathan Thomas: The picture, yeah, the scan. You wanna keep it because then the AI can study you over time and start seeing trends. And that’s where you can make these small changes. I call it the Titanic problem. Literally, the Titanic, if they had made a very slight adjustment when they first found out that there was an iceberg field up ahead — make a tiny little adjustment, they would have still arrived on time and alive.
Warren Whitlock: You said still. They didn’t arrive, they would’ve arrived. That’s a real big adjustment.
Jonathan Thomas: Exactly. So if you make these slight adjustments, and the historical patterns that you keep can be reviewed by the AI.
Warren Whitlock: Right. So the data is really what we’re looking at keeping, not me prancing around in my underwear.
Jonathan Thomas: Correct.
Warren Whitlock: And it’s still data that I’m not sharing with the world. My idea of the distributed future is we get everything we need close by. If I need to send that data off, your device and my AI decide that some data is needed someplace, then it’s shared appropriately on whatever settings I give it.
Jonathan Thomas: It will be done agentically. So you’ll have intelligent agents that kinda make a handshake. You’ll have agents on the inside of your devices, there’ll be agents that are in the cloud, agents in other devices, and they’ll kinda make handshakes and say, “This is what data needs to be transmitted out,” but it has nothing to do with the way you look physically. So you’re protected.
Warren Whitlock: Actually, the embarrassing data isn’t my naked body. It’s the biomarkers and how bad some of them are for me being a guy who says he’s gonna live another 80 years.
Jonathan Thomas: That can all be encrypted and literally just extracting the weights out so the AI can assess what has changed. So you don’t even need any data that would determine or get pegged back to what is Warren.
Warren Whitlock: In a typical day, or like during this call, if this was turned on, the agent’s set up and everything, and we’re moving a little into the future, your algorithms along with thousands of other things be there. One of my agents thinks, “Hey, this is something we should pay attention to,” decides to mark it and pay attention to it to show me a pattern. And it takes that, something went above the range or whatever, and it says, “Let me go to the primary care’s agent and compare it to what the primary care says,” which that agent knows whether or not to alert the doctor.
Jonathan Thomas: Correct.
Warren Whitlock: It might say, “I’m not sure about this, but you know what? It’s not what the doctor decides. The doctor I know from history is gonna recommend a specialist.” And it goes out and asks the specialist agent, who comes back and says, “No, you know what? The guy is fat. He’s not really falling apart.” Or it may say, “Add a turnip to your salad and you won’t have this problem anymore.” Whatever it is, comes up with that at no time actually talking to a doctor, and the doctor is monitoring this in whatever ways they need to.
Or it might become something that, “Hey, this looks bad. That’s cancer. Send this off.” The doctor looks at it and says, “Yes, that’s right. Let’s give him one pill,” or whatever, it fix the DNA. Genetic problems can be fixed that easy. To me, it’s just mind-boggling. Now as a senior citizen, I deal with Medicare, and I went 20 years without insurance and then went on Medicare, and suddenly it was like I felt like I was cheating with the good coverage that I had.
And I say that as a positive. Now, the flip side of that is, my wife has chronic conditions, I have chronic conditions. We spend a lot of our life trying to get through, get insurance numbers to the right people. “Oh, yeah, we have your insurance number, and you’ve been seeing us for three years, but we haven’t photocopied your card this year.” “Okay, I’ll bring my card in, and you can photocopy it.” That’s just the most minor of thing. Referrals, getting the referrals lined up and then getting an appointment takes the… And the doctor says, “Yes, I need to see this as soon as possible, so we’re gonna make an appointment that’s six weeks out.”
Instead of the usual three months. And I’m going like, “Six weeks? That’s still a month.”
Jonathan Thomas: What you’re addressing, Warren, is outdated structures and outdated processes. And we literally, as humans, have created the tools to have a utopia, if you will. But what’s between us and utopia right now are these outdated systems. “Warren, we need a photocopy of your ID card.” Seriously?
Warren Whitlock: Yeah. We have to put that in the file along with the six pages you fill out when you come in. And then, if we haven’t had that in a year, we’re gonna ask again. What, am I a reliable source, me, without notes of what prescription medicines I’m on? That’s scary.
Jonathan Thomas: All of that will be changing dramatically in the future.
