Josh Clemente (Levels) on tracking blood glucose in real-time on Forward Thinking Founders

You track your to-do list, your investments, maybe even your steps and heartbeat. But what about your glucose? Josh Clemente, founder of Levels, is betting that it will soon be popular to do just that. Wearing a continuous glucose monitor will help battle metabolic dysfunction – something that many young and healthy people contend with, whether they are aware of it or not. By tracking how factors like food, physical activity, sleep, and stress impact our bodies, Levels aims to make lifestyle logging the key to genuine health. Because when we have clarity about what constitutes healthy habits for our bodies, we can cement those habits and take control. As a guest on Forward Thinking Founders, Josh explained to host Mat Sherman why Levels could take a big step toward reducing chronic illness.

– Check out Levels
– Follow Levels on LinkedIn or Twitter
– Connect with Josh Clemente on LinkedIn or Twitter
– Check out Forward Thinking Founders
– Connect with Mat Sherman on Twitter

3:45 – Metabolic dysfunction: The leading cause of chronic illnesses

Our current sedentary lifestyle and bad eating habits are leading to metabolic dysfunction and insulin resistance – a contributor to large-scale chronic illnesses.

“When we have sedentary lifestyles or we’re eating processed foods, or just high sugar consumption, or a lot of stress, all of these things can start to influence our body’s ability to maintain glucose, that sort of homeostasis right where your glucose is well controlled. When that starts to happen, you begin to influence these large hormonal fluctuations and spikes and crashes in your metabolic system, which ultimately lead to breakdown. And this is insulin resistance. Over the long-term, you can start to see additional long-term chronic illnesses. We are seeing at an epidemic scale here in the United States prediabetes, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and cognitive decline. Alzheimer’s itself is now being considered type three diabetes and even cancer is related to metabolic dysfunction. And so all of these things together are called chronic illnesses because they’re the compound effect of years and decades of choices that are made without good information. So what Levels is doing is providing context for the choices you’re making in real-time.”

6:41 – Continuous Glucose Monitoring for optimizing health and performance

Levels is taking the existing technology of continuous glucose management for diabetics and adding in a layer of lifestyle logging, helping customers create healthy habits based on context.

“We’re taking existing devices developed for the management of diabetes and we’re coupling them with our lifestyle logging and behavior change software. So we bring in this raw data stream which has all of these interesting sub-metrics about it, the rate of change, the number of the variations in a day, and how high it stays out of your target range. All of this stuff is really important. And so we do all the analysis and we surface insights such that you can identify specific lifestyle behaviors that are influencing your metabolic control both positively and negatively. The long and short of it is that every one of our customers receives a prescription consultation to get access to one of these devices. We supply a kit from our pharmacy partner that shows up at your door. It’s a very direct-to-consumer-like experience and you log into the Levels system, start logging your lifestyle daily – your diet, exercise, sleep, and stress. And then you get scores that tell you specifically how that meal-meeting-red-eye-flight exercise routine is affecting your metabolic control in the moment. And so you can start to tailor these streaks and reach high scores, both for meal choices and for daily streaks and activities and start to see how both individual and combinations of actions can lead to optimization and develop lifelong habits.”

8:45 – The calories in, calories out hypothesis of fitness is wrong

Research on the Ketogenic diet and the superhuman properties that it can exert on the central nervous system led Josh to realize how powerful a good diet can be.

“While I was at SpaceX, I was exposed to some work by Dom D’Agostino. He’s a neuroscientist and Keto researcher from the University of South Florida, which basically showed that the Ketogenic diet can exert essentially superhuman properties on the central nervous system toxicity, which basically is a situation where in a high oxygen environment, the brain, there’s a lot of reactive oxygen species and if there’s glucose available, they react and you end up having some rapid oxidation which is really bad. You can have seizures and it’s deadly. And so in this paper, I was exposed to this information that diet alone, basically the macronutrient balance of diet, can introduce multiple hours of protection in this crazy environment. And that was the first time that I really sat back and thought, wait a minute, so physical fitness does not equal health. Essentially, there’s a massive lever, which is diet, which influences how your body is functioning in real-time.”

11:59 – Data is critical to battle a silent epidemic

Josh started Levels because getting a CGM device shouldn’t be difficult when the data it provides is so critical for our society.

