Josh Clemente, Levels + Space X // The Future Of Health Tech + Optimizing Metabolic Health

Josh Clemente is the co-founder and president of Levels Health, a health tech startup that uses continuous blood glucose monitoring to provide users with real time data and steps they can take to improve their health right that second. Josh comes from an engineering background, working for cutting edge companies like SpaceX and Hyperloop. He brings that experience of working on out of the box solutions to big problems to Levels. Today on the Creator Lab Podcast, host Bilal Zaidi and Josh discuss why monitoring glucose is so important, how it impacts your long-term health and how elegant software can help people change their behaviors.

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18:53 – What causes those mid-afternoon slumps

High carb meals at lunch can cause our blood glucose to spike and a corresponding amount of insulin to be released. This leads to the dreaded afternoon crash.

“If you cause a very aggressive blood sugar spike, your body will release a correspondingly aggressive insulin spike to clear that glucose out. The reason for this is that high blood sugar levels are damaging to tissues. That’s a very reactive molecule and it can cause a lot of damage very quickly if the levels are too high. So your body very quickly responds, releases a flood of insulin. That insulin drags glucose levels down and oftentimes overcompensates. And then you end up with a reactive hypoglycemic scenario, which is where your blood sugar has now gone from a very high point to an extremely low point one to two hours after your meal and all of the hormones associated with crashing blood sugar are kind of contradictory to what you just did. So now your blood sugar is crashing. Your body’s afraid of just running out of energy. Now you release hormones like ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, which tells you: your blood sugar is crashing, you need energy, you need to eat again.You might feel shakiness. You might feel a little lightheaded. You might feel extreme fatigue. So these are all the things we associate with like the afternoon lunch crash and that ‘hanger’ that’s associated with it.”

22:25 – Glucose should be a primary health indicator

It may not be the only molecule that we should observe, but since high glucose can lead to health issues like diabetes, heart disease, and stroke, it is one of the most important ones to track.

“The CDC states that the majority of these, and Alzheimer’s is now being called type three diabetes by the way, can be avoided with proper lifestyle choices. And the reason they say that is that the metabolic dysfunction, the outcome is preceded by dysregulation of glucose and insulin long before. So for decades in advance. So by looking at the research and understanding that the breakdown that we’re seeing, you know, the outcome that we kind of all pay attention to, which is a heart attack or a stroke or Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the wheels were set in motion decades earlier. And it was a stack-up, a compounding effect of decisions that led to eventual dysregulation in insulin and then glucose, which when elevated for long periods of time produces inflammation. Inflammation then leads to inflammatory, basically these inflammatory storms that can attack tissues. Glucose is a very reactive molecule and in the presence of oxygen, it leaves reactive oxygen species. All of this can attack tissues, and these can be tissues of the nervous system, of the arterial system, of the skin, of the brain. And so what we’re seeing is that the inflammation that is downstream of blood sugar dysregulation is what is actually the real culprit. But the way to control for it is to monitor and maintain control through our choices. It’s not that glucose is the only thing we should pay attention to, but it’s a leading indicator.”

27:15 – Every diet or lifestyle can benefit from glucose monitoring

Levels’ mission is not about promoting one “best” type of diet. It’s about each person taking charge of their health and making the best choices based on data.

“What matters is, again, balance: controlling the hormonal environment that we’re operating under. And we’ve shown that no matter who you are, no matter what your philosophy is, you can optimize and make better choices daily if you’re listening to your body in a closed loop with objective data. And so we have everyone from Keto carnivores in the program, optimizing in a direction you may not expect, which would be for Keto, for example, experimenting and finding carbohydrates that they can consume that make them feel good, actually increase their energy levels without pulling them out of ketosis, which they want to maintain for weight loss or for longevity or for cognitive function. On the other side, we have people like Dr. Casey Means, my co-founder, who is a 100% plant-based vegan. And she has some of the best metabolic control in the dataset, despite eating almost exclusively carbohydrates with some healthy fats and proteins. And so it is entirely possible that you can be from whatever philosophy you’d like, but that you can ground it in data.”

30:28 – Wearables need good software backing them up

Wearable health trackers are only as good as the software that supports them. When the collected data is useful and accurate, people get a true benefit from data that can be turned into actionable steps.

“The thing that takes a heart rate monitor and turns it into a Whoop Strap or an Oura Ring is the interface with the end user. So taking that raw data and turning it into an experience where people can understand what’s happening and make concrete behavior change. And so that’s what Levels is doing. We’ve taken existing products, existing hardware. We’ve set up a tele-health physician network that we work together with to ensure that we can arrange prescription consultations for these devices, which are currently prescription controlled here in the U.S. and then you get a kit in the mail and you put on the sensor. You download the Levels app and then you interface with your data full-time and you log your lifestyle, diet, exercise, sleep, and stress, and you receive scores and metrics that help you to make better choices and at least understand how your decisions are affecting you every day. And you strive for streaks of basically maximizing your metabolic scores and maximizing your meal scores. Over time, we’re going to introduce increasingly proactive insights. So eventually identifying opportunities to reach out to you and say, for example, when I step off that red eye flight, ‘Hey, Josh, you didn’t sleep last night. You know, you got three hours of sleep. Typically when this happens, your blood sugar is 20% higher and you respond negatively to these foods, perhaps consider substituting for these foods instead, which you’ve demonstrated better response to.’”

36:20 – Small tweaks in your diet can have big benefits

Continuous monitoring allows you to see what small changes can be made in order to improve metabolic health, such as eating whole fruit instead of drinking a smoothie.