Warren Whitlock: There’s metformin, which I think is a wonder drug. I am type 2 diabetic. It has been prescribed to me, but I also read about diabetics living longer, if they don’t die from the outcome of type 2 diabetes. But they actually live longer because they’ve been taking metformin. And there’s an FDA study going on that’s supposed to be a six or 10-year study, and it was in year two and they’re going like, “This is really a waste of time.” The markers are so good for taking it. So I’m a big fan of metformin.
Jonathan Thomas: How do you monitor your sugar levels? Do you have a CGM?
Warren Whitlock: Yeah, I have a CGM. Last year they came out with an extended release version and I get a letter that says, “You should switch to the extended release. We’ve notified your physician.” Thank you, insurance. How nice of you. That’s modern technology working. It was a physical letter that came, but other than that, it was good customer service. And so the next time I see the doctor, which is always three or four months after I saw her last. That’s the schedule. That gives her four bills a year she can put in for seeing the old guy. By the way, I love my doctor. This is not anything against her. ‘Cause we have great discussions when I go in. It’s 10 minutes, so I think I get 10 instead of six because I tell her stuff and she learns.
So a couple of weeks ago I saw her. I have received metformin and the regular pills doubled for the last six months. And I said, this doesn’t look right. The amount of milligrams on the extended release is half of what I was taking. She says, “Yeah, it just works that way.” And that was the second time, and I asked the pharmacist and they said the same thing. I go, this doesn’t seem right. I’m cutting my dosage in half.
Jonathan Thomas: That’s a good thing, though, Warren. I think the continuous release gives you a much more well managed diabetic situation.
Warren Whitlock: But then when I eat carbs, then it goes up higher than it used to. So I don’t know if that’s the pill, that’s because I decided I wanted more bread in my life, which would’ve been subconscious. I don’t remember that decision. I love pasta. I used to say, “If you see me eating a salad, send for help. I’m obviously being kept against my will.” And that’s not true now. I eat a salad most days.
But I think we don’t even need to wait till the future. We can be building agents right now that do that, that talk to whatever agents we can. The supply side in medicine seems to be in a way it’s just not gonna work. The first CGM I got came with that. It was a fortune. The service was only a couple hundred dollars a year, but then buying the CGMs through them was a nightmare. It’s now covered by Medicare, and they send me all I can use without me thinking about it.
Jonathan Thomas: Excellent.
Warren Whitlock: I used to really worry that this item that I was paying $75 for was on my arm and then stop working after 30 seconds. And then it’s just more nonsense that I shouldn’t have to do. The reason why they want it changed every 10 days is the income off of changing it every 10 days.
Jonathan Thomas: Of course. They keep extending them out a little bit. There are some technical issues, battery life and whatnot. But they could make it last a whole lot longer than 10 days.
Warren Whitlock: Your monitor should be able to tell you. Everything I do that’s habits, I’m overthinking and spending more time thinking about it than I am doing it. So I seem to be habit averse.
Jonathan Thomas: Get good habits and follow them. Get on a routine. We’re talking about going from where we are to utopia. There is some structure in place that, for the human side of medicine, it requires people to be sick, right? If you look at the veterinary side of medicine, if a farmer’s livestock starts dying, they’re firing their vet, right?
Warren Whitlock: Right. Absolutely.
Jonathan Thomas: So veterinary medicine has a financial backbone that is conducive to having healthy animals. Humans, it’s kind of ass-backwards. They want sick people, and keep them sick, and keep them alive as long as possible. That’s a horrible financial model. And that’s something that needs to be flipped upside down. And I think AI and the technology that we have is going to wean us off of all of those things. It’s just gonna take some time.
Warren Whitlock: It’ll take some time. The insurance companies don’t want us to be weaned off of it. They want things they can bill for the rest of your life. And the pharmaceutical companies same. And I won’t even go as far as trying to say there’s a conspiracy or anything. But let’s throw all that out the window and say they only want what’s best for us. And they know that once you have diabetes, giving you your metformin, and your CGM, and your prick your finger stuff, all of that stuff is gonna be good business for them.
Jonathan Thomas: It is good business for them. And it can still be good business for them and made more seamless for you.