“The experience I had with not being able to get the hardware and then the amazing actionability and quality of the data stream to help me identify activities that were working against me and implement new ones that were objectively positive led me to dig deeper on the social scale of the problem. I found that 90 million American adults in the United States have pre-diabetes, 90% of whom don’t know they have it. And 35 million are type two diabetic. Our lifespan has gone backward for three years. Basically, many of the things that we’re struggling with at a social scale can be connected to metabolic dysfunction. And so my own experience, coupled with the realization that this is an epidemic, a silent epidemic, was all it took for me to leave my other projects and get started.”

14:37 – There’s no one size fits all

Diet is less about things like macronutrients and more about how your personal metabolic system reacts to specific foods and lifestyle choices.

“ And what it ultimately is about is you don’t have to enter your macronutrients and your fat and grams of carbohydrate like the way MyFitnessPal would work. It’s about you. Understanding how a specific choice you made, a portion or a specific meal, affected your metabolic control. And the reason that we do it this way is because there is a huge amount of personalization in this space. There were some landmark studies started in 2015 using continuous glucose monitors to show that two people with and two people without diabetes can consume a banana and a cookie made with wheat and they can have equal and opposite blood sugar responses to those two foods. So this is where it doesn’t really matter. There’s no one size fits all. What’s important is that you log the things that you are doing in your life. And you understand how those specifically affect you and how minor tweaks, like adding a walk after a meal, sleeping nine hours instead of five hours, de-stressing maybe with a mindfulness routine if you’re in the middle of a stressful workout, all of this affects the hormones in your body and your metabolic control. And so you’ll start to identify these very quickly, probably within the first week. In weeks two and three, you’ll make some changes. You’ll explore how those levers work. And then by week four, you’re able to really implement some optimization and try to shoot for a perfect score in your metabolic health.”

16:13 – Making CGM sexy and mainstream

The majority of adults in our society have bad metabolic fitness and/or are obese. That’s why it’s Josh’s mission to make continuous glucose monitoring sexy and mainstream.

“I touched on some of the numbers again. We’re at a point in society where 12% of adults are metabolically healthy, 88% are unhealthy, 70% are overweight or obese. We have the highest rates of childhood obesity, diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease ever. The mission of Levels is to reverse the trends of metabolic dysfunction, broadly speaking. So there’s an epidemic. We believe that empowering each individual to make better choices driven by their own data and then multiplying that by millions of individuals and you get social scale changes is how we reverse these trends. So right now we’re in the process of reframing the conversation around metabolic health. So it’s not something you either have or don’t have, it’s something that you work on its focus, effort, and repetition, the same way you go to the gym to get stronger. And so caring about glucose control right now, we think of it as something for sick people. Like you don’t need to worry about that unless you’re sick. This is what we’re reframing and showing that actually, it’s for people who are desiring to maximize this life and who choose to seek healthier choices every day – present and future. And so it’s not like this boring fringe thing. It’s actually sexy and mainstream.”

19:55 – Goal: LeBron James with Levels on his arm

Levels is partnering with various thought leaders to educate the public about the importance of glucose monitoring. While they are looking to partner with elite athletes like LeBron James, the message is that this technology is for everyone.

“A lot of the education is around just bringing into the light the fact that you don’t have to be someone who’s terrified of diabetes to care about glucose management and metabolic control, metabolic fitness. We’re connecting those dots and then we’re very much leaning into the athletics sort of aspirational brand model. One of our goals is that LeBron James is warming up with Levels on his arm, helping people to understand that no matter where you are on the metabolic health spectrum, this is something you should care about. Elite athletes can use this to monitor their fuel source, their fuel supply in their blood in real-time and make better choices for training. And at the same time, someone who is struggling to lose a ton of weight that they’ve never been able to shed can use it to understand that the connection between those specific choices they’re making each day and that goal of weight loss.”

21:50 – Your body is like a bank account – you don’t want to overdraw

Health data should be as easy to access and analyze as financial passbooks. That will help us share this data with experts and coaches, making informed decisions in our day-to-day choices for a long and healthy life.