“We see this regularly where people are assuming just based off what they see on the internet that, for example, the healthiest breakfast food is oatmeal. Google that, you’ll see it on the top three, no matter what list you’re looking at. So people are often making the choice to eat oatmeal every morning, even though they may not even enjoy it. And what we’ve seen in our dataset and I personally have seen is that oatmeal is often one of the worst offenders for people’s blood sugar. So you’re starting off the day. You want to be energized and ready to attack the day and so you eat a big bowl of oatmeal and your blood sugar skyrockets, you stay elevated for a while. It comes crashing down right as you’re walking into your first meeting and you crash, boom 11:00 AM, and then you were ravenously hungry for lunch. And these types of things, when we’re in the open loop are very challenging to identify, right? It’s like, you kind of blame it on, ‘Oh, I must not have slept well, last night. I thought I did, but I guess not.’ And now for the first time you can see the objective data, which is clarifying actually, it’s just a very simple tweak. Maybe you have avocado toast in the morning, which you enjoy far more anyway. And you can now optimize this metric and eliminate all that qualitative negativity.”

38:44 – CGMs are expensive, but that will likely change

The cost of the monitors may go down over the next few years. For now, it’s still competitive with the cost of seeing a nutritionist.

“We’ve seen about an order of magnitude improvement in the device costs over the past 5-10 years, and that process will continue. As we’ve seen with every electronics revolution, the microelectronics revolution in particular has brought down the component costs and will unlock, once coupled with the supply and demand mechanisms of a larger market, will unlock increasing improvements and in the device costs themselves. Today, our program is $399 for the first month. That includes the prescription consultation, the devices themselves, access to the Levels software and daily, weekly, and monthly reports. Then we offer the ongoing subscription at $199 a month. All things considered, this is significantly cheaper than a nutritionist or a nutrition program. And it’s guided by real-time data. So it’s much, much less subjective, much, much more driven by objective data. So people are finding that this is extremely valuable and can easily pay for itself just in one month. And we really lean in there and say, like definitely do this. Learn quite a bit about yourself, and then make the best choice for you.”

45:54 – Building on existing hardware

Because CGM technology already existed when Levels was founded, Josh and his team were able to get the company off the ground quickly.

“What was beautiful about it is that by leveraging the existing hardware, we could basically take a concept and demonstrate it with essentially a prototype experience with almost no effort. So what we initially did was focused on setting up a relationship with the tele-health network, such that we could arrange consultations. And then if prescribed, we could get people’s CGMs and then communicate with them about their experience and understand what they would like to see in the future version of this when we have an app and we have an interface. And so that very prototype process, we were actually revenue positive within literally a month of starting the company. Because we kind of moved very quickly on that prototype from there. We had a vision, people could experience it, and we were able to raise some money from angels and strategics quite quickly on safe notes.”

52:21 – CGM is for anyone who wants to be healthy

Josh feels that marketing the Levels CGM technology comes relatively easily – because it’s all about empowering people.

“It’s not some sort of disciplinary product where I feel like it’s scolding me all the time. It’s actually quite the opposite. It’s unleashed all this potential to live my life with confidence and make the correct choices so that I can be both optimizing for long-term health, but also just experience today minimizing these crashes and optimizing my energy and getting off coffee as a crutch and all of these benefits, right? So that really drove home for me the potential here. And looking at the future, we just fundamentally disagree that you should wait until something’s broken to try and fix it. I just completely disagree with that on its face. And I argue the complete opposite. You know, this is not a technology that is for people who are sick. It’s for people who don’t want to get sick, and who want to be making better choices every day. And you don’t have to be an extreme hypochondriac or someone who is like a biohacker testing crazy things on themselves all the time. You just have to be someone who doesn’t want to be unhealthy.”

55:51 – Marketing through education

Levels is focusing their marketing efforts on educating people on metabolic health. At the end of the day, the ultimate goal isn’t to sell the Levels product. It’s to create awareness about metabolic dysfunction and give people a starting place to begin improving.

“Finding ways to reach our audience where they are and helping to educate on why this is important for it for everyone. It doesn’t have to be so that you’re an athlete out there trying to break records. It can be for someone who’s again just trying to get through the day without massive energy crashes like I was. I’m just trying to choose what to bring to the lunch table or to the dinner table every evening without needing a PhD. Bringing that marketing team together that can identify opportunities for education and to show people why metabolic health again, is the foundation beneath physical health and mental health. So a lot of this is like, it won’t be the standard paid marketing where you just kind of pay the Facebook machine and hope for the best. It’s very much deliberate, intentional, education-oriented. And so anyone who reads our blog will see that we put a huge amount of effort into those articles.They’re essentially scientific literature. We’re also taking on podcasts like this one to reach out and have different audiences kind of hear the message and understand the value proposition. Arranging that tech, that sort of strategy, and finding the different audiences that are out there and kind of meeting them in a community environment where it’s very obvious that ultimately, if we can just educate the market on why this matters and people just take action even separate from using Levels, we will be successful.”

59:05 – The future of wearables is integration

There are so many health trackers out there, but where the data gets really helpful is when you see how it all stacks up together.

“So right now, tracking one’s sleep is useful, but it’s even more valuable when you understand the acute insulin resistance that happens after you skip a night of sleep or have a very short and uncomfortable night of sleep. And so sleep data maximizes the value of glucose data and glucose data maximizes the value of sleep data, because glucose dysregulation also leads to restlessness and inflammation, which can lead to a poor night of sleep as well. So this is a closed loop, and this is the same across many different wearable metrics that we’re looking at. Body temperature, again, our exercise levels, the amount of metabolism or the amount of energy we’re producing through fat oxidation, glucose oxidation, what’s powering exercise versus sedentary behaviors. All this stuff comes together and it’s crucial that we bring it all into a single environment and place it in context with one another. And so we’re working with our friends at Eight Sleep. You mentioned mattresses. So Eight Sleep is a sleep science company that has a smart mattress measuring temperature and other heart rate variables. We’ve got Whoop and Oura and the other risk-based monitors. And so bringing together a health stack that allows you to plug in whichever metrics you’ve got and increase the resolution of the picture, right? All of this is important to us. The most valuable metric is how does that play out in your metabolic health. So we are working on integrations with several of these in real time.”

