Transcript
Josh Clemente (00:00):
Man, I got to, I got to do better at preparing myself for the, what am I grateful for today thing? Let’s see. So I have been doing, I’ve noticed a lot of increased back pain lately, and I have always been allergic to the effort and pain tolerance takes to really expand flexibility and mobility, but I’ve been doing a 21 day hip and back stretching challenge. I’ve been fairly consistent and I’m seeing some benefits. I mean, it’s really tough for me to sit in a painful position for literally 20 minutes at a time, but that is what this consists of. And, I think I’m grateful for the progress I’ve made and I’m hopeful and optimistic that this will continue to improve. And that my, I will not be an excruciating back pain, later in life as a result of investments made now.
So I guess I’m grateful for the opportunity to put myself through self-inflicted torture in exchange for long-term benefits. If anyone has a mobility practice that they enjoy, please share it with me because I’m a newbie here. Okay, let’s see here, let me move this thing out of my way. All right. So recent achievements, excitingly, the waitlist has broken over 27,000. It’s an additional, just constantly keep updating in your minds when you’re talking to people. We got to make sure that they’re aware of exactly how far behind they are if they only sign up now, they need to get on the list ASAP, if they want to ever get their hands on levels.
So 27,000, that’s exciting. We recorded and released, or we recorded four podcasts this week. I think we released two. Casey you’ll give the update there, but excitingly we had a real strategy in place thanks to Tom and his efforts, for the natural state in particular, to have an introductory URL that guides people to a CGM landing page, or sorry, a landing page on his website that talks about CGM and then links over to our partner landing page. And the result was over $18,000 in podcasts attributed revenue in three days. So this is kind of the first, sort of test of our podcast affiliation strategy. And it’s really cool to be attributing revenue directly to these episodes, and huge shout out to, the Biohacker Babes and to Dr. Anthony Gustin over at Natural State.
These alliances are huge and the education from these podcasts I think has value in and of itself, but obviously pushing our business forward is a big win. And of course, thanks to Tom and Nick, and Casey for all the work on that strategy. So we also had a super exciting conversation with Ben Bickman. You may have seen on Twitter, Sam, updating everyone that we’re going to make, why we get sick required reading for all employees. The reason there is that this book basically is the manifesto for levels. Ben Bickman is a consummate professional in this space. He’s one of the leading, sort of the leading, PhDs who is studying insulin resistance and bringing awareness to it, and how it’s a social scale problem. So, it was awesome to speak with him. He’s using levels right now and super enthusiastic.
And so we’re going to push forward with an offer to join our research team and collaborate with Molly and Dom, and really push some sponsored research forward. So this is awesome. More to come there, we have content or sorry, we have job descriptions up for our roles. These are head of marketing, head of ops, also head of content. We just launched. And so, we’re getting some amazing applicants already. I’m going to be taking a large role here in this hiring campaign to vet people and then introduce them to the rest of the team to start technical conversations, and sort of push this hiring process forward. But we have a ton of need here on ops and marketing, and of course content as well. So please, if you know exceptional candidates point them to our JDS.
And, overall though, it’s been pretty cool to see how much high quality attention we’re attracting organically. The edge team launched a sinking capability. So what this allows is basically much higher volume and more reliable sinking for our data link. So CGM data down into the Levels App. So this is a big win, thanks to how in particular, the entire entry team that worked on this, this is going to be really awesome for our scaling efforts. Let’s see, Jhon was working on deep-linking this week. So if this would allow us to link directly to pages in the app. So imagine you get an email insight, it’s talking about some specific insight or event that occurred during your last week of the program.
And you can click that link, and it’ll open up directly into the app, and show you specifically where that is so you can analyze the terrain around there. So this is going to be very useful, probably hard to imagine just exactly how useful this will be, but it’s exciting to see these systems building from a foundation for us to stand on for future sort of insights, which is what most people really want from our program. And then, our standby list emails. So we’re calling basically the terminology here is we have our waitlist, which is 27,000 people long. And then we have our standby list, which is basically people who have pre-ordered and paid for our program, and they’re waiting for their consultation data to arrive and for their kit to arrive. And so that standby list is about 400 people long right now.
And so we’ve defined Sam in particular, and Jeremy, and others who have been working on the email implementation inch inside, have these defined and now it’s time to spec them out, and they’ll basically be going to customers, and helping them stay in the loop on exactly where their sort of border status stands. So they can have a good idea of when their delivery will actually show up. So this is exciting. It’s a big step in the direction of keeping our customers more up to speed on how their orders are trending. Some other very cool stuff that does not have a bullet point here. You can see a couple of really cool names on the screen, Dr. David Agus from the Lawrence… Well, we all know him as Larry Ellison Institute at USC reached out. Apparently somebody named Ashton Kutcher was talking about our product to, Larry Ellison’s team. And they’ve reached out, they’re really excited.
