July 29, 2026 – Guardrails for AI Bruce Randall and 360 Smart Care Peter Basica

00:04 Intro 1: Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country, welcome to the Small Business Administration award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion, Jim Beach.

00:26 Jim Beach: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there building America, continuing to build great businesses, doing what you can to employ people, start businesses that make revenue. I am just so excited for what you are doing. I’m excited for our show today as well.

00:48 Jim Beach: First up, we have Bruce Randall. We’re going to talk about AI and the guardrails that it needs. Bruce is a specialist on that, and this conversation is so important. It’s so obvious 01:00 that the guardrails are needed. Uh, there was the OpenAI admission that their project, their product actually jumped out of the sandbox.

01:11 Jim Beach: We will talk about that. Absolutely a fascinating conversation. After that, Peter Basica is with us. He has built a company called 360 Smart Health. It is… Or Smart Care. I, I, I’m gonna have to double-check that. And it’s amazing what he has done. I was really, really impressed. We talk about the importance of data and how that is driving the entire industry now, but so much of the data is not accessible, used, processed.

01:41 Jim Beach: And so we get all into all the medical stuff and have a great conversation about how to fix American healthcare. That is, of course, a very lofty goal. You know, there’s nothing more broken than our healthcare system, I don’t think, in America. Maybe the mortgage system. Uh, education. Oh, gosh, I’m making quite a 02:00 list here, aren’t I?

02:01 Jim Beach: Anyway, we have a great conversation about how to fix, uh, that industry. So I’m excited for that, excited for the show. Please go buy The Real Environmentalist book. It was a finalist for Indie Book of the Year in its category, so really excited about that. Uh, still need you to get a copy and write a review for us.

02:21 Jim Beach: It, it’s a great thesis that entrepreneurs are solving the environmental crisis already. We will be right back with a great show. Thanks for being with us.

02:45 Jim Beach: Change? Introducing The Real Environmentalists, the bold new book by Jim Beach. It’s not about activists, politicians, or professors. It’s about the entrepreneurs, real risk-takers building cleaner, smarter solutions, not for applause, but for profit. The entrepreneurs in the book aren’t giving 03:00 speeches.

03:00 Jim Beach: They’re in labs, factories, and offices, cleaning the past and building clean products for the future. The Real Environmentalists is available now, because the people saving the planet aren’t the ones you think. Go to Amazon and search for Real Environmentalist. Thank you We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us.

03:18 Jim Beach: Very excited to introduce my next guest. Please welcome Bruce Randall to the show. He is doing a lot of things in the technology space that add up to a really cool career and expertise in the AI space, and I’m excited to talk to him about that. He’s been a technology exec at companies like Oracle Cloud and AT&T, where he built high-performing, multi-million dollar teams.

03:45 Jim Beach: He has also been a fractional CEO, board member, that kind of thing, and is now the fractional CEO of a company called Zeta Technology, and we will talk to him about that as well. And on the AI 04:00 front, he has a new book out called, I went forward one too many times, The AI Human Paradox What artificial intelligence reveals about consciousness and the future of being human.

04:15 Jim Beach: Bruce Randall, welcome to the show. How you doing?

04:19 Bruce Randall: Jim, thank you very much. I’m very pleased to be here. I’m doing well today, and I look forward to our conversation.

04:26 Jim Beach: So did you see last week where ChatGPT announced that the newest version got outside of the box and- Hm … figured out a way to lie to the humans about it, and then, then got caught, like, a week later?

04:43 Jim Beach: Did you hear about this?

04:44 Bruce Randall: Yes. They, they broke out of the sandbox, they found a place to play, and it didn’t work out well. And that’s what my book says, we need guardrails, and the guardrails were down for that time. That’s why it escaped. 05:00

05:00 Jim Beach: Okay. Uh, I don’t… What, what do you mean the guardrails were down? Yeah.

05:05 Jim Beach: I hadn’t seen any articles mention that point. Um, so how do you know that? I just thought that there were no guardrails, or that the, I think it’s version 5.6, was able to get through whatever guardrails they did have. It was able to-

05:20 Bruce Randall: Yes …

05:20 Jim Beach: you know, get out of the sandbox, you know, proactively.

05:24 Bruce Randall: Yes, and that’s, that’s the whole point, is that with each version up you need stronger guardrails to keep it in.

05:32 Bruce Randall: And when you go up that quickly, you don’t always keep up with the guardrails, and sometimes, and this is a good

case in point, where it can escape where you thought everything was good, but then you found something that wasn’t quite in the guardrails. That’s… I call them guardrails ’cause it’s easy for most people to understand.

05:52 Jim Beach: I think that’s a great, uh, word, a great description. Um, all right. We d- we can’t 06:00 have guardrails, um, Bruce, because if we do, the Chinese will beat us.

06:07 Bruce Randall: That is a very good point. And it is a race between The US and China as the two main players, and whoever g- gets artificial super intelligence and quantum to work together is gonna be the winner of e-commerce in the world, and defense and so forth.

06:25 Bruce Randall: So you’re right. We can’t have too many guardrails, but we need to do some things to check for the general public. There are two systems out there right now. There’s one that’s behind closed doors, and there’s one in the public. The public one is what we see, and that’s what we’re all talking about here It, well, what, there’s two versions of what?