1:04:30 – The future of healthcare is personal prevention

Josh sees the balance of preventative care shifting from doctors to individuals, thanks to the help of wearable health technologies.

“If I look 10 years in the future, I want to see data being used more consistently and more objectively in our approach to prevention. And I wouldn’t say that I would put that entirely on the medical world. I would put that on the individual, right? Our philosophy is if you have real-time information and you’re making choices that are driven by it, it is certainly possible that you can modify the outcome well before it ever happens. Then when you do, if you do develop something that needs some sort of medical care, walking in with context that is years of data, metabolic data, sleep data, diet data, lifestyle habits. And the conversation can be grounded in how you’ve lived your life for the past few years. That’s a great starting place, and it’s a much more educated starting place than where we are today. So generally speaking, this is the direction we’re going. If people understand the value of personal health information, they want this, they’re leaning heavily into it. And it’s not even necessarily that in the future, doctors will have to comb through years and decades of CGM data. That’s where the data analytics that Level’s is producing can help. We can throw processing power at this and show, pull out these conclusions that can then be used by an expert to help you navigate whatever sort of sort of health conversation you’re having.”

1:08:18 – Balanced meals and food order

It’s best to avoid candy altogether, but carbohydrates can be better tolerated if paired with protein and fats and eaten in the right order.

“We’ve started to learn that generally the best approach is to eat balanced meals. So to mix in healthy fats and proteins into a meal completely changes the way that you metabolize those. For example, like if you’re going to have a banana in order to power a workout or something, maybe have that with an almond butter, which also has some protein and fat in it. We’ve seen over and over again that improves the response. Another nice thing is the macronutrient content and order also really matters. There’s a study that shows that  if you eat the same meal that has, let’s say, a salad, a protein, and then a carbohydrate. If you eat that meal in different order, so let’s say you eat it with the carbohydrate first and then the protein, and then the vegetables last versus the other way around, you can improve your insulin response and your blood sugar response by close to 50% to that exact same meal by simply putting the vegetables first. It’s key to have fiber and to pay attention to, again, the order that you’re eating things and not kicking your system directly with a lot of carbohydrates, especially if you’re a sensitive responder and instead to maybe work your way up there. And the fiber seems to help to slow the process of digestion and absorption. So those are some key ones that you can just start today.”

1:10:32 – Quick exercise after meals

Another easy tip is to go for a walk after meals to help your body metabolize your food. All exercise is beneficial, not only high intensity workouts that get your heart racing.

“I’ve completely kind of adjusted my perspective on exercise after seeing blood sugar information. What do you mean by that, is that you don’t have to go 110%. You don’t have to be swinging kettlebells and throwing barbells to make really meaningful improvements in your metabolic health. The biggest thing, if there’s any one easy takeaway that I would recommend, it would be light exercise, especially around meals. So move more often, more times throughout the day. You don’t have to go to the gym and have a one hour session. It should be, if you can get five minutes to walk around the block, or if you can get even better 25 minutes to walk around the block while you’re on a phone call, optimize towards that. And especially as it relates to indulgent meals. So if you’re going to eat a meal that you’re sensitive to, or that is quite rich and high in carbohydrates, taking a 20 minute, 30 minute walk directly after that completely changes the way your body’s metabolizing it. And the reason for that is that your muscles, the biggest muscles in your body, your legs, are able to absorb glucose without insulin. And only when they’re being contracted, so when they’re being used. So finish that meal up, stand up, go for a walk, and you’ll potentially avoid that slump, that crash thereafter, and also really improve your glucose and insulin response.”

Josh Clemente [00:00]  I was in recurring meetings with Elon at various times throughout our, my time there. And, you know, he basically just said, “Look, we’ve got to get this capsule out now. And I’m tired of, you know, basically all of the bureaucracy and slowness, and we’re going to produce a capsule in 30 days and we’re going to unveil it to the public.” And he’s like, “Go make that happen.” And so there was nobody at the company at that time who was meaningfully focused on this project. And so over the course of 30 days, we literally produced a full-scale mock-up of something that looked actually quite similar to the ultimate crew capsule that flew this year to the space station. And it was just kind of mayhem and it was extraordinarily fun. And at the end of 30 days, we had something we were super proud.

Bilal Zaidi [00:47]                         People always say like, “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.” But like, in this case it’s, you are actually a rocket scientist. Welcome to Creator Lab. This is your host, Bilal Zaidi. Today’s episode is with Josh Clemente. He’s a mechanical engineer and the founder of Levels. He previously led teams at SpaceX and Hyperloop where they developed life support systems for astronauts going into space. He’s literally a rocket scientist. He’s really seeing on the kind edge of health tech, helping people to optimize the metabolic health. We go into all of that and try to deconstruct what it actually means for a layman like myself. We discuss why monitoring glucose is so important, how it impacts your long-term health and how software can help drive behavior change. If this is the first time you’re listening to the show, make sure you subscribe on your podcast app. Or if you prefer video, you can go to youtube.com/creatorlabFM. I’ll have an episode for you every Wednesday with one of the greatest business minds in the world. Let me know what you think of this one. You can tweet me @bzaidi. Now let’s get into the show. Welcome to the show, man.