Warren Whitlock: It’s one of the things that the future, when we think about stuff like AI job loss is the current one I’m doing a lot of thinking on, because the people I follow now are talking about how wrong they were to talk about job loss. We’re gonna go through a period of upheaval between say now and 2029, 2030, where there’s gonna be so much confusion, so many people worry about losing a job, that things are gonna change. Everybody’s life is gonna change. And then they say we’ll get past that. Of course, they’re all multimillionaires at the very least.
If they’re a school teacher and they’ve dedicated their lives to helping kids, which I think is a noble thing, I could never do it — really what we need is for them to wake up and say, “Hey, this going to a classroom and trying to babysit 30 kids for a few hours is not the future. We’re gonna teach these kids to learn a lot faster.”
In a school of the future, I think we’ll still have them because it’s better for a kid to spend time with a good teacher and to get to meet other people — the social. But in learning something, the good schools are now setting up with an hour or two a day, and the kids are outperforming the ones that sit there for six hours. They still keep the kids the whole day, but they do enrichment activity. And then if the kid needs help, the AI tells the teacher, who can spend one-on-one time with them — actually spends more one-on-one time with each of their students because they’re really not responsible for the teaching. They’re responsible for the wellbeing of the system and helping the kid learn.
I homeschooled one of my kids. After four of going through normal, my fifth kid said, “I don’t wanna do this.” What he spent the rest of the day doing, ’cause he went to work with me, was this brand-new thing called Google. And he could find anything. Today he is the financially most successful of the family. But bottom line, there’s so much abundance that’s there already — what can we do to bring this to other people?
And I think the school is one. Medical, man, I don’t think you can go wrong right now if you get involved with something that’s gonna improve health without requiring the normal process of FDA, insurance and medical structures that we have. What we need is the ability to work within or without of those systems, get the expertise we can from it. I have nine toes now. I’m so much better. Balance is better, all of that, because I got something taken care of.
Jonathan Thomas: All of these things, again, get back to the structural changes that need to take place. And you don’t have to burn it down. We don’t wanna burn it down. It needs to be augmented.
One of the things that we are doing is, we have this score that gets created. We call it an ASVS score. A-S-V-S. Algomash Sustainable Vitality Score. And you could think of it as your FICO score for your health. So insurance companies could actually use that score. It’s just a numerical score. And they can use that to not only better service their clients, but also better protect them.
Warren Whitlock: Their issue is gonna be we’re gonna need insurance less, maybe because we’re healthy but maybe just cutting out some of the waste. I don’t need to physically see my doctor five or six times a year. It’s the only way I get any question answered. I wanna be able to have a Zoom call. The 10 minutes I was talking about earlier, she was sitting by my side, which is great that she did that because I could hear her. And we had a great discussion, but at no point did we touch in any way, shape, or form. I could have done that on a phone call.
I’ve done telemedicine. You spend more time talking to people who set it up than to the doctor. I hope it’s gotten better, but I think telemedicine and messaging where I can — if I need to see a doctor, fine. It’s not the time to see the doctor I worry about. It’s the accumulative BS where I never get anything done ’cause I get done, then I come home and I’ve gotta go set up referrals. I’m going for a blood test tomorrow. It’s taken three weeks to get around to the point that I can get this. It’s this constant struggle. When we get rid of that, all the good people will still be employed in some way.
Jonathan Thomas: We need to show them tools that let them make more money by keeping you healthier longer.
Warren Whitlock: Yeah, because if I’m healthy, I’m gonna cost less than if I’m sitting in some kind of extended care. When I talk about adding years to my life, the years I want are at this health or better, which I think I can get a lot better, especially with the drugs that are being worked on now that will reverse aging.
Bottom line, I’ve had a good life. If it ends tomorrow, eh, so what? At the same time, I wanna work on all this because I think it’s so great for humanity that as we have less kids and live longer, and this ridiculous idea of you’re gonna work till you’re 65 and never do anything again. I blew right through 65, and so that’s just fine.
Jonathan Thomas: So how do you envision eliminating this structural friction? You’re a crypto guy. You’re a nanotech guy. So how can we use those tools to help eliminate this friction?
Warren Whitlock: I like that we’ve turned the interview around. I’m gonna talk a lot anyway. Why not you ask the questions? I’m all for that.
What I see is we have to build systems that are outside of that. You’ve heard the stories of IBM developing the PC in a skunk works. But to change anything, you have to be looking years away, so let’s go develop a way to get through some of that technology faster. Pharmaceutical, the same way. We’re getting to the point where they know what all the combination of chemicals are. Protein folding is done. It’s there. There’s still a lot to learn from the database of what we have. We’re just scratching the surface there. But solving that protein folding problem was huge. That’s been solved. Math is gonna be solved.