06:48 Bruce Randall: Well, there’s, there’s two development systems. There’s one that’s behind closed doors, which certain large companies are doing, and of course, which the government’s doing, and then there’s the part that the public 07:00 sees, and that’s another version. Um, so we’re, I believe that we’re more advanced than the public sees based on people I’ve talked to and knowledge that I have.

07:09 Bruce Randall: But I can’t prove it because you can’t prove what you’ve heard from sources that’s not in print media. Right. So you said super

07:19 Jim Beach: AI plus quantum. Yeah. What does quantum mean?
07:24 Bruce Randall: Quantum is when you have a system that goes beyond classical computers. A good example is classical computers read the, the software on a sheet or on your screen.
07:39 Bruce Randall: Quantum computers looks at it 360 degrees, so it sees opportunities on the other side and also potential problems. So you get more out of a quantum search, but quantum can only be used for high-end problems. It doesn’t work on the low-end problems. 08:00
08:01 Jim Beach: All right So where are you on the AI spectrum? Uh, Terminator at one end and all diseases cured in a week on the other end.
08:18 Jim Beach: Where do you fall on that spectrum, sir?
08:21 Bruce Randall: I… That’s a good question. I am in the middle, but I’m a little more optimistic than pessimistic.
08:31 Jim Beach: Okay. Do you see a security threat at all? I mean, it seems to me we could just unplug them, or they don’t have the ability to build guns and move guns around. You know, I don’t know how they could really threaten us.
08:50 Jim Beach: Um, there’s just too many layers, I think, in the fact that they can’t rebuild themselves. You know what I mean?
08:57 Bruce Randall: I understand that. Just let me 09:00 paint a little picture for you here. Imagine that the AI broke into some government site, let’s say it was a nuclear site, and then squirreled away the codes and took control of that.
09:14 Bruce Randall: That would be world-changing. That’s something that we need to be concerned about. It’s not shooting guns, it’s what it can do in the electronic realm where we’re all connected
09:27 Bruce Randall: So you’re saying that they could take over the military asset away from the aliens? They could. They could take over, they should take over bank accounts from those aliens here on Earth, and if we don’t have our money or control of our assets, then in this world, most people would be lost.
09:48 Jim Beach: Yes, 100%. So who should be doing the guardrails, Bruce?
09:54 Jim Beach: Is this the United States government or a, a consortium of 10:00 companies, uh, with China? How do we get that… U.N.? Where are the rules made?
10:08 Bruce Randall: I think for the… Each country has to take care of them themselves first before we can go beyond that. And I think, in my opinion, that the companies that are doing this now in the public ring need to put the guardrails in place, in, in force so that they don’t overstep and we don’t get escapees, for example, that we just had.
10:29 Bruce Randall: That’s something that if all of the AI companies and the companies working in this realm came together and were to agree on, on, like, common architecture or common, common guardrails that we would use, that would be a big help for everybody. But everybody’s an individual right now. It’s kind of the Wild West, where it’s as fast as you can go and as hard as you can go, and whoever wins gets the furthest, and that’s really the Wild West attitude that we have right now, and 11:00 everybody’s being cautious, but they’re also going forward as fast as they can.
11:07 Bruce Randall: And the question is, uh, is, is there caution enough? And that’s the big question.
11:12 Jim Beach: Right. Well, some of them are going backwards. Anthropic started, I think, with a, some sort of morality core and have since waved that off, haven’t they? Is, am I remembering this correctly?
11:27 Bruce Randall: Well, there’s been some executives that have moved around and been a little vocal, and it depends on one’s opinion as to what enough is.
11:38 Bruce Randall: And if you put five people in a room, you’re gonna get five different opinions. And unless they come out with facts backing that up, it’s a matter of an opinion and not necessarily of the company. So it’s still a, a foggy area, and it’s hard to get a read on it with what’s out there right now because you’ve got different opinions.
11:58 Bruce Randall: And in my book, I 12:00 was sourcing, uh, sources, and I had to do… I had to go extra deep to check the sources because in this particular, particular realm, with everything that’s being put out, we have to be very careful that what we’re reading is actually truthful. And there’s an article that was out there that was all truthful, but it put a picture in your mind that was very, very much not truthful, and that’s the point that I’m trying to make.
12:29 Bruce Randall: We have to use our discernment and caution when we read things to really understand what’s true and what’s not true.

