#474: Josh Clemente on Improving Metabolic Health
Episode introduction
Josh Clemente is the Co-Founder of metabolic health company Levels. Josh began his professional career at SpaceX, first as a rocket scientist and then managing the team that designed astronaut life support systems, before his own health concerns led him to focus on how tech can be used to understand and improve health. In this conversation with Anthony Pompliano on The Pomp Podcast, Josh shared how he developed his obsession with metabolic health. This obsession included finding a balance between energy input and output, training for optimal metabolic fitness, and banking healthy habits for your future with the assistance of Levels’ continuous glucose monitoring biowearables.
Show Notes
Key Takeaways
5:44 – Metabolic fitness started with SpaceX astronauts
Josh recounts his background as a rocket engineer working on the astronaut life support program, which led to an obsession with biotech.
“I eventually worked on the astronaut life support program. So SpaceX was…a satellite launch provider initially, and then the big transition came when it became clear that part of the business was working and now it was time to try and take humans into space. And that was like a fundamental rewrite of the organization. Now you have human lives at stake and it’s no longer an empty shell. It’s like, got to keep them alive in there. So I was one of the earliest employees on the life support program at SpaceX and was able to work on that in partnership with NASA all the way through to the critical design review phase… I was able to work on that science and life sports stuff, and then, ultimately got obsessed with human performance and metabolism and started Levels.”
15:40 – Health is based on effective energy production
The body needs energy to function, which it gets from metabolizing food into energy. When metabolism is working well and producing energy, then the whole system is healthy.
“We don’t have anything to answer a fundamental question, which is, “Where is my energy coming from?” And, “How well is my body functioning at producing that energy?” And so this is the concept of metabolism. Essentially every tissue, every cell in the body requires energy to function and where it gets that energy is from our food and environment. So the calories we consume, the sunlight that we absorb. And this concept of metabolism is very abstract for society. But in fact, metabolic fitness, which is the efficiency with which we’re producing energy for our brains and our muscles and the rest of the tissues in our bodies, fundamentally underlies physical fitness and mental fitness.”
19:40 – Balanced inputs and outputs
There needs to be a balance of input (food) and output (exercise) to create a positive response in the body. It is possible to change your metabolic functioning by thinking about the two simultaneously.
“The question of how to measure input versus output is a tricky one. Ultimately, we need behavior change. We need to make better choices, but, it’s much easier to focus on the outputs than it is on the inputs…So you eat a meal, let’s say you have a pizza. You tap that into the Levels interface, take a picture, and then, let’s say, you sit on the couch. Levels monitors using the continuous glucose information coming from the biowearable. We monitor the way your body responded to that pizza and we then surface that to you as a score. So just a simple score out of 10 and that’s the output. But you see the input. It was a pizza, and I sat on the couch, and the output was of a negative response. My body experienced a prolonged blood sugar elevation followed by a hypoglycemic reactive crash when I was flooded with insulin. Insulin stores glucose as fat, so I gained body fat as a function of this. And then we encourage you to try something different to compare that input to a different set of inputs. So this time we maybe recommend, have that same pizza but this time take a walk around the block. So take 20, 25 minutes. Immediately after finishing that pizza, instead of sitting down, go walk around. And now you see a completely different output, which is that for many of us, the muscles in our posterior chain that are powering that walk can absorb glucose without insulin, that fat-gain hormone, as long as they’re being contracted, as long as you’re exercising them. And so now you eat that same pizza, you go for a walk and your body experiences a totally different blood sugar response and correspondingly a totally different hormone response.”
26:52 – Abundance is our downfall
Food used to be scarce and take effort to source. Now it is possible to eat abundantly with no effort whatsoever, yet our physiology has not caught up with this new abundance.
“For most of human evolution, we’ve had essentially to be on the constant lookout for food. We never knew where our next meal was coming from. We were in a constantly fasted state between meals. We now have a situation where we have an abundance and not only an abundance, but we almost have this ability with our processed food supply to short circuit the human metabolism. We can, in a single meal, get more fast acting carbohydrates than a prehistoric human would have come across an entire lifetime. And that’s not a joke…I don’t think we evolved sensory feedback for the quality of what we were eating, because every calorie was positive. It was going to keep you from dying. We don’t have the system to give us the feedback that we need. So when we eat those potato chips or we eat that candy, we are relying on very, very abstract feedback mechanisms.”
28:30 – There is no “healthy” food for all
Everybody will respond to a food differently. One person may tolerate a food with no spike in blood sugar, whereas someone else has a strong response to the same food.
“So to the question of a cookie versus a banana, which is healthier? Most people I think would answer pretty easily that the banana is healthier. In 2015, the largest study on non-diabetics with continuous glucose monitors was done. This was at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. They put 800 subjects through a week of continuous glucose monitoring and made them eat these standardized foods. At the end of the trial, they were able to show that two people could eat the exact same two foods, in this case, it was that banana and a cookie made with wheat, and they could have equal and opposite blood sugar responses to those two foods. And so one person flat on the banana. big spike for the cookie. Another person, the exact opposite. What that indicates is that they’re also experiencing opposite hormonal responses. So that insulin release that drives fat gain or ultimately is associated with insulin resistance in Type 2 diabetes, could be opposite for these two people.”
35:00 – Train metabolic fitness like physical fitness
You can train your metabolism just like any muscle in the body. With focused energy, effort, and repetition, the metabolic muscles can strengthen and lead to more freedom to enjoy indulgences.
“How well is your body producing energy? How well is it responding to the specific lifestyle choices you’re making every day? The nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress levers you’re pulling every single day combine into a metabolic profile. And so, we really want to reframe the conversation and get people to stop thinking about this as something that’s out of their hands, or like a switch is flipped, and start getting us to think in terms of focus, effort and repetition. If I know what is causing a positive and or negative response in my body, I can modify those behaviors, not just by removing it. If I love cheesecake, I don’t necessarily have to remove that if I just add a stroll afterwards, or if I just make sure that I sleep well that night, get a full eight hours. And that can help me maintain insulin sensitivity, which helps me process those indulgences.”
38:05 – Alcohol reduces blood glucose, but not in a good way
It may look like alcohol has no effect or even a reduction in blood sugar, but that does not mean alcohol is not detrimental to the metabolism.
“So for most people, the assumption is, ‘Oh, alcohol is all carbohydrates, so if I eat this while I’m wearing a glucose sensor, my blood sugar is going to skyrocket.’ The reality is that alcohol actually hijacks your liver. Your liver treats it as an emergency situation and wants to convert the ethanol in the drink into fat. That’s essentially how you can metabolize ethanol. It turns it into triglycerides, which are then stored on in body fat. In order to do that, it seems to shut down the production of new blood sugar, so what you end up with is a situation where on a glucose monitor you have a drink or two, and this varies person to person, but there will typically be either no response or an actual decrease in blood sugar, and what’s happening behind the scenes is both the alcohol and anything you’re eating at that time are being biased towards fat production and fat storage, which is probably not a great alternative to glucose production, but it is a really interesting effect.”