And now as these things are solved, how are we gonna use them? What are we gonna build? And the biggest force against us going on is getting the people to do that. We need to train everybody that AI is here, not going away. Post-singularity’s gonna be abundant. You need to figure out where your place is in that and do that. There’s gonna be people say, “I’ll never get in a self-driving car.” That’s because they’ve never been in a self-driving car. Once you’ve experienced it, you just go, why would I fight this?
Jonathan Thomas: AI is gonna be humanity’s greatest collaborator. And people, like you said, need to get on board with it. Eliminate this fear of it. It’s here to stay. The cat is already out of the bag, so to speak.
Warren Whitlock: We are in the singularity. We just haven’t experienced much of it yet, and some people just don’t know. I still see people telling me, “Crypto’s a complete scam.” And they’re going, “You just don’t understand what the banks are doing.” You don’t look at meme coins to figure out what’s going on with crypto.
Jonathan Thomas: There are so many things that can be done with crypto. One of the things that we’re looking at doing is tracking data so you can better train AI models, and then be able to monetize the people that have supplied that data. So we want people that are supplying data to actually get paid for the data that they’re supplying versus how it’s been in the past where everybody’s uploading their pictures on Facebook or Instagram, and they get zero. So crypto can play a huge role in that, and I think we haven’t even scratched the surface on where crypto’s going.
Warren Whitlock: Absolutely. So the future is that blockchain and AI converge to give us what we need. Everything will be stored in the securest way we know. And I’m not saying blockchain as the blockchain and there’s one way to go. IBM doesn’t call it blockchain. They call it distributed storage of some sort.
Jonathan Thomas: It’s an indelible ledger of some sort that is protected, and it tracks data over time.
Warren Whitlock: That theory is with us. It’s been proven. It’s gonna go on. We know that it’s incredibly difficult to send a spaceship to the moon, but we’ve done it over and over again. SpaceX was able to take a look at it, go with first principles, and say, “What do we have to do to build a rocket whose goal is to go up and come back down?” And they were able to do that. Elon’s comment when he blows something up is kinda like, “Great, we got the data we need.” It costs a lot to get that data. You have to have trial and error.
Jonathan Thomas: How can you break things faster and learn?
Warren Whitlock: And how can we turn that into something positive? And how can we get the muck out of it? If I was advising you, we’d be looking at how can we get this to the market that has nothing to do with big pharma, big hospitals, big Medicare, government, and big insurance? Just what can we do to avoid that?
As a consumer, that frustrates the hell out of me. I got into talking with my doctor about oxygen — I used to get oxygen baths, and there’s oxygen hyper chambers. I do know that when I went every day for three weeks to take a bath in oxygen-rich water, all sorts of symptoms got better. People started telling me, “Your skin looks so much better.” But the bill was thousands of dollars and I couldn’t afford to just keep doing that all the time. When we get those systems to go outside that, the big advantage to what you’re working on is that we’re talking about something that’s not gonna add a huge cost to have it out to everybody.
Jonathan Thomas: It’s healthcare that’s going to be free.
Warren Whitlock: Yeah. It’s gotta be built into every phone. Why not? Whether it’s turned on or not, the technology is built into the phone. It’s already there. Like my Apple Watch and CGM, they’ve been working on it and saying it’s maybe gonna come out in a version two versions from now of the watch. But some of it is, “We can’t trust that the glucose level is gonna be strong enough that we can say to your doctor that’s what it is.” And that’s where the hang-up is.
Jonathan Thomas: I’m gonna pilfer something from Elon. His Tesla FSD, full self-driving. He went with vision only. He got rid of all of the sensors, LIDAR, all of that stuff. I want to apply the same concept to healthcare. It’s vision only. So instead of full self-driving, our FSD is full self-diagnostics.
The camera should be able to tell you virtually everything that’s going on in your body. It should do it behind the scenes. And these intelligent agents should be able to go out and share this information. When a doctor needs to be pulled in, they’re pulled in at the appropriate time. It’s very frictionless and seamless. Extremely cost-effective. Everybody wins.
