https://youtu.be/KLlVJsbNOj8

Transcript

Josh Clemente: Okay. Welcome to March 26th. Jumping straight in. This week was pretty exciting. I think a number of reasons, which I’m going to factor into my, what I’m grateful for this week, but the community calls continued with David and Dorothy teaming on at this time. The recording is in Slack, highly recommend everyone watch that there are a lot of really powerful insights and opportunities to improve. Thank you, Ben and Dorothy for tackling needs, and then thanks to everyone else who’s going to continue contributing.

Josh Clemente: The in-app programs are almost ready for internal release or internal testing. This is going to be… David also posted something in Slack, I’m sure he’ll give more, more detail, but this is going to be really key to helping people understand where they are in the journey. And also just seeing that there is a journey, which is oftentimes if people don’t look at some of the peripheral documents we send it’s not entirely clear that there’s a path of progression. And then Dashboard V2, almost ready to go out to customers Day Score V2 UI and work, all exciting stuff.

Josh Clemente: We’ve had some really big conversations this week and the week prior with some experts in the fields of clinical and regulatory. So pictured here, Dr. Gerald Shulman from Yale, Dr. Rick Johnson at the University of Colorado and Stacy Aman who’s a former chief counsel at FDA. All of these we’re working towards potential advisory agreements with. More to come on this, but the point is we have a really nice have a nice lineup of very interested and exceptionally talented people who want to help us achieve our goals, which is key. And then we had our first analysis of subscriber trends released this week.

Josh Clemente: And I want to give Xinlu a shout out here. This is a really nice deep dive with a lot of data and a lot of powerful insights. So lots of opportunities to improve both the wellness factors for our members, but also things like churn and retention, which are more business focused. But this is one of the first deep dives that really gives us something to get our arms around in terms of how the long term use case of Levels is playing out. So I consider this like purely positive. It’s the first we’ve done and so much that we can improve on.

Josh Clemente: And then two new podcast feeds went live. So these are called Metabolic Insights and Clubhouse Sessions. And again, big shout out to Ben, he’s been pushing our audio feeds out. We have the whole new Level podcast that we’re working on. That’s still a work in progress, but getting close to our initial launch. And then yeah, these two new feeds will be… They’ll be a way of renewing our content across channels and for our audience members that maybe aren’t in Clubhouse, for example. Or taking out chunks from our IG Live conversations, which can oftentimes just be segregated into the IG channel and pushing those across audio where they can be found by others. So really excited for this and to continue broadcasting our message on new channels.

Josh Clemente: And then a strong week for press and exposure. So Casey did a great IG Live with Dr. Kerry Jones. We’ve, I mean, LIFE ITSELF conference with Sanjay Gupta. I think Casey, you’re a speaker now officially for that conference, which is going to be huge. That’s in partnership with CNN and then Clubhouses and traditional print. It was a great week. Lots of interviews have shipped. And then Sam did a nice remote culture. I think it was the first part of four with folks from GitLab. So this is talking about how to build a remote first company. And I think I’ll let Sam speak to it, but I think there were a lot of opportunities to pause and reflect on what we’re doing and potentially make some improvements.

Josh Clemente: I want to point out a few other interesting things this week. So Gabe Mendoza is… I want to give him a quick shout out, really a power user. He’s all over the Facebook group and providing really nice detailed breakdowns for our members. He’s taken a community activist role and has been in on some of our community calls and just been a really positive and supportive member. So I want to give him a quick shout out. I had a nice conversation with Kanil, who goes by Nerdabetic on his YouTube channel, very supportive. He is the leading CGM researcher in the T1 space, so just staying up to speed on CGM trends. Great conversation there. We’ve got a lot of support across communities. People want to help us. And so it’s a really nice week for that.

Josh Clemente: And I think that’s it. Some nice quotes from our members here “Levels is a game changer.” Okay. Quick culture kudos here. So I want to highlight David and Miz and Stacy, they took full weeks off this week. I’m sure they cheated and checked their email once or twice, but in general, I just want to highlight this as a really nice example of people checking out, setting up their work so that everyone knows where they’re going and then just tuning out and turning things off. I was able to catch up with David and Stacie, and it sounds like it was a nice relaxing, recharging trip. I hope the same for Miz. The Flinners went to Jamaica. Miz went to Sonoma, so I grabbed a stock photo there because he didn’t have any. But yeah, excited to see people relaxing and decompressing. All right. Over to David.

David Flinner: Yeah. Thanks Josh. I am just ramping back up. So a little bit lighter on my update this week. But even in my absence, there was a lot of awesome work that was done across the product development team. So Dashboard V2, we think we have most of the… Well, all of the gating blockers done to push a release to our members. It’s a big update. There’s a lot left to be done, but it’s a big change that’s opening up a new canvas for us to iterate and have a lot more features. So I’m excited to get this out there, get some feedback and then continually start adding more and more value here like in app reports. This is the primary surface for our education journey, and personalized insights will be starting to show up here. So thank you all for testing it. I know the full, there are some remaining UX minor issues that I think we need to keep iterating on, but all of the main things are out there. So we really value getting member feedback. So I’d love to get this out and get the feedback as soon as possible. Next slide.