40:20 – Diet standards are not your standard diet
There are plenty of diet choices out there and each person will find something different works for them, however it is clear that the Standard American Diet (SAD) is not beneficial.
“Don’t eat the standard American diet, which is high carbohydrate and very high fat, including core sources of fat. I think the ketogenic diet, it’s very hard to maintain in my experience. I personally am not keto. I instead strive for a high protein, moderate fat, low carb diet. And ultimately that’s just my decision. My co-founder Casey, she’s a plant-based vegan, so she only eats plants. She doesn’t eat any meat. And she has – between the two of us, we have totally different macronutrient profile sheets – a lot more carbohydrates than I do. But she actually has better blood sugar control than me. And so that’s another counterintuitive piece where she’s using a lot of this really nuanced knowledge about how her body metabolizes specific foods and in what order. So fiber fat content along with those carbohydrates can modify the way her blood sugar responds.”
42:00 – The body has plenty of energy stored
Diet and exercise plans are typically based around energy in and energy out. But actually, the body has plenty of energy stored as fat. With interventions like intermittent fasting, you can train your body to use this stored energy.
“The reality is most of us have, the average person has about 80,000 calories of body fat stored on them and they only have about 2,000 calories of stored sugar, which is called glycogen. So you can easily burn through that 2,000 calories of glycogen in a single 90 minute workout. But you can go multiple days on the body fat stores. So training your body to using – I think mechanisms like intermittent fasting to tap into that body fat and become more acclimated to using it, I think is a really great approach. I do a lot of it myself. It helps to release you from the grasp of food scheduling as well. It’s nice to be able to do one meal instead of three sometimes.”
43:50 There’s a sweet spot for supplements
There is little need for supplements if your diet is correct, although most people could benefit from vitamin D.
“There are some supplements that probably make sense, certainly, if you know you’re going to be compromised on them. I think vitamin D is a really good one. Vitamin D is super important…I think vitamin D supplementation makes a ton of sense. Magnesium is another, I think, really important supplement that I take commonly, especially when fasting. And I tend to eat a lot of avocados and I do add bananas in here and there for potassium. Those are the ones that I’ve noticed the symptoms or side effects associated with too little of that specific vitamin or supplement. Beyond that, I tend to be skeptical. If there isn’t good research connecting a specific effect of too little, then I would argue that you’re probably just urinating most of it out because many of these supplements tend to have like 10,000 times your necessary daily value.”
48:30 – Seeing the immediate impact is game-changer
With biowearable technology like CGMs showing the result of a decision in real-time, it is easier to make healthy choices consistently.
“Most people do not want to be unhealthy, and ultimately it’s by prolonging the length of time between an action and the negative reaction to that action. By prolonging that you allow the behavior change piece to dissipate. Our memory dissolves and we lose the immediate reinforcement that happens. Whereas if you…touch a hot stove and immediately feel pain, you don’t touch hot stoves anymore. If you were to eat something and immediately feel pain, you wouldn’t eat that thing anymore. And as we mentioned, there is no sensory system for that. So by replacing in as close to the same amount of time as possible that sensory feedback with a visual or a data-driven feed piece of feedback, we can help to supplement people’s senses of positive and negative when it comes to these things like nutrition.”
52:04 – Biometric health tracking is banking for retirement
By tracking health and making changes in the present, you’re ensuring that you reach retirement and that you’re healthy enough to enjoy it.
“It’s going to be much more similar to a financial data sort of feedback model, where you you get feedback. You see your withdrawals and deposits. You see the compounding rate and direction of return on your investments. So what you’re doing each day, you see the connection to your long-term plan, that retirement trajectory that you’re on. You get expert advice if you need it. If you want to do something specific or if you just generally want someone to coach you along the way, you can have that directly and it’s driven by data. It’s not abstract and guesswork. And so ultimately, I think, with metabolic health and really health generally, by having that same data-driven, very large data set per individual type of relationship to ourselves, we can build a similar model where you’re slowly but surely working towards that future where you are not only financially retired, but also know you’re going to be healthy enough to enjoy it type of thing. And so it will be a background layer of available confidence. You’ll be able to build confidence in what you’re doing.”
Episode Transcript
Anthony Pompliano: [00:00:00] What’s up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You’re listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let’s kick this thing off.
Josh Clemente is the co-founder of Levels. Josh is a rocket scientist and worked at SpaceX for six years. He managed the team that designed the life support systems in the space shuttles.
In this conversation, we discuss biowearables, metabolic health, physical output versus food consumption, real time, biological information, and working at SpaceX and Hyperloop One. I really enjoyed this conversation with Josh and I hope you do as well. Before we get to this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.
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Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion, this podcast is for informational purposes only.
All right guys, bang, bang. Got an awesome episode today with Josh. Thank you so much for joining us, sir.
Josh Clemente: [00:05:25] Thanks for having me on.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:05:26] Absolutely. You’ve got an amazing background in terms of you’ve worked at some of the most innovative companies in the world and now you’ve started a company that’s really pioneering this biowearable space.
Before we get into what you’re doing today, I want to go back. Tell us a little bit about your background, what you did at SpaceX and at Hyperloop and then we’ll talk a little about those companies.
Josh Clemente: [00:05:44] Definitely. I grew up in Northern Virginia. A little bit south of DC. Had a big property. I was always into machines, most particularly cars, motorcycles, dirt bikes, always building stuff. And I decided to go to school for mechanical engineering and spent some time on thermodynamics and heat transfer and not really knowing what I wanted to do other than work on machines and vehicles. Ultimately after school I spent a brief stint selling used cars and then I got the call I was waiting for and went and worked at SpaceX for about six years. That was for sure one of the highlights of my life. During my time there, I think I completely changed as a human being, like end-to-end just completely transformed the way I think about the world, where I see myself on the hierarchy of intelligence, way closer to the bottom than I had previously thought.
But it was an unbelievable experience and I met some of the best people in my life who will be close to me forever, I hope. I learned essentially how to solve problems from first principles and using that foundational, what is the simplest solution that gets us to an iterative step forward. That mindset is just rampant in SpaceX and I think in Elon companies, generally, sort of an Occam’s Razor type approach where you just go for the simplest solution, typically, and also attract really exceptional people with a big mission. So that was an unbelievable experience.
I eventually worked on the astronaut life support program. So SpaceX was previously… They were a satellite launch provider initially and then the big transition came when it became clear that part of the business was working and now it was time to try and take humans into space.
And that was like a fundamental rewrite of the organization. Now you have human lives at stake and it’s no longer an empty shell. It’s like, got to keep them alive in there. So I was one of the earliest employees on the life support program at SpaceX and was able to work on that in partnership with NASA all the way through to the critical design review phase. Got that across the finish line and then moved over to Hyperloop and spent about a year specking out the earliest full-scale system for Hyperloop demonstration and for people who aren’t familiar with that, that system is essentially a Maglev train, so a magnetically levitating high speed train inside of a tube, and you evacuate all the air out of the tube so that there is no aerodynamic resistance. And so now with very limited power draw, you can maintain really high speeds, so much higher than a Maglev train in open air can do. So we built a full scale concept out in Las Vegas, and I was able to work on that science and life sports stuff, and then, ultimately got obsessed with human performance and metabolism and started Levels.