Warren Whitlock: The vision of this that just struck me — I was just talking about telemedicine. If we just made it so that in a telemedicine call that was turned on-
Jonathan Thomas: Now you got it. And you don’t even need to trigger the telemedicine event until it’s necessary.
Warren Whitlock: And then it should be, if doctors, instead of lining up patients and seeing each one for X number of minutes — if the system instead works on doctor sits at his desk and gets pinged when there’s something he needs to do, and he’s in a pool with 100 other doctors, so there’s always somebody available to take the call. We know that works. We know that’s call center organization.
Travel is one of my favorite to look at. Without changing any technology at all, just the tech we have, I could decide I want to fly to Detroit and my AI would be smart enough to say, “What the heck are you going to Detroit for, Warren? You don’t have any business there.” But once it gets past that, it books. And what happens is a car pulls up, I get in the car with maybe my laptop bag, and off I go. I don’t worry about clothes because the AI has gotten the right service, and my clothes will be in the room waiting for me on hangers.
It would be like getting on a private plane, but you’re skipping TSA because you’ve registered. You walk to the place where the plane is, walk on the plane, sit down, and you go. Get to the place I’m going, and Uber is there waiting to pick me up and take me to the hotel. The hotel room is already checked in. I already have my mobile key on my phone. At no time do I have to interact with anybody. In a world of abundance, we’re not talking about what do we do to maximize revenue per room.
Jonathan Thomas: When you think about abundance, where do you see the biggest friction in turning that insight into lived vitality?
Warren Whitlock: It’s all existing structure. Let’s say you and I decide we’re gonna build the travel of the future. We have to be able to interface with everything from ticket sales to security to airport. We do our best to get along with that. But at some point, I just wanna be done with all the friction. And that’s the reaction I normally get from airline employees. We’re going like, “But wait a minute, isn’t all this tech available?” And they go, “Yeah, we have all this,” ’cause they know the name of everybody that’s on the flight. They could do all of the interactions they need. Health checks could be done: “Hey, you’re at risk. You really should drink a bottle of water before you get on that plane.” Instead of, “Give me that bottle of water you’re carrying because we wanna make sure there’s no germs in it.”
By the way, some of that oxygen water I got in drinkable form, these big tall bottles at $10 apiece. The doctor at the oxygen place built a system outside of the existing system. Works very well. And again, you can’t say — I wanted to help him on some marketing and said, you can’t go out and tell people you can get cured. But stage four skin cancer patients are what he really treats, and their comfort level is so good. He’s got evidence that’s been working for 20, 30 years. But we can’t go out and say it cures cancer because the FDA would be suing him — not about what actually happens. Most FDA and regulatory lawsuits are about infractions of regulations.
So again, bottom line, let’s set up a new service. In fact, I wanna keep talking with you. I wanna see where I can get in on this. By the way, do you pay for the app now?
Jonathan Thomas: A little bit. But it’s not that much, and eventually it will go to basically zero. Your healthcare will be essentially zero.
Warren Whitlock: Are you charging a monthly fee for it?
Jonathan Thomas: No.
Warren Whitlock: Okay, so it’s not a subscription. It’s a one-time charge. And that has to do with you’re a small company and you need the users, and the income helps with that, and it also means you’re only dealing with people that are serious enough about it.
Jonathan Thomas: Yeah, there’s a lot of costs behind the scenes. And we’re self-funded, so we don’t have a big VC behind us.
Warren Whitlock: Oh, man, all the investors that listen to my show are gonna be going like, “Dang, Warren, turn him around. Get him to take some money. We want in on this.” And you’re using AI, so boy, you already got the magic power there.
But somebody needs to build these things. You are building a piece. But really, let’s stick this in with the telemedicine, everything. It’s like concierge medicine. I would imagine your typical customer is somebody that knows what concierge medicine is.
Jonathan Thomas: Yes. It’s even beyond that. It’s agentic medicine. It’s more seamless than concierge medicine. It’s concierge medicine for the everyday guy or girl.
Warren Whitlock: It’s the model of concierge medicine taken down to something that makes sense.
Jonathan Thomas: Correct.
Warren Whitlock: When I didn’t have insurance, I talked to some people in concierge medicine. It includes a gym membership, which I found interesting, and a number where you could text a doctor at any time. I’ve learned this from my coaching. I can tell 500 people that part of the package they’re buying is that they get access to me. I don’t have to worry about getting 500 texts every morning. It’s like two.