David Flinner: So related Xinlu has over the last few months, we’ve been working on the backend for Day Square V2, and this week Jhon started working on the front end for that. And what you see here is just some in progress of concepts for it. We’re going to be going back and forth a bit after he gets back from his vacation on what would optimal UI experience for this be like. With the new Day Score, we want to help people understand. We want it to be much more explainable. So you understand why did I get this score? What components actually drove this and where are my opportunities to improve? And then also connecting it back with education. Like, what is variability? Why is it important? And then what zones may have been associated with areas of increased variability or increased stability? So you can see another way to close the loop on how your activities affect your behavior. So yeah. Take a look at this one. See if you like it. There’s a lot of cool stuff that I think we can work on with it, but very early days.

David Flinner: Next step. And then Gabriel is going to be starting working on a sleep details page. So this is there’s a… The next version of our sleep efforts are going to be around letting you add and edit a sleep log and then having effectively the equivalent of a zone details page, but for sleep. So right now we annotate the graph with your wake up and your sleep. When we have a zone, the sleep details page, you can tap that icon and then click learn more. And then we’ll show you a few metrics that are related to the sleep. And then a chart that shows you the entire duration of your sleep. Right now, that’s a problem because we chunk our charts from midnight to midnight. So you can’t really see an entire sleep usually.

David Flinner: This will also be something that we can slot into the forthcoming in-app daily reports that will show up on the home feed. So you wake up say, good morning, Miz, it’s, a great day for you. Tap here to see your morning review. You can see how your night went, see what’s up for today, things like that. So next slide. So there’s a lot of other work going on. That’s all that I had prepared to highlight here, but I know we’ll probably hear more from Miz iterating with Jeremy on subscriptions, continually great work there. As Josh mentioned, there’s a really good subscriber’s analysis from Xinlu that you should take a look at. I didn’t include any more screenshots of the programs or lessons because it hasn’t changed since last week, but we’re getting very close to pushing that out. The Levels lessons feature is code complete. We’re working, Haney and I and Casey are working on getting some content rolled out for that. So that’s forthcoming very soon. And yeah, I think that’s about it. So back to you, Josh.

Josh Clemente: All right. Thank you, David. And thank you everyone mentioned here for the work this week. Quick hiring update showing week over week, our new workable reports here. So lots of intro calls happening, lots of applications coming in. One update, we’re working on a role design for head of clinical research. So this is not yet ready to launch, but we’re gathering the information we need to make this a very successful search. And then we still are always keeping our eyes open for software developers and general counsel is still open. Okay. Mike D.

Mike Didonato: Thanks Josh. So for this week theme, really want to highlight, we’ve heard this before, that need for more guidance and it breaks down into two primary pieces. It’s, how do I move through the experience? What do I do with it? What feature should I be using? And then also, once I do get the info, what do I do with it? So I think it’s a little bit of that, so what versus now what conversation that we’ve had in the past. And I think we all know that it won’t be fixed with the one thing in particular. Definitely excited to see the Dashboard V2, Day Score V2 and programs come to life. But then also I think the information that we’re getting from the community calls will be really valuable as well. And then that’s really all. Quick update, I know we spoke about, I think it was a couple weeks ago, I highlighted our theme tracker on the forum. I am finishing up a draft of the memo that I’m be circulated to a smaller group within the team. And then I’ll hopefully roll it out to everyone towards the end of next week.

Josh Clemente: Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you, Mike.

Michael Mizrahi: Yes. Great. So the big news this week as it’s been for the last few weeks, but worth highlighting is that the subscriptions migration is pretty much good to go for the majority of our members. So we had a lot of members to manually move over, to create Stripe customers for, but with a lot of grunt work, we’re through it. So this is great, great news. And a lot of legwork by Jeremy, Braden, Mercy for really migrating a bunch of those over. So thanks everyone for the work here. It’s a one time effort, but great to have done.

Michael Mizrahi: We’ve also, Jeremy was able to implement alternate schedules for subscriptions. We haven’t yet rolled this out, but there are a number of customers that have preferences around how often they want to get sensors. In most cases we’ve seen that people end up with extra sensors. They like to take a week off in between their two sensors. And so they end up with a pile and then feel overwhelmed, need to pause, need to cancel. So we have the ability to ship every two months, potentially even quarterly. We haven’t rolled it out because we’re not quite sure how to message it. And just to, we want to fully understand the use case first to make sure we’re meeting it. But this is implemented and ready to go. So a little bit more digging in, and we’ll be able to turn this on.