They’re building a series of rev or resorts called Sensei, which are all about wellness and about getting a better understanding of your body. And also obviously living in a very lavish environment for awhile. So this is exciting, we’re going to chat with them this week and see if there’s a collaboration opportunity. Men’s health, was streaming the, Dan Giordano workout with levels front and center, as you can see in the bottom left there. And there were like, I think at one point there were something like 40,000 people streaming this. So this is really awesome. Thanks again, Dan, for showing us off and pointing us to, or pointing everyone to the levels IG, this was huge. We’re getting a lot more of that IGTV style, stuff coming soon.
We got Zach Bitter into the program. So Zach Bitter for those of you that don’t know is an absolute machine. You can see this little anecdote down here. He ran 100 miles at seven minute per mile pace on a track. And so he did over 100 miles in 12 hours and he experiments a lot of different eating styles, particularly carnivore and keto. And so it’s really awesome. He and Ben Bicker are good friends and, yeah, overall, it’s going to be cool to see how he uses our program. What are some other good ones? Oh yeah. This anecdote was fantastic. Mega Doshi, who is helping us with marketing and content. She was running in central park and she just ran into someone who was also wearing Levels. So this is the beginning of a really big movement, obviously, but this is kind of the first anecdote I know of where someone was seen in the wild with the same level situation going.
So that’s exciting. We’ve spoken with Blackstone, we’ve continued to have exceptional conversations with investors, investment teams, and, Sam will give us more of an update there, but kind of high level we’re expecting term sheets sometime in the second week of September most likely. And then of course our Twitter enthusiasm continues and we’ve got some cool people like Jim Kwik from Super Brain and the head of lacrosse at University of Oregon, joining the program so overall an amazing week and thanks to everyone for contributing.
Sam Corcos (08:12):
I think, it wasn’t Dom this week as well. I don’t know if we announced that.
Josh Clemente (08:16):
We announced that last week. But, to reiterate on that Dom D’Agostino, neuroscientist ketogenic researcher from University of South Florida has officially joined. He will be, basically the prerequisite for him joining was that we have a legitimate research budget established, and that will be over the next 12 months, putting out a full clinical protocol for… Well, working with them on their clinical protocols for publications and studies, that budget’s going to be on the order of 100,000 or more. And Dom is extremely enthusiastic to be working with us. And already putting us in touch with some really big players like UnitedHealth, one of the huge insurers who was interested in quantifying health for those that are insured through them. So exciting stuff to come there. And especially as we add people like Ben and Molly into the mix, we’re going to get the world-class team of metabolic researchers, is going to be working with Levels as you can see. Anything else, any other questions done on this first slide?
I don’t know if I talked about Lance, but Lance will also be using our program. So that’s quite exciting. We have, I know that Lance has a history and all I know is that he is a consummate athlete, and the guy he works harder than anyone else. So it’s going to be really cool to see what he thinks and if he has any breakthroughs on the metabolic side with our product. In terms of milestones we have, you see we put a strike through rollout pre-orders and the reason there is we’ve done this. We have people who, like I said, we have about a 400 person standby list. These are people who have ordered the product and have paid for it, and they’re not waiting to deliver, or for delivery. So, that achievement is out, it was kind of a, it’s still not the case that you can go on the website and pre-order the product.
And we would likely keep it that way. We’re going to maintain an eight to 10 week backlog, which it allows us to be very flexible in terms of our demand balancing, essentially. So if you have any questions on how we’re going about managing the standby list versus the waitlist, please reach out or bring them up right now. And, happy to talk about it. From there, of course, we’re going to continue to launch your insights framework. All the other product features that we need in order to go full launch, and then always keeping our eyes on the NextGen hardware partnership. We’ve got some good conversations upcoming. Any questions on these milestones?
Cool. So this week we had an uptick in orders, 87 orders placed, 62 orders shipped. We’re going to continue to see more orders going out the door than our standby expectations. So basically we’re kind of going to double our capacity through August, versus our expectation. And part of that is just trying to get, accelerate some of our standby lists, so we can hit that eight to 10 weeks. And part of it is testing our systems, and seeing what kind of volume we can maintain. So keep an eye out for a… I clicked too many times. So, yeah, continue to keep an eye out for updates on the standby load balancing, we’re likely going to push for 300 orders in September delivered, which is a really big, that’s a big volume increase over prior months. Sam?
Sam Corcos (11:33):
Yeah. So we still have plenty of cash, the fundraiser is going really well. We’re pushing people now into October. You can see our projected revenue. As I mentioned before, this is revenue that’s already booked. It’s just not recognized. This is deferred revenue. Next slide. Monthly revenue is on target, kind of redundant to the last slide, but it’s a nice chart. Next slide. And weekly revenue, you can see we had a pretty big jump and that was mostly from some of the podcasts efforts. So it’ll be interesting to see the… We’re doing some more experimentation with podcasts of, do we announce the, skip the waitlist in the actual conversation in the podcast? How does it work when we then do it in a newsletter afterwards and a blog post? We’re doing some experimentation around podcasts to see what converts for us and what we can expect going forward.
