Transcript
Josh Clemente (00:00):
Okay, I’m going to kick off something I’m grateful for. I am grateful for a change in the weather, it was hot and humid and brutal for a long time and it has been 60s and just perfect. If you know me, you know that I run hot, so the heat and humidity is my absolute nemesis and I’m feeling really good about this. Although, that is not to say that I like shorter days and winter, it’s just that the qualitative experience is better right now.
Josh Clemente (00:28):
Okay, so kicking off for the recent achievements this week, the big conversation obviously topic amongst the company right now is the ongoing fundraise and things are really coming together amazingly well. Sam is able to join us by the time we get to his slides, he can give a little more detail there. But sufficed to say we have the attention of some of the top firms out there and we are getting really impressive term sheets, so we have several offers and it’s all very good stuff, nothing that should be predicted or assumed as a guarantee so we’re in the very top percentile of companies and it’s a good place to be. So, I’m excited about that. I can give some more detail as well in a minute.
Josh Clemente (01:13):
Recruitment is underway for an initial study that we have an opportunity to incorporate levels into so Dom, to his credit, is moving super fast and just getting us connected with a ton of potential pilot programs that we can jump into. One of these is a metabolic study with Dr. Alison Hall and they have a 12 week metabolic observation program that we can potentially slot some levels into, it’s going to be awesome. Once we get this fly wheel spinning, I think it’s going to lead to some really amazing stuff and what we’ve seen with Whoop is that they are out there and in the mainstream right now because there are so many interesting ways in which they’re using their data in sort of a semi clinical fashion to show how powerful HRV is and I think we will be leveraging something very similar here shortly.
Josh Clemente (01:58):
First automated fill requests have been tested, so huge shout out to Andrew for pushing this forward, this is a key criteria for us to be able to up level our operational throughput. Moving fill requests through right now is super manual, as you all know, and going automated is going to really alleviate us. There’s been some technical development required, so we’re very close. I’ll let Andrew speak to that when we get to the end stuff, if necessary. On that topic focusing on enhancing our throughput, specifically through the EHR, the Electronic Health Record which is used for the patient physician consultations, and we have some big promotions coming October with Bulletproof and Ben Greenfield both of whom you can see on this slide rocking levels, so this is coming soon. Please don’t distribute these photos just yet, this is going to be a big announcement for them and to their audience, but we need to be ready for a large influx in orders and we need to clear our standby list before that. Big focus in the next few weeks is going to be nailing down throughput and ensuring that we can move those orders through fast.
Josh Clemente (03:06):
A few things that launched this week in the app, the insight cards framework and in-app challenges both moved out this week. Thanks to the eng team and David for pushing these so hard and I can’t wait to continue building on them. The wait list reached 32 500, so this is roughly 290 sign ups per day, again, without a marketing budget. I actively interviewing some great candidates who can help us understand our growth channels and continue to maximize this but it’s just impressive to always look at this growth and realize that this is organic, this is word of mouth, this is traction coming through social and elsewhere and it’s just amazing to watch happen but we need to obviously maximize it and we’ll continue to see even steeper rates of growth there, I think.
Josh Clemente (03:51):
On the hardware topis, we’ve been spending some time in strategy on next-gen hardware manufacturers. We’ve had some great conversations this week with four next-gen hardware manufacturers, I guess that’s over the last eight or nine days. Some really amazing stuff coming this way, there’s a ton of attention on the hardware side and there’s going to be awesome competition basically driving in the direction that we needed, which is increasing availability and affordability of sensor systems that can measure glucose but also additional analytes, so I’m super excited about the stuff we’ve been chatting about. And then obviously I just want to touch on a big week for personalized health and wellness. Apple announced some Fitness Plus products and also just generally their focusing more and more on health and wellness, of course. It’s amazing to see the attention that big players are putting on this.
Josh Clemente (04:38):
Some other stuff in the slides here. We’re getting some great user generated content, as usual, we have some good conversations ongoing with everything from Crossfit to Whoop, Zero, TedMed, Men’s Health, this is all stuff that’s coming through in real time right now. And, to highlight some of what’s happening out there, Peter Attia I think we all know him, he’s sort of a legend in CGM right now, one of the most forward thinking doctors on it. He’s aware of us, thinks we’re really cool and that really makes me feel good, that’s a blessing I like to hear, so awesome stuff there. And then, we’ve been in great conversation with A16Z and during one of the update calls we had with them, they said “Seems like you’ve made a hundred years of progress since we last spoke” and I think that really speaks to the effectiveness of this team, and to blow away an organization like them is something we should all be proud of. I won’t read everything that’s on this page, but just a really awesome week and keep in mind, this is just one week, so congratulations to everybody.
Josh Clemente (05:47):
Over to welcoming Miz. Miz, if you want to jump in and say a few words, I won’t read through your slide, if you’d like to.