Michael Mizrahi: The folks that haven’t been migrated are those that are edge cases for some reason. So there’s a handful of members that need UPS or FedEx. We normally ship with USPS, so those are manual changes that we have to make. And then there’s some on free plans. So all employees are still manual, we have a plan for moving those over. And then a bunch of VIPs are on all sorts of exceptions. Some only get one sensor, some have some different plans. So we’ll be moving those over in time, but for the most part we’re up and running. We have about 200 manual subscriptions and about 650, 700 on auto Stripe subscriptions.

Michael Mizrahi: One other really cool byproduct of this is that our Stripe revenue reporting per customer will now be more accurate. Previously when a subscribed, they had their 399 plan, which was one customer. And then when they subscribed, there’s another customer on the subscription plan with a, it’s the same email address, same customer, but two different customer accounts in Stripe. Moving forward, one customer in Stripe is one customer in Retool on the Levels side. So some cool things there to understand who our top spenders are and all these kinds of things, which we can still do in Retool, but nice to have that lined up.

Michael Mizrahi: Moving on from that completed consults this week at 100. We think we understand what’s going on here. So Ben and I are digging into it and Andrew will help us out. But it seems like a bunch of the Salesforce subscriptions that we pushed through last month, bumped out spots of folks, of paid signups that had scheduled consults. And so we need to move those back in. We’re still doing well on the revenue targets, but want to make sure we’re hitting the delivery targets for all the members. So this should be pretty easy to pull in and we can turn right through those in a matter of no time, so more info to come there.

Michael Mizrahi: And then finally, a new metric I wanted to bring out, just looking for interesting things to share with the team. Resolution Rate is a pretty standard support metric, single touch resolution, first touch resolution, called a bunch of different things. Basically the question here is how many of our support conversations do we solve in one touch? A customer writes out to us and we respond and resolve it and it’s done. There’s no back and forth. There’s no follow ups. We’re about 40% of our conversations are single touch resolution. This matters because every additional touch adds to our volume and the more efficient we can be, the more customers we can support without necessarily having to scale linearly.

Michael Mizrahi: So we really want to edge this up as much as we can to be really fast to respond, but also really efficient. To actually solve the problem on the first try, without requiring a lot of interaction. It’s great that we can do that interaction, but efficiency is better. So we’re going to start looking at this a little bit. We already have this in mind and the issues that take multiple touches, we know what they are. It’s when we confirm an address, it’s when we ask a follow up question. So there are things we can do to prevent against that. That’s it for now?

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you, Miz. Ben.

Ben Grynol: Okay. So we are blending growth and partnerships into one section this week. So starting off. So shout outs to Molly and Dom, they’ve been making some good connections for us on the partnerships front. So hat tip, and really appreciate all their work in doing that. As far as podcasts go, there are two podcasts coming out in the next week or so. Just Raised is one that Sam was on. It’s a business tech podcast. He’s talking about being a founder and all these cool things. And then Acquired the one with Josh is coming out in the first week of April, so look forward to those. Next slide, please.

Ben Grynol: So weekly revenue. Recognized revenue. You’ll see that the middle bar, the green bar is the one that is down and that’s exactly what Miz was talking about, so we won’t get into depth on that, but we should be, the gray bar should be roughly what the recognized revenue bar is. And gray is just cash generated. So once that is resolved, then we’ll have more insight to that. As far as monthly revenue, cash generation is really strong. We’re at $450,000. So those orders will carry over into April in the following months and we’ve hit our target at, or surpassed our target at $328,000 so far this month. Cash in the bank, 10.5, so we’re sitting well there. Next slide please.

Ben Grynol: And growth theme of the week. So audio, to carry on what Josh was saying, so this is a breakdown of what we’re doing and why. So we’ve broken out three different feeds. We’ve got an audio strategy memo that highlighted what we were thinking of, how we might want to treat some of the audio content that we’re creating. And so these feeds currently the Metabolic Insights, which is the one for our blog, the audio articles from our blog, the Clubhouse Sessions is anything that we’re doing live. And then a whole new level is the branded podcast. And so right now, two of the feeds are distributed through all major podcast platforms. So you can go and you can subscribe there and make sure you review too. Why not?

Ben Grynol: A Whole New Level will launch in mid April. That’s our plan with it. So we’re just dialing it in a little bit more. The reason why we did this is to separate out the assets. And so we thought about it and it didn’t make sense to have a feed that was one, based on education or insight, that’s everything coming from the blog. Another one that’s based on thought leadership and connection, which is the live sessions through Clubhouse. And one that’s based on storytelling. And so in order to have three distinct feeds that people knew what to expect each week, that’s why we broke them out the way that we did.