Josh Clemente (12:47):
Cool. Any questions on financial and revenue projections? Okay. Quick notes on recruiting. So as of right now, we have these three recs open head of marketing or growth. So this is a person who can take on the full spectrum of the marketing experience. Somebody who is the hands dirty type, they’re going to test out our channels. They’re going to prove product market fit for us, or at least demonstrate repeatability through our channels and take on a multi-million dollar budget to go out and pursue these and scale us. So, we’re currently vetting nine candidates for this. We’ve had more than that come through, but a few of them haven’t matched what we’re looking for. And so over the next few weeks, we’ll be vetting those out and look forward to conversations with them. I’ll introduce you as those people come through and then head of operations, this would be, again, somebody who’s very hands-on.
They’re going to be taking on the entire scope of running the backend of our business day to day. So this is logistics, it’s supply chain, it’s HR, customer success, product integrations. So all of the things that we need to keep the business moving forward. So I think of somebody who has managed a very large high volume business before Uber ops leads. We’re getting a lot of attention from former Uber people. So if you know anyone that fits that type of mold for either of those two slots, please reach out or forward them our JD, we’ve got 12 candidates for them right now. I’ll be taking lead on the intro end of both of these requisitions.
So, you can point me to anyone if they’d like to speak directly, go ahead and just introduce us. And then for head of content, I’ll also be helping here, but, Casey is, she can probably give a better description of what we’re looking for here and in tactical terms, but high-level, this is someone who can manage the content production with seamless processes to really basically alleviate our team and get high quality content continuously onto our channels. Casey, anything to add there?
Casey Means (14:39):
Yeah, that’s exactly right. We’re looking for a seasoned content professional, likely a seasoned journalist who has a lot of experience essentially, leveraging content across all digital channels, producing content, managing writers and helping us really take our content strategy the next level, and push out a really regular cadence, and really good processes for taking content from start to finish, and then distributing across channels. So, really excited to find a great individual for this.
Josh Clemente (15:13):
Well, yeah, some people are away. Anything else on recruiting? Cool. So our customer engagement slide is not blank, this is just not updated that’s my fault. If you go to Twitter and you search, @unlocklevels and look at latest, you’ll see our customer engagement and it’s much more exciting than this slide. So I recommend everyone do that. It always brings a smile to my face and sorry for not getting this one updated this week, but we had some tidbits on the recent achievements slide, Casey.
Casey Means (15:46):
Thanks, Josh. Actually, can you reload? It’s funny, because our customer engagement side is actually the opposite of that slide. It is so full. So, yeah, this is a visual representation of even more podcast project this progress. This project continues to astound me how much our internal team, Nick and Tom, and Josh, and also just our network has been delivering so hard on getting us connections with podcasts. So we are up to 48 podcasts sort of in the mix so far, we have had 14 shows released, nine shows recorded that are unreleased and 25 scheduled. So Josh and I are spending a good chunk of our time at this point on these podcasts, talking about Levels and also really working on sort of the pitches, and the angles, the key messages that we’re really trying to pound home.
There’s a lot of different amazing angles, that we can talk about with CGM and with Levels. And so it really lends itself to a wide variety of podcasts topics, from athletic performance, to nutrition, to medicine, to beauty, to weight. And to entrepreneurship. And it’s just really exciting. So lots more are going to be coming out, and we’ll keep you updated. But right now this list of pictures here is essentially everything that is scheduled or already recorded. So, yeah, exciting stuff there. To some press and media updates here on the left, we had a couple nice, small press wins this week. Sam was featured in the sociable is 20 tech leaders we should get to know. We had an article, in an interview that I did with HNGRY, about personalized nutrition. And we are connected with the, TechCrunch’s editor who is going to be getting into our beta program.
And I’ve been connected with the Mixergy founder. So may have an interview coming down the pipeline there. Also in touch with a number of other outlets that I mentioned last week and those conversations are still happening. So BBC, New York Times, a number of others. On the right, just reiterating what Josh was talking about, we’re really doubling down on our efforts to build out our world-class advisory team. And we’re taking a very structured approach to this. We’ve got a Kanban spreadsheet on this and notion that you can track, but really trying to fill out this advisory team with the top tier researchers, clinicians and thought leaders in this space, and not just limiting to clinical and healthcare, but really research clinical policy, military, entrepreneurs. We are really excited to build this team and are going to be over the coming weeks continuing to reach out, and make connections, and have these conversations, really amazing conversation with Ben Bickman yesterday that was inspiring to all of us.
He was extremely enthusiastic about joining our team and doing research with us. And so, hopefully more positive updates on that next week, as we nail down the details. Next slide. Some new blog posts. We actually, Ben Bickman contributed a short blog post to our blog. So that’s now up there. What should I expect to see on my continuous glucose monitor if I’m on a keto diet or in ketogenesis? So that was very, very kind of him to do. We also have, more metabolic journeys articles about customer testimonials up on the blog, check it out. We also have some really cool upcoming collaborations happening in terms of our writing efforts. So, something we’re really excited about doing is basically nailing down a really stake in the ground piece about what optimal glucose levels should be on non-diabetic individuals. That’s something that has not been published.