“And so when I look 10 years in the future, I see a world where our health data is much more like our financial data, where you could whip out your phone and you can have a live look at how you are, what your trajectory is, to make a metaphor, the deposits and withdrawals. Now we kind of have a bank account balance and we have no way of accessing it or seeing whether we’re overdrawing. And in the future, that is not going to be the case. We’re going to have a host of analytes, not just glucose, but feeding into a metabolic model of our own health, projecting us into the future. We’ll be able to share that data with experts we trust for guidance and coaching. We’ll be able to not only know that we’re set up for financial security into retirement, but also that we’re going to be alive and well to enjoy it. That’s really where I see Levels balancing the playbook in terms of longevity and human flourishing.”

Mat Sherman: [00:00:00] What is going on, everyone. Thanks for tuning into another episode of forward thinking founders. I am very grateful to have your attention, at least for the next 15 minutes of this episode, forward-thinking founders is a podcast. I interview a pre-seed and seed stage founders about their products, what they want to build into the world and why we dive into how they spend their time.

What’s their vision. What’s the origin of stories. All these things. So you can learn all about what’s coming tomorrow because these companies haven’t hit critical scale. Yet most of them haven’t hit product market fit. These are just early stage companies. And the big question is what can this be? It. And in this podcast, we bring that out.

So with that, I really hope you, it enjoy your time listening to this episode, and I’ve already done 200 plus. So if you like this one to listen to some of the other ones like with Amati Kuhn, Austin, all red, we at Colver, we break interviews. So check it out, enjoy the repository. And for now let’s get into today’s episode.

Here we go. All right, how’s it going, everyone. Welcome to another episode of forward-thinking founders. We’ll be talking to founders about their companies, their visions for the future and how the two collide today. I’m very excited to be talking to Josh clemency, who is the founder of Levels. Welcome to the show.

How’s it going?

Josh Clemente: [00:01:13] It’s going great. Thanks for having me on. Yeah,

Mat Sherman: [00:01:15] thanks for coming on. I’m really looking forward to learning more about what you’re working on. Um, so for people that don’t know what Levels is, or haven’t heard of it, can you kind of tell us what you’re working on?

Josh Clemente: [00:01:25] Yeah. Levels is the metabolic fitness company.

So we provide bio wearable devices and the software that’s necessary in order to understand and take action on your metabolic health in real time. So what this means is providing, uh, you know, a method of. Tapping into your biological information in the moment and making better choices around diet, exercise, sleep, and stress with the end goal, being achieving the state of metabolic fitness, which is, uh, it underlines physical fitness and ultimately mental health as well.

Mat Sherman: [00:01:56] So let’s kind of start high level for someone that I don’t like. I mean, I work out a pretty healthy, but I don’t have a intimate understanding of, uh, of, of health on a certain Levels. And I feel like a lot of people might be in the same boat. So kind of start high level. Why is it important to understand that the metabolic level of your health, or can you just start with, um, high level, why it matters then we can talk about, you know, how it works and then why you got started.

Yeah.

Josh Clemente: [00:02:22] So, um, let’s see. So metabolism is the way that our, our bodies, our cells take out our food and environment and turn it into energy. So that’s kind of like the, the bucket of what metabolic process means. So without metabolism, we don’t have energy, we can’t power any of the cells in our, in our bodies.

And so that’s why I say that it underlies a it’s kind of the foundation underneath. Physical fitness and mental health, because both our, our muscles and our brains require energy in order to operate. Right. So you can imagine if energy systems are broken, the processes that we’re operating, uh, you know, cannot function effectively either.

So that’s kind of, you can, you can imagine that when, with that framework, if metabolic dysfunction sets in, um, things start to go haywire in the body, and this is exactly what we see. So, uh, the way the, the primary energy strata or, um, You know, molecules in the modern human are either carbohydrate or sugar and fat and so carbs in when they break down in the digestive system, they turn into what’s called glucose, which in the bloodstream is a really powerful molecule.

It’s what your sort of cellular machinery can run on. And the body wants to keep that in a very tight band. So it wants to maintain a lower threshold and a higher threshold that are, uh, Quite tightly controlled. And so it uses other hormones like insulin ghrelin and leptin, which are related to hunger and satiety to help you, uh, sort of moderate your behaviors to keep blood sugar very tightly controlled.