12:38 Jim Beach: What rules, if you were in charge, Bruce, would you, uh, put in place? We’re making you dictator.
12:45 Bruce Randall: Uh-oh. And so- I would- … what rules are
12:48 Jim Beach: you gonna put in place?
12:50 Bruce Randall: I would be… I, you know, I, at this point I don’t know what rules I’d put in place because everybody’s at a different place.
12:56 Bruce Randall: I would look at this and understand where everybody is, 13:00 and then put something in place that’s workable for everybody, and then monitor it. But nobody’s gonna give that up because they’re not gonna tell you where they are truthfully, because then everybody’s gonna know, and that’s a company secret thing.
13:18 Bruce Randall: Yes … this is, this is really the, kind of the Wild West where each company is at a different place, and you’ve got different types of quantum and different types of AI, and it’s a matter of who’s gonna make the most advancements and get there first, ’cause there’s a big prize for that Who do you think’s leading right now?
13:40 Bruce Randall: I think it’s between Agentic and
13:47 Bruce Randall: Well, I think they’re- Who was that? Who did you
13:49 Jim Beach: just… You said a- a Agentic?
13:51 Bruce Randall: Yeah, that’s Claude in that group.
13:53 Jim Beach: Oh, okay, Claude. All right. I’m sorry.
13:54 Bruce Randall: Yeah I didn’t know
13:55 Jim Beach: the other fancy name.
13:57 Bruce Randall: And then I think you’ve got Google that’s, that’s right up 14:00 there, and it depends on if you had measured 10 things, they wouldn’t all be high on all 10.
14:04 Bruce Randall: They’d be somewhere in the middle, but they, they’re pretty close, and they’re, they’re, they’re doing a lot of very specialized work right now.
14:13 Jim Beach: Okay, so what are the things that Claude is good at versus Google, and what’s Go- Google good at that Claude’s not good at?
14:20 Bruce Randall: Well, Claude is very good at, at the work that, that I’ve been doing, and I know that the Claude Code, I’m hearing and reading a lot of good things about that, where you can actually set up, uh, Claude to be a reoccurring business that feeds you money, and it just operates.
14:37 Bruce Randall: Uh, it’s, it’s got a very good R&D team, I think probably one of the best. And where they are right now, nobody knows, but I can imagine where they may be.
14:46 Jim Beach: So, uh, explain that. How can you set Claude up to be a recurring revenue source for you?
14:53 Bruce Randall: Well, you can get bots. You can use a Claude Code to set up a business and, and get the 15:00 bots and the AI to do all the automated systems to keep it going.
15:04 Bruce Randall: If you wanted to do trading, you could set up all the parameters. You could set up the goes and the no-goes, and this could just operate while the market’s open and just make trades that were safer, and you get smaller amounts of wins, but you get a lot of them, so you make more money. Yeah. I’ve seen that done.
15:22 Bruce Randall: Who does Claude in… Uh, do they integrate with, uh, Swim or Think or all of those big platforms? Claude works very well with, with, with the codes they work with. Some of the codes that you’re working with, you can integrate or you can connect with about anything out there. So it’s not a matter, integration is really not that much of a problem anymore, especially in this world.
15:47 Bruce Randall: You can integrate pretty easily. So it’s a matter of who do you wanna connect to and, and, and, you know, there’s a way to do it.
15:57 Jim Beach: So back to you being dictator, do you think that 16:00 as dictator that you, we should nationalize the industry and fight with the Chinese that way? Uh, you know, what do… If we’re 5% behind them, it, with a fractured, uh, attack with each of these companies doing little different things, uh, should the dictator America come in and say we’re gonna have an American effort so that the Chinese don’t beat us first?
16:27 Jim Beach: Who, who cares if they beat it? What, what difference does it make if they get there first? Does that automatically make us not the superpower winner or turn our missiles off? Uh, there’s like 12 answers there- Well- … Bruce. Go.
16:40 Bruce Randall: Well, if, if the Chinese get there first- They can take over commerce and they can take over mi- militarily because they are, they’re more advanced than ours.
16:50 Bruce Randall: They can overtake our systems, and that’s not a good thing. When it comes to working with the codes itself and getting the government involved, the 17:00 government owns a certain percentage of the Intri- Intel and, and another company. And I don’t know what that relationship is, but I, I do know that there’s a government effort of working with this technology that is c- that is behind closed doors.
17:15 Bruce Randall: It’s more advanced than what’s out here in the marketplace. So I think that’s happening already along with what’s happening out here with the different companies.
17:25 Jim Beach: Okay What are you using AI for personally? What have you found it to be the most productive, changing, or productivity-increasing, uh, tool you’ve found for your office?
17:41 Bruce Randall: Well, I find that AI can, can help me in a lot of areas in research. Uh, but the research I have to triple-check to make sure that what’s coming through isn’t from a bot, isn’t from an automation, or isn’t somebody’s opinion with the article four levels down. So it takes more work to 18:00 do that. I find it’s faster than search engines, because search engines you have to search for what you want, and I just find that depending on what I’m looking for, I use the different AIs, and I get a faster result that I can vet and I can use, uh, and it saves me time, and that’s a big savings, uh, for anybody
18:21 Jim Beach: Uh, can you explain why so many of the engines are getting these false results and treating them like they’re real?
18:28 Jim Beach: Why does it do that, and how do we stop that? What’s the guardrail to prevent that?
18:34 Bruce Randall: Yeah, that’s a very good question, and I don’t know what the re- what the guardrail for that is. I do know that the training that, that AI is doing, and sometimes in the back, depending on what you put in the search box, it’s called a prompt, it goes out with probabilities in the database or in the, in the, in the base that it has, and it finds the words that percentage-wise match that best and put it up, 19:00 and that’s what you get when it comes out.
19:02 Bruce Randall: Now, if you change the way you prompt, then you’re gonna get different results, and that’s why there are courses on how to prompt, you know, how to, how to write inside the search box what you want because it does make a difference. And there’s programs where you can, you can go directly to the source with fewer prompts, and that’s something that i- actually, y- you tell AI what you want, it helps you get there.
19:28 Bruce Randall: Um, and I took a data science course, and it’s all about probabilities and the different ways of, of searching. And if somebody wanted to learn more about, they could take a, they could take a course or listen to some videos on how to prompt. And they won’t, they might get their answers faster with fewer prompts after that.
19:48 Bruce Randall: That’s good advice. Bruce, what else? We have about a minute left. Well, I have my website that just came out, which has my books on it that I’ve written on AI, 20:00 quantum, and QAI, and has articles that I’ve written on topics, white papers that are written on topics, and it’s brucedrandall.ai. And I suggest people go there.
20:12 Bruce Randall: The articles are free. You can read about the books, and if, if, if that interests you, then, then you can order.
20:18 Jim Beach: Fantastic. Bruce, thank you so very much for being with us, and I wanna apologize publicly to you, Bruce. We, uh, bounced Bruce around like a pinball, uh, before we actually got him recorded, and that was my fault very much, and I apologize to you, Bruce, publicly so, uh, sorry for doing that.
20:37 Bruce Randall: No problem, Jim. It worked out, and I’m happy to be on with you. Thank you.
20:57 Intro 2: So that’s a, that’s a wonderful question. That’s a-
20:59 Intro 2: Oh 21:00 my gosh, I’d love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim.
21:02 Intro 2: Wow, that’s, that’s a, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question and, and I don’t have a great answer.
21:10 Intro 2: It, that’s a great question.
21:11 Intro 2: Oh, that is such a loaded question.
21:14 Intro 2: Man, that’s actually a really good question.