Josh Clemente [01:57]  Thanks for having me on. This is awesome.

Bilal Zaidi [01:59]                         So look, we got connected. I think it was maybe about a month ago now, four, five weeks ago. And I think I just DMd you because I’d seen what you’re building with Levels. And I was like, this is something I’ve been kind of following in the background for some time. And I was just really curious, like how you’re approaching it. And I wanted to test out the product and we basically had a back and forth, had a phone call, and I was like, kind of blown away. So I said, we should come on the show, talk about what you’re doing. It’s very unique. So yeah, if you could just kind of introduce yourself before we kind of go into the details of Levels, that’d be a great start.

Josh Clemente [02:37]  Definitely. I’m Josh, I’m the founder of Levels. I’ve been an aerospace engineer and sort of systems engineer for my entire career and have over the past two years diverged into physiology, metabolism and tackling the problems with metabolic dysfunction through the real-time access to one’s own health information.

Bilal Zaidi [02:59]                         So for someone who’s listening and they say like, “What the hell is metabolic health?” So could you explain kind of like in simple terms what that means?

Josh Clemente [03:06]  So metabolism is, basically it’s the chemical processes that are used to produce energy from our food and environment, right? So every tissue, every cell in the human body requires energy to function. And the way that’s produced is through these processes, which are called in whole, our metabolism. These are systems that or running based on hormones. So the human body is not an incinerator. You don’t feed fuel in it. It lights on fire and you get energy out. It’s actually like a chemistry set where chemicals are going in. That’s our food, that’s our sunlight, the other things that we’re exposed to in our environment and other chemicals are produced and recombinated and then released into the bloodstream. And that’s how energy is released, right? So you, it’s a molecular process. There’s a whole host of cascades of hormones that are involved. But what it comes down to is whether it’s your brain, your muscle, or your body fat, all of those tissues are alive. All of them demand energy to function properly. And so metabolism is the precursor or the foundation under which physical health and mental health exists.

Bilal Zaidi [04:09]                         And I guess a lot of people have heard the word metabolism and they normally refer to it in, “I’m getting older, my metabolism’s slowing down.” But I don’t think we’ve necessarily connected the dots to what that actually means in real time. So, we’re going to go into the details of Levels and kind of like how you’re attacking this big problem. But before we do that, I’d love to just paint a picture of your background because you mentioned you were an engineer or you are an engineer or, and you worked at SpaceX and Hyperloop. So like if I say SpaceX, you were there for six years, like. What kind of comes to mind from your time there?

Josh Clemente [04:44]  Specific stories? One of my favorite experiences at SpaceX. Well, ultimately, my fondest memories were working on the life support systems team. So developing the systems that produce breathing gas and breathing oxygen for the space suits, the astronauts are wearing, maintaining the cabin pressure and concentration of chemicals in the cabin for the crew members to be able to breathe and float around and be comfortable. Fire suppression systems. So basically working on developing the first new astronaut carrying spacecrafts since the eighties and that, the team I worked with was absolutely second to none. And it was just an amazing part of my life. You know, specific examples that I look back on and smile were the way that the crew capsule was sort of released to the public. We called it the V2 unveil. This happened, I think in like May of 2012 or 2013. And you know, Elon, I was in recurring meetings with Elon at various times throughout our, my time there. And, you know, he basically just said, “Look, we’ve got to get this capsule out now. And I’m tired of, you know, basically all of the bureaucracy and slowness, and we’re going to produce a capsule in 30 days and we’re going to unveil it to the public.” And he’s like, “Go make that happen.” And so there was nobody at the company at that time who was meaningfully focused on this project. And so over the course of 30 days, we literally produced a full-scale mock-up of something that looked actually quite similar to the ultimate crew capsule that flew this year to the space station. And it was just kind of mayhem, and it was extraordinarily fun. And at the end of 30 days, we had something we were super proud of. And, so it’s that type of thing, like just the scrappiness and willingness to break all the rules of aerospace is what I look back on with the fondest memories.

Bilal Zaidi[06:33]                         That’s awesome, man. Yeah. I guess it’s one of those things we all see it on the news and we watched the videos and obviously we’ve seen what Elon Musk has done in several different worlds. But yeah, it’s not everyday I get to meet someone who’s actually worked on something that crazy. And one of the things people always say like, “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.” But like, in this case, is you actually are a rocket scientist. That’s cool. And then what about Hyperloop? Cause that was another Elon Musk aligned project. I don’t know of how involved he is with that, but what attracted you to that and what were you doing there?

Josh Clemente [07:11]  Well, after I left SpaceX, I wanted to get involved in, you know, another super early stage scrappy project, and I was actually kind of incubating a different startup idea at that time. I wasn’t quite ready to go to market with it. And Hyperloop to me is right up my alley. So it’s vehicle engineering. So for people that don’t know what Hyperloop is, it’s basically an electromagnetic levitating train inside of an evacuated tube. So you have a tube from point to point, you know, hundreds of miles long, you pull all of the air out of it. And you put in an electromagnetic levitation system in there with a train hovering on it, and you can go hundreds or thousands of miles per hour because there’s no wind resistance. So the energy sort of conservation is really amazing. So that project is the same as developing a spacecraft, right? Because you’re pulling all of the air out of the tube, it’s at vacuum, which is the same as space. And so the vehicle, the train has to be a spacecraft and it needs life support systems, it needs propulsion systems, it needs avionics, you know, it’s basically flying. And so that was super exciting to me. And I got a chance to be one of the first senior design engineers working on their full scale prototype, which we built out in Las Vegas. And yeah, architecting out some of the life support stuff and building infrastructure level products. And just demonstrating that this technology is possible. And Elon actually was not involved in that project. He published a white paper earlier on that defines the business case, but decided to kind of see where the market took it. See if anybody did, you know, any meaningful process or progress before he got involved. Ultimately he decided to take a different approach with The Boring Company, which is his sort of slow move on the Hyperloop model.