No, there is no consensus, in the healthcare community or an industry about this. So we’ve been reaching out to our network about putting together a consortium of clinicians and researchers to essentially say, “This is what we think optimal glucose levels should be in non-diabetic individuals, what we should be striving for.” We’ve reached out to our network and a number of individuals are very interested in publishing this with us. So, some of the team from Supersapiens, including senior endocrinologist, their chief scientific officer at Molly Maloof and, so this is going to be, I think, an exciting way for us to move the conversation forward. So yeah, stay tuned and that’s it for me, also in terms of SEO updates, we’re going to move those two to once a month. So none for this week, but in a couple of weeks, we’ll have some updates on that.
Josh Clemente (20:17):
Yeah. The, the industry collaboration is super exciting. It also positions us as leaders inside the leadership space because we’re driving this forward. And I think it’s a really exceptional way to message ourselves, reaching out to teams like, Supersapiens who on paper are somewhat competitive with what we’re doing, but at the same time, it’s just, we need like metabolic health is such a huge space. And what needs to happen is definition and agreement on why it’s broken. It’s broken because there’s disagreement between the reality and the published reality, which is, under 140 milligrams per deciliter is okay, is kind of like the current standard. So what we’re doing is we’re trying to get a bunch of people who are working on the same problem to agree and to put standardization to practice, so that we can all, sort of be pushing in the same direction. And, of course from there levels will still be dominant. So there’s nothing to fear there, but it’s exciting.
Casey Means (21:09):
And something positive. I think that we did early months and months ago is put up our, ultimate guide to normal and optimal glucose levels on the blog, which was our personal stake in the ground about, the current thresholds for what is normal are way too lenient. And if people just abide by those, they will develop insulin resistance, just staying under 100 for fasting or under 142 hours after meals. So we put that stake in the ground early and what’s been really nice is that that allows others to kind of evaluate it. And we’ve found essentially universal agreement amongst people we’ve talked about, who have been thinking about this a lot. And so, I think it positions us well to be able to lead this conversation and potentially a really high-impact paper on this topic. So really looking forward to that.
Josh Clemente (21:50):
Great. Yeah, there was also something I wanted to mention, sort of on this topic, if anyone is interested, you should definitely check out the recent AMA from, Peter Attia, it’s on his website. But he defines kind of the problem, which is that metabolic dysfunction manifests in a bunch of different ways. And it’s not just that your glucose levels will exceed thresholds, it’s that insulin resistance is the underlying issue. And so there are all types of case studies that he talks about there, where different manifestations show up, glucose levels can be normal, insulin levels can be 10 times worse than they should be that type of thing. So, yeah, this is just like shining a light on the fact that this is a nuanced space. Okay. Over to Mike on customer success.
Mike Di Donato (22:32):
Thanks, Josh. It is another great week of, a lot of feedback, so much positivity, whether it’s our branding, content reporting, lots of exciting things. There are two things that I’d like to highlight, the levels program guide. I’m not entirely sure that we’ve been, effectively communicating like the value or more importantly, the value of what can be found in it, as we’re getting some more inbound on some of the things or questions that are answered there. The positive thing, from my perspective is I think a lot of this will be solved when we roll out the educational program cards, that I know everyone’s been working on so, very excited and encouraged for that. And then the other thing that’s top of mind for me, and, Josh alluded to that we were hard at work at, shipping our communications for the standby list. Currently we’re in a premium area. And with that, there are higher expectations.
And, at a previous company we used Gallup for our customer satisfaction survey and they shared a study with us. I’m not sure if they did it, or if it was with another organization they’ve partnered with. And they did a survey of people going to Disney World, and some of the largest retailers in the United States. And what they found was, people are willing to wait, in long lines. And a simple acknowledgement of, “Hi, how are you?” Resets the clock in their mind of their wait time, perception. So, I also put an image here, kind of highlighting how excited people are to use Levels. This is the kind of inbound that we get. And I think if we can just close the loop and just keep them engaged, and keep them excited, it’s definitely going to take the experience to another level.
And, I always like to include a quote. You could see there, “In my practice I distribute and help people get set up everyday, until I found Levels I would never have thought to use CGM except for the management of diabetes. This is awesome and is the future!” And this is from a pharmacist, and an assistant professor of pharmacology at University of Florida. So, that’s really all I have.
Josh Clemente (25:20):
Nice, any questions on customer success this week?
Casey Means (25:26):
Thanks so much for the summary Mike. It’s really helpful. And this note for Harper is absolutely heart-wrenching. I keep thinking, oh, when I get Levels, everything will be sorted out. If you can push my order through, feel free to upcharge me, it would be incredible.