So that’s where we are now.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:08:24] So let’s talk a little bit about this idea of like first principles thinking and almost the simplistic solution. Obviously, Elon’s fingerprints are all over both of the companies that you just described. But walk through… Are there specific examples where you saw this in practice or was it something that maybe there was an experience or some kind of training that really got you from what I’ll call a civilian to now be fully indoctrinated into this type of thinking in problem solving?
Josh Clemente: [00:08:53] Yeah. It’s a pervasive culture of simplicity and the easiest way to describe this… As a really green engineer going into one of my first meetings at the company, my expectation was that I was going to have to take notes and research a lot of what I heard in that meeting afterwards to understand what was happening, because I did not anticipate that I would be able to pick up on the language of advanced engineering. The result was actually that it was essentially a first 101 level conversation about designing a product that could be very complicated if you wanted it to be, but because SpaceX eliminates acronyms and jargon, it’s not allowed, no one is allowed to use industry speak. I, as a fresh out of school engineer understood everything that was being talked about, and it was being spoken about in ‘explain like I’m five’ approach. It sounds a little weird initially when you hear conversations that SpaceX because they’re like, ” What if we make it bigger?” ” What if we make it out of titanium instead of aluminum. That’ll be lighter, and then we can add more… The volume will be improved.” And so there’s all these conversations that are just maintaining very low level terminology so that if anyone catches on, and that the goal here is that whoever is in the meeting, privy to the conversation, no matter what their background or what their responsibility set is, they can understand and potentially contribute to problem solving. And if you create artificial barriers of complexity, just your language creates barriers. If I had had to take notes in that meeting and go look things up, that means I couldn’t contribute in the meeting, and I may never get back to that same group of people in that same context at that point in the project to offer my insight. And just because I didn’t have insight at that moment, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t in the future. And many, many times midstream and in conversation, people would just hear an idea and say, “Why don’t you try this?” And the company SpaceX is very build test iterate company. So if you are waiting to build a complex version of a potential solution before you test it where it might fail and you have to start over again, you’re going to inevitably spend more money and more time doing so. So if there’s a version of a concept… And one example is, so the spacecraft, the Crew Dragon spacecraft, when it mates with the International Space Station, it uses this really complicated system called a docking adapter and it sort of floats and adapts to the ISS. Both vehicles are moving at different rates and at different angles and they connect and grab onto each other. Originally we were supposed to have to buy this system off an existing aerospace provider, and it was going to be on the order of close to $50 million, something like that. Instead, a team of engineers said, “There’s a simpler way to do this.” And they built, using McMaster-Carr parts, which is like a… It’s an e-commerce hardware store online in Snowmobile Springs. They built what we call the McDocker, which was, I think it was on the order of like $20,000 worth of parts that did everything that the $50 million component would have done. And they demonstrated it live. That was the build test iterate approach that we were constantly using at SpaceX It was like, “I think I can do this with parts that are laying in my garage. So I’m going to, and then I’m going to record a video of it and share it with the team.” And in traditional aerospace, that doesn’t really happen. You don’t have that license to hack things together if necessary. And it goes all the way to the top. I remember when the Falcon 9 v 1.1 rocket first flew. It tried to relight its engine. So rockets traditionally burn up on re-entry. So they put their satellite in space and then fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. SpaceX was trying to land them and recover them and re-fly them and when that first Falcon 9 flew that was able to relight its engine, it wasn’t able to land because it didn’t have any way to do so, but it relighted its engine and slowed down. Elon basically went on stage afterwards and said, ” Now that that rocket did what it was supposed to do, we’re just going to put legs on it and land it because that way it’ll be able to land, and if you want to land, you need to have legs to land on.” And it was like a child explaining something. That’s the example I want to drive home. It’s just that the simplicity of the language pervades the end solution. It ended up that we just put legs on Falcon 9 and it landed. You know what I mean?
Oftentimes you can get caught up in thinking about crazy complexity when at the end of the day, if you just describe it in its simplest form, that might be what you can do.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:13:10] How much of the language ends up determining the simplicity of the design versus the simplicity of the design determines the language? Is there a causation there or they both go hand-in-hand?
Josh Clemente: [00:13:22] I really think it goes hand-in-hand. I think by creating a space where you can speak in very simple terms and describe very simple concepts without embarrassing yourself, you actually create sort of a competition where… Some of the conversations, as I mentioned, are kind of bizarre where engineers are literally talking in absurdly simplistic terms about very, ultimately, complex concepts.
So I think it’s bi-directional. I think by having a mental model that is driven by simple language, you are keeping yourself at the root of the problem. You’re not getting caught up in… As you learn more about a space and you get deeper into an industry, you pick up on jargon and descriptors that are much more abstract and by default, if they are abstract descriptors you need to be deep in the industry to understand, they aren’t the core of the concept. Like if you look at the Wikipedia description of a system, that’s the first principles associated with it. It moves people from point A to point B. That’s kind of like what you’re solving and anything beyond that is no longer your first principle solution. If you’re not solving, moving someone from point A to point B, you’re on some sort of extraneous part of the problem. So by keeping the language focus there and then simultaneously rewarding, simple scrappy solutions in terms of what you’re actually building, you can create a culture that is competing for simplicity. And I think that actually ultimately means elegance because I feel allergic to complexity, generally. The deeper we have to go, the more parts that you have to bolt on to put things together. There are just more failure modes. There are more people that have to be in the loop. It generally creates bloat. And so fewer, simpler, more elegant in my mind.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:15:04] Yeah. The whole idea of simplicity equals beauty, I think is very, very true and it’s cool to see it implemented in a business and especially in a highly technical and what many people think is a highly complex type of hardware type business.
Let’s talk a little bit about Levels. It’s an amazing product, but before we talk about the product, what exactly is the problem that you’re going after? You’re talking a lot about this metabolic fitness, or metabolic awareness in pursuit of metabolic fitness. Talk about like where is the impetus for this idea? What was the problem? How did you come across it and why did it catch your eye? And you’re so passionate about it.
Josh Clemente: [00:15:40] Yeah. Essentially Levels solves the question of “What should I eat and why?” And we have wearables that tell us a lot about what’s happening, with our step count and with our heart rate and such, a lot of exercise and sleep tracking.
But we don’t have anything to answer a fundamental question, which is, ” Where is my energy coming from?” And, “How well is my body functioning at producing that energy?” And so this is the concept of metabolism. Essentially every tissue, every cell in the body requires energy to function and where it gets that energy is from our food and environment. So the calories we consume, the sunlight that we absorb and this concept of metabolism is very abstract for society. But in fact, metabolic fitness, which is the efficiency with which we’re producing energy for our brains and our muscles and the rest of the tissues in our bodies, fundamentally underlies physical fitness and mental fitness.