Bilal Zaidi [08:54]                         As we go into the story of Levels and what you’re actually doing, they seem like completely different worlds, right? Because what you’ve got is what I’m wearing here. If we can get it on the camera. Representing. We’ve got, basically I’ve been called a cyborg for the last a month, but it’s something that’s going to be measuring my blood glucose levels every five, 15 minutes or something like that. So we’re going to go into the details of that, but that’s obviously very different to rockets and very different to, you know, transportation in a completely new way. But what the kind of basis of the show, why it’s called Creator Lab, is really around this premise that people like yourself are creating in different worlds. And you can take those same skills and the same processes and go on work on SpaceX and then go and start something completely from scratch. And you’ll be able to, we’ll be able to help you take some of those learnings from you today. So, let’s jump into Levels then. So, what year was it? And like, what was the time where you started thinking about, “This is a problem, and I need to be the one who’s going to fix it.”?

Josh Clemente [10:00]  So the process of kind of discovery was very personal for me. I’m a, despite being an engineer, I’m also a level two CrossFit trainer. And I, you know, I’ve always played sports and been interested in physical fitness. And that has been my, you know, core philosophy around health. “If you work out hard and you can run fast and jump high and lift heavy weights, you’re healthy.” And that’s a carry over from just traditional sports science, which kind of puts the entire emphasis on burning calories and being fit. So I was just a believer in that, worked out consistently throughout my career. However, towards the end of my time at SpaceX, I was, you know, kind of hitting this fatigue limit. It was my physical and mental energy was just at all time lows and wildly fluctuating throughout the day. So, a lot of this I blamed on just pure stress. You know, we’re working in a high intensity environment. We’re moving fast, this is just normal. But as I got exposed to some of the research in the world of human performance, specifically the work of people like Dom D’Agostino out of the University of South Florida, demonstrating that ketogenic diets have protective neurological effects on rodents exposed to extremely high pressure oxygen environments. So these types of, you know, sort of abstract studies that demonstrate that diet actually has a very powerful physiologic control over human performance, or at least organic performance. I started to think more critically about, Okay, so I understand energy and thermodynamics. I understand that the human body needs it to run. And clearly this is not a very clean process. You know, there’s a ton of hormones involved in how we generate energy. And here I am, you know, feeling proud of myself for being physically fit. And yet I’m dragging myself through the workday. Like I literally, you know, I get home, I do email until one or two in the morning. I probably went to the gym at 10:00 PM to squeeze in an intense workout. My heart rate’s pumping. I climb into bed. I, you know, opened my eyes on the tenth snooze of the alarm and drag myself into the car. Barely scraped my way through my day’s meetings. And I’m just consuming caffeine to keep myself going. And this is not. So my thought about who I was in terms of health was very different from the reality, the day-to-day qualitative experience of how I felt. And so as I kind of got closer to the end of my time there at SpaceX, I started thinking, “All right, as I go into my next gig over at Hyperloop, I’m going to take some time to start experimenting. And I’m going to learn about the effects of diet. I’m going to try and figure out which one is right for me and make some better choices.” You know, “In a holistic sense around my lifestyle.” This led kind of down an internet rabbit hole, and I started digging into metabolism physiology like very specifically, and just discovered that five of the top ten causes of death in the United States and in developing countries are related to metabolic dysfunction, discovering that endocrine breakdown, which is the breakdown of the systems involved in metabolic processes, precedes chronic illness. So the diagnosis of illness by decades. Understanding that 90 million Americans have prediabetes and 90% of them, according to the CDC don’t know it. And then thinking about all of this is happening because we have no feedback in our lives. You know, we’re making choices, we’re sitting down, we’re eating lunch every single day and we’re making those choices based off what worked for a friend or what feels good, what tastes good. We have no feedback other than the bathroom scale on whether or not these choices are actually making us healthier. So, I decided, you know, I need some quantitative data in my life. I can’t continue. Like once I had kind of pulled the blinders off, I just couldn’t continue flying blind. And I started pricking my finger to get blood sugar information. This is something that people who are managing diabetes do regularly. I didn’t, couldn’t really make heads or tails of it. This caused me to dig even deeper into the research. Eventually I discovered that there’s this thing called a continuous glucose monitor, which allows you to get a full time, high resolution data stream of your blood sugar information. And I requested one from my doctor. He told me, “No, this is for sick people. You don’t need to worry about that until you’ve been diagnosed with something.” I then asked a few other doctors via tele-health. None of that worked. Eventually, I got my hands on one. This took like, literally, I don’t know, 10 months or something. And once I put it on, I discovered that I was either pre-diabetic or borderline pre-diabetic, depending on who you ask. And the blood sugar sort of patterns I was seeing were highly dysfunctional and spending significant time above the normal thresholds, and then crashing back down multiple hours later, lots of oscillation, spikes and valleys. And now with my new understanding of metabolism, I realized like this is triggering a hormone or a hormonal cascade, which is affecting everything from my hunger and satiety levels to my stress levels, and to my energetic availability for exercise. And so not to mention mood and cognitive function, right? So it all crystallized in that moment. There’s an accessibility issue to this amazing technology. The potential for it is extremely valuable. There’s an epidemic that is unspoken. No one thinks about metabolic health in their daily lives. And the key to all of it is closing the loop between the actions we take and the reactions we experience in our bodies. So it was very first principles kind of concept, and the idea is make, proliferate this technology, put it in the hands of people, but couple it with behavior change software that can connect the choices you’re making specifically to, better choices you could be making.