Ben Grynol: So onto the how. How are we doing this? Well, what we want to do is create a loop with all of them. So everything should have text based content and audio based content. That being anything that comes from the blog has text and audio associated with it. Any of the other two feeds, the Clubhouse Sessions and Whole New Level, we’re going to create transcripts and show notes and then link those to the website. So we’ll end up getting this loop or this viral loop of content that gets higher ranking through the indexing and domain authority and all these cool things. So that is what we’re doing on the audio front.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. All right. Mercy, social.

Mercy Clemente: All right. So this week we hit 24,000 followers on Instagram. I actually think late last night, early this morning, we’re at 24.1, so that’s exciting. Common theme that we saw on Instagram this week, a lot of people were sharing about how they reacted to asparagus, which was a very random ingredient, but I had quite a few people tag us in stories doing that. So that was interesting. Some people, Natalie over here on the right, she did worse with asparagus, or yeah, with asparagus as compared to Theresa on the far left, she did better with it. So I just thought that was interesting. Casey did an IG Live with Dr. Carrie Jones that saved to an IGTV so if anybody missed it, feel free to check it out. It was pretty interesting. Twitter we’re at 12.9 followers. Not really a common theme, just kind of all over the place, but always interesting on Twitter. We had the Clubhouse event on Tuesday this week, that was also a really interesting one to listen to. But yeah, that’s it for social.

Josh Clemente: Thank you. All right.

Casey Means: Oh, can you reload for me, Josh?

Josh Clemente: Sure.

Casey Means: Sweet. Just to follow up, going to be leaning into a little bit more IG Lives these next couple weeks, we’ve had some great offers come in and opportunities to do these. And so across all these channels here that are happening in the next couple weeks, it’s getting close to over… Well it’s over half a million followers who will see these. So it’s pretty significant. The Carrie Jones one went well. It got over 10,000 views in one day and over 350 follower bump in that hour between My Channel and Levels, Instagram channel. So pretty amazing. 63 comments in just over a day on there with people really raving about Levels. So it’s an interesting channel. And so one we’re going to into a little bit more over the next couple weeks. Next slide.

Casey Means: Our press pipeline is just hopping and crazy right now. All of these images of names of outlets are people we’re either in contact with or actively working on press pieces with and so it’s just, it’s a definitely a really exciting time for exposure, for our message and for really getting metabolic health into the zeitgeist. We had interviews with or submitted to Shape, Runners World, Wired, Women’s Health, Real Women this week. And we also a piece in the Gadgeteer that was a really favorable review of the Levels experience by the editor. This actually has a lot of readership, the Gadgeteer. So it was just a really nice detailed exploration of the person’s, the editors experience. But yeah, so over the coming weeks and months, we’ll see a lot of these press opportunities come to fruition. But yeah, big shout out to JTPR our PR firm for really helping solidify a lot of these and for Tom for pushing them forward. Next slide.

Casey Means: Just a quick note on conferences, as Josh mentioned, we’ve had some really great conversations with the LIFE ITSELF team. So this is what’s sort of poised to be the next TEDMED. It’s started by the former founder of TEDMED, Marc Hodosh, and it’s going to be hosted by Sanjay Gupta and Marc Hodosh in September in person in San Diego. We’ve had many, many conversations with the team, and this was sort of our… A conversation this week where we really solidified what was essentially a verbal agreement to move forward. Potentially have two talks at the conference, actually.

Casey Means: The idea behind this is that we would… Everyone at the conference would wear a Levels sensor and essentially that would be a centerpiece of the experience of the conference. It’s going to have some really high profile people. Anthony Fauci is speaking, David Sinclair, a number of others, head of the CDC, lots of really great people. And so the idea that they’d all be wearing Levels sensors is pretty exciting. The thought is that we do an intro talk where we actually show people how to apply sensors and give sort of the overview of metabolic health, why is it important and then do sort of a data wrap up at end of the conference. So it’s going to be covered by CNN and some really exciting work to be done there.

Casey Means: So just also I spoke at the Diabetes Essential Conference this week. Other speakers were Jason Fung, Ben Bikman, Perlmutter, a lot of our close network, Dom, Bret Scher. And then we’re doing a conference in a couple weeks called The Wellness Experience. And I just, if anyone’s more interested in learning more about sort of how we’re evaluating these opportunities and why we’re choosing specific conferences, there is a document in Notion about conference and speaking opportunity strategy that really outlines what our criteria is for participation in these conferences, opportunities or panel. But big picture, this all fits under that heading everything with press, IG Lives conferences of both being part of growth and marketing, but just big picture, this is all about continuing the movement and getting the drumbeat of metabolic health out there as much as we possibly can, making it part of the zeitgeist and getting in front of as many eyeballs as possible with this really important message. Next slide. Awesome.

Josh Clemente: All right. Thank you, Casey. Haney.