Mike Mizrahi (05:54):
Sure, [inaudible 00:05:55] pretty quickly, but just want to say hello to everyone officially on the forum. Met a handful of you through one on ones this week but looking forward to rounding up the rest of the team in the next few days and early next week. It’s been an awesome week, it flew by, plenty to absorb and to get up to speed on but I’ve loved everything I’ve seen so far. Some details, I’m from Brooklyn, San Francisco in 2014 and though there’s a big exodus I’m still here for now. Came from Uber, was there for just about five and a half, six years, from early stages, a start up scrappy phase that felt very much like where we are now to global scale, 20 000 employees, hundreds of cities, millions of riders. So, there’s a lot of stops in between there and I’m kind of excited to see us progress through some of those stages but loved those years and learned a ton. And also have a bunch of other experiences, I’ll put some user guides together, they’re almost coming, so stay tuned for further details from some other pull outs from other experiences.
Mike Mizrahi (06:54):
On the side, have a fair number of hobbies I didn’t put in here but I found the coffee Slack, huge coffee fan. I don’t home brew, I tend to enjoy coffee shops and getting around new cities by navigating to the coffee shops, generally gets you into the right neighborhoods, so huge coffee fan. I like to play polo, I ski if the weather’s good, more for the ski trips but skiing for many years. Started cycling this year which I’m really enjoying, just took a ride and seeing when to spike or not spike was exciting, so looking forward to seeing how that plays together. Until now, before I moved to San Francisco, a hike meant a walk through Central Park and I think learning that there’s an actual hiking culture has been very interesting to me, so dipping my toe into that water.
Mike Mizrahi (07:45):
Other than that, I’ll wrap it up here. Excited to meet you all, thrilled to be here, and I’m looking forward to everything ahead.
Josh Clemente (07:51):
Awesome. Is that Yosemite in the top right there?
Mike Mizrahi (07:55):
That’s Yosemite. That was Cove at Yosemite in I think late July, reservation only, pre fires. It was super nice, yeah. That second picture there is my partner Ben, he works in healthcare at Genentech, the commercial side of a drug called Ocrevus for Multiple sclerosis. So, I learn a ton about healthcare, can geek out over payers, providers, physician networks, all that kind of stuff, so that’s home conversation often. So, we’re all in healthcare now which is nice. Then yeah, that bottom photo is a polo picture which I picked up from Sam and David that play, or were playing polo this one time, so that was a fun story that I got somewhere along the way.
Josh Clemente (08:35):
Love it.
Josh Clemente (08:39):
Yeah, exactly. Everyone please, if you haven’t had a chance to chat with Miz yet, definitely make that happen and give him a warm welcome as he gets ramped up. I’m super stoked to see just the progress and attention on some of the big problems we’ve been wrestling with over the last few months and Miz is here to help. So, this is exciting and yeah, be open and reach out. Be proactive, we’re growing, I know, and it’s hard to get everybody into a conversation in week one but hopefully by end of week two, everyone’s had a chance to dig in on a call.
Josh Clemente (09:16):
All right, weekly beta trends real quick. So, we’ve moved quite a few orders this week. We had 174 shipments last week, 143 this week, 82 new orders and 170 last week, which are both very large numbers. We’re moving towards, as we ramp up into these promotions, we’re going to be accelerating those quite significantly. So, the goal is to get to 40 orders per day over the next three weeks and that is in the intention of clearing our standby list such that the new orders can be delivered for Ben Greenfield’s people and Bulletproof’s people in four weeks, so expect to see these orders and shipments increasing semi linearly over the coming days and weeks. Sam?
Sam Corcos (10:00):
Yeah, so we’re still up 2.7 in cash, we’re in a really good position, which gives us more than a year of runway. As Josh mentioned, we’re in discussion for a new round right now, we’re on track to hit our revenue goals. As I think Josh mentioned we’re planning to start accelerating this over the next couple of months, so next slide. We had two record weeks in the last two weeks, this one is a good week, it’s on track with our goals, so we’re in good shape on that front. Next slide. And we still need to finish the revenue recognition migration, but you can see that we’re on track to hit all of our numbers, so we’re in good shape.
Josh Clemente (10:51):
Nice. Any questions on fundraise, financial, biz dev?
Megha (10:56):
I have little question on this and I totally understand if there’s no answer to this but I was just curious. We’re thinking about launch and I’m kind of thinking about this in the lens of partnership and marketing, is there a goal that we’ve put out to either investors or for our own company about our sales and distribution targets for, let’s just say like Q4, Q1, Q2 of next year? Because I think that will help me better understand different marketing and partnership levers that maybe we should be using.
Sam Corcos (11:29):
Yeah, I think we’re approaching it somewhat incrementally, which is to say we’re stressing ops as much as we can without breaking everything and getting to a point where we know that we can support this many people. When we doubled our revenue from July to August, it definitely exposed a lot of cracks which is helpful but we’re still able to effectively, so it’s really just ratcheting it up as quickly as we can while still being able to do it effectively. A failure mode would be me and David need to get pulled off of what we’re doing to support something that’s happening because other things are breaking, so I think the numbers are going to be somewhat ambiguous. We’re planning our Q4 OKRs I think sometime later this month and once we’re really thought through those, we’ll have a more concise answer for that.