Bilal Zaidi [15:37]                         Love that, man. Yeah. And just to share, because when we spoke on the phone, I told you some of the parallels, definitely not a CrossFit level two like you, but I had my own personal kind of intense digging down a rabbit hole thing that happened to me like a few years ago, similarly, And it was because, well, at the time I was trying to cut some weight and similar to you, like, you know, there’s part of it is like just feeling good. Part of is looking good, which is always going to be there. And anyone listening to this probably wants to do that too. But then there’s the kind of imbalance of like, you’re a very fit guy and you’re still feeling basically like crap all day. And that’s, that isn’t something that if you go to a doctor, they’re just like, “Oh, you’re probably just tired,” or they’ll just kind of brush it off a lot of the time. And I think it’s this bigger problem that I also discovered, which was the problem with the kind of healthcare system is that we kind of only fix things right at the end when we’ve already figured out, “Okay, someone’s got diabetes now, let’s shoot them up with insulin.” You know? Versus like that massive group you said 35% of people, whatever it, is that have pre-diabetes and saying, “Actually a lot of this can be slowed down or reversed completely through nutrition and obviously healthy eating.” At the same time, I guess a lot of people, who maybe aren’t as extreme as you and I who want to put something in their arm, a lot of people have this phrase they’re always kind of lean back on, which is balanced, right? So they’ll say, “Okay, well, it doesn’t matter. Like, you don’t need to put that in your arm. You don’t need to, you know, do the finger pricks. Just eat like healthy,” whatever that means. “Do some exercise and we’ll be okay. We’re like in our thirties or forties and we should be okay by at this age.” The problem with that though is that the word balance means different things to different people. And there isn’t any like there isn’t any individuality to that phrase. And I, and that’s kind of what I love about what you guys are doing is you’re giving people that feedback loop to figure out what those individual actions should be. So could we just go into a tangible example? I think you mentioned it there, but you said like maybe after lunchtime, you might have like this drop in energy. And a lot of people have this. I used to have it all the time. And like what is that generally caused by, from your research?

Josh Clemente [18:08]  So the way that carbohydrates specifically are digested, they break down into glucose, which is a, it’s a sugar. Well, glucose and fructose. We’ll talk about glucose because that’s the primary one. But basically you consume carbohydrates. They break down your digestive system, they turn into glucose and that releases into the bloodstream. It becomes what we call blood sugar. And the mechanism that your body uses to get that sugar out of the blood and into the cells to be turned into energy is a hormone called insulin. And so insulin responds proportionally to glucose for people who have a functional, you know, metabolism. And basically the insulin is the key that opens the lock that lets glucose in. Because the function of insulin is to bring glucose levels down, if you cause a very aggressive blood sugar spike, your body will release a correspondingly aggressive insulin spike to clear that glucose out. The reason for this is that high blood sugar levels are damaging to tissues. That’s a very reactive molecule and it can cause a lot of damage very quickly if the levels are too high. So your body very quickly responds, releases a flood of insulin. That insulin drags glucose levels down and oftentimes overcompensates. And then you end up with a reactive hypoglycemic scenario, which is where your blood sugar has now gone from a very high point to an extremely low point, you know, one to two hours after your meal. And all of the hormones associated with crashing blood sugar are kind of contradictory to what you previous, to what you just did. So this is like now your blood sugar is crashing. Your body’s afraid it’s running out of energy. Now you release hormones like ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, which tells you, “Oh, your blood sugar is crashing. You need energy, you need to eat again.” You might feel shakiness. You might feel a little lightheaded. You might feel extreme fatigue. So these are all the things we associate with like the afternoon lunch crash and that hunger that’s associated with it. We’ve had some studies, specifically for example n 2015, the Weitzman Institute gave 800 people who did not have diabetes, continuous glucose monitors, and tracked how they responded to meals. And they showed that two people who eat the exact same two foods can have equal and opposite blood sugar responses. So this is not like they’re somewhat different. This is one person spikes significantly on a banana and is completely flat on a cookie made with whole wheat. And the other person is completely flat on the banana and spikes on the whole wheat cookie. And because of the way that our bodies respond to the chemicals coming into them, the food that we’re eating, they have to release hormones to process that, in proportion to the sort of the chemical wave that’s coming in from the breaking down, the digestion of the food. And so the two people who are having that banana and that cookie who respond differently are having opposite hormonal responses to those foods. So this concept of balance, although I completely subscribe to it, I am not an extremist in one direction or the other, we want to ground that concept of balance in the individual. So by giving the person the real-time data on who they are, are you the fruit sugar sensitive person or the grain sugar sensitive person? Helping them to understand context is the way to achieve true balance. When we kind of pull out the data and say, “Oh, no, you don’t need to worry about that. If you just do these one size fits all things, you’ll be healthier, just like the rest of us.” That doesn’t really hold up when you find that the American population is 88% metabolically unhealthy. And this is a study from the University of Northern Carolina that came out last year. And so, yeah, we’re realizing that that standard one size fits all philosophy is really not holding up in the face of the evidence. And in fact, to achieve true balance, you just need context. You need information that’s telling you where your sensitivities lie, and this could be genetics. This could be microbiome. This could be stress, environment. How well rested you are. All of this matters and creates a dynamic machine that is metabolizing, you know, the food you’re giving it.