So we spend a lot of time trying to perform better in the gym and perform better at work, but at the end of the day, we never think about the foundation for both of those, which is how well are we producing the energy for our brains and bodies. And so, that’s what Levels is seeking to do is to optimize metabolic fitness by using time data in essentially as closed loop a feedback style as possible. Meaning when you take an action, you receive feedback on how well that performed for you or how well you did, the reaction you experienced, how positive or negative that was within as near zero time as possible. So closing that gap to the maximum degree that we can.
The concepts that you threw out there, metabolic awareness, metabolic fitness… Metabolic fitness is the goal. We all want to incrementally improve day after day. And as with anything, focus, effort and repetition are necessary to improve physical fitness, mental fitness, and metabolic fitness. So the decisions we’re making, they compound over time into a positive or negative result and if we don’t have feedback on whether we’re heading in a positive or negative direction, we have no way of achieving metabolic fitness because we don’t know which direction we’re heading. And so metabolic awareness is that feedback. It’s the moment where your body has a closed loop of a data stream essentially to your brain telling you positively or negatively how well you’re doing. And so in the Level system, essentially we take in feedback, we take in data from what we call biowearables. These are devices which are measuring a molecule in the body.
This is fundamentally different from a traditional wearable, which is measuring a superficial marker. So pulse which, you can measure with your finger or step count, which you can just count. In this case, it’s a molecule that would otherwise not be measurable without this device.
And we take that data in context, with your lifestyle choices, the nutrition decisions, you’re making your stress level, your sleep quality, and your exercise and we pull out insights to help you understand specifically how well your body is functioning and where your areas for opportunity for improvement are.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:18:35] Got it. And so as you’re doing this… Maybe let’s talk about the traditional wearable market. So you talked about pulse, you talked about step count. There’s a whole bunch of them. Everything from a Whoop Band to an Apple Watch, all the way on down. And really what those seem to be focused on is what I’ll call output in terms of it’s the physical body doing an activity and what is the impact of doing that activity. So you can get everything from very simple, just how many steps did you walk today to, “Hey, you walked a lot of steps, which meant you burnt a lot of calories and then you slept well tonight,” and that is all connected and will tell you that. And so that’s very, very valuable for people.
But what you’re really focused on is the input of what’s going in the body. So how do you actually measure what’s going in the body? What does the product look like today and what is it doing when somebody puts it on?
Josh Clemente: [00:19:24] It’s a complicated problem. Ultimately, metabolism is, it’s describing the chemical reactions going on in your body. The human body is essentially a large chemistry set with a lot of chemicals being released in response to other chemicals. And so it’s not like a very clean machine where gears are connected and you turn the crank and energy comes out. It’s actually, you’re pouring chemicals into your body all the time and then hormones have to be released essentially to allocate where those chemicals, those resources end up, and that might be weight gain, that might be to the brain for cognitive functioning, that might be to the muscles for exercise. All of that is dictated by hormones and complex processes and signaling by other markers, chemical markers.
In this country, we have an extremely concerning yet largely unspoken epidemic of metabolic dysfunction, where the university of North Carolina released a study in 2018, showing that 88% of adults in the United States are metabolically unhealthy and the CDC is constantly releasing scarier and scarier updates where younger and younger people are getting Type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease – all of these concerning side effects of very poor diet and chronic lifestyle decisions. And so at a point where 90 million Americans have pre-diabetes, 70% of whom will become Type 2 diabetics if they don’t do something about it. And yet we have no feedback system to tell us whether what we’re doing is working in our favor. We ultimately are heading in the wrong direction and flying blind when doing so.
The question of how to measure input versus output is a tricky one. Ultimately, we need behavior change. We need to make better choices, but, it’s much easier to focus on the outputs than it is on the inputs. It’s very tricky to get really good data on what’s going into the body. So the way that Levels attacks this is by highlighting for the user, for that member who is using the Levels product, we highlight for them the way their body reacted to a specific input.
So you eat a meal, let’s say you have a pizza. You tap that into the Levels interface, take a picture, and then, let’s say, you sit on the couch. Levels monitors using the continuous glucose information coming from the biowearable. We monitor the way your body responded to that pizza and we then surface that to you as a score. So just a simple score out of 10 and that’s the output. But you see the input. It was a pizza, and I sat on the couch, and the output was of a negative response. My body experienced a prolonged blood sugar elevation followed by a hypoglycemic reactive crash when I was flooded with insulin. Insulin stores glucose as fat, so I gained body fat as a function of this. And then we encourage you to try something different to compare that input to a different set of inputs.
So this time we maybe recommend, have that same pizza but this time take a walk around the block. So take 20, 25 minutes. Immediately after finishing that pizza, instead of sitting down, go walk around and now you see a completely different output, which is that for many of us, the muscles in our posterior chain that are powering that walk can absorb glucose without insulin, that fat-gain hormone, as long as they’re being contracted, as long as you’re exercising them. And so now you eat that same pizza, you go for a walk and your body experiences a totally different blood sugar response and correspondingly a totally different hormone response.
And then we surface those two sets of inputs and outputs for you to compare, so we can show you just a simple stroll after every meal can completely transform the way your body is processing those meals and the load you’re putting on your hormonal system and how your body is forced to respond and allocate those resources. So that’s where our focus is. At the end of the day we want to make sure that the person who needs to make better choices is being presented with all the information and we only want to pull in as much input as necessary to highlight an insight, essentially. So we don’t make you tap in calories or macronutrient counts or anything that most nutrition apps make you focus on. We instead just focus on closing that loop between the input and the ultimate output.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:23:29] So let’s go back to the way that you’re measuring this. It’s a patch that essentially goes on the back of an arm. What exactly is happening with that patch?
Josh Clemente: [00:23:40] Yeah. This technology is called a continuous glucose monitor and it was developed over the past few decades in the lab and then ultimately was moved into the therapeutic space for people with diabetes. Essentially what it’s doing is when you have diabetes, the insulin glucose feedback loop is broken down. So basically, when you eat carbohydrates, glucose gets into the blood. It’s a form of sugar. It’s in your bloodstream. The hormone insulin has to be released by your pancreas to get that glucose out of your blood and if it doesn’t, it can start to cause serious tissue damage. So for people with diabetes, they really have to have a full time, high resolution awareness of their blood sugar levels. Historically they’ve had to prick their finger every single time they need a blood sugar measurement. And that just gives you one point in time. It says you’re at 106 and you have no idea if you’re going up or you’re going down or where you were two hours ago.
So this amazing technology, which is a CGM, which is essentially a tiny little patch. It’s about the size of two quarters and there’s this little flexible filament on the underside of it and that filament is very hair-like, essentially. It sits in the skin and it actually interacts directly with glucose molecules. And so this breakthrough over the past, roughly 10 years, has allowed people to go from pricking their finger dozens of times a day, to having a continuous, full-time data stream right to their phone that is telling you glucose in say, five-minute increments without having to prick your finger, without any mass or inconvenience. That’s the development process for the tech. It’s typically a wireless data transfer from this little patch that you wear full-time for about two weeks directly to the phone.