Josh Clemente (12:32):
Well, any other questions? All right. So, quick touch onto recruiting. These are the two main postings we have up right now. Some great conversations on Head of Content this week. We have two promising candidates that I think split evenly into a sort of editor role and a potential digital marketing role, which is great. Those are the two big areas of focus for us on content side, so continuing those conversations and hopefully bringing in some really great talent on content very soon.
Josh Clemente (13:05):
Customer engagement has been awesome this week. I’m sure everyone’s following along in social fire hose but it’s just so cool to see people unlocking these sorts of insights like “Just because it’s a plant, doesn’t mean it’s good for you”. It’s really nice that these can be taught through data rather than through the verbal advice format that it’s traditionally had to be sort of disseminated through. People are just learning in the moment and they’re embracing it, right? They’re not pushing back and saying “I don’t believe that” because it’s objective data and so we are party to this great process of education.
Josh Clemente (13:42):
And then, obviously, Instagram is also great. This week we had a really nice example from Krishna of the multi zone comparisons that launched last week and he was able to demonstrate basically two examples where, one he took a bike ride and ate pasta, and the other he ate pasta and sat down, and the third was he had a really bad night of sleep and ate the same meal. And so all three of those compared and it just perfectly stacked up and demonstrated how everything is contextual. So, it’s beautiful, the product features are moving in the direction that we hope and people are resonating with them, so great work everyone. Okay, Casey content.
Casey Means (14:22):
Yeah. So, as Josh mentioned, our hiring for Head of Content is progressing. We have one candidate who’s currently doing the technical challenges now and was really enthusiastic to work through those. We’ve got lots of thought leadership in the pipeline, so our medical advisors are getting rolling on guest posts, we’re going to have a written interview with Molly Maloof based on our Instagram live conversation. We’ve had a lot of specialists be interested in partnering with us for content, who have writing experience. So, a doctor of optometry doing some posts on eye health and glucose, a doctor of pharmacy doing a post on the different types of CGMs and sort of the science behind them and the history, and then we’ve got other great pieces. So, in sports, Kim Hildreth and Sarah Schermerhorn wrote a post for us that’s now up on the blog, so check that out. And other specialists who are writing great things. You may have seen Dr. Vimal Ramjee’s cardiovascular health post from last week, so really cool stuff and I think it’s just going to really create a lot of awesome diversity of thought in the blog.
Casey Means (15:30):
We’ve also just had some really nice guest posting opportunities, interview and media opportunities come down the pipeline. Fasting Lane, which is a book written by Jason Fung, they reached out to us to do a guest post on their website and so we’ll do a post about intermittent fasting and how CGM can help up level that process. Men’s Health reached out and is doing a post on CGM for non-diabetics and wants to use the product beforehand and include Levels in that. And then we also have a call scheduled for today with Marc Hodash who’s the founder of TedMed.
Casey Means (16:02):
Lot of social media initiatives really ramping up this week. Big thanks to Mega, and Mercy and Stacey. We’re going to have increased cadence and increased variety of posting and the strategy laid out by Mega is really amazing. We’re going to have a lot of great stuff coming down the pipeline. Yeah, next slide. More progress on the podcast front, we’re just keeping that train moving. Big shout out to Tom for keeping these wheels turning. So, this week we have two released, one recorded and six secured. Wellpower was recorded and Rest and Recovery and the Founder were released.
Casey Means (16:43):
We’ve also just been noticing that our sources of leads is becoming more and more diverse. We’ve got Lemon not Pie bringing in some podcasts. We’ve had about, I believe, three confirmed by them. And then we’ve got, of course, more inbound coming. It’s getting easier and easier to get these cool outreach secured and also for people to be reaching out to us for podcast and then our Stand Together and Edelmen PR connection is also helping us. So, it’s just firing on a lot more cylinders and I think we’re just going to see this continue to compound.
Casey Means (17:20):
Also had a call secured with Dhru Purohit who’s the host of Broken Brain podcast. This is a top tier one podcast, has about 2000 iTunes ratings and this is an offshoot of Mark Hyman’s doctor pharmacy podcast, so it kind of gets us into that Marc Hyman network as well. It’s interesting because I’ve been reaching out to him now for months and just recently things shifted a little bit where all of a sudden he was very, very enthusiastic to schedule a call and we’ve exchanged about three or four emails in the past couple of days, which just sort of shows how the buzz is starting to build.