Bilal Zaidi [23:03]                         Why is glucose essentially the one thing that you guys at Glucose Levels, the one thing you guys have really focused in on first is. The other things you could potentially be focusing on.

Josh Clemente [23:13]  Yeah. So the primary energy molecule for most modern humans is glucose. And the, as I mentioned earlier, the metabolic dysfunctions that we see in this country are things like, again, PCOS, pre-diabetes, type two diabetes, Alzheimer’s, stroke, cardiovascular disease, and all of these are inflammatory chronic conditions. And so the CDC states that the majority of these, and Alzheimer’s is now being called type three diabetes, by the way, can be avoided with proper lifestyle choices. And the reason they say that is that the metabolic dysfunction, the outcome is preceded by dysregulation of glucose and insulin long before. So for decades in advance. And so we have, you know, by looking at the research and understanding that the breakdown that we’re seeing, you know, the outcome that we kind of all pay attention to, which is a heart attack or a stroke or Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the wheels were set in motion decades earlier, and it was a stack-up, a compounding effect of decisions that led to eventual dysregulation in insulin and then glucose, which when elevated for long periods of time produces inflammation. Inflammation then leads to inflammatory, you know, basically these inflammatory storms that can attack tissues. Glucose is a very reactive molecule and in the presence of oxygen, it leaves reactive oxygen species. All of this can attack tissues, and these can be tissues of the nervous system, of the arterial system, of the skin, of the brain. And so what we’re seeing is that the inflammation that is downstream of blood sugar dysregulation is what is actually the real culprit. But the way to control for it is to monitor and maintain control through our choices. And so there, it’s not that glucose is the only thing we should pay attention to, but it’s a leading indicator. The dysregulation that occurs around mealtimes when we were making choices that are kicking our systems over and over again, that precedes the overall dysregulation which- So basically like when you see big blood sugar spikes after meals, as long as they come back down, well, you don’t have diabetes yet. Right? Because your body can still maintain control. However, over time, like I mentioned, that can lead to insulin resistance due to the increasing amount of insulin to respond to those spikes. And once you have insulin resistance, then you’re going to see that your blood sugar actually will not come back down. So now you’ll be maintaining those elevations for longer. And when you do come down, you come down to a high elevated fasting glucose. And so all of this takes very long periods of time. And because there’s no acute symptoms, there’s no situation where, you know, one blood sugar spike, you know, can kill you or something like that, we kind of tend to ignore it. And we say, you know, kick the can down the road, worry about that when it’s broken. The reality is that every day we need to be considering these things because if you look at the rates in this country and abroad, they’re increasing, especially among children, you know. So we have rising rates of type two diabetes among kids. We have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. That’s increasing, skyrocketing. It’s a thousand percent higher than it was in the fifties. All of this stuff comes back to lifestyle and the choices we’re making daily. And so even though, I would not say that glucose is the only molecule we care about. It’s certainly the most, it’s the 80, 20 highest value metric today. And we’ll be adding additional analytes to that platform as we proceed.

Bilal Zaidi [25:31]                         You’ve mentioned all the different diseases that this impacts, right? And as I started digging into this as an amateur as well, I’ll just give one example. There was a recent vegan, pro vegan documentary.

Josh Clemente [25:45 ] Game Changers.

Bilal Zaidi [25:46]                         Game Changers. Exactly. You know, really well made. A lot of people watched it and became vegan for a few weeks or longer. And I’m not against veganism. Like, I think it’s great if you eat more vegetables, but I think what happens in a documentary like that is people will latch on to these like headlines and anecdotes and they will kind of piece this Storyland together. And then the result is, “Okay, that means meat is bad.” Right? Whereas another documentary might be saying, “Sugar is bad,” let’s say. And they’ll be doing the same sort of techniques. So my kind of question as a layman is like, who am I supposed to trust when you see a four-hour interview on Joe Rogan with PhDs on both sides, and there’s no conclusion at the end, you know?

Josh Clemente [26:32]  Excellent question. This is ultimately why Levels exists. So there’s a huge amount of contradictory information out there in the nutrition world. A lot of it is due to, I think, this kind of extreme approach where if some is good, the most must be better. And ultimately, very little of it is grounded in a large end data, meaning a very large sample sizes with long-term outcomes. This is where Level’s philosophy emerges, which is that we do not subscribe to any one dietary philosophy. We do not subscribe to the concept of one size fits all. The data that our platform is built upon demonstrates that there is no one size fits all philosophy. What matters is again, balance. Controlling the hormonal environment that we’re operating under. And we’ve shown that no matter who you are, no matter what your philosophy is, you can optimize and make better choices daily if you’re listening to your body in a closed loop with objective data. And so we have everyone from keto, carnivores in the program, optimizing in a direction you may not expect, which would be, for keto for example, experimenting and finding carbohydrates that they can consume that make them feel good, actually increase their energy levels without pulling them out of ketosis, which they want to maintain for weight loss or for longevity or for cognitive function. On the other side, we have people like Dr. Casey Means, my co-founder who is a 100% plant-based vegan, and she has some of the best metabolic control in the dataset despite eating almost exclusively carbohydrates with some healthy fats and proteins. And so it is entirely possible that you can be from whatever philosophy you’d like, but that you can ground it in data. And that’s what’s missing from the debate today. We have a lot of people looking at a lot of research studies from populations who aren’t like them and trying to project out to the entire world.

Bilal Zaidi [28:25]                         Amazing. Yeah. And I’d love to go into Levels specifically here cause I realize we’ve kind of touched on what a CGM, continuous glucose monitor, is, the problems, but just so people completely understand what it looks like, like your program. Could you just explain, like, you know, there’s this thing I’m wearing in my arm, which you didn’t actually create. That was one of the big healthcare providers who already create these things. And then there’s software that goes with it on, an app on a phone essentially. Could you just talk through like what a typical user looks like and what their experience would be like?