We’re now getting to a point where, again, the convenience factor, the price point and the usability. The usefulness of this information has made it such that we can start to expand it to areas outside of therapy. So it’s no longer just necessary that you have diabetes that you’re managing, but in fact, we can start to focus on optimization. So whether or not you have diabetes, no matter where you are on the metabolic health spectrum, we can be making better choices. If we have better insight – I’m sitting down to eat lunch. What am I going to eat and why? We can now ground that in objective data.
And so that’s the currently the application we’re using CGM for, and that platform, I expect, will include many more analytes in the coming years.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:25:54] Yeah. And what’s so interesting to me about this is… The obvious thing would be, “Hey, you had this persistent, flat glucose level. You ate a bunch of candy. Now, all of a sudden it spiked. You shouldn’t do that anymore.” So a very binary ‘eat this don’t eat that’. But you highlighted an example of, it’s not just a single perspective of ‘eat this eat don’t eat that’. It’s also holistically looking at ‘you ate the pizza and then you sat on the couch’ versus ‘if you eat the pizza and go for a walk’.
And so would it be fair to say that the only way to get a truly holistic measurement of this stuff is to actually understand what’s going on inside the body, combined with what’s going on outside. It almost feels like if you’re just measuring the external output or you were just measuring the internal consumption. Both of those things, don’t tell the whole story. So you need to understand both in order to really give people a true recommendation of ‘here’s the best thing you can do to be as healthy as possible’.
Josh Clemente: [00:26:52] Yeah. Yeah. I definitely think that it’s both. The situation is that people have for a very long time been scarecely constrained. For most of human evolution, we’ve had essentially to be on the constant lookout for food. We never knew where our next meal was coming from. We were in a constantly fasted state between meals. We now have a situation where we have an abundance and not only an abundance, but we almost have this ability with our processed food supply to short circuit the human metabolism. We can, in a single meal, get more fast acting carbohydrates in than a prehistoric human would have had, would have come across an entire lifetime. And that’s not a joke. We now have this situation where because we didn’t… I don’t think we evolved sensory feedback for the quality of what we were eating because every calorie was positive. It was going to keep you from dying. We don’t have the system to give us the feedback that we need. So when we eat those potato chips or we eat that candy, we are relying on very, very abstract feedback mechanisms. And some sometimes, for most of us I think, we wait for potentially months or years until the bathroom scale starts to change or until we get a scary diagnosis at the doctor before we start to think about what am I putting into my body? And so it’s necessary in this day and age specifically when we’re increasingly moving to Internet based productivity, we’re becoming as a result, more sedentary and our processed food supply is continuing to get more energy dense. It is truly possible to poison ourselves with abundance and so we have to build new feedback mechanisms to give us that sensory response that we otherwise wouldn’t have. So there’s that problem, which is that we genuinely do need this as a function of where we are in our evolution.
And then secondarily, there’s no one-size-fits-all. And this is where it really gets complex. There are some high level things I’m comfortable saying like candy is not a good idea, it’s just sugar. And that is such an energy dense system or a situation that our systems can’t handle it and this is coming from someone who is a confessed recovering candy-holic, and I’ll go into those stories in a minute, but beyond that, it gets more nuanced. So to the question of a cookie versus a banana, which is healthier. Most people I think would answer pretty easily that the banana is healthier. In 2015, the largest study on non-diabetics with continuous glucose monitors was done. This was at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. They put 800 subjects through a week of continuous glucose monitoring and made them eat these standardized foods. At the end of the trial, they were able to show that two people could eat the exact same two foods, in this case, it was that banana and a cookie made with wheat, and they could have equal and opposite blood sugar responses to those two foods. And so one person flat on the banana big spike for the cookie, another person the exact opposite. What that indicates is that they’re also experiencing opposite hormonal responses. So that insulin release that drives fat gain or ultimately is associated with insulin resistance in Type 2 diabetes, could be opposite for these two people.
So it is truly the case. I think that not only do we have the concern about what we’re presented with every day in terms of options, but we have to go another layer deeper if we really want to be optimal in the sense that we should also understand specifically how we, our own individual genotype or phenotype, responds to that specific food, our own chemical makeup.
And I think much of this is context. So I actually believe that only a small fraction is genetics driving those individual responses and the rest is something like stress, body composition. So basically, how much fat you have on your body, how much muscle you have on your body, how well slept you are, how much cortisol and insulin are circulating in your bloodstream at any time – that’s all what dictates how your body’s going to respond to a specific meal.
And so that’s why the Levels system is focusing on bringing in much more than just nutrition. It’s nutrition in combination with your activity level, with your sleep quality, ultimately with your stress, through additional analyte tracking. This way we can help you identify which of the levers you should pull on hardest.
If it’s a situation where you’re experiencing severe metabolic dysfunction as a result of non caloric decisions – you’re in very stressful meetings all day and you’re sleeping very poorly and your blood sugar is chronically elevated because you’re in a state of essentially an enhanced fight or flight mode, we can highlight that as opposed to someone who’s eating candy all day. That’s a little bit of an easier connection to make.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:31:18] Yeah. It’s fascinating to me that you’re able to get such a great understanding of the holistic picture. You mentioned earlier metabolic health, and I want to make sure that people really understand this. I think this is the crux of everything you’re talking about here. What exactly is metabolic health? And then what are the things that people who have great metabolic health or really bad metabolic health experience?
Josh Clemente: [00:31:43] Yeah. So this goes back to the metabolic fitness conversation. Metabolic health, the best way to describe it is… When the body is able to produce energy effectively without harmful byproducts such that you can perform to the maximum extent that you need to and can age gracefully. I think that’s a good way to describe metabolic health. It’s a complex subject. There’s a lot that you could dig into there, but what’s important is that many people assume that metabolic health is something binary. So I’m either very metabolically healthy or… Oftentimes people say I have a fast metabolism or I have a slow metabolism and I’m metabolically unhealthy. The reality is that, and this has been studied, essentially conventions of diabetes experts have come out and said there is no such thing as thresholds. Everyone exists on this spectrum of metabolic health and we’ve drawn these lines in the sand and said, this is diabetes. This is very metabolically unhealthy and this is slightly less metabolically unhealthy, but still bad and that’s pre-diabetes and the rest of us are all in this other end of the bucket of the spectrum.
So what we’re reframing it as, is metabolic fitness. It’s your fitness level. How well is your body producing energy? How well is it responding to the specific lifestyle choices you’re making every day. The nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress levers you’re pulling every single day combine into a metabolic profile.
And so, we really want to reframe the conversation and get people to stop thinking about this as something that’s out of their hands, or like a switch is flipped, and start getting us to think in terms of focus, effort and repetition. If I know what is causing a positive and or negative response in my body, I can modify those behaviors, not just by removing it. If I love cheesecake I don’t necessarily have to remove that if I just add a stroll afterwards or if I just make sure that I sleep well that night, get a full eight hours and that can help me maintain insulin sensitivity, which helps me process those indulgences.