Mike Haney: Yeah. So in content this week, I want to just highlight one of the pieces that went up is a new member profile style. We’re always playing with new what we call rubrics or sort of formats ways to cover topics, and so this is a new one we’re trying for member profiles, we’re calling it Five Questions. We’ve got a couple more of these and the works, the five questions probably won’t always be the same, but it’s just a way to tell more stories in a shorter, quicker way. And we’ll continue to do the really long pieces, both the sort of thought leadership pieces, why I put the other piece this week, the processed food one, if you haven’t taken a look at that, it’s a super deep dive into processed foods. What they are, how to tell what they are, what they do to your system, how to think about them when you’re shopping. So we’ll keep kind of balancing it. But I think this is going to be a really key part of the content moving forward is just having this mix of short and long stuff for people to get into. Next slide.

Mike Haney: And then I also want to share some content milestones, some numbers that we’ve hit. So this is cumulative since the site launched. The page use for the blog, we’ve passed 500,000. Organic traffic we’ve passed, of the organic traffic we’re at 275,000 of those visits are coming to from organic. This is again, since I think January of 2020 is when this starts. For the site itself, we were over 750,000 new users in a million sessions. And the total page views for the site is actually over 2 million. And then I just called out the audio articles as well since that’s been a fun new initiative the last couple months. We’ve just hit 50 recorded. There’s about 90 articles in total. So we’re slowly working our way through the back catalog. And we have cumulatively more than 500 lessons, but last week was our first week in which we passed 500 lessons in a given week. So just some interesting stats to see where we’ve come on the content side over the life of the site. That’s it.

Josh Clemente: Nice. I love it. Nope. So here, I have a quick recommendation slide I inserted in here. Highly recommend if anyone’s listen, looking for some listening over the weekend, these two episodes of The Drive with Peter Attia, with Dr. Rick Johnson, Dr. Gerald Shulman. These are super fascinating. These are two of the doctors that we’re talking to about potential advisory roles. And so both of which take a mechanistic look at insulin resistance, but through different angles. So highly recommend that. And then tonight we have a Fourth Friday Fireside. So just a prompt for anyone that’s looking for something to do this evening, come join us and we will dig into some of the, the stuff we’re all thinking about. Okay. We’re really blasting through this week, our special guest had to delay so that leaves more time for individual contributions. J.M., you’re going to kick us off today.

Josh Mohrer: What a nightmare to have your name is first on the list. This was a really special week for me, as I got to meet a bunch of you in person in New York, that was really fun. It was a reminder of what a great ball it was for me to come join you guys. Really nice week. I’m actually headed out to Los Angeles over the weekend to spend some time with my in-laws. If you have in-laws or are aware of the concept, you might understand what I’m about to say, which is if there’s any extra work you want to send my way, feel like you need to offload something, I’m your guy for the next week. Hope everyone has a really good one and I’ll see you at Fireside.

Josh Clemente: Good luck with the trip. Gabriel.

Gabriel: Yeah, I’m really excited about new dashboard going live, props to Jhon. And personally me and Kate are going away next week, hoping to do some camping. So looking forward to that.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Picks everyone. Murillo. Murillo Nicacio De Maraes: I’m really excited about the report that came out this morning. Genius report, the super subscribers. A lot of good information there. And personally, just been feeling better lately, just the weather, my girlfriend being back and all that, it’s amazing how much stress just brings you down. Just having those things sort of solved, just been sleeping better, feeling, more active and all that, it’s been great.

Josh Clemente: Nice. Mike D.

Mike Didonato: Yeah. So on the Levels front, definitely exciting to see the opportunities that are coming our way, whether it’s the speaking engagements or the people that we’ve been targeting for a while that are open, or hopefully we’ll be joining soon, whether it’s an advisory capacity or something else. And then personally, I’ve been in L.A. for six weeks, I think, and I am heading back to the east coast on Tuesday. So I am excited to see what it’s like back east.

Josh Clemente: It’s not like when you left. Hao.

Hao Li: Yeah. I’m pretty excited about the Clubhouse Sessions we had so far. It’s a really nice touch on marketing. And also I learned… always learning new things from the conversations. And personally, I’m pretty excited to take on some masterclass over the weekend. Probably I start with stock training, just get back to playing with stocks.

Sam Corcos: The Penn and Teller magic one is really good.

Hao Li: Yeah? Oh, okay.

Josh Clemente: Huh. I haven’t looked at either of those. Yeah, give us some reviews. Dom is, I think he’s in route to Alaska right now, so not joining us. Jhon. Jhon Cruz: Yeah. On the Levels side, I am excited to get the new version of the application, getting pushed to customers. And on the personal side, I’m excited to have vacations next week. It’s going to be good to visit my parents and spend time with my family. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Enjoy that. Sam.