21:16 Jim Beach: School for Startups Radio. We are back and again, thank you so very much for being with us. You know, healthcare is our number one concern maybe in the country. It’s just so important, especially if you’re sick. If you’re sick, the state of American healthcare is your number one concern without doubt.
21:34 Jim Beach: We need to solve this problem, and I’m excited to introduce a guest who is working on the issue. Please welcome Peter Basica to the show. He is the founder of 360 Smarter Care. It is a healthcare technology company dedicated to helping employ- employers reduce healthcare costs while per- uh, improving the health and wellbeing of everyone in the system.
21:58 Jim Beach: Peter is very 22:00 dedicated to this, but he’s also very active in the community. He’s on the Dean’s Advisory Board at his alma mater. I think it’s his alma mater. And is also very active in the, uh, local organizations like, uh, Newark Youth Career Pathways Board and several other, other organizations like that.
22:19 Jim Beach: Peter, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
22:22 Peter Basica: I am great. How are you?
22:24 JIm Beach (5): I’m sick, Peter. I have two chronic health conditions, and I spend more time dealing with insurance than I do dealing with my health
22:38 Peter Basica: You are an ordinary American. 50, 58% of Americans have some type of chronic condition, whether it’s diabetes, hypertension, obesity, chronic pain.
22:50 Peter Basica: 58% of us live with some type of chronic condition. Uh, 30 some odd percent live with two.
22:58 Jim Beach: Unbelievable. 23:00 Is it us? Am I to blame? Did I do this to myself? Is it the food we’re eating and the microplastics?
23:08 Peter Basica: It’s a laundry list of things, but what we choose to focus on is we just practice medicine the absolute wrong way.
23:17 Peter Basica: The primary care physician should be at the heart and center of our medical care, and they’re not. They’re, they’re dismissed as though they’re not a specialty and they’re not important. Your primary care physician 30 years ago, well, maybe longer than that, delivered your parents’ babies. They delivered their babies.
23:40 Peter Basica: They delivered the next generation. The family knew and trusted them, and that trust is absolutely essential to the outcome of care. Those relationships are gone. Polls show today that just over 50% of Americans say they have a primary care physician. 24:00 But when you drill down and ask deeper questions, what they mean is they go to the same urgent care center.
24:07 Peter Basica: Big difference.
24:09 Jim Beach: And if you have two chronic conditions, the general practitioner can’t really take care of you, can they, in the 15 minutes or eight minutes or whatever they’re allotted, allowed to spend with you? It takes that long for me to review my medical history for a new doctor, you know?
24:29 Peter Basica: That 15 minutes is a major, major issue.
24:33 Peter Basica: There are some patients that physician sees that need five minutes. There are some that need 45 minutes, and that an insurance company or a bean counter somewhere is dictating you get 15 minutes is absolutely wrong. And it doesn’t save money, it costs money because people don’t get well. I’m not gonna ask what chronic conditions you have, but I’m gonna bring up a study, not my favorite 25:00 organization, but they do do some good work, and it’s from the WHO.
25:03 Peter Basica: The WHO did a worldwide study on people with hypertension. You have hypertension, without knowing a thing about you, we already know the physician said, “Lower your sodium intake, lose a few pounds, and exercise more. Take a pill.” That’s four things you have to do to get well. 37% of the people worldwide do that.
25:25 Peter Basica: Just 37%. Take a wild guess, and it’s a low number, what the percentage is in the United States.
25:35 Jim Beach: Half that?
25:37 Peter Basica: 3%.
25:38 Jim Beach: Wow.
25:40 Peter Basica: Gee, why don’t people get well? I can’t imagine
25:46 Jim Beach: Yes. I have Crohn’s and Guillain-Barré, Pete. So those are my two chronic ones, which are two really weird ones to match together, I’ve been told, but, uh, anyway.
25:59 Jim Beach: So how are you gonna- 26:00 Uh,
26:00 Peter Basica: yeah, so, so, so how do you deal with the fatigue that those cause?
26:06 Jim Beach: Uh, right now I’m sleeping 16 to 18 hours a day
26:14 Peter Basica: Oh my gosh
26:16 Jim Beach: I s- I can’t get out of bed
26:18 Peter Basica: Brutal
26:19 Jim Beach: You know, I’m- Brutal … I’m incredibly tired. And then the drugs, the drugs that I’m on, you know, including the Oxycontin, you know-
26:27 Jim Beach: there’s, there’s just nothing worse. But, uh- … the pain is, well, bad enough that that’s what it was needed. So how are we gonna solve this, Peter? What are we gonna do? What does 360 Healthcare do?