And so, connecting all of these dots for people into a holistic picture of, okay, all of that abstract advice of eat healthy work out more, I can now understand contextually what that means. Working out more allows me to use the glucose I’m putting into my body immediately and eating better means avoiding these massive hormonal kicks to my system, which ultimately can break it down.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:33:58] Got it. The other part of this, that to me is really fascinating is there is some, I don’t know, taboo, things you can put in your body that everyone seems to be really, really religious about. So I’m going to throw a couple of them out there and you just throw me back, whatever comes to mind when I say them. The first one is alcohol. What’s the thought process there? And what have you guys seen from a trend perspective?
Josh Clemente: [00:34:21] Yeah. I think there’s a ton more studying that should be done in terms of alcohol and its effect on metabolism. But what we know is that it’s counter-intuitive. So for most people, the assumption is, “Oh, alcohol is all carbohydrates, so if I eat this while I’m wearing a glucose sensor, my blood sugar is going to skyrocket.” The reality is that alcohol actually hijacks your liver. Your liver treats it as an emergency situation and wants to convert the ethanol in the drink into fat. That’s essentially how you can metabolize ethanol. It turns it into triglycerides, which are then stored on in body fat. In order to do that, it seems to shut down the production of new blood sugar, so what you end up with is a situation where on a glucose monitor you have a drink or two, and this varies person to person, but there will typically be either no response or an actual decrease in blood sugar, and what’s happening behind the scenes is both the alcohol and anything you’re eating at that time are being biased towards fat production and fat storage, which is probably not a great alternative to glucose production, but it is a really interesting effect and I think generally for me, the biggest concern with alcohol is just, it destroys my sleep. It almost seems like it doesn’t matter when I have it during the day. My heart rate’s elevated. My body temperature is elevated and my sleep is worse. So I tend to think of it as a stressor that I use sparingly and typically earlier in the day,
Anthony Pompliano: [00:35:45] What about what I’ll label as the keto diet? So basically I’m going to eat no carbs. I’m only going to eat meat and I’m basically going to be as strict as possible with a fanatical focus on just meat consumption.
Josh Clemente: [00:35:58] Yeah. I think that there are many ways to put together a diet that avoids the sort of energy toxicity that we touched on where you have a ton of sugar and really a ton of fat, either of those, can cause essentially toxicity in the metabolic system. So what I think is important is that you don’t do what I just mentioned. Don’t eat the standard American diet, which is high carbohydrate and very high fat, including core sources of fat. I think the ketogenic diet, it’s very hard to maintain in my experience. I personally am not keto. I instead strive for a high protein, moderate, fat, low carb diet. And ultimately that’s just my decision. My co-founder Casey is, she’s a plant-based vegan, so she only eats plants. She doesn’t eat any meat. And she has – between the two of us, we have totally different macronutrient profile sheets – a lot more carbohydrates than I do. But she actually has better blood sugar control than me. And so that’s another counterintuitive piece where she’s using a lot of this really nuanced knowledge about how her body metabolizes specific foods and in what order. So fiber fat content along with those carbohydrates can modify the way her blood sugar responds.
So she has been able to build a really high quality plant-based diet. I think I’ve been able to build a really high quality, more animal-based diet. And at the end of the day, there are also people who are maintaining exceptional glucose and probably improving their risks of certain chronic lifestyle concerns with the ketogenic diet.
What I think it all comes together as, is wherever you are, whatever you’re able to pull off, whatever your dietary philosophies are, they should be grounded in some objective data so that you can confirm that this is actually doing what you think it does. And there have been plenty of people who have come in having kind of predetermined assumptions about a specific, either a specific food or a philosophy or dietary approach that have been blown up in the face of better data.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:37:47] Absolutely. Intermittent fasting seems like another one of these themes or trends that people are grabbing onto. How have you guys seen that impact some of this?
Josh Clemente: [00:37:57] Intermittent fasting with a glucose monitor is pretty cool because you can see the effects of your body doing its thing. Essentially when you cut out carbohydrates or really, when you cut out all calories, most people think that they’re going to plummet. Their blood sugar is going to drop and they’re going to have this fatigue issue and they’re going to probably pass out or something. And the first time that you do an extended fast and you see that actually all of these spikes and drops and all of the hormonal fluctuations associated with that, completely disappear and your body goes into this very elegant mode where it is taking what you have on yourself, your existing body fat and it’s converting it into the appropriate amount of blood sugar to keep your brain functioning. And so you’ll typically see like a nice, slow decrease and then a very flat blood sugar line and most people feel really good. And when you see that data, when you see that feedback loop and realize that you can actually maintain this for days without any calories, and you’re not going to pass out, most people. Of course, there are some of us who have a condition that prevents that, but the reality is most of us have, the average person has about 80,000 calories of body fat stored on them and they only have about 2,000 calories of stored sugar, which is called glycogen. So you can easily burn through that 2,000 calories of glycogen in a single 90 minute workout. But you can go multiple days on the body fat stores.
So training your body to using, I think, mechanisms like intermittent fasting to tap into that body fat and become more acclimated to using it, I think is a really great approach. I do a lot of it myself. It helps to release you from the grasp of food scheduling as well. It’s nice to be able to do one meal instead of three sometimes.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:39:39] Absolutely. The other thing that I find fascinating about all of this is multivitamins and just what I’ll label as not food yet trying to get some sort of nutrient impact. How do you guys see that playing out? Are there any trends or takeaways?
Josh Clemente: [00:39:56] I think there are some supplements that probably make sense, certainly, if you know you’re going to be compromised on them. I think vitamin D is a really good one. Vitamin D is super important and especially as we… Like in winter months are indoors. I think vitamin D supplementation makes a ton of sense. Magnesium is another, I think, really important supplement that I take commonly, especially when fasting, and I tend to eat a lot of avocados and I do add bananas in here and there for potassium. Those are the ones that I’ve noticed the symptoms or side effects associated with too little of that specific vitamin or supplement. Beyond that I tend to be skeptical. If there isn’t good research connecting a specific effect of too little, then I would argue that you’re probably just urinating most of it out because many of these supplements tend to have like 10,000 times your necessary daily value. This goes to the, if some is good, is more better type concept and I think generally, no. There’s a sweet spot for almost everything and just taking a multivitamin probably isn’t doing much that you couldn’t get from a better diet.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:41:00] Let’s talk a little bit about the biowearables. So we talked a lot about what you’re measuring and how that can be impacted, but the actual device itself and this growing class of things I put on my body that measures something going on inside of my body. How do you see that evolving over time? And is that something that Levels will say, “Look, we’ve got one product. We want to eventually expand into an entire product suite. Or is it just staying really, really focused on that glucose monitor?
Josh Clemente: [00:41:26] Yeah, I think we’re just cracking the shell on biowearables right now. I consider Levels to be like a bow wave into an entirely new market that has previously been undiscovered – the metabolically aware, or the nutrition aware, or honestly, the health seeker who wants to continually know that they’re making positive compounding returns on their lifestyle investments. We’re making decisions all day every day, whether it’s going to the gym, taking time away from family to do that, or eating food that may not taste as good as that delicious doughnut, but we’re doing it because we want to improve our health. And so, we’re opening up an opportunity to get those micro optimization receipts. What you’re doing is working or not working, and here’s how to do it better. And to continually feel like you are moving in a positive direction.