Once I get down to who are the three or four people where I can really make a change in their life, my life, or improving society — I consider this conversation to be one of those where, wow, now I’ve hooked up with somebody who knows where they’re going and going to do something. The good in the world is that we’ve meshed thoughts for long enough that we’ll both come up with better ideas. The same about networking. If people I know get a chance to meet people you know, whether or not they ever even know this conversation happened, the world’s a better place.
And that’s what I’m preaching. Abundance is to be shared everywhere you can. And there’s one last thing — you talked about roadblocks. We need to get rid of the profit motive. Capitalism is great, but we are now seeing a future where capitalism doesn’t work. Because if my job is to take something and make it free, you find some way to have a profit motive in there. Capitalism’s still the best way to do that. But when you’re talking about coming up with something that’s gonna go from a small charge that you give the customer to billions of people using it-
Jonathan Thomas: When everything is virtually free, capitalism will get wiped out naturally.
Warren Whitlock: Yeah. And we still need to feed and get clean water to a huge number of people, and basic housing and things like that. The futurists I know talk about a number of $350 in the US for a person — shelter, food, basic energy hooked up — to make that work for $350 a person per month. And what it’ll be is robots building houses. Right now I see that we could use another 10 million instant houses, everything from a studio apartment up to mansions.
Jonathan Thomas: So how do you incentivize greatness without having some financial benefit? That’s something I struggle with.
Warren Whitlock: It’s an interesting thing, and I get into the spiritual side of that — that you are not a whole person unless you’re giving to other people. And you have to figure out a way to give, and we ought to be teaching that, not take.
Jonathan Thomas: I get that, and that’s a great attitude. It just doesn’t work well with our species.
Warren Whitlock: And it hasn’t worked well with our species because of scarcity. But do they really, though? At this point in life, you’re not in this company because you need to build wealth. If you have the billion dollars there and everything’s going fine, would you still be doing something like this?
Jonathan Thomas: I am, of course. This is my passion.
Warren Whitlock: Oh, you just admitted to being a billionaire. I’m kidding. Whether you are or not is inconsequential. You’re building something that’s gonna be better for the abundant future. And I totally applaud you for that.
I’m not doing this podcast to get paid. I’ve done thousands of episodes of podcasts, very little sponsorship. I wrote the first book about Twitter, and I have a podcast since forever. I can’t position myself as a futurist that’s gonna tell you how to get ahead — I’m thinking about how I can 10X or 1,000X or million X what you’re doing. I think about that in every conversation. Because I know you, and I’m gonna share this, I’m gonna be a better person because I share this interview.
Hey, that really got… what was his name? Well, I know he had two first names.
Jonathan Thomas: JT.
Warren Whitlock: Oh, JT. Yeah. And this is a great guy, JT, and I remember him ’cause he has a bald head. Oh, wait a minute, that’s half the people I meet. Unlike your camera, I can’t tell you what the distance is between your eyes and how big the nose is and whatever features there are. That must be how the Bill Clintons of the world can know everybody and remember everybody.
Jonathan Thomas: You’ve not been interested in learning that. You haven’t trained yourself. You’re perfectly capable of doing it if you wanted to.
Warren Whitlock: Yeah. We don’t teach face recognition to humans. I’ve never seen a class on facial recognition. I’d take it. This American Life had a segment on about face blindness, and the experts were saying that it’s not binary. At the end of it, Ira Glass is talking to his producer, and he says, “Yeah, I think I’m like that.” And the producer says, “Yes, I’ve traveled with you. When we’re at a conference, I’m constantly telling you who people are.”
Whatever the continuum is between zero and one, I’m closer to one than zero. And so what? I would love to get better at recognizing faces. But in my database of the future, I’m gonna know that. I’m gonna be able to get the signal. I like the idea of not so much on the display, but in the ear. I wear bone conducting headphones — I got ’em on now. It’ll be whispering in your ear instead of needing an assistant to do that. And you go, “Oh, yeah, I remember. JT, and we talked on Twitter.”
Jonathan Thomas: Exactly.