Casey Means (17:55):
On other fronts, not on this slide, but research efforts like Josh mentioned are really moving along. Dan McCaffery is really taking so much ownership of this, I’m very grateful for his work over the past month, really starting to manage these relationships. So, exciting opportunities on the Dom D’Agostino and Ben Vickman front. And then, from the advisory standpoint, we had a great call with David Perlmutter last night, author of Grain Brain and Brainwash, and a neurologist focused on metabolic health. He is very interested in potentially joining the medical advisory board. And we got connected with Rhonda Patrick who is just an absolute legend and she is going to be trying our product and wrote a very enthusiastic email about Levels, basically saying, it was all caps, “Wow, this is going to be really big”. So, lots of exciting stuff on the advisory standpoint. So, that’s it from me.
Josh Clemente (18:55):
Awesome. Yeah, Rhonda is up there with the Doms, the Peter Attias, the Kevin Roses, she runs in that circle. She’s on their shows all the time and she has her own great show called Found my Fitness and we’re excited to be able to get her into our early demo there, it’s going to be huge. Awesome, thanks Casey. Mike?
Mike (19:14):
Can you hit refresh, Josh? Also, her Twitter’s pretty awesome, she has some great Tweets. So, another great week. A lot of excitement and engagement. On the right is a screenshot of a conversation that I had with Kristen from Whoop. She was was messaging me and she sent a screenshot of her Whoop recovery data and then her Levels metabolic score for the week and it was just super interesting that it was directly aligned and I think she went ahead and posted on social, so that was great. And then she went ahead and introduced me to some interesting folks, so I was very grateful for that.
Mike (19:58):
Three things I’d like to call out from the week. We saw kind of consistently come in from customers was questions or confusion about the consultation process. The other would be questions or confusion about exercise and “My glucose fight and then I saw that it negatively impacted my metabolic score”, and then the third one would be around low levels, specifically over night. The good thing is, I know cards will hopefully solve most of that. I know we have the strenuous inside card that I believe gets pushed after day one and I think we have a card for sleep and night levels towards the end of the first week. Only one that I think theoretic the consultation question and maybe we can solve that with some kind of standby communication or update on that end, but outside of that…
Mike (20:56):
I’m not quite sure if you can read the screenshot that I posted that came inbound via SMS text, but the customer was super excited and is just really excited about what we’re doing and she’s only a few days in. So, it’s pretty awesome.
Josh Clemente (21:11):
Yeah to specifically quote there “This might be the most informative dietary metabolic education I’ve ever had and I’m well read and a medical professional”. So we have heard this same line several times, in fact one of the hardware manufacturers we’re working with, he’s in his last year of medical school and he said one podcast that he listened to from our team educated him more on the real world application of metabolic concepts than in all of medical school and he’s currently about to graduate. So that’s key. Let’s just put the rubber hitting the road. I do want to note on the strenuous exercise thing, there’s also increasing the integration with Apple health kit and being able to bring in more wearable data coming soon. I know John is working on this but being able to bring in walks and also heart rate information is going to help automatically flag strenuous exercise. So I know David you’ve also architected some good wire frames for this, so that’s going to really help remove the onus on the individual to select when strenuous exercise happened.\
Josh Clemente (22:14):
Any questions on weekly feedback and or the podcast and content stuff?
Mike (22:20):
One quick follow up, Josh. I know not everyone can read all of the meeting notes that I put out but there is a really interesting conversation I had with someone, his name was Martin, on a debrief call yesterday [inaudible 00:22:30] everybody give that a quick read. It was an interesting perspective and some really good feedback.
Josh Clemente (22:37):
Yeah, that’s a great point. I think Martin’s from the Bulletproof team, so he gave very thoughtful feedback. Maybe surface that one in the general thread after this on Slack so everyone can read through.
Casey Means (22:49):
I’ll say, I can’t wait until Levels is taught in medical school as clinical modality and in fact, Molly does teach a class on longevity at Stanford Medical School and so we may be mentioned this year so that would be pretty cool.
Josh Clemente (23:08):
Yeah that’s a great point. Dr. David Agus was also pushing us in that same direction. He’s like, there’s all these abstract concepts like milligrams per deciliter in blood concentrations and things, he’s like what people need to care about is metabolic scores and trends in those, and he wants people to walk into their doctor’s office and tell the doctor “My metabolic score this week is 54 no matter what I do” and that is what should be the indicator of a problem and I love thinking about that.
Casey Means (23:32):
Actually, I’ll also mention Dom D’Agastino gave grand rounds for University of South Florida this past week and he mentioned Levels, so it is being shared in those communities and the academic department. It’s great to see.
Josh Clemente (23:45):
Love it.
Megha (23:46):
One other quick comment on the customer success. Part of our Instagram social media strategy is to feature some of these quotes and testimonials. I’ve been going through as many docs and Twitter feeds and social fire hose on Slack but if there’s anything that really jumps out at you, feel free to DM it to me or just email me so I don’t miss it. We have so much to go through and you guys are kind of the eyes and ears, so just send it over if you see anything that’s especially worth elevating in social media.
Josh Clemente (24:17):
Good point. Yeah, thank you.
Mike (24:21):
So many great quotes to pull from.
Josh Clemente (24:23):
All right, David, over to you.