Now, when we have, uh, sort of sedentary lifestyles or we’re eating processed foods, um, or, or just high sugar consumption, or a lot of stress, all of these things can start to influence our body’s ability to maintain that. Uh, glucose that sort of homeostasis, right where your glucose is well controlled.

When that starts to happen, you begin to influence these large hormonal fluctuations and, um, sort of spikes and crashes in your metabolic system, which ultimately lead to breakdown. And this is insulin resistance, uh, over the long-term you can start to see additional, uh, so sort of. Long-term chronic illness.

That’s set in which we’re seeing at a, at an epidemic scale here in the United States where, uh, prediabetes diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, cognitive decline, uh, even, uh, you know, Alzheimer’s itself is now being considered type three diabetes, even cancer is related to metabolic dysfunction. And so all of these things are kind of, they set in, uh, they’re called chronic illnesses because they’re sort of the compound effect of years and decades.

Of choices that are made without good information. Right. And so, uh, again, what Levels is doing is providing context for the choices you’re making in real time. So you, you can see how a specific action induced a specific reaction in your blood sugar control, and you can then start to optimize. That’s very

Mat Sherman: [00:05:04] helpful.

Um, very helpful to hear. And it’s sounds like you’re working on some extremely crucial technology’s crucial gum product. Let’s kind of talk about like, what is the product? Is it like a something you put into your arm? Is it like a brain machine interface is like, I have an idea of what it is. I did my research for the people that doesn’t know, like, how do you accomplish.

Yeah. How do you accomplish the goal of what product is

Josh Clemente: [00:05:26] it? Well, we’re not yet at the brain machine interface, unfortunately, but we’ll, we’ll be working on that. Um, no. So the way it works is, uh, basically we’re, we’re monitoring during the sort of primary metabolic molecule in the modern human, which is glucose.

And most of the dysfunction, most of the metabolic dysfunction globally is caused by glucose dysregulation, which leads, like I said to hormonal breakdown. So there is, um, a set of. Not about disease or dysfunction called diabetes, where the body has lost control. The insulin glucose feedback loop is broken and glucose Levels are way out of control.

And this causes a ton of tissue damage and a lot of really bad effects. And so a technology was developed called continuous glucose monitoring. Which is used for the management of diabetes traditionally. And this allows people with, who are living with diabetes to understand that their blood sugar Levels in real time.

And they can sort of use medications like insulin or Metformin to help them sort of. Yeah, maintain control to the maximum extent possible. Now we’ve recently reached, um, with that technology. It’s been decades in the development, but we’ve reached a point where we can now start to enhance, uh, the accessibility and bring that tech into the world of general wellness and performance optimization.

And that’s what Levels is doing. So we’re taking existing devices. Developed for the management of diabetes and we’re coupling them with our lifestyle logging and behavior change software. So we bring in this raw data stream, uh, which has all of these interesting sub metrics about it, sort of the rate of change, the number of the variations in a day, how high it stays time out of your target range.

All of this stuff is really important. And so we do all the analysis. And we surface insights such that you can identify specific lifestyle behaviors that are influencing both positively and negatively, your metabolic control. So, um, you know, long and short of it is we have, uh, every one of our customers receives a prescription consultation.

To get access to one of these devices. We ship a pharmacy, supply kit from, uh, from our pharmacy partner that shows up at your door. It’s very direct to consumer like experience and you log into the level system, start logging your lifestyle daily, your, your diet, exercise, sleep, and stress. And then you get scores that tell you specifically, you know, how that meal meeting red eye flight exercise routine, how that is affecting your metabolic control in the moment.

Right. And so you can start to tailor these streaks and, and reach high scores, both for, for meal choices and for daily, uh, you know, streaks and, or combined, you know, activities and start to see how, uh, both individual and combinations of actions can, can lead to optimization and develop lifelong habits.

Mat Sherman: [00:08:09] So why did you decide to get started working on, on Levels? This is a incredible technology that you’re building. I know it’s helping a lot of people. Why did you decide to get started or what’s the origin story?

Josh Clemente: [00:08:20] Well, um, the origin story, the short of it is I found out that I was either borderline or full blown pre-diabetic despite having very low body fat and traditionally sort of aesthetically looking like I was in good shape.