Warren Whitlock: I found out about the first social CRM 15 years ago, by the guy who created one of those big CRMs from the late ’80s, John Ferrara, and he had this new thing called Nimble. Since the ’80s I’ve considered a database to be important. And your database was a Rolodex back then. When I started in social media, I had a database of 130,000 people that I built up from my business. When Nimble came along that helped a lot, and I believe it’s just under 500,000 now.
But I’ve got a million other databases to keep. I have a company where we have 9 million customer records that have interacted with us over the years. Maybe 2 million of them are active now. This morning I sent out an email that went to a million people. That is a website where people are allowed to download free e-books.
Jonathan Thomas: Well, come on, Warren. You’ve nixed profitability. Just give it away for free.
Warren Whitlock: I’ve been doing it for a long time. I am reminded regularly by everybody from the bank to the wife to people I’ve just met like you. They’re saying, “You should have a whole lot more than you do.” But it’s okay because I look at business as being like a Monopoly game.
Mom comes in, we’re playing Monopoly. You’re winning, I’m losing. And mom says, “It’s time to go to the mall.” Your idea is gonna be let’s leave it right where it is, and we’ll come back in a few hours and finish the game. Whatever happens, happens. Here’s the thing: after dinner we’re gonna set up the board and play again. The outcome of who won or lost the last game is negligible at that point. We don’t even remember it.
The idea of seeking to optimize and looking for the best way to do it — if I could change things so that another thousand people got to know about what you’re doing, and cut out some of the crap. Regularly I watch Peter Diamandis and he talks about Fountain Life. You go through the procedure and $15,000 later you find out about the cancer that hasn’t reached stage one, and you can take some action. Is that worth $15,000? Yeah. Is Warren gonna spend $15,000? Maybe not. So I think anything we can do to speed up that process keeps souls alive.
Jonathan Thomas: The bottom line is this universe has got so much potential already built in. We have been brought up with this scarcity mindset. And we need to change that.
Warren Whitlock: Work is good for the soul, but the reason to work is not because your soul’s gonna get better, and it’s not because you’re gonna make some more money. You need to eat. Remember 200 years ago none of the jobs we have today existed. People didn’t get jobs, they worked on their farm. 100 years ago, schools were around and nothing like they are today. Unfortunately way too much like they are today.
Jonathan Thomas: But won’t it be nice when we have the agreement to maximize people’s talent instead of pigeonholing them into — a kid goes to school and you’re assigned to this classroom, and you’re gonna sit there all day and learn.
Warren Whitlock: And no kid left behind means that every kid has to go at the slowest pace. It just doesn’t mathematically work out. The idea of we wanna reach every child is fantastic.
Jonathan Thomas: But that diverse group might have some talents in another area that we can’t see.
Warren Whitlock: They’re neurodiverse, they’re demographically diverse, and they’re gonna have experiences you don’t have. Tom Peters started preaching this in the ’90s like crazy. He wrote In Search of Excellence, the biggest business book ever in the ’80s. And we all started preaching that we cared about excellence when we wrote our mission statements.
If we get together, and I’m just thinking you, me sitting on the beach, drinking our — it’d be water for me. You can have a Mai Tai. We’re sitting and having a conversation, enjoying the view, and we come up with an idea. We’re gonna do something, and we pick up a phone and say, “Do this,” and it goes and does it.
I was consulting with a guy — we’re thinking of starting something up. He says, “We really should do something in all that blockchain stuff you’re doing.” This is maybe 2018, 2019. Those conversations taught me so much, and the one that I quote myself on all the time is: what are we going to do in commercial real estate with blockchain? He had a commercial real estate background. There’s plenty of people that are big businesses that only own four, five, six properties, and their software is cobbled together. And we said, if we eliminate what the hassle of escrow is, somebody can decide to invest in a property, get all of the information they need instantly compiled, and then make that decision. It may take weeks, but it doesn’t need to take months or years to close on a property.
Jonathan Thomas: Yeah. There’s a very well-known developer out of Chicago that’s doing a lot of work in Saudi Arabia using blockchain and crypto in commercial real estate. They’ve got some very clever ways of doing things. It’s becoming huge.
Warren Whitlock: What I came up with is I want this to be: I can drive by, point my camera at this place. It knows which property it is. It knows whether or not it’s available for sale. And of course, with AI agents, it should be negotiated and comes up with, “Hey, they’ll agree to this price, and I say you should agree to this price. It’s in the range of what we wanted. Let’s close it.”