Sam Corcos: Yeah, I’ve got a lot of things this week. I got some time in with David in New York and we put together some ideas on ways we can better communicate the product roadmap. So I think we have two or three different concepts. So I think we’ll be hopefully presenting those to the team sometime in the next week or two, which I think will be helpful. I’m really excited about just the cadence at which we publish content just across the board, be it the podcasts or the blog. It’s like every time I look up, we have a new, meaningful piece of content, which is pretty cool. Sam Corcos: And I’m also, I got an Apple watch, which is good. I’m documenting my experience using it for the lifestyle incentive program, so hopefully we can all… Hopefully there are some takeaways from it. One of the things that’s actually super interesting about this, and I’ve heard that WHOOP maybe has something similar is there’s a separate app called research where you can opt into different research projects using the Apple Watch and similar to the activity experiment that we’re doing on a small scale right now, just within the team that J.M. is leading, I can see potential for using Levels as effectively a platform for doing these types of low touch trials that can really move the science forward in a way that’s never been possible before. So I can see a lot of potential for it. And it’s been a good learning experience.

Josh Clemente: Very cool. This week I was excited to be able to spend some time with some Levels teammates. Jetted up to New York to hang out, meet J.M., see Casey, Sam, the Flinners. The other interesting things, I’m really excited about the increased resolution of information we’re getting and also interaction with our members. So this week in particular, I highlighted this at the beginning, but just Xinlu’s analysis of the subscribers and the community calls, both of which certainly highlighted areas of major opportunity. We’re making assumptions about how things are going and it’s always better to have objective data.

Josh Clemente: So I think this is just really nice to be able to start setting up, rather than having these mental ideas of how things are running, just setting up structure to improve these and on the next round of analysis, I hope to see improvement. And if not, we’ll keep iterating. So it’s just really cool to have data around these things and also to be in conversation on the community initiatives with our members and starting to get a feel for how it feels to be using Levels as an outsider essentially. We’re all in the vibe of the company. But to be someone who’s never heard of this thing, to find it, buy it, experience it, what is that like? And there’s a lot of opportunity to improve that experience for people. Yeah. Haney. Mike Haney: On the professional side, I’m really excited about the audio articles channel launching. I feel like that’s such a great next step for this project that I really loved because it wasn’t something I thought I was going to do when I came in. This is one of these ideas that’s so Levels, getting into that. It arose through a conversation with Mike B. Then Ben had the idea of taking it into a feed. Sam had the very good idea of setting this sort of automated system for the VO artist. So I feel like it’s just, it’s such a cool example of the kinds of things that surface in this sort of a work culture and where people really have permission to take things and run with them, and so I’m really glad that that’s continuing to move forward. And on the personal side, I’m off next week headed out to Joshua Tree with the family, so that’ll be nice.

Josh Clemente: Very cool. Ben.

Ben Grynol: Yeah. So very pumped on the memo that Xinlu had put together. Just so much great insight. It was really thorough, really well written and appreciated. Having that data and that insight. The other hat tip, Casey, all the work with LIFE ITSELF it’s awesome. It’s such a big opportunity and I think it’s going to open a lot of doors for us to be put in front of that audience. So hat tip there. And then on the personal front today is Pam’s birthday and so we’re headed out to the lake, really excited to do that. That’s it.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. No email necessary. Miz.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah, I’m going to plus one on what everyone said here about the podcast, but what I think is really cool is that this is like a budding media business. We have a really great content operation on the blog. We’ve got three podcast streams. I tuned into some of the community calls that were recorded earlier this week. Really, really interesting to see the interaction there between David, Ben, Dorothy, and the member’s experiences. So I found that really just great to have on in the background and connect with members in a way that’s different from how we do the feedback calls, which was really valuable, but this is just a different format that lets them interact with one another. It felt kind of like watching the election exit survey. That guy, Frank, who does those calls. It was interesting, so enjoyed that very much.

Michael Mizrahi: Plus one also, on the subscriber feedback insights, it’s one thing for us to throw up a number that says here’s how many subscribers we have, it’s very different to understand what’s actually happening within the cohorts at different points in time. So, so love that. On the personal side, fun, active weekend plan, going for a bike ride in Murrin with a friend tomorrow for a nice long day, and then in Big Sur for the day on Sunday, seeing some friends who are driving up there. So yeah, just excited to get out.

Josh Clemente: Two beautiful places, enjoy. I think Andrew is somewhere in a moving truck right now. So hopefully things are going well for him. I don’t think he was able to join the call. Stacie.

Stacie Flinner: Just echoing everyone that was in New York. It’s always nice to spend in person time colleagues and especially nice to meet J.M. for the first time.

Josh Clemente: Mercy.

Mercy Clemente: I’m super excited about the product updates this week. That was huge. Also subscriptions of course, it’s nice that those are, I think almost all of those have been manually moved over, so that’s super exciting. And then personally, the weather is warm and sunny and my niece turns one this weekend, so my sister’s having a little tiny party for her, so it’s going to be nice to see them.