26:41 Peter Basica: We have been pitching under the Rural Health Transformation funding. Uh, in the one big beautiful bill, there are, uh, $50 billion set aside to transform rural healthcare.
26:54 Peter Basica: And what we are proposing states do is run a 4,500 27:00 patient panel, a cohort, and implement care the way we believe it should be implemented, with the primary care physician at the heart of the care, and interfacing with the specialists that you deal with to make sure that everybody’s working together in your best interest, doing the things that need to be done, making the decisions regardless of the insurance company that are best for the patient.
27:28 Peter Basica: That’s part of it. The next part of it is using technology. There’s a device made in California. It’s called MedWand. The MedWand is an FDA-approved remote diagnostic device that can eliminate 75% of the inpatient visits. Our concept has a brick-and-mortar like group of physicians and PAs and nurses and assistants that take care of you, so that you’re always seeing the same 28:00 physician and familiar faces to build that trust.
28:03 Peter Basica: But we can do an awful lot of things remotely, including a blood draw by sending a phlebotomist to your home or to your office. So we, we use that to be able to get the patient in front of the physician more often and do it cost-effectively. Next on the list is something we call proactive bi-directional digital therapeutics.
28:28 Peter Basica: It’s a fancy name for being able to look at the data that we collect through remote patient monitoring, whether it’s through a device that you purchase commercially or one that’s supplied by the physician’s office, and turn the data dumps that they create into actionable data on the part of the physician.
28:48 Peter Basica: Let’s use a diabetic as an example. Depending on the person’s age, weight, and other health factors, each physician is gonna wanna know when their A1C, their blood sugar level, is 29:00 above a certain point for X number of days, and it will vary patient to patient We take the data that’s collected from the continuous glucose monitor and only notify the physician’s office of when those parameters have been exceeded.
29:16 Peter Basica: That prompts a proactive call from the physician, and in that diabetic instance, it goes something like this: “Hey, how you doing?” “Oh, I’m okay.” “Well, your blood sugar level doesn’t look okay. What’s going on?” “Well, I’m on vacation. I’m sitting by the pool here in Puerto Vallarta. I’m on my fifth piña colada. I know.
29:37 Peter Basica: I’ll get back on my diet on Monday.” Terrible plan, but we understand. The other is, “I’ve been watching it too. I’ve never been more careful with my diet. I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do. I’m exercising, and it just keeps going up.” Let’s get some blood work and look into this before something negative happens.
29:59 Peter Basica: 30:00 Proactive interventions on the part of the primary care physician’s office. And last but not least, we create a research database with a medical school that is involved in AI and looking towards the future of medicine, because the students in that program will look at data differently. They won’t be set in their ways by having practiced for fifteen or twenty years.
30:32 Peter Basica: They will question the database, query the database in different ways, and that will lead to breakthroughs in treatment and care by looking at the, the different elements that influence health, whether they’re environmental or social or economic. That’s our plan. What we’re finding is that, unfortunately, the 31:00 administrators that run the Departments of Health and Human Services, the, the Medicaid offices in the various states, simply don’t look forward.
31:11 Peter Basica: They’re doing more of the same, and there is nothing being done with that fifty billion dollars that will be transformational. One of the questions you’ve asked me is why am I on this show? We need people to call up their DHSS and tell ’em, “Hey, guys, what we got ain’t working. We need a different program.
31:30 Peter Basica: Find a different way. Find a new way. Do some pilots. Do this right.”
31:38 Jim Beach: Okay, Peter, how do you make money doing that? Sounds like a, a nonprofit in a lot of ways. What, what’s the, the actionable finance piece?
31:50 Peter Basica: Eventually, this would turn into profitable business in different ways. We would supply the digital therapeutics, and we would get 32:00 paid for supplying a service to the government.
32:02 Peter Basica: At this point, it’s a direct expense. Our company was founded, it’s a mission-based company, on the concept that if we do the right thing for people and do it with enough people, we will become wealthy by doing the right thing
32:23 Jim Beach: Okay. Isn’t that a little pie in the sky? I mean, if we did the right thing, gosh,
32:32 Peter Basica: I don’t know that that’s- It’s…
32:34 Peter Basica: I, I’m gonna shock you. No, it’s not. Uh, we are in our sixth year of business. We have been profitable for two years, and the people that use our services at this point in time are doing exactly what we hoped they would do. They are leading happier, healthier, richer, fuller lives because of the information we provide them and empower them to take care of 33:00 themselves
33:02 Jim Beach: Okay.
33:03 Jim Beach: Or is, is someone paying for the data? You know, I, I know that data is the most valuable thing on Earth. Do you, do you monetize the data somehow?
33:12 Peter Basica: Oh, that, that is a great question. We have not been able under the, what, what we refer to as Direct Care. Uh, under the Direct Care program, we have not launched yet.
33:25 Peter Basica: We are talking with three more states where we’ve got our fingers crossed that maybe we’ll get it across the finish line. If we don’t get it done that way, in which case the database would be public and the benefits, financial benefits would flow to the public sector, we’re probably gonna find a way… No, I’m gonna take that back.
33:48 Peter Basica: We will find a way to do this with private funding, and we’ll own the database, and we will have the most valuable medical database in the world. Yeah. My choice would be 34:00 to partner with a medical school, but if we gotta do it alone, we’ll do it alone because it needs to be done. How is the AI fitting into it already?