And, uh, this is something that was a real shock to me. And it came from my experience using continuous glucose monitoring. So to dive in a little deeper there. Um, I am a CrossFit level, two trainer. I worked at SpaceX on life support systems. And while I was at SpaceX, I was exposed to some work by Dom D’Agostino.

He’s a neuroscientist and keto researcher from the university of South Florida, which basically showed that the ketogenic diet can exert. Essentially superhuman properties, um, on the central nervous system toxicity, which basically is a situation where in a high oxygen environment, uh, the brain, there’s a lot of reactive oxygen species in the brain.

And if there’s glucose available, like they react and you end up having like some rapid oxidation it’s really bad and you can have seizures and it’s deadly. And so, uh, this paper, I was like exposed to this information, that diet alone, basically the macronutrient balance of diet can, uh, Introduce like multiple hours of protection in this crazy environment.

And that was the first time that I really sat back and thought, wait a minute. So physical fitness does not equal health. Essentially. You can be, you, you can have, uh, there’s a, there’s a massive lever, which is diet, which influences how your body is functioning in real time. It’s not, it’s no longer. I had to kind of face the fact that it’s like this calories in calories out hypothesis of just like be lean and you’re going to be healthy, really isn’t the case.

And so I started to think. Uh, more specifically about my own experience and my, how sort of my day to day was functioning. And I realized that I actually don’t feel very healthy despite working out regularly. I have these like crazy energy waves, um, or, you know, basically feeling fatigued day in and day out, like getting out of a meeting and rushing to find another coffee before my next meeting and was experiencing like this physical burnout.

Um, and, and so anyway, that, that led me to start thinking very seriously about like, I need some quantitative data on this. And I, I ultimately found a book called wired to eat by Robb Wolf, which talks about this, this sort of, uh, the rise of continuous glucose monitoring and, um, Given that I, I was familiar with metabolic health or metabolic physiology.

Uh, at this point I realized like, Oh, that’s pretty powerful to be able to measure that molecule in real time to measure glucose in real time would be amazing. So I, I tried to get my hands on one of the devices by asking my physician for a prescription. He was not familiar with the use case and kind of thought that this was just like, A little bit hypochondriac of you, you don’t need this, you don’t, unless you’re diabetic, you don’t need to care about this.

And so I was turned down actually by that physician and then like three other physicians thereafter, ultimately, uh, I was able to get a device from Australia and, uh, when I put it on it, it took me about a week to get enough data, to understand that I was either a fully pre-diabetic or borderline, you know, kind of depends on who you ask.

Some, some physicians have different opinions on where the thresholds lie, but. Suffice to say my blood sugar was completely out of control. And I was spending a large majority of most of my day or most days in the pre-diabetic blood sugar range. And this was entirely due to dietary decisions. I was making many of which I thought were objectively healthy.

So you can imagine, like at the time I was, I was training pretty hard lifting a lot. And uh, you know, I was eating. Brown rice sweet potatoes, like large portions to replenish glycogen and be ready for the next workout and what this was causing, because I have this extreme sort of carbohydrate sensitivity was large elevations in my blood sugar and then hormone hormones flood into the, into the system like insulin and bring me crashing down.

And then that’s when I’m like, you know, crawling to the coffee maker. So that was, uh, That experience like both the access issue of not being able to get the hardware initially, and then the amazing actionability and quality of the data stream to help me identify activities that were working against me and implement new ones that were, that were.

Objectively positive, uh, led me to sort of dig deeper on the social, social scale of the problem. Uh, I found that 90 million American adults in the United States have pre-diabetes 90% of them don’t know they have it. And 35 million are type two diabetic. You know, our lifespan has gone backwards for three years.

Uh, basically all of the things that we’re struggling with at a social scale can be connected or many of them can be connected to metabolic dysfunction. And so my own experience, coupled with the realization that this is an epidemic, a silent epidemic, uh, was all it took for me to, uh, leave my other projects and get started.

Mat Sherman: [00:12:50] That’s it’s a great story. Um, and it’s like, exactly. I think how a startup should be, should be started. Like you realize something with yourself. It’s like, Oh my gosh, there’s something here that I need myself. Um, can you kind of go into the day to day? Like, let’s say I got this and I there’s a good chance.