Josh Clemente: Plus one. I think Tom is in a different moving truck right now, also wasn’t able to make it so hopefully things are going well for him too. Casey.

Casey Means: Yeah. So plus one, seeing some of the team this week in New York was just so wonderful. So much to be excited about. I plus one on the audio articles. So cool, I think those are going to be just, I think people are going to love those. Be able to listen at 1.5X speed while they’re walking or running. I’m just so excited about that and getting our content distributed, this amazing content that Haney’s doing, just getting distributed to more people. So that’s, I love that. Also just was super inspired by conversations this week with Dr. Gerald Shulman and Richard Johnson. It’s just incredible that literally the top of the top of academic medicine, Yale, University of Colorado, people with 700 publications are saying things on calls like, “This is going to be game changing. This is going to change the world. This is what’s needed. We want to be a part of it.” It’s just so heartening and I think it’s going to also just accelerate our ability to learn about metabolic health through partnerships with them and help more people. So just so excited by all that.

Josh Clemente: Love it. Okay. I believe this week, Miz is going to share a story with us.

Michael Mizrahi: Sure am. I’ll take over the screen sharing Josh. Okay. And do you have me in full screen? Great. So the story this week starts with some support quote and I promise this isn’t all about work. We’ll get into some other storytelling soon, but this one’s relevant. So Mercy got this ticket this week, which said, “I just tried applying the sensor to my arm and I wasn’t successful and I evidently didn’t do it correctly.” So we get these kinds of requests often. We know that our onboarding can be tricky, and there’s a bunch of things we can do to improve on it. And so understood there’s a lot of pieces there, but this one went on and took a little turn that we weren’t expecting. The next line said, “I put the circular cloth-like patch on my arm and then pushed down on the applicator.” Okay. So we keep reading. “I now realize that the cloth patch must have been for something else. I fear I’ve ruined my CGM, please help.”

Michael Mizrahi: So always fun and present this with the utmost respect for our members. Many may not have had experience putting on a CGM before. It’s a pretty different experience if you’re not familiar with it and you don’t know what to expect. And so we’ve seen some funny things around the performance covers around mistakes that happen when they get put on, but this was certainly a first that was worth sharing and it kind of segues into today’s share. Michael Mizrahi: But before we even get to that, this story starts on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. I think I was sitting in Duboce Park having some morning coffee, checking my email, not enjoying the view, when I saw Josh’s email that he wanted me to do the weekly share this week. And I didn’t have anything ready, but was just brainstorming in the moment, and on the south side of Duboce Park is Duboce Avenue. So Duboce is this really cool little neighborhoody park in San Francisco and if you walk through, it’s just a few blocks long. There’s a dog run area, really picturesque, you get some hills behind it of Buena Vista Park. It’s awesome.

Michael Mizrahi: To the south side, there’s a street called Dubocee Avenue, which runs alongside the park and the Muni train back. When those used to run pre COVID, goes into a tunnel on the right and goes underground and comes out on the other side in a neighborhood called Cole Valley. So it’s a really convenient tunnel, but it’s just for the trains. It’s just train tracks. It’s like the aboveground subway train that then goes underground. The Muni bus equivalent of San Francisco. So Duboce Avenue goes alongside, the train is on the road and then it pulls off to the right and there’s a stop right there in the middle by those planters. And then it goes underground.

Michael Mizrahi: And you see all these do not enter signs except Muni. And you see a lot of these speed bumps or vertical control elements as they’re called in the industry. But without fail cars manage to go into that tunnel way too often. And back when trains were a thing and people were commuting on the N Judah, trains would get delayed somewhat often and it would cause this massive backup through the whole city because trains were now rerouted and diverted and they can’t go any other way because they’re on the tracks and it’s just a big mess.

Michael Mizrahi: So this happened, I was once walking by a few years ago and there’s like fire trucks and commotion. And it turns out this happens very, very often, at least a few times a year, despite the signs, despite the speed bumps. Local news is always like, “Another car goes into the tunnel.” They have to be extricated by the fire department. They have to be escorted out. So there’s YouTube videos about it. Just this like local nuance that I like to think San Francisco’s special and has these fun little stories. But turns out, a lot of cities have these stories.

Michael Mizrahi: And so the story today is called the can opener and it’s kind of a famous story about a bridge in Durham, North Carolina. And so this bridge is 11′ 8″ tall. It’s been nicknamed the can opener bridge. You can see it right there, right outside of Raleigh. Well again, in Durham, and we’re going to watch a quick video. I really hope my audio comes through. It’s about a minute and a half long. And so enjoy this video and we’ll talk on the other side.