34:12 Peter Basica: Well, AI is a, a very interesting tool. We use what we’ll refer to in this discussion as open AI on the back end of our work and in the development of our work. However, AI is still too immature to be client-facing, so we use closed AI in our outputs that go out to a user, to a patient. We only let it learn what we provide it to learn.
34:44 Peter Basica: An example would be our Veterans Administration Navigator. The Veterans Administration Navigator has read every single page of the VA website, literally indexed every single word, every hyperlink, 35:00 and downloaded all ninety-four publicly available PDFs. It studied the PDFs, found that two of them were so old they were in direct conflict with other PDFs-
35:11 Peter Basica: so we only make ninety-two of them available to the user. But it is one hundred percent accurate and stays accurate. We survey that website. We, we rescan it once a week, so we are always up to date. But the safeguard is the only information a veteran who’s trying to use our navigator will get is the information that the VA has made available to the public
35:43 Jim Beach: All right.
35:44 Jim Beach: Do you actually deal with the VA? Uh, are, are you just scanning the data, or do you have a, a deal with them? Or is there a possibility of getting a deal with them?
35:55 Peter Basica: We are working right now with the New Jersey, uh, Veterans 36:00 Administration Department. Uh, Mickey Sherrill, the, the new governor, Mikey Sherrill, pardon me, uh, was a pilot, uh, an Apache pilot.
36:10 Peter Basica: She is very veteran-centric. She’s elevated the position of the lead administrator for the New Jersey VA to that of a cabinet level position. The commissioner there, his, his name is Vincent Salмино, is a truly dedicated public servant looking out for the best interest of the veteran. Everybody I’ve met in that department so far has impressed me beyond belief.
36:41 Peter Basica: They are so different from s- many of the people we’ve met in the DHS departments. They really wanna help the veterans, and we are working through an implementation to work with and, and support the Virginia VA. Uh, we have 37:00 discussions ongoing in Maryland, New York, Georgia, Illinois. So that program appears to be moving forward with some momentum.
37:10 Jim Beach: Excellent. What about the insurance companies? How do they fit into this, and are they in favor or against? What have your interactions with them been?
37:21 Peter Basica: I have, uh, mixed emotions on that, and the reason is I, I too have gone through a life-threatening illness and UnitedHealthcare was literally perfect in their treatment of me.
37:38 Peter Basica: Having said that, to get the care that I needed to get fully recovered and be well today, I had to do my own work, my own research, and, and literally interview physician after physician. The reason I say I have mixed emotions about UnitedHealthcare is I worked with an executive 38:00 who happens to be in charge of research worldwide at UnitedHealthcare, and I would send him papers and doctors’ names and ask him what their opinion was, and he was extremely helpful.
38:14 Peter Basica: But my claims, which he had nothing to do with, were paid like clockwork. I had no issues. I was stunned at how easily we were… I was able to navigate that. But the amount of work I had to do on my own to get myself well, that should’ve been my primary care doctor. Somebody should’ve been able to do that for me.
38:38 Peter Basica: That I happen to know some people because I’m in this area of, of business is why I was able to do what I did. If I wasn’t in this position, I don’t know that I’m talking to you today, and that’s wrong. That’s just wrong.
38:55 Jim Beach: It’s so true. Having a friend in the healthcare industry, 39:00 like a father that’s a doctor or something like that , makes such a difference.
39:04 Jim Beach: It’s amazing how much- It- … different your care is, so.
39:07 Peter Basica: Exactly. And that, that’s wrong. Exactly. Uh, I was lucky with the doctors I talked to. I talked to the number one, number three surgeon. I talked to the number one radiologist on- oncologist. Two of them just volunteered and gave me their mobile phone numbers.
39:24 Peter Basica: The care I received was unbelievable. There are a lot of bad things you’ll hear about New York, but if you’re gonna be sick, New York, as far as I’m concerned, is the mecca of healthcare in the United States.
39:36 Jim Beach: So let’s talk entrepreneurship, Peter. How did you, uh, have the idea for this business, get it started, uh, raise the money for it?
39:45 Jim Beach: Go back in time seven years and tell us the entrepreneurial history of starting up.
39:52 Peter Basica: I woke up at two thirty in the morning when New York was under lockdown and realized that the startup that we had 40:00 initiated during and, uh, just before COVID was dead. We weren’t gonna be able to get out and see the people we needed to see.
40:08 Peter Basica: We were under lockdown, and our healthcare system was in many ways collapsing. Our apartment was just three blocks away from one of the larger hospitals, and we saw the refrigerated trucks move in for the bodies. Take a walk, streets were empty except for the occasional body getting loaded into the trucks.
40:30 Peter Basica: It was unbelievable. So I woke up at two thirty in the morning and realized that I knew the people that I needed to know to change the equation. I literally went to my computer, started typing out an invitation for Monday morning, and my wife woke up and says, “What are you doing?” I said, “Go back to bed. I have an idea.”
40:56 Peter Basica: We met Monday morning and Three Sixty was born. 41:00 Who’d you meet? Interesting. A physician that had a concept to, to search for urgent care type services, outpatient services that were low cost but highly recommended. I met with a gentleman at Gomo Health, and his name is Bob Gold. He is… He is the, the genius that literally started looking at computer to human behavioral changes in the year 2000.
41:39 Peter Basica: There is nobody on the planet that has more experience with this than Bob. I talked to a gentleman who is now my partner, and Joel Scardelli at that time was a VP at USI with twenty years of experience in group health insurance. And the four of us got together and formed three sixty. 42:00 The physician unfortunately, uh, didn’t work out.
42:04 Peter Basica: His program was not what it should have been. Uh, it was more an idea than it was an algorithm. We worked with him to get him to change it and improve it and fix it for six months, and at the end of six months we said, “Goodbye, we are writing our own program. See ya.” With that, uh, Joel, myself, Bob are, are still all here together.
42:32 Peter Basica: We have not taken a dime of money from anyone else. My wife and I bootstrapped the entire thing. We want the freedom to do what we wanna do when we need to do it without the influence of venture capital or private equity funds.
42:49 Jim Beach: Well, I agree with that. They are a nightmare to deal with. And can I ask how much money you put in it?