David Flinner (24:26):
Yeah and on the product and engineering side, so much great work going on across the whole team. I’m sure excited about the stuff that just launched and underway. So I’ll start with the things that launched, as Josh said, we finally got the cards framework out the door a couple of days ago, which was fantastic. This is the foundation for all of the proactive insights and value add on top of the [inaudible 00:24:47]. So starting with the education and program cards, we’re not stopping there. You’ll see a demo on like the right hand side of event detection, one of our first movers onto other value adds that are less program based more event based. We automatically detect something that you may want to know about to help close loop and surfacing it back to you. So, great work Xinlu and Jhon on the cards framework.
David Flinner (25:13):
We also have the initial version of the in-app challenges, fully launched, that you saw last week. Andrew, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we kept testing the production version of the automated fill requests, I think we’re more launched on that one this week than we were the previous week.
Andrew (25:30):
Yes, yeah.
David Flinner (25:31):
Yeah, so woo hoo. Sorry, bear with me, there’s a lot of launches and progress excellence going on here. Next we have, John released a update to our daily email which is removing zones with strenuous exercise from the daily email, from the scores. So a long time ago we, as Josh mentioned, we had support for strenuous exercise and masking out the zone scores so that you don’t get negatively effected but that daily email never had that built into it. Now, I think, all surfaces are consistent with removing strenuous exercise scores.
David Flinner (26:08):
Another small tweak that I’m really excited about is that Mario launched the metabolic score in our calendar picker. For a long time we’ve had the metabolic day score represented as colored circles in the day slider across the top of the dashboard and now if you want to give even more context for how you’re doing across an entire month or even more than one month, you can open up the calendar picker and see all of the colored circles there as well. That’s really great for at a glance, you can see how you’re trending and you can think of it as one of the first steps that’s more geared towards people who are going beyond a single month program as well. So it’s really helpful for your one month program but if you’re a multi month user, like internal staff we are, you can see how you’ve been trending month over month which is really nice.
David Flinner (26:55):
Let’s see. Next after that, you’ll also see there’s some indications for streaks on the graph, so we’re going to start annotating the calendar picker and having new cards showing motivational progress for people who are in optimizing mode, how long can you actually stay in the green and string together continuous days of metabolically fit efforts. So, in progress, we’re just about ready to start internal testing for the Dawn Effects card. Evan’s pushing out some code to let the team test that, hopefully today or maybe Monday. The program tracking and persisting of zones, two really critical back end projects, are wrapping up fairly shortly from now and that’s going to unlock a lot of other features like searching [inaudible 00:27:46] zones, making sure we have consistent and accurate program state whether you’re active or paused.
David Flinner (27:52):
Let’s see. Has Josh mentioned? Jhon started working on pulling in heart rate and sleep data from Health kit and Google fit, which is super exciting. The next layer of non-glucose information that we can pull in and start to provide other insights off of that. The first one being automatically flagging strenuous exercise so you know what’s happening and you know that that glucose spike is different from a food related spike. But it goes beyond that, we’ll be able to have really interesting insight cards around to flagging users “Hey, it looks like your sleep was worse yesterday than the day before and that same meal that you copied, it looks like there’s a difference here”, kind of automatically what Krishna surfaced that Josh mentioned earlier.
David Flinner (28:32):
And then the next big feature that will be coming out is the event detection that Gabriel’s working on and that’s down there by the right. Apparently there’s one other picture here which is in our daily report, which I’m just starting to think through. There’s some early mocks put into Slack product channels, so you can take a look at those but we want to pull the daily report in-app and then provide more direction and more insights and really have it be oriented around three things. How did I do yesterday? How did I do overnight? And what should I think about looking forward today? So, it’s a different surface area where we can provide slightly different information that’s also value additive, particularly about how did I do overnight, which our current dashboard doesn’t give you that full view because it splits it off at midnight. Any questions on what’s been going on or things I missed?
Sam Corcos (29:29):
Man, that’s a lot.
Josh Clemente (29:31):
Such exciting initiatives too. It’s like I can’t figure out which one I’m most excited about. To touch on just specifically event detection, for example Mike you brought up the feedback we got from the Bulletproof team, and this was one of the primary ones. As easy as we make logging, many people are just so confident in their habits, when they see a little bit of data, they decide “Okay, I don’t need to log anymore” but event detection is where we can surface the lowest hanging fruit. So if you’re the type of person that just isn’t going to make time for logging, we can surface those really important events proactively so that you can just… it’s the 80 20 solution for people to realize what is causing problems for them and what’s driving their metabolic score. That one in particular I think just like direct close loop feedback with what we’ve received from customer feedback this week, is going to be helpful there. Generally I’m so stoked about all this stuff.
Josh Clemente (30:32):
Okay, any other questions? Sorry to jump in there with a ramble. Great. Awesome work this week everybody. Okay, onto individual contributions. Sam, I’m going to kick off with you.