I will. It sounds like you’re very interesting and useful to, to my life. So let’s say I got it. Um, I want to kind of get into the nitty gritty of like the user experience. Is this something where I, anytime I do something, I input it is any of it automatically, is there like analytic, like, like if I was to get it, can you kind of describe to me what I would experience and what my first month would look like?

Josh Clemente: [00:13:26] Yeah. So the program is structured as a 28 day experience. And so you would get it, you would apply a patch to your, the back of your arm. And this little patch has a filament on it, which does break the skin. It’s a, it’s a called a minimally invasive, uh, Device. And so that filament is electrochemically measuring your glucose molecules and it’s sending wirelessly transmits to your phone.

So you’re going to use your phone, uh, to log your lifestyle choices. And we, we do this in Levels in a very low overhead way. So basically you snap a picture, enter a few words about what exactly you’re eating and then, uh, for the next two hours or multiple hours, actually, this has done dynamically our, uh, metabolic models.

There are algorithms pull in your glucose information and then analyze it to understand the quality of that choice or the, I would say the, the net positivity or negativity of that choice on your metabolic control. So we have, uh, in the background, we have these algorithms that are taking the raw data stream and turning it into a set of scores.

One out of, let’s say one through 10 for our, for Emil score and then out of a hundred percent for your overall daily score. So you, you just log your choices, you log your sleep data, your workouts, we pull in from Apple health kit, your diet, you just, again, snap a picture of your meal and add a few notes.

And what it ultimately is about is not necessarily, uh, you know, you don’t have to enter your macronutrients and your, your fat grams of fat grams of carbohydrate. Like the way MyFitnessPal would work. It’s it’s about, uh, you. Understanding how a specific choice you made. A portion or a specific meal affected your metabolic control.

And the reason that we do it this way is because there is a huge amount of personalization in this space. Um, there were some landmarks studies started in 2015 using continuous glucose monitors to show that two people. With two people without diabetes can consume a banana and a cookie made with wheat and they can have equal and opposite blood sugar responses to those two foods.

So this is where, uh, you know, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no one size fits all what’s important is that you log the things that you are doing in your life. And you understand how those specifically affect you and how minor tweaks, like adding a walk after a meal, sleeping nine hours instead of five hours, uh de-stressing maybe with a mindfulness routine.

If you’re in the middle of a stressful workout, all of this affects the hormones in your body. And your metabolic control. And so you’ll start to identify these very quickly. Like probably within the first week in weeks, two and three, you’ll make some changes. You’ll you like explore around how those levers work.

And then by week four, you’re able to really implement some optimization and try to shoot for like a perfect score in your metabolic health.

Mat Sherman: [00:15:57] And who is the ideal user for it? I mean, I feel like anyone would get benefit out of this, but is there a persona that you’re going after as an athletes? Is that like people in tech that have stressful lifestyles who would be the ideal user for Levels?

Josh Clemente: [00:16:13] Well, I, I touched on some of the numbers again, like, you know, we’re at a point in society where 12% of adults are metabolically healthy, you know, 88% are unhealthy, 70% are overweight or obese. We have the highest rates of childhood obesity, diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease ever. And, uh, you know, so.

Really this, the mission of Levels is to reverse the trends of metabolic dysfunction, broadly speaking. So there’s an epidemic. We believe that empowering each individual to make better choices, uh, driven by their own data. And then, you know, multiply that by millions of individuals and you get social scale changes is how we reverse these trends.

So right now, Uh, you know, we’re in the process of reframing the conversation around metabolic health. So it’s not something you either have, or don’t have it’s, it’s something that you work on, it’s focus, effort and repetition, the same way you go to the gym to get stronger. And so, um, you know, caring for, for about glucose control right now, we kind of think of it as something for sick people.

Like you don’t need to worry about that unless you’re sick. Uh, we’re reframing that and showing that. That actually it’s for people who are desiring to maximize this life, you know, choose to seek healthier choices every day, present and future. And so it’s not this like boring fringe thing. It’s actually sexy and mainstream.

And so we’re reframing that conversation. And we’re starting with, with people who are very forward-thinking and already health seeking and who see this product and say, I already know that I want that, you know, there’s no, no educational element whatsoever. And these are people who maybe like use woop who use eight sleep.