Mike Di Donato (25:42):
And we get many, and we get many things like that, and people are really excited, and they’re willing to wait, and they just want to be kept in the loop and learn more. So super exciting.
Josh Clemente (25:54):
That’s awesome. Cool. Yeah. Thanks for assembling that. David, over to you for product and design.
David Flinner (26:00):
Can you a refresh, if you don’t mind.
Josh Clemente (26:02):
Yup.
David Flinner (26:05):
That’s a lot faster than it used to be. The refresh processes and groups.
Josh Clemente (26:09):
Is that IBM computer I’m running on.
David Flinner (26:11):
Nice. Yeah. So, actually this is a combined product design engineering, but I just wanted to highlight a few things. Again, Josh mentioned, but huge congrats, at the how I’m launching the data sync, improvements. This is one of the centerpieces of our scale 10X initiative. So, we can take on a lot more customers now, a lot more concurrent customers, so it’s a big, big win. And then, also Andrew, has launched automated prescription handling with our true bill integration. So it’d be a huge efficiencies gained there, I think on the ops side and also a lot more that’s foundational for unlocking a lot better improve coms with our customers. So we can time emails for when, like exactly based on how they’re progressing through the pharmacy integration and when their package is going to be delivered.
There’s a whole bunch more in progress right now. We’ve got a lot of, big features coming up, that the whole team is working on. So just to highlight several of them, the activity feed, which is the foundation for the education cards that Mike mentioned, is deep underway, both on the frontend and backend with Jhon and, Xinlu. And the next stage after that is going to be closing the loop on our, under things that happened, certain events that happened, that you’re not sure what they are and how it affects your health, Evans is taking the first steps on that with the Dawn Effect detection, got a bunch of other features of, right now zones, we’re doing some backend work to make sure that, we can interact with zones in a scalable way so that you can search all your zones.
You can have lightning fast, sorting of them. You can link directly to them, maybe in the future, share them with your friends. That’s kind of the goal that persisting zones is directed at, that Jeremy is working on, and we’re continuing to improve the edges around the program experience. Right now, in the past, Mike has been manually emailing customers, their weekly emails and their final report. I personally email them, but there’s been some rough edges around, tracking, making sure that we know when a customer is progressing actively throughout the program versus when their sensor falls off and they’re paused, when they finish, or they kind of finished not really finished.
So, Hao is working on some program tracking improvements for that. And then a couple of other in progress work on offline mode. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but we have Maria working on this, offline mode broke a few months ago and we’re getting it back up and running, and that should be out the door soon, it’s almost done. And if you’ve been watching this gift loop for the last two minutes, as I’ve been talking, you’ll see that Jhon has pushed out something pretty magical, I think, and internally for testing, which is deep-linking. And Josh mentioned this before, right now, our app or emails, nothing really takes advantage of the deep-linking, but once we have the activity feed and we have insight cards or education cards that are really interesting for people, we can start linking you directly to them now, with this work that Jhon did on deep-linking.
So it’s pretty sophisticated. You can even create a link that will go to your activity catalog, filter for avocado and sort by descending. So you can see all of your worst scores or your best scores of avocado, things like that. So it’s pretty robust. And then, we’re thinking through, Gabriel is starting to think through how we compare more than two zones, and that’s going to be a big win for the experimentation, that our customers love to do. So a whole bunch of stuff in progress. Andrew, anything else to add here from your side?
Andrew (29:53):
I think it’s good. Good summary.
David Flinner (29:55):
Cool. Yeah, I’m really excited about this. Fewer gifts this week, but lots of meaty stuff on the backend. Next slide. Just a quick sneak peek at some of the things I’m thinking through. So, after we had that initial activity feed implementation done, the next step is, taking a look at helping people understand things that they don’t understand on the graph, things they forgot to log or strange things that we know something about, that we can help share. So, this is event detection. So what you see here is just a quick mock of, let’s say we detected a high glucose event, which is probably a meal, we can prompt you to say, “Hey, did something happen here?” With one tap you can choose that at an entry to the graph, to the dashboard, add an optional note, and then there’s your score. So, that’s the kind of thing that we’ll be doing next. And then, talk to Evan a bunch on how we can better close the loop on your specific actions and what it means for your overall metabolic fitness.
So one of the quick louvers we think we can do is, help you understand how any given zone that you have with your meal logs, how did that directly affect your metabolic score? So you ate that, like an apple, and we’re very sensitive to it, dropped your metabolic score by 20%. We can show that to customers pretty easily. We can show you also when you have that apple with almond butter, that it didn’t drop it at all, and you saw no movement in your metabolic score. So, one more way we can help close the loop there. Next slide. And finally, yeah, as, Casey brought up the blog, I did this in last second. Casey and Sam worked with Eugene, our contract designer to put together some really nice improvements to the blog. And so this is in progress.