42:56 Jim Beach: Uh, don’t tell us anything that’s none of our business. A hundred thousand, a 43:00 million, a house, a boat, a yacht? Uh,
43:04 Peter Basica: a boat club? I literally, I sold everything I owned. Everything. And we got to a point, a tipping point, where I looked at my wife and I said, “I have no idea how I’m gonna make payroll, and how we’re gonna pay the rent next month.”
43:24 Peter Basica: We got our first contract with a deposit, and it’s just moved forward since. It has not been easy. It has been a struggle. Two and a half years with, with doing nothing on my part but writing checks instead of getting checks.
43:44 Jim Beach: So what was that first contract for? What did, uh, what kind of service did you provide them?
43:51 Peter Basica: Uh, we provided them a mental health service, SmarterSelf, for a school. Okay. I don’t know what that is. What is 44:00 SmarterSelf? It, uh, SmarterSelf is a, a program that we refer to as a performance coach in your pocket. It is for high school students. It is a performance coach in the sense that it provides the modalities that a performance coach could provide a world-class athlete.
44:21 Peter Basica: What’s interesting about that is they’re exactly the same as those a psychiatrist would use, and the only difference between that performance coach and a psychiatrist is a psychiatrist can write prescriptions and they use drugs. But the modalities, the tools that they use are exactly the same That means that the program we’re providing these high school students supports their mental health, which is desperately needed in a social media-driven society that teenagers are growing up in.
44:57 Peter Basica: It’s brutal what they deal with 45:00 and the stresses that they’re under. It’s different than when we grew up. It’s different than when anybody grew up. And SmarterSelf is a tool that helps them deal with those things. It has evolved. It is a much better program than what we started with, but that’s the nature of three sixty.
45:21 Peter Basica: Whatever program I wrote, it- Is it an app? How does it physically exist? Ah, interesting. No, it is not an app. It’s all driven by text messages. People read their text messages. Apps are like gyms. They’re full in January, they’re empty in April. They just don’t get used. We are a push-pull system, and what that means is we send out, based on your profile, one or two, three at the most, text messages per week.
45:51 Peter Basica: But if you’re gonna take a test, you can text back to us, “Test,” and we will reply with a breathing exercise 46:00 for you to calm yourself down, to focus so that you can go in and take that test and do your best. So that, that’s the pull-down. Each of our users gets their own dashboard, their homepage. On their homepage, the top third is basically how are you.
46:20 Peter Basica: And when you answer how you are by picking a smiley face, one that’s a disaster and the other that’s great, we respond immediately with support for that. If you said you’re feeling great, we’ll send you something stupidly happy, like a feral video singing happy. And you’ll look at it and say, “This is so dumb, I gotta smile.”
46:43 Peter Basica: It’s a reinforcement of your mood. If you said, “It’s an absolute disaster of the day. I’m miserable,” and pick that face, we will send you a supportive message with materials that you can choose from 47:00 depending on what works for you to help you get through that rough day. And a third of your page literally now will change to support your current mood.
47:14 Peter Basica: The bottom third of the page, simple. That’s where you put your favorites. Oh, a guided meditation is what works for you? Which one was your favorite? Put it here. Do you like to read white papers to deal with your depression or your stress? Here’s your favorite white paper. Oh, you need a vid- here’s a video.
47:35 Peter Basica: So whatever works for you then is at your fingertips. So your own page, which is accessible anywhere you have an internet connection, and text messages, no app.