They’re like, you know, Basically the, the conscientious health seeker, um, a lot of Peloton people in there. And ultimately as we, as we start there and that sort of each had audience, we’re also very quickly moving down into the, the weight loss segment and then ultimately into, into the mainstream where this is a product that re you know, it’s the next Fitbit.

It’s a bio wearable that. Literally anyone who wants to take more control over their health long-term is going to start using. So, um, yeah, so right now, I think to some, to summarize it’s like health seekers initially, and then eventually the mainstream, as we, as we expand and make our product more accessible.

And I have

Mat Sherman: [00:18:18] to ask, this is a, you’re doing this thing where it’s, it’s a new type of product. You need to kind of like educate the market that know like this actually matters for, for, for everyone or for most people, not just people that might be diabetic or it could be guided by diabetic. How. How’d you figure out how to market it in a way or not even market it, but it’s like, talk about it in a way that these, these health seekers kind of aligned.

Did they automatically get it or did you need to like bring them into a place and educate them a bit to get them to realize like, Oh, this actually is a thing. How do you educate the market?

Josh Clemente: [00:18:51] Yeah. It’s so education is, uh, one of the largest focuses of the company. We, we spend a lot of time, uh, thinking about reading the research and then writing about why this is something that every single person should pay attention to.

And, uh, we do that on our blog, but we also do it through collaborations with. Uh, you know, with our friends in both academia, like Ben Bickman again, uh, Ron Patrick is one of the people in Jason Fung, who we’re really hoping to work with in the near term, Don D’Agostino again, you know, working with people who are already in the space and helping to basically build confidence that our message is meaningful because it’s, you know, we’re supported by these people who are.

The thought leaders in the space. So that’s one thing and, you know, like just publishing content. That’s very approachable. It’s not very, it’s not super high level academic, but it is well re referenced and cited and, um, you know, connecting the qualitative goals that we all have. So we all want to look good and feel good and helping people to understand that, you know, glucose control is not just about diabetes, right?

It’s about, um, you know, fatigue Levels like I was experiencing it’s about, uh, Skin wrinkles and acne are actually very closely connected to glucose dysfunction, weight gain. You know, the hormonal theory of weight balance is of extremely strong and Dr. Jason Fung, again, you know, in the obesity code, it’s a, it’s an amazing book about this exact mechanism.

So a lot of the education is around just bringing into the light, the fact that you don’t have to be someone who’s terrified of diabetes to care about glucose management and metabolic control, metabolic fitness. Um, and so we’re connecting those dots and then, you know, we’re very much. Leaning into the, um, the athletics sort of aspirational brand model.

Right? So, uh, we, you know, one of our goals is that LeBron James is warming up with Levels on his arm, helping people to understand that again, that like no matter where you are on the metabolic health spectrum, this is something you should care about. Elite athletes can use this to monitor their fuel source, you know, their fuel supply in their blood in real time and, and make better choices for training.

And at the same time, someone who is struggling to lose, you know, Uh, a ton of weight that they’ve never been able to shed can use it to understand that the connection between those specific choices they’re making each day and, uh, you know, that goal of weight loss. And so it’s, it’s a powerful molecule.

We’re, we’re trying to, uh, you know, we’re definitely starting in a, in a more sort of athletic space. Um, but then, you know, making sure the message is loud and clear that this is for everyone.

Mat Sherman: [00:21:09] And aside from getting LeBron, wearing this on his arm during a warmup I’d love to hear, or I guess on top of that, what is your vision for Levels?

Um, you know, if you looked out in 10 years or 15 years, what could it look like? And I guess what direction are you rowing? And

Josh Clemente: [00:21:27] yeah. Well, one of the things that, that really bothered me early on was just. Not only that this technology existed and I’d never heard of it before, but that the, the access pathway is very convoluted.

It’s very, it’s very hard to use your health information in your daily choices. Right. We use data, honestly, we use data in and. Basically every corner of our lives, except for our own personal health and wellness. And so when I look 10 years in the future, I see a world where our health data is much more like our financial data, where, you know, you could whip out your phone and you can have a live look at how you are, what your trajectory is, sort of the.