Glucose is one piece of this. It’s a really important… I mentioned some stats in the beginning. It’s a really important problem in society today. Glucose dysfunction and all of the side effects associated with it are ravaging over 120 million people each year who are dealing with some sort of metabolic dysfunction that is preventable. So we’re going to stay focused there and continue to expand access to that technology and improve the actionability. But it’s one of many. And so we are going to continue to push innovation and look to work with innovative companies who are developing the next generation of sensors that are going to go a little bit deeper in the direction of biowearables.
I think this will probably be real-time sensing of hormones like cortisol and insulin which are associated with your stress and how your body is allocating, fat storage, and probably deeper into lipids and triglycerides. So ultimately I think you’ll be able to get a really good immediate view on your full metabolic health, not just your glucose regulation. And it’ll probably be, I would imagine, a consolidated form. So you’ll wear one thing on your body and it will do everything that your current wearable does plus it’s measuring molecules below the skin, which I think is the ultimate… It’s the Holy Grail of longevity, using these closed-loop feedbacks sort of fashion.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:43:27] For sure. You’ve mentioned a couple of times, ‘real time’, especially focused on real-time data collection or presentation. Is that something that previously just wasn’t available and now there’s the technology and the platforms to do it in real time. Is there some other reason why that’s the future? Or is it just literally, if you have more data and you’re able to track it in real time, then you can be more effective in the recommendations and ultimately the behavior change?
Josh Clemente: [00:43:51] Yeah. We have a theory of behavior change that it is closed loops that make the difference. So most people do not want to be unhealthy and ultimately it’s by prolonging the length of time between an action and the negative reaction to that action. By prolonging that you allow the behavior change piece to dissipate. Our memory dissolves and we lose the immediate reinforcement that happens. Whereas if you do something… You touch a hot stove and immediately feel pain. You don’t touch hot stoves anymore. If you were to eat something and immediately feel pain, you wouldn’t eat that thing anymore, and as we mentioned, there is no sensory system for that. So by replacing in as close to the same amount of time as possible that sensory feedback with a visual or a data-driven feed piece of feedback, we can help to supplement people’s senses of positive and negative when it comes to these things like nutrition.
So I do think that the timeliness of a piece of feedback is crucial to the behavior change. We’re all about minimizing feedback loops. We don’t really focus on blood tests where you do it once and you get results two weeks later or something like that. They’re nonspecific. It’s much more temporal. You eat lunch and you see how you respond to that minutes later, and then you eat dinner later, another lesson on dinner, and then you can do that over and over again. And you have hundreds of permutations of exploration in a 28-day period and each of those was an opportunity for immediate lesson learning. That’s where I think all of the behavior change value is and that’s what our team believes and has written about. Our theory of behavior change is that by taking micro electronic technology and using it. We’ve unlocked a huge amount of opportunity with this, essentially the minimization of size, scale and cost of electronics. We can now build these closed feedback loops for a huge number of data vectors and, I think, completely changed the trajectory of health, not to mention many other things, as we’re seeing in finance and elsewhere,
Anthony Pompliano: [00:45:49] Is it going to be a world where literally we all have a bunch of sensors on and we’re walking around and there’s like a live dashboard and we almost get to a predictive state where it says, “Hey, you’re about to eat X, don’t eat X.” Or, “Hey, you’re about to lay down on the couch. Don’t do that, go for a walk.” How time/predictive does this get? And then also how pervasive do these technologies come into our life? And is this something that we necessarily want, or I don’t know. You guys have built this, so you tell me how you guys are thinking about some of the… Making it available is one thing, wanting the whole world to use something has a whole bunch of other connotations.
Josh Clemente: [00:46:22] Yeah. I think that in the long run I would like to see us reverse the trends of metabolic dysfunction. That 88% who are unhealthy, I’d like to see that be the healthy set and only 12% of us are dealing with preventable chronic lifestyle related illnesses. I think the productivity we’d see and the benefits to society would be hard to even imagine.
The direct costs of diabetes are expected to be over 600 billion in 2030 in the US alone and the secondary effects are, as I mentioned, it’s really hard to trace them. So I think it’s important that we ramp up our focus on metabolic health in the nearer term, but I don’t think it’s going to be an invasive thing.
I think this technology is going to continue to develop and refine, and it’s going to be much more similar to a financial data sort of feedback model where you you get feedback. You see your withdrawals and deposits, you see the compounding rate and direction of return on your “investments”. So what you’re doing each day, you see the connection to your long-term plan, that retirement trajectory that you’re on. You get expert advice if you need it, if you want to do something specific or if you just generally want someone to coach you along the way, you can have that directly and it’s driven by data. It’s not abstract and guesswork. And so ultimately, I think, with metabolic health and really health generally, by having that same data-driven, very large data set per individual type of relationship to ourselves, we can build a similar model where you’re slowly but surely working towards that future where you are not only financially retired, but also know you’re going to be healthy enough to enjoy it type of thing. And so it will be a background layer available confidence. You’ll be able to build confidence in what you’re doing.
And I do think it will be predictive in the sense that the devices will be able to tell you, “Hey look! You didn’t sleep at all on that red eye flight and you should avoid these foods. Those don’t work for you when you’re under this kind of stress from poor sleep. Recommend this menu instead.” Very simple, low cognitive overhead. It’s not invasive, but it just takes away that guesswork and “Okay. Yeah. I’m compromised on sleep. This is going to help me be healthier.” And you can connect that right with your goals.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:48:32] Yeah. I love that and I think that you’re probably more right than than wrong there.
Before I wrap up, I was asking everyone the same three questions. The first one is, what’s the most important book that you’ve ever read?
Josh Clemente: [00:48:45] Yeah. This one I’ve had to ponder a little bit. I’m going to say this book was extremely important to me. I’ve only recently read it. I’m putting it on a high pedestal, but it is amazing and it’s “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink. I think that the way he reframes so many of life’s problems into a very simple binary where it is your responsibility. That’s just all it comes down to. if you just take away all the mental argumentation about whose responsibility it is and accept that it is your responsibility to improve every single day, everything that you do, everything you’re involved in, it’s a position of power, actually. It’s an empowerment book and that’s what I loved about it. It was taking something that sounds on the outside like a burden and turns it into a real mechanism for empowerment, which I love.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:49:30] Yeah. I think that that book is… Even though everyone knows about it, for those that haven’t read it, they feel like there’s no way could live up to the hype, but it definitely does, at least in my opinion and it sounds like you as well.
When it comes to sleep, our friends at Eight Sleep, they’ve sponsored this question. And as I’ve talked about it on the podcast before, they basically have this bed that cools and helps you get deeper sleep and just a much more refreshing sleep. I sleep on one every night and absolutely love it. What’s your sleep schedule? Do you do anything before sleep? Do you do anything specific during sleep, or any kind of things that changed over the years?
Josh Clemente: [00:50:07] Yeah. I love the Eight Sleep, folks. I have my Eeight Sleep Pod Pro that I have not yet unboxed, but I am absolutely ecstatic that I finally have it.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:50:15] I feel like you’re measuring what goes in people’s body. They’re measuring what happens when you go to sleep. You guys should be friends.