Michael Mizrahi: So hope everyone enjoyed that. I kid you not, there are hundreds of these videos over the last 20 years. This camera got put up in 2008, by just a local neighborhood person who is just fascinated by this and it’s become this phenomena that just keeps going. And so there’s a lot of things at play here. One, this is a relatively low bridge. There’s a railroad that runs above it, which is run by the state. I think it’s a state managed railroad for cargo trains. And then below it, there’re all sorts of, I think there’s some sewer lines, some gas pipes. There’s some reason why the road can’t be lowered. And so they’ve, between the city, the county and the state, there’s just this bureaucratic mess of like, everyone’s trying to fix it, but there’re all sorts of constraints where they’ve tried a bunch of things and none of it’s really worked. This continues to happen.

Michael Mizrahi: So some of the things they’ve tried. They put this over height when flashing sign that you might have seen in a few of the videos, in a few of the clips, where when a car is approaching the lights… When a truck is approaching that’s over height, the lights flash. There’s a sensor a few blocks up that starts flashing these lights to get the attention of these drivers. They’ve put signs in the few miles approaching this bridge. They can’t reroute traffic because a lot of trucks need to make that left to get into a local industrial area to deliver a lot of things. So then they said, “Okay, we need to really stop people. When an overnight truck approaches, we installed a traffic signal that’s going to turn red and force the truck to stop. Flash the lights. They’ll absolutely see the sign and they’ll turn.”

Michael Mizrahi: And so that of course doesn’t work. And so there’s a lot of different approaches to this. I think in the end, they here on this next one, you can see that over height must turn with the red light, like the truck has to stop. And of course they go right through. So they’ve tried a lot of things. This pulls back into our instructions of we can try a lot of onboarding videos, but at the end of the day, there’s a path of least resistance or of a lot of resistance that the truck is going to go through. And it’s just human nature in terms of how you build infrastructure and how you have to design for these things earlier on to make sure that you’re accommodating for the traffic that’s coming through. So just a fun anecdote and it turns out this particular bridge is famous, but there’s some other ones too.

Michael Mizrahi: This is in Sydney where bus went into a very, very low overhead and it actually takes off the top half of the bus, which is terrifying. And the story ends in also in Australia in Melbourne where there’s a lot of tunnels through the city and a lot of big trucks that were going through these tunnels causing a ton of damage, delays, multimillion dollar fixes, potentially some injuries and deaths. And they figured out a way to at least stop most of it. And it’s a really cool, really in your face solution called a water curtain. And so one more video, I’ll show you that one and we’ll leave it there. So here’s a potential solution for this. [Video plays]

News anchor: Sydney traffic has once again ground to a halt after a truck driver ignored warning signs and almost wedged his vehicle in the Harbor Tunnel. Authorities warn it’s only a matter of time until someone is killed.

Andrew Denney: This B double had no business being here. Bob Allen: Some drivers just don’t realize what the trial of destruction they’re leaving behind them.

Andrew Denney: Too tall to enter the Harbor Tunnel, flashing lights, tell the driver to stop. Other cars do, but he keeps going. Seconds later, he ignores another warning sign. He only stops when tunnel operators activate a projected water screen over the entrance.

Bob Allen: Fortunately he managed to see that one. What could have been a simple stop and diversion if he’d actually left the scene and followed the directions turned into a 23 minute delay for most motorsists.

Andrew Denney: A stop sign, doesn’t get much more obvious than this. Tunnels across the city have been forced to install the water curtains because truck drivers are ignoring warning signs.

Bob Allen: We’ll get three or four a month, at least. The traffic lights have reduced that, but as you can see from this morning, we’re not capturing everybody.

Andrew Denney: The damage driver inattention causes is severe and can force tunnels to close for weeks. Here a driver knocked a 20 ton beam onto vehicles below.

Stuart Sinclair: It’s a pity that infrastructure that’s been built, particularly for heavy vehicles and for the road network isn’t built in consultation with the industry.

Andrew Denney: Authorities say they can’t do anymore to warn drivers of the dangers. They’re pleading with truckees to pay attention before somebody gets killed.

Bob Allen: It’s just hugely dangerous. And you don’t know what’s going through these driver’s mind.

Andrew Denney: Police have issued an infringement to the driver. Andrew Denny, 10 News.

Michael Mizrahi: And that’s it.

Josh Clemente: Love the narrative. The storyline was fun to follow.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah, there’s a fun podcast on this from 99% Visible, so I’ll drop the link in there if you want to hear the audio version.

Sam Corcos: Love the water curtain idea.

Josh Clemente: Water curtain’s brilliant.

Michael Mizrahi: We got to get that to like pop out of the box. Flash start.

Josh Clemente: Yep. If your sensor is not synced the patch backing doesn’t come off.

Sam Corcos: Can be one of those greeting cards that pops out at you when you open it.

Josh Clemente: Oh man. Well, I love it. Way to weave the metaphor and thank you, Miz. All right, team. Well, you get eight minutes back. Welcome to the weeks where some of us take our vacations. So I’m looking forward to another short week next week and longer shares. Enjoy your time off for those of you that are taking it and have a great weekend, everybody.