You know, to make a metaphor, the deposits and withdrawals. Right, right, right. Now we kind of have, uh, a bank account balance and we have no way of accessing it and seeing whether we’re overdrawing and in the future, that is not going to be the case. We’re going to have a host of analytes, not just glucose, but feeding into a metabolic model of our own health, projecting us into the future.

We’ll be able to share that data with experts. We trust for guidance and coaching, and we’ll be able to know, not just that. You know, we’re going to, we’re set up for financial security into retirement, but also that we’re going to be alive and well to enjoy it. Um, that that’s really what, where I see where I see Levels, um, you know, balancing the playbook in terms of longevity and human flourishing.

Mat Sherman: [00:22:42] And together you’ll need some help. You’ll need some customers. A lot of customers you’ll might need some more investors. If you want to do that, you’ll need employees. You’ll need LeBron James, but outside of all of that, you’ll, you’ll definitely need help from the forward thinking founders community. So for my last question for you is how can the forward thinking founders community help?

Are you hiring? Are you looking for customers? Are you looking for investors? How can the community assist?

Josh Clemente: [00:23:05] Yeah, first off, uh, definitely, you know, read what we’re putting out there into the world in terms of our blog and our information and let us know if it’s resonating what’s missing. But, um, you know, the biggest thing is we’re building the strongest team in the history of health and wellness.

Uh, you know, we’re, we are looking for world-class candidates across, uh, across roles. So connect with us, you know, if you or someone, you know, wants to, to put that personalized data in the hands of the individual, uh, in order to achieve. To change metabolic outcomes and reverse this trend. Like please reach out, help us to enhance human flourishing and join the team that it’s already a stellar world-class, uh, group.

And, uh, we’re very excited to continue that and looking for people like the Ford thing, founders audience to help us continue to do so.

Mat Sherman: [00:23:45] And then just final question. If someone wanted to get like, find you online, like go to your website, shoot you an email, tweet you, how can someone get in touch on the internet?

Josh Clemente: [00:23:54] So, uh, Levels.health or Levels, health.com is our website. And then we’re on social app, unlock Levels for Twitter and Instagram. And then my Twitter account is Joshua’s forest. Like, go ahead and drop me a DM there if you have, uh, someone interesting. And, uh, the rest of the team is also on Twitter. We’re always like talking about these things.

So that’s the best way to get in touch with us is through one of our social channels or. Via the website.

Mat Sherman: [00:24:16] All right. Well, thank you so much for coming

Josh Clemente: [00:24:18] onto the podcast. Thanks a ton for having me, Matt. All

Mat Sherman: [00:24:22] right. Thank you so much for listening to the episode of forward-thinking founders. If you’re sitting in there, you’re just saying Matt, I want more.

How can I get more? Well, luckily you can get it at forward. Thinking city 14 city is a community for the thinking network, right? And we have multiple different. Aspects of the city. One that we have AMS, some of the previous guests that had been on the podcast, like Jonathan Barco, Kristin Anderson, Austin already come back and they do AMS with the residents.

You can ask them any question that you want, right? You can ask them about fundraising the early days, how they got their customers. We read these every single week with another, you know, really great founder that has been on the podcast. Additionally, um, we have our pitch battles, right? So if you want feedback on your pitch and the opportunity to potentially pitch in front of VCs and talk one-on-one with venture capitalists, this is where to do it.

These are monthly pitch battles. So if you don’t get in the first time, try again, right? The goal is to improve and get feedback to eventually wanna raise, uh, get into the room with the VCs to raise capital three. So you can get back to your company and building a great startup, building a great business.

The last thing I’ll mention is that if you were kind of interested in just community, we have our coffee hours and happy hours where you can meet other residents, learn about what they’re working on. Talk about social things, anything you want. This is a city for founders. It is for investors. It is for startup enthusiasts.

It’s for anyone that loves startups. So if you’re interested in what I’m saying, go to forward thinking.city and join the city for $15 a month. Um, you know, the way, the reason I charge is because I want to be able to do this full-time and bring as much value as I possibly can. And I think it’s a well worth the value.

You can ask any of the current residents and they will attest to that. So you’re going to forward-thinking dot city, joined the city and you’ll see immediately. Then the next day, may the next pitch battle the next event. And I hope to see you there forward thinking.city. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.