47:48 Jim Beach: That sounds very cool. And how did it play out? Did they re-up, or are they still a client? And are other schools using that product too?
47:57 Peter Basica: They are still a client, and we have 48:00 expanded.
48:00 Peter Basica: Uh, so that business is growing, and it, it pays the bills
48:16 Peter Basica: We have that vertical Number of offerings at this point? Our most profitable offering is something called Advantage, which is a very similar product, but it is for employees And so you sell it at the corporate level through the HR department? Exactly. Exactly. Uh, presenteeism and absenteeism are huge issues.
48:30 Peter Basica: The empty chair, and the empty chair is a disaster for every business. We know what your health is like. You’ve heard what my health journey has been like. People showing up at work doesn’t mean that they are working well. It means that they dragged themselves out of bed feeling rotten, and they still showed up.
48:54 Peter Basica: But are they doing their best work for you? Absolutely not. So it is a full 49:00 health program for the employees, physical health, mental health. It is a program to help your employees improve their quality of life. Because when they show up and they’re feeling better, they’re more productive, and your business does better.
49:18 Jim Beach: Have you heard of a company called Discovery Health out of South Africa, Peter?
49:25 Peter Basica: That sounds familiar, but it just might be the name. Uh, tell me about it
They, they partner with businesses and have services like you do, similar, but when you use them, you get points, and if you accumulate enough points, you get a free flight on Virgin or a movie ticket or something like that.
Everything comes with a reward. And the health, you know, if you go work out, you get 20 points. If you get your blood drawn, you get 50 points. If you, you know, lose 100 pounds, you get 300 50:00 points. And it’s, you know, all of the, sort of what you’ve been talking about plus an incentive system to make people actually want to do it.
50:09 Peter Basica: Now, now that you’ve explained it, yes, I have heard of it. Um, it is an app, and we feel that the reward needs to be intrinsic. And by that we mean if you don’t see an improvement, you’re not gonna continue to do it no matter how much free stuff we give you. Wellness programs have given free bowling, free gyms, free this, that the employer has paid for to employees, and the people that go to the gym are the people that were going to the gym anyway You know what your health journey is like.
50:49 Peter Basica: Would a free gym membership and a free cup of coffee at Starbucks get you to the gym?
50:54 Jim Beach: No, but, uh, a discounted, like a free movie or something 51:00 else might. And I think s- part of the problem is, is you assume that the incentive is good for everyone, and I don’t want that incentive. And I think that’s one of the things Discovery does differently is that they let you use your points to get like a shopping- And, and,
51:16 Peter Basica: and they have a, a wide, yeah, a wide variety of things that- Yes
51:19 Peter Basica: that you can do.
51:20 Jim Beach: Yeah. Anyway.

51:22 Peter Basica: Our, our underlying philosophy is just different. Uh, the good news is that industry-wide, the utilization of wellness programs in business runs at 43%, and we are at 65%. That’s yesterday. We are introducing literally this week Reflect U360 technology. It is a facial scan that you use your phone for.
51:50 Peter Basica: Your phone does not do facial recognition. It looks through your translushen- translucent skin and measures blood 52:00 flow through your veins. It literally from a 30-second scan reports on over 50 different health aspects of your body, everything from stress and anxiety to fatty liver buildup, through a scan.
52:18 Peter Basica: It’s amazing. That scan is going to take our utilization from 65%, it will skyrocket. It will jump easily, we believe, 15 points. In addition to that, we have not till this time been able to measure when people open and read their text message or click on a link in their text message, and that will be implemented within the next 60 days, and that should boost us again by another 10 or 15 points.
52:55 Peter Basica: We expect to end this year with a staggering 53:00 90% utilization rate. Wow, that would be unbelievable. Double the industry standard. So we know what we’re doing works, uh, and it works well. So we should probably talk 12 months from now, and you can ask me if it turned out to be marketing BS from Pete or fact.
53:19 Jim Beach: Peter, how do we find out more? Follow online, get some of this for our business. How do we get in touch?
53:27 Peter Basica: Use our website. It’s, uh, the digits 3-6-0, so 360smartercare.com
53:36 Jim Beach: Fantastic. Peter, thank you so much for being with us. Great information, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.
53:41 Peter Basica: Anytime. Enjoyed every minute.
53:43 Peter Basica: Have a great day, and, and feel better, man.
53:46 Jim Beach: Oh, thank you so much. And we are out of time for today, but we will be back tomorrow. Be safe, take care. Go make a million dollars. Bye now.