Sam Corcos (30:45):
Oh man. I didn’t have anything prepared. I think the one that I’m most excited about was actually similar to what Casey said, which is how quickly things seem to have gone from us aggressively reaching out to people and them ignoring us, to them reaching out to us and being excited about what we’re doing and it seems like June was one of these inflection points and it seems like just in the last few weeks we’ve seen another inflection point where all of the best people are reaching out to us to get involved with us. So, that’s been really encouraging.
Josh Clemente (31:23):
Agreed. Hao.
Hao (31:27):
Yes. For the user program tracking feature, I deployed the code yesterday, just had a little bit technical difficult issues, so I’m so excited to see how it actually works after we cleared out the data base sting. Hopefully it further helps us to understand their progress in their program and automate a lot other things.
Josh Clemente (32:00):
Cool. Laurie.
Laurie (32:04):
I’m very excited about the electronic fills that are coming. Mercy’s been very helpful, she’s been great. We’ve been getting the orders filled, the replacements handled, subscriptions are caught up. Yesterday, I think I left after three or four hours, it was great. There wasn’t anything to do for a few minutes, so that 40 order a day I think we can do that if you’re talking about manual fills, we can do that. And like you Josh, gosh the weather change is a refreshment, isn’t it? It’s very nice, so hopefully the rest of the year will be a little calmer.
Josh Clemente (32:44):
Agreed. All right, Tom.
Tom (32:49):
So I’m excited that Levels has officially entered the Griffin family beyond my own personal use and I’m definitely like the health nerd of the family, the early adopter and they’re kind of the early majority, so it’s been nice to see that happen. The person using it is my brother’s fiance who, like a few other family members, were a little bit skeptical of the value and thought that we ate kind of healthy enough and within a few days, she’s texted me about 50 times and has some real surprising high glucose events including her standard wheat bread sandwich lunch every few days or so which put her to 195 and oatmeal which put her to 165, which is a standard record, so.
Sam Corcos (33:36):
Yeah, it’s whole wheat.
Tom (33:41):
So the rest of the family is raising their eyebrows and not everyone wants it. And again this is a population who wouldn’t necessarily be the first to buy a product like this, so it’s really exciting to watch those conversions happen first hand.
Josh Clemente (33:55):
Word of mouth. Love it. You can’t escape the evidence. Miz.
Mike Mizrahi (34:02):
Yeah. I’m just excited to get started. I think I’m starting to wrap my hands around things and understand what’s going on. Had a few good hours yesterday where I actually got to update some things, and hopefully I didn’t make too much of a mess, Mercy and Mike in front, but just organizing and doing some spring cleaning there and it felt really good. On the personal side, excited to have my sensor on, we have fresh air which can’t be overstated and so, just excited to breathe fresh air this weekend and get outside a little bit. Our neighborhood shuts down, we did like a shared streets for COVID, where a bunch of the restaurants can put out tables and so I signed up for my volunteering slot of civic duty to man a barricade with cones in case any androids come through. So we have three hours of standing on the street but helping the neighborhood. I’m looking forward to [inaudible 00:34:55].
Josh Clemente (34:56):
Yeah, awesome. Megha.
Megha (35:00):
I am really excited about… this is going to sound geeky and probably like a year behind all of you, but I’ve been listening to so many podcasts featuring Josh and Casey over the past week. Some of them multiple times, like over and over again and I’ll rewind them and I’ll write down things like [inaudible 00:35:17] in aisle six and I’ll go home and look it up on Google and Wikipedia and I’m so insanely passionate and excited about learning. To the point where I’m like “Gosh I wish I studied up in genetics and nutrigenomics in college, so I’ve just been so excited to learn. And there’s just something that wakes up this passion and mission inside of me and then I go and tell all my friends and my parents and my sister, and they probably are like “Shut up”. The science is so fascinating, it makes me that more excited to just dig in and do everything we can, so short story, I’m really excited to listen to even more podcasts featuring Josh and Casey multiple times. It just makes me really, really excited.
Josh Clemente (36:04):
That’s awesome. Thank you.
Casey Means (36:05):
Thank you.
Josh Clemente (36:09):
Glad there’s utility there. So thanks. Jhon.
Jhon (36:14):
I continue making progress on the hardware data import. It should be ready for internal testing in a couple days. So, that’s exciting. I know we have been waiting for this for a long time. And personally, tomorrow we are going to have a horseback riding tour with my son. I’m not a big fan of horses but my son loves them and I’m going with him.
Josh Clemente (36:39):
He’s going to be a polo player in no time. I think Miz is going to have to there and coach him.
Jhon (36:45):
Hopefully, yeah.
Josh Clemente (36:46):
Nice. Gabriel.
Gabriel (36:50):
Yes, personally, I just found out a friend is lending us their car this weekend so hopefully we’ll have some hiking opportunities that we didn’t have a few hours ago, so looking forward to that.
Josh Clemente (37:00):
Nice. Mercy.