Jonathan Thomas: Yeah, but how long do you want it for, Warren? Do you need it for the next five years or the next five days?
Warren Whitlock: Yeah, or five hours. And then we looked at Halloween stores and Christmas stores, where they’re constantly looking for property. There’d been a Harley Davidson restaurant on one of the biggest intersections in Vegas. They decided to close, and it sat there. There’s obviously a way that somebody could open up something there if they could get it open instantly. But if you try to go to the county and get something approved for a different kind of use, who knows how long that could take.
My friend explained to me the key thing: cutting down the time to get a property closed means they can go work on another property. So somebody might go from six transactions a year to seven. How much is that worth to a company?
I look at everything as being distributed has gotta be better. Every phone, every building has to have some kinda history stored on it. If I’m buying a house, I should be able to know the complete history of that house. And I think when we’re able to do that, shouldn’t we have a chain of title on our life? They asked me, “Were you hospitalized before?” I was 67 and I said, “I haven’t been hospitalized in the last 65 years.” “Oh, okay, then it doesn’t matter.” But that’s the structure. It should be in the records, and it should be my records that I’m carrying around.
So a movement that I would put with what you’re doing is the idea that all this data belongs to the individual. If it’s sovereign data kept by me, now my negotiating with you is how much money can you make getting me to the right kind of services connection through your agents.
Jonathan Thomas: Well, as an example, you said you’re a diabetic. You wear a CGM device. You could actually help train the AI by uploading a facial scan tagging your glucose measurement. The AI is gonna learn more about you. Now, you should be able to get rewarded for that. Down the line, as revenue comes in from licensing the service or however we choose to monetize it, by using these crypto technologies, we’d be able to track that in the blockchain that’s indelibly etched. And you can prove that you own your data, and it just is seamless.
Warren Whitlock: Every time I have a problem — the dentist right now, I have a problem where there’s a collection agency trying to get $700 from me, and I go, wait a minute, I didn’t see the dentist all of last year. So I call. They don’t know. I go online to their site, I put in several messages, and then suddenly I’m hearing from a collection agency. I don’t wanna deal with this. It shouldn’t be that way. It should be like everything is done neat and tidy and we move on.
Jonathan Thomas: Exactly. So how do we wrap this up neat and tidy and still stick together and move forward? You can share with your group. I’ll share with my group.
Warren Whitlock: Definitely we’re gonna do that, and we’re gonna talk again. Who knows? Maybe you need some connections that I have. They’re gonna find out about your company, and you and me, and I hope it’s gonna help them. Maybe they’ll come away with some new idea.
And I’m gonna start using your stuff and we’ll talk about how we might extend that. And maybe I should share some data publicly. The fact that I’m doing it every day, and what it told me about, I’m gonna share that publicly too. And again, as you’re growing and trying to acquire market, I have lots of resources. How many people are using this right now?
Jonathan Thomas: Quite a few.
Warren Whitlock: Okay. Good. And it is available and out?
Jonathan Thomas: It is available, yeah. We’re releasing a new version in the next three weeks or so.
Warren Whitlock: Great. I will sign up today, and we’ll get going on that. Again, let’s get your website and how to find you. I know you’re JT now.
Jonathan Thomas: Website is algomash.com.
Warren Whitlock: Okay. AlgoMash, easy enough. I’ll make sure that gets in show notes and tweets and stuff. And if they need to contact you?
Jonathan Thomas: JT@algomash.com
Warren Whitlock: Okay, great. Simple. His email’s out in the open. So much for privacy — let’s flood him with good wishers. Only positive stuff. We want those to come on in, ’cause there’ll be some point — it may not be AlgoMash, but at some point, JT’s gonna come out with something that he’s gonna let us invest a few million dollars, turn that into a few billion dollars. This is not investment advice. You’ve heard my story enough to know I’m not the guy to give investment advice.
Jonathan Thomas: Nor am I.
Warren Whitlock: I can tell you all sorts of things about where the technology’s going and what kind of things I’m looking to invest, mostly my time. I have limited time, only another 80 years on this planet, and I wanna use that time well. And every project I look at is something where, how can this go 100X?
Jonathan Thomas: Exactly. Thank you, Warren, for having me on as a guest. I really appreciate it.
Warren Whitlock: Great. Let’s wrap up there.
Jonathan Thomas: Okay. Cheers, mate.
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