It’s not ready yet, but we think it’s going to be a lot better information density, a lot easier to read the articles, with not so darker theme. And then you can see a couple things here. We’ve clustered things based on customer intent. So there’s metabolic fundamentals. If you want to dive more into the 101 things, if you want to get the latest, there’s a column for that. And then, the most popular articles as well. And then, as you know, some of our articles are super in-depth, [inaudible 00:32:01] the category defining thought leadership pieces that Casey mentioned, like the ultimate guide to glucose levels, and those will have a special treatment, this thought leadership, annotation, so that customers, if they really want to get the premium pieces from us, they can find those directly. So this is an in progress and excited to see that happen.
Josh Clemente (32:21):
Nice. Great update. I’m super excited for the event detection stuff in particular, that is going to be huge. For people that have low adherence, this is going to, I think drive them towards more groundbreaking understanding of what’s going on. Cool. So any questions on product and design, data science? Okay. And please I’ll always send feedback on the format of the Friday forum where we’re constantly trying to make this better and more information dense without overdoing it. So if this is landing and we made some recent changes this week, so just let us know how it goes. We’re now onto the individual contribution section. So looking for about a minute from each of us, personal is encouraged. Casey, go ahead and kick us off.
Casey Means (33:11):
From a personal standpoint. I am so excited because my parents are visiting Portland this weekend. First time seeing them since the pandemic started. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago, they bit the bullet and bought a sprinter van a couple of weeks ago. And so they are heading north it’s in this bright red van that they’re calling Rosie. So Rosie is arriving in Portland tonight, or actually just outside of Portland and we’re going to basically hang out at a campsite this weekend, and do socially distant games, and meals, and some bike rides. And I am so excited to see them, so.
Josh Clemente (33:49):
That’s awesome. Hao, over to you?
Hao Li (33:53):
Yeah. I’m going to campaign tomorrow as well. So really excited about that. And I got the book, so I’ll see how much I can choose to read over the weekend while I’m camping. Yeah, I really enjoyed, Ben Bickman’s, lectures and Ted talks on a YouTube channel called, I think, Low Carb Down Under. It’s a pretty awesome channel. So yeah, that’s about it.
Josh Clemente (34:24):
Nice. And for those of you that haven’t, you should look at that, the area up there where, Hao it lives and just revel in the beauty that he’s going to be experiencing this weekend. It blows my mind. It’s a gorgeous area of the world.
Casey Means (34:38):
Where are you headed, Hao?
Hao Li (34:40):
Just, in the middle of the island. So it’s up North a little bit. It’s called Nanaimo is another, I think, second largest city on the island.
Casey Means (34:40):
Awesome.
Hao Li (34:52):
But it’s not actually a city.
Casey Means (34:56):
Have fun.
Hao Li (35:00):
Yes.
Josh Clemente (35:00):
Jhon.
Jhon Cruz (35:01):
I’m personally excited about, so currently this weekend I am always excited about soccer, but this weekend it’s, Champions League and Europa League finals, for those who don’t know that about soccer, but participants of this two competitions are the best soccer clubs in the world. So the final draw of the Champions League is going to be Bayern Munich, from Germany versus Paris Saint-Germain, from France, And for Europa League, the final draw is going to be Sevilla from Spain, versus Inter, from Italy. So it’s going to be fun.
Josh Clemente (35:45):
Brilliant. I imagine your son is going to be enjoying that with you.
Jhon Cruz (35:45):
Yeah, of course.
Josh Clemente (35:51):
That’s awesome. Mike.
Mike Di Donato (35:56):
Yeah, lots to be excited about, obviously all the engagement that we have and definitely the EHR consultations moving through kudos to Andrew, Josh, and everyone over at Truepill. Things seem to be moving through really effectively. And things are just happening much quicker. So definitely exciting there. And then personally, I’ve been thinking about this whole moving thing or spending time elsewhere and, I kind of put it on my calendar to really think about it on Sunday. So more to come on that, I guess I’m excited and kind of have anxiety that I don’t want to think about it, but, yeah, more to come.
Nick Krasney (36:47):
I’m back to L.A., Mike, we need to go [crosstalk 00:36:49]-
Mike Di Donato (36:48):
Yeah, man.
Casey Means (36:50):
Portland is awesome.
Nick Krasney (36:50):
… Southern California is where is at.
Evan (36:50):
Rome and California.
Casey Means (36:50):
Portland.
Josh Clemente (36:56):
Get a sprinter van mike.
Evan (36:56):
#Vanlife.
Josh Clemente (37:00):
Yeah. Exactly. Cool. Evan over to you.
Evan (37:04):
I’m not going camping per se, but the entire bay area is ringed by massive fires. And so it smells like a campfire and the air is hazy and the sunsets are beautiful. So I don’t know. It just sucks. I can hate it, but what can you do? State’s on fire. How about yours?
Josh Clemente (37:22):
At least there’s a camping ambience.
Evan (37:23):
It has a very big camping on ambiance. Yeah. All my clothes smell like Ash.