Mercy (37:06):
Yeah the weather’s changing, which is nice. It’s not as humid out, I appreciate that. Then personally, I’m going to go up and I’m going to see my niece, going to watch her [inaudible 00:37:15] tomorrow, so I’m excited to see her.
Josh Clemente (37:19):
Yeah. This week was pretty crazy for two reasons. I remember when I first got a chance to meet Dom D’Agastino, basically I just saw an email about the crossfit health conference in 2019. This is when Sam and I were just like… literally the week when Sam and I were incorporating Levels, and saw this email, I was like “Oh, that’s interesting I should go to that”, got on a plane, flew there, turns out Dom D’Agastino was presenting. I just walked up to him, started talking to him about it, he was in a rush and gave me his card, he was interested. And then reached out to him, I guess two months ago, and now Dom is literally an ambassador for us and is talking to Peter Attia about us and is connecting us with Julie Foucher and has Rhonda Patrick just stoked about what we’re doing.
Josh Clemente (38:13):
And that transition for someone that I personally respect and loved his work for such a long time, I’m personally fan boy’ing big time there, and also it’s just so cool to see people that are at the forefront of this industry just absorbing Levels and just saying “Thank God somebody’s doing this because I don’t have time to do it, somebody has to though”. It was just a really cool week to see he reached out for us and is continuing to just lobby so hard and I think we’re building a serious movement with… As Eric Rose said, who’s the CEO of Crossfit with some legends, so that was fun.
Josh Clemente (38:48):
All right. Mike.
Mike (38:52):
Yeah, I’ll plus one to what Sam said about people even contacting us, even personally. In the last week four people just trying to get in contact with Beck and Marge and after sending them gently bumping this thread four times and I gave up. More recently this week, one of them jumped on my calendar and a few followed up, so it’s pretty cool just to see that. The other thing is definitely Miz, super excited to have you on the team. We had some awesome conversations this week and you’ve already jumped in and made a lot of things more efficient, so definitely excited to see what happens over the next few months. And I think I’ve said this the last couple weeks, but just product and engineering, the projects, David’s page just continues to get longer and more full and continues to move and move and move and it’s just exciting. The insights framework is just awesome, so super pumped.
Josh Clemente (39:50):
Nice. Casey.
Casey Means (39:53):
Yeah, so much to be excited about this week. I’m so excited about Miz joining, welcome. It was so great to chat with you this week. Also, just echoing what Mike and Josh said, super amped about the people who are interested in this. It’s crazy that two of the people who have been most influential in getting me excited about metabolic health and really have been influential in my career, which is Rhonda Patrick and Sarah Godfried. Sarah’s in the program using it actively and Rhonda’s going to be next month, so it’s hard to believe. I’m totally fan girl’ing as well. So that’s exciting. I would say another thing, I got Superhuman, the email platform about three weeks ago and I am down from 22 000 emails in my inbox to 40 emails in my inbox and I never thought that this would ever happen in my entire life and I am so excited. Big plug for Superhuman for people who aren’t using it yet. Email is the bane of my existence, I’m bad at it and I think this is going to be a life long game changer.
Casey Means (40:57):
Lastly, personally, I escaped Oregon last week on Sunday morning because of the wildfires and went to my partner’s house, family’s house, in Northern Pennsylvania and it’s starting to turn fall’ish here and it’s so spectacular. It was like 35 degrees last night and I’m loving it. It feels so beautiful and East Coasty and I hope we get to get out and take some walks this weekend.
Josh Clemente (41:20):
Nice. Hey, Sam, do we get a discount on Superhuman given they’re investors?
Sam Corcos (41:27):
I can check with Rahul.
Josh Clemente (41:28):
Let’s make that happen. All right. Evan.
Evan (41:32):
Yeah, I’m really glad to be going home. I too escaped California for the wildfires because you can’t breathe in all the smoke and now I’m going to go home and it’s going to be nice because there I have my own stuff and fast internet and my routines and the ability to walk outside without melting in 100 degree heat. I’m in Las Vegas right now.
Josh Clemente (41:53):
Nice. All right. Thanks everybody. So we’re onto story of the day, which is Hao. Hao, do you want me to switch over to your screen?
Hao (42:05):
Yeah I’ll do the sharing.
Josh Clemente (42:07):
Cool. I will stop here.
Josh Clemente (42:11):
(silence) Sweet.
Hao (42:32):
You guys all can see my browser, right?
Josh Clemente (42:35):
Yep.
Hao (42:36):
Cool. Right, so yeah. I just want to gave a small, tiny talk about my journey from being obese to actually obsessed with metabolic health and sort of changed my life and physical appearance, as in lose a lot of weight. It all start from really a normal every day life for normal humans nowadays, you’re eating a lot junk food. And all the food around you are like super, ultra processed and combined with starch, carbs and oil, which obviously after I learned so much about the insulin and the insulin resistance the worst combination you can find and unfortunately for Chinese cuisines, I think most of them fall in that category.