Josh Clemente: [00:50:20] We are friends. Yeah. They’re great friends of ours and supporters, so I’m glad to hear that they sponsored this question. I’m a warm sleeper. I always wake up in the middle of the night just uncomfortably warm and so that thermoregulation that they incorporate, I think is going to be a total game changer for me. I’m really excited to put it to the test.
Generally, I have over the time that I’ve been using metabolic tracking, glucose tracking specifically, to understand how well my body is performing. I’ve totally changed my perspective on sleep. I used to be a ‘sleep when you’re dead’ type person, like that’s weakness, and just recognized very quickly how bad my situation was. To give some context. I was actually borderline pre-diabetic or fully pre-diabetic when I started this company Levels, despite being a CrossFit trainer and always caring about physical fitness. And so everything that was going wrong was not my degree of body fat or my exercise. It was that I was eating foods that were putting me into a bad place and sleeping poorly and being highly stressed. So my current approach… Now I track sleep with Whoop. I also have my Garmin 245 that do sleep tracking and between the two of them, they forced me to recognize that I can’t drink alcohol close to bed, really, even in the afternoon. I can’t eat meals within about two hours of going to sleep and I have to get at least seven hours. I do pretty well after seven hours, but ideally eight hours every night. And light is another real big one. I just cannot get the same recovery scores when I have light streaming in.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:51:46] So if you don’t drink in the afternoon or at night, does that mean that you’re waking up and pounding a couple of shots?
Josh Clemente: [00:51:51] I got to tell you, man, some of these other European cultures, I think, have that figured out. No, but seriously, it is interesting to look at places like Italy where oftentimes you’ll have a glass of wine in the afternoon and then a big meal in the afternoon. And then you get up and walk and relax and then go to sleep relatively early. I think that gives the alcohol some time to metabolize out of the system. There might be something to it.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:52:13] Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Last question that you’ll get to ask me. You want to finish up is, aliens. Are you a believer or a unbeliever?
Josh Clemente: [00:52:21] I’m a believer. And one of my favorite sort of mental problems to wrestle with is the Fermi Paradox, with the vastness of the universe, why are there not aliens absolutely everywhere? One of my favorite books on this… This was going to be like the other book that I was going to say in your first question is The Three-Body Problem. This is written by, I always screw his name up, Cixin Liu, I think, and totally amazing. It has a really beautiful explanation for why aliens may not be revealing themselves and I just think probability-wise, very unlikely that we’re alone and I want to figure out why we haven’t seen anyone yet.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:53:00] Before you ask me the last question, I got to ask and I don’t know why I didn’t think about this earlier. Any idea if Elon believes there’s aliens? Or what SpaceX is internal general view on this?
Josh Clemente: [00:53:13] Yeah. Generally, I think people look at the statistical probability and think, yeah, we’re very likely not alone in the universe, but given the fact that we have, as far as we can tell, a very hard limit on how fast we can travel, which is the speed of light, the size of the universe doesn’t actually matter because there’s only so far that we could ever make it in a million lifetimes. And so at a certain point, the universe is actually not as big as it really is because we just could never interact with anything that far away. So I think that kind of cuts into it. It’s like, well, maybe aliens are just on the opposite side of the universe and we’ll never come across them.
Elon’s perspective is, we don’t know that there are aliens. All we know is that we are the only conscious life forms and consciousness has to be preserved. And so that’s the underlying philosophy of wanting to get to Mars is to preserve… As far as we know, until we come across intelligent beings besides ourselves, we have a responsibility not to extinguish our own existence.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:54:07] That’s a pretty compelling mission there for sure. What question you got for me to finish up?
Josh Clemente: [00:54:12] This one I’ve been grappling a lot with. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts. I got to ask, how has social media been good or bad for society on balance?
Anthony Pompliano: [00:54:21] Oh, I think huge, huge net positive overall. Look, I’m biased. I worked at Facebook for two years and I think that until I worked there, I didn’t really understand the net positive aspect of it. I just thought, I was like agnostic. I didn’t really have an opinion. But when you start to understand the benefits of everything from a high level of just, “Hey, you connect billions of people together and now they can communicate, do commerce, coordinate and all that kind of stuff.” There’s a lot of benefit to that.
Two is you start to understand the human element of it like, “Hey, you and I, we were in first grade together. I moved to a different country and then I find you 30 years later and we reconnect.” There’s some of that type of just objectively positive impact on the world that happens.
And then the last thing is, there’s this argument that the platforms and actually even throw in the messaging applications and social media applications. Like they’re one of the last stands against overreaching governments. If the people can’t communicate via encrypted manners or can’t create a Facebook group or go to an event or whatever, that’s probably not a good thing. But with all that said, there’s definitely downsides to it and I just think the folks who make the argument social media, isn’t good or bad. The impact can be good or bad, but really the impact is merely like a mirror of who we are as a society. So if we’re all getting worked up about something it’s worse on social media. If we’re all really happy about something, it’s worse on social media. And so I think that it’s more of an amplification type thing. So if you think of it through that perspective, then the question becomes, are we good people or bad?
Josh Clemente: [00:55:55] Right. Frankly…
Anthony Pompliano: [00:55:58] Yeah, frankly. The argument, depending on what group, what geographic location, at what time, for good or bad people and good or bad actions. So I think it’s obviously super complex. And there’s, frankly, no right answer. But the positive impact I saw, I think, drastically outweighs the negative impact. Anyone who’s making like a perfectly blind argument and like, “Oh, everything is great on the Internet and the Internet’s amazing and so is our social media and all this stuff, and there’s no negative impact.” I think like you could pretty much now assume that that argument doesn’t really stand the test of time.
Josh Clemente: [00:56:31] Yeah. We’re figuring it out still. It’s the early stages. It’s interesting to have seen the whole chronology. It’s going to be amazing to see what happens 20 years from now.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:56:39] I continue to joke that… The saying of the revolution will be televised. The revolution will be tweeted to some degree.
Josh Clemente: [00:56:47] No doubt about that.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:56:48] Absolutely, absolutely history. Historians will go back and they’ll just look at Facebook posts and tweets and stuff like that to get a lot of information.
Josh Clemente: [00:56:55] It’s crazy.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:56:56] Listen man, I really, really appreciate you taking the time to do this, Josh. Where can we send people to find you on the Internet or find more about Levels?
Josh Clemente: [00:57:03] Yeah. So I’m on Twitter @JoshuaForrest and I’m on Instagram @josh.f.clemente and then Levels, I highly recommend everyone check out the website levelshealth.com and the blog in particular, which breaks down a lot of this abstract metabolic stuff into understandable, approachable terminology that you can bring home every day. And we’re on Instagram and Twitter at Levels.
Anthony Pompliano: [00:57:29] I found the blog to be amazingly helpful, so I definitely suggest other people go check it out as well and hopefully we will send some people over to you guys and also find you on Twitter. So thanks so much for doing this, man. We’ll have to do it again in the future.
Josh Clemente: [00:57:41] Absolutely. Thanks for having me on Pomp.