Josh Clemente (37:28):
Man. Okay. Gabriel.
Gabriel Brady (37:33):
Yeah. So I’ve, had and continuing to have get to many calls they’ve opened really great this week. that’s something that’s exciting for me. Working on comparing more than two zones has been really interesting so far, and I’m still learning a ton about that, the apps, that’s been great. And then personally, inspired by, Josh, about a month ago, I was having really severe back pain at one point. I had to lie down on the sidewalk, because I literally couldn’t move. And now I’m like pretty much back to full fitness, so that’s exciting, and a relief.
Josh Clemente (38:16):
Awesome.
Gabriel Brady (38:17):
And then also, me and my partner want to go watch the sunrise tomorrow, which I’m excited about, we’ve been meaning to do that, like literally all summer, to go down to the lake and watch the sunrise and we haven’t, and that it’s finally threatening to get cooled again, so now’s the time, let’s do it. Sorry about that.
Josh Clemente (38:35):
Awesome. Enjoy that. Okay. So for me personally, well, professionally, I’m excited to get more involved in the hiring process with these new racks. It is super inspiring to look at the people who are applying and interested in what we’re doing, and to meet them, and talk to them, and just hear their thoughts for how they can unlock the next sort of levels in the various areas of our business. So, it’s just fantastic. I’m going to be dedicating quite a bit of my time to it, and I’ve started to get ramped up in the last few days and have a few interviews today, actually. So yeah, really cool stuff and something I’m excited to take on.
And then, let’s see personally, well, yeah, I think that personally, I’m excited to be hitting well over a year of levels and realizing that I’m just fully in sort of enmeshed in this new lifestyle where, it’s very health and wellness oriented and to have a company now, suddenly that that is just filled with amazing people pushing for the same thing. Is like pretty amazing to realize. And sometimes it’s hard to step back and like get a high level view of that, but, it’s just, it’s amazing to see everyone coming together and all the just fantastic personalities, and contributors that are now part of this thing. And, yeah, it just sounds professional, but it’s personal. Like this is so much fun and such an honor to be a part of. So, yeah, just really excited for that, Tom.
Thomas Griffin (40:16):
Personally, my brother and I have seven of our best friends up in Cape Cod this weekend. People have come from all over the country and even the world, everyone got tested once or twice prior to the weekend. So we’ve done this safely and, yeah, we’re just incredibly excited to be with each other. A lot of us haven’t seen each other for a really longtime, so we’re just having a ton of fun catching up. And then professionally, I had a number of just really amazing calls this week. A few were on that first slide, men’s health, Jim Kwik, Zack Bitter, to name just a few, there were a bunch more, and it’s just really incredible to have the opportunity to pitch both the personal vision of levels, like how it can change an individual’s life, as well as the global and societal vision of the company, and to do so with such like authenticity.
Casey and I were texting after one conversation in particular where I was just so excited after the call and reflecting on how fun it is not to just say what we said on these calls, but to really believe it with every fiber of our being. And I think that that’s a pretty rare position to be in professionally, frankly. And I’m just super grateful for it day in and day out of it.
Josh Clemente (41:43):
Okay. I don’t think Laurie is on the call, Laurie correct me if I’m wrong. Okay. We’re going to jump to Sam.
Sam Corcos (41:52):
On the personal front. I decided that it was time to leave California, so I’m in Montana, same with a friend and it’s been great. And we’ve got a couple of dogs here, which I like, I don’t usually get to hang out with dogs, so that’s been fun. And so I’ll be in Montana for awhile.
Josh Clemente (42:12):
I love it. yeah, I might be out there in Montana fairly soon as well with my dad looking at some stuff. So maybe I’ll see you there.
Sam Corcos (42:19):
Oh, cool. Yeah, I’m in a Whitefish-
Josh Clemente (42:24):
Okay. Then I will see you.
Sam Corcos (42:24):
… and I don’t know where that is, but that’s what I’ve been told it’s called.
Josh Clemente (42:26):
Yeah. That’s like Northwest, I think, probably Southwest, sweet. Nick.
Nick Krasney (42:32):
Very cool. I’m trying to imagine a good feel to fish in Montana, but I somehow can’t see that happening. Yeah, so, professionally I’ve been involved in some very interesting projects here. As some of you have heard me say many times the curse of knowledge and the curse of expertise, meaning things that are kind of second nature to us might not be so second nature to other people. So I’ve been working on a couple of projects, one to create a few versions of these general purpose, like files, so basically blurbs that we can use to communicate what we’re doing, but doesn’t require having, knowing very much about metabolic health to understand what Levels does and why it’s important. And then the second version of that, that I’ve been doing is actually related to the press. And it’s kind of interesting because in terms of how we pitch our story, after press pitches, we have evergreen content.