Hao (43:40):
I just listed three pictures for my favorite dishes from Chinese cooking. The far left is sweet sour pork, it’s not the same as the one you see from like Cantonese style, it’s more like Northern style but they are the same. They are a lot sugar in there and the meat and the oil, so it really contribute to how I get really large from very early. And also, the pastries in China also falls in that category because they make oily scallion pancake which basically the flour and oil sort of deep fried and it’s really yummy but really bad if you’re eating a lot of them. And also noodles with meat sauce, which is another worse combination of starch and oil.
Hao (44:55):
And thanks to all the fast food, it also did quite a bit contribution to my issue. I call this bio hacking as well because I feel like it’s not normal, it’s sort of hacking your normal body and the only thing is, it’s the wrong way to bio hacking. It just make your health worse. So, after so many multiple decades of this delicious but lethal food, I just developed a lot like normal obese people’s issue like hypertension, over weight and I think I also had a really bad mental clearness for fatigue sometimes randomly and I think that they all caused by long term metabolic disorder I had.
Hao (46:02):
So, I think the awakeness call came from the last visit to my family doctor and it’s a new doctor I met and my first family doctor actually. He didn’t really go through too many history of mine, ask too many questions but just did a test and my blood pressure’s pretty high. So he just started prescribing me with blood pressure pills, which makes me really nervous because first I don’t believe in pills and second, I’ve been having high blood pressure issues since very young and I don’t really experience any severe illness but I understand that’s a way to fix it or try to fix it. But I just don’t have the gut feeling like it’s the right way to fix it. So I start gathering a lot information, keep learning around how can I first, of course, lose my weight, and then I came up with ketogenic diet because at the time it was a pretty popular topic, I think it was back in 2018, I think it’s still hot.
Hao (47:29):
So just like everybody else, just browsing the websites, browsing the internet and try find a more useful information, so I visit those two Reddit communities a lot. Well, who wouldn’t trust random people posting random thoughts on Reddit, right? But joking aside, actually those communities kind of helpful it’s really encourage each other and providing relatively valuable information on the science side. They post a lot of papers and studies and reviews, and of course YouTube videos. I also at the time watched a lot talks from actual scientists and the doctors which definitely helped a lot for me to understand all the concept about what actually causing you to like metabolic disorder in that state.
Hao (48:39):
And I watched a lot of YouTube videos and listened to a lot podcasts from all sort of source to understand, to gather more information about keto and how to do it and what’s the right way to do it, instead of just fill up with bad oil fat stuff. And then I start my little journey. From the far left is I think a year ago from 2018, that’s how big I was. The second picture, right of it, is the day I think when I decide to start do the ketogenic diet. It was, I believe, October 14th, 2018, and I think at the pic my weight is around 255 pounds. With all the information I gathered, I start quite diet journey, so I eat mainly following all the ketogenic suggestions on a lot leafy greens, and fat of course, and fasting actually I believe is the most important part of my journey. Because I believe after all calorie intake will definitely decide on if you can control your weight.
Hao (50:17):
But I really believe in keto because it’s really the easiest way for me to actually control the calorie intake and also all the food they suggested, are the food I love. So after so many bowls of leafy greens and steak and butter and fat and eggs, we even bought half a pig. I have to do the butcher part which is kind of fun and I don’t want to do it again. It’s been fun. And then, I think after about a year, I reached my current weight which is 185 pounds and I’m still in the maintenance mode for that. I feel very much better than before from what I look and also from my mental happiness or health. That’s quite a short but really effective journey for me from obese to really obsessed with metabolic health and I just want to keep learning more.
Hao (51:40):
And then, later on I discovered Levels and became where I’m now. I really hope Levels as a concept and also tool can help a lot more people. Here you go. Any questions?
Josh Clemente (52:02):
That’s so awesome.
Sam Corcos (52:12):
I’m reminded of some of the studies, Casey probably knows the specifics better, but how sugar, we’re talking about bio hacking the wrong way, how sugar actually hijacks your brain and I’ve seen studies where it has more addictive tendencies than cocaine which is from my understanding pretty addictive.
Casey Means (52:30):
Yeah, mice that are even given the choice of sucrose or cocaine, even if they are cocaine addicted, will still choose sucrose over cocaine. Saw quite a few mouse studies that have shown things like that. It’s crazy.
Josh Clemente (52:50):
Preaching to the choir. I know that’s how I am. Hao, thank you for sharing all that. The most impressive thing is, and unfortunately just given the landscape, your physician wants to help you and they offer what they consider to be the easiest route but the easiest route is not always what people want, right? They want, in most cases, health and I think that’s where we can help with Levels, is just provide the easiest route to real health. This should be easier than taking pills. So, I love the self motivation that you show and just taking that on yourself, it’s pretty inspiring.
Hao (53:28):
Thank you.
Josh Clemente (53:30):
Well, awesome. That was a great one. I really appreciate everybody contributing both personally and professionally on these every single week and with that, I will let you all finish your Friday. Enjoy it, have a great weekend and talk soon.