We have, news pegs meetings, something happens in the news, we get all over it and then we have time pegs, right? So it’s a holiday or a certain amount of time passes, or something happens. And so designing stories around that is really interesting. It does remind me of the sketch from the data carving show that’s kind of funny, that the premise was that Tom Brokaw wants to take a vacation. So he wants to try to prerecord several months of news, which creates some interesting situations of him trying to anticipate, when and how Gerald Ford will die. But, I dumped it in the chat, it’s a very funny sketch in case anybody wants to see it. So really looking forward to tightening up the level’s communication story, that much better as my last project here. On the personal front, I’ve been wanting to get a telescope for a really longtime and I’ve been back and forth on it.
And I don’t want to spend the money because I live in L.A. So I ended up buying these astronomy binoculars and I kind of figured like, okay, they’re 100 bucks, in the worst case I have a pair of binoculars. They’re really cool. I tried it for the first night time two nights ago, I was able to see Jupiter’s, moons, yesterday I was able to see the rings of Saturn. It’s not that big. So it’s easy for me to throw my bike or in a car. The only downside is I need to go pick up my tripod from my parents’ place, because if you’re looking that far out, right? Any small motion, it makes it kind of wobbly, but for 100 bucks I’ve been super impressed. And it goes nicely with the handheld microscope I told everybody about, I think on a previous Friday forum, or maybe it was the assemblage.
Anyway, super excited to get all this stuff rolled out. And, yeah, hopefully today or tonight I will have a more steady view of Jupiter and Saturn, and hopefully Mars, at some point will rise high enough for me to be able to see it over my cityscape, but yeah, all good stuff.
Josh Clemente (45:11):
Nice. Send the link to those binoculars. I’m going to need to potentially swipe those.
Nick Krasney (45:17):
Yeah. Let me get the tripod on and then I’ll send it to you right now.
Josh Clemente (45:21):
Perfect. Love it. Yeah. Down here in Strathmere, I can see Mars gets high enough by about midnight. So I need to survey from a closer perspective ASAP. Okay. So, this week Sam’s got a bad connection. I sent him a late notice that he’s up for the weekly share. So I’m going to take the hot route on this one. And we only have about four minutes here, so I’m going to discuss my experiments this week with almond butter. This is something that is a direct fallout from Casey and her Dr. Casey’s kitchen trivia that day. So during our virtual assemblage, I won this little mini-food processor here, and I bought a giant sack of whole almonds raw, because I prefer raw almond butter. And I proceeded to destroy about, I don’t know, a quarter of them by basically steaming them.
So apparently when you’re running almond butter in a food processor, you need to pulse it to keep cool. And I was just running it, for like five minutes belligerently and I saw steam rising out of it and it smelled really bad and burned and thought I destroyed the food processor. So a few rounds later, I had this very delicious, semi-chunky, cinnamony almond butter that literally is the best I’ve had yet. And it took just a little bit of experimentation. So I highly recommend giving this a shot. I’m going to move on to cashew butter next I think. And, yeah, you use less almonds than you expect you will burn out the motor in your food processor if you have one. Let the stuff cool for a few minutes in between pulses.
I think it’s about like 60 seconds on as the max, 60 seconds off. So I do a 50% duty cycle, about 10 minutes total of blending you’re going to have a really nice product there and then mix it in with my favorite whole fat, Greek yogurt and you’ll be very happy. So Casey, thank you for making my life better with these new food items I’m experimenting with. And, that’s all I’ve got prepared for the week. And is there any questions on this?
Casey Means (47:19):
That’s epic. The cinnamon was such a pro move, Josh.
Josh Clemente (47:22):
Oh man. It’s so good. Now you got to, it’s just a dusting, it does it for me. I don’t want it too cinnamony, but, yeah, that was my favorite batch, just a cinnamon guy.
Casey Means (47:32):
And you didn’t add any oil or anything. This was just straight almonds.
Josh Clemente (47:35):
Straight almonds. It looked like it was… It’s really interesting there’s a phase change. Like it’s running as flour. It looks like almond meal. And then all of a sudden it literally transforms into butter in like a second. It’s really crazy.
Evan (47:48):
Yeah. I got it.
Mike Di Donato (47:49):
Casey, do you add oil or anything? Because I have a Vitamix. I have to finally try this, so.
Casey Means (47:57):
Nope. I actually have added a little of coconut oil to some of the nut butters I’ve made and I think it might be because I’m being too impatient. I think I need to actually do Josh’s method, which is like cooling and the pulsing for 60 seconds. And then waiting for that phase change, you can sort of game the phase change by adding oil, but obviously that’s not whole food, so this is epic, I’m trying your method, Josh.
Josh Clemente (48:22):
Nice. All right. We’ll have a taste off at the next step. The next assemblage, everyone will have to bring their own sourdough starter and nut butters. Now this is what it’s like to work at levels, just accept it. Cool. Any last QA, topics for discussion, et cetera. All right. Well thank you all. Keep crushing it. And, I think we’ve got what two weeks left in August. I think we have one more Friday forum in August. So looking forward to catching up with you all next week and have a great weekend. See you.