Josh Clemente [29:02]  Yeah. So Levels is for anyone who wants to make better choices, right? So you want to learn from your body, you want it to be every day making decisions that are bringing you closer to health rather than, you know, leaving you somewhere, in uncertainty. And the average person who is using our product today is actually quite a diverse population. Everyone, from those trying to lose some weight to elite athletes who are trying to hone their running times for a 50K. So the Levels program, you know, originally we approached the problem thinking, “Well, let’s produce the consumer product version of a continuous glucose monitor. So we’ll develop the hardware.” But then the realization quickly set in that the hardware is actually quite good. And there are options available that were developed for the management of diabetes that are quite convenient to use. You know, they’re waterproof, you can wear them in the shower. You know, they’re essentially non-invasive in the daily life. And they have this little filament that sits inside the skin and measures the glucose molecule through an electrochemical reaction, and that sends the data directly to your phone. And so this is really great, but the issue is that in order to understand what you’re looking at, when you’re using a continuous glucose monitor, you kind of need like a PhD in physiology in order to decipher that curve and turn it into actions and insights. And so, you know, looking at other trends in the wellness world, things like the heart rate monitor, the ECG, electrocardiography, you know, the thing that takes a heart rate monitor and turns it into a Whoop strap or an Oura Ring is the interface with the end user. So taking that raw data and turning it into an experience where people can understand what’s happening and make concrete behavior change. And so that’s what Levels is doing. You know, we’ve taken existing products, existing hardware. We’ve set up a tele-health physician network that we work together with to ensure that we can arrange prescription consultations for these devices, which are currently prescription controlled here in the US. And then you know, you get a kit in the mail, you put on the sensor, you download the Levels app and then you interface with your data full-time and you log your lifestyle, diet, exercise, sleep, and stress, and you receive scores and metrics that help you to make better choices, and at least understand how your decisions are affecting you every day. And you strive for streaks of, you know, basically maximizing your metabolic scores and maximizing your meal scores. Over time, we’re going to introduce increasingly proactive insights. So eventually identifying opportunities to reach out to you and say, for example, when I step off that red eye flight, “Hey, Josh, you didn’t sleep last night.” You know, you got three hours of sleep. Typically when this happens, your blood sugar is 20% higher and you respond negatively to these foods, perhaps consider substituting for these foods instead, which you’ve demonstrated better response to. And so we’ll be able to proactively reach out and just provide kind of a helping hand and some accountability to, over time, maintain better and better metabolic control.

Bilal Zaidi [31:57]                         And just to clarify, you guys aren’t paying me to say any of this, like you guys did send me this to try it out, which is amazing. But just wanted to clarify that. And also, since we’re at it, we, neither of us are doctors. So if anyone wants to do any of these things, they should consult their doctor, so none of us gets sued, or speak to your team. Because you work with doctors too, and you have to be approved by one. I’m just going to just give one more example of how I’ve used it even in the last two days. So I ordered, I just was traveling and I got back and we didn’t have any food in the house. So yesterday I was still kind of eating crazy food. And I ordered jerk chicken and rice and peas and plantain or something like that for food yesterday. And I took a picture of it on my phone with the app that you guys have created. And then over the next few hours, my glucose, continuous glucose monitors monitoring my blood sugar levels and then shows me on a graph on the phone, but I don’t have to do anything. After a few hours, I get a score out of 10, say, we think this, your body reacted negatively to this in this case. Versus today when I had a big salad, it was like a 10 out of 10 because everything looked great. So it’s just that real time feedback. And even as someone who has done some of the more extreme things of finger pricking and all that sort of stuff in the past, just because I also wanted the data out of curiosity, this is just on a whole another level because you’re getting it every, is it five minutes or 15 minutes or something like that.

Josh Clemente [33:30]  So you can get a new data point every minute if you scan and then it’ll provide one every five minutes.

Bilal Zaidi [33:34]                         Yeah, exactly. So it’s just a whole another level of insights. And it’s actually made me realize even personally, as one other example, there’s this Banza Chickpea Pasta that we have sometimes. And generally, like, I know that pasta like traditional Italian pasta made of flour, like I love, and I could eat seven times a day like most people, but I, it reacts really badly to me, and I get lightheaded sometimes. And I just want to fall asleep. This one, I was actually really surprised how my blood sugar levels have- I’ve had it like five or six times and it’s allowed me to be kind of like constantly okay. Whereas I would try a, another alternative rice, brown rice pasta, and it would like shoot up. And even things like fruit is another one, which people often debate. If I have a smoothie versus a juice, there’s a big difference because there’s like, I guess fiber or other things in there. So, but again, someone else wearing this would be completely fine with it and not have to worry. So even just in the few weeks I’ve tested out, I’ve already realized certain things I now avoid where I can.

Josh Clemente [34:44]  You know, identifying the ways that you can sort of just make these micro optimizations. And you know, what you’re describing is closing the loop, right? Between your body’s actions and reactions. You know, this is what we call metabolic awareness. It’s the precursor to metabolic fitness. So once you have that information, you can now add focus, effort and repetition, and you can improve over time. And it’s actually not that challenging. It’s realizing the differences, for example, between, like you said, pressed juice and a smoothie. So we have this philosophy that again, if something is good, more of it might be better. So we should, you know, strain all of the pulp out of vegetable juice and cram a hundred vegetables into a cup and chug it. But then you realize, actually, what you’re doing there is you’re stripping away all the fiber and you’re sort of pre digesting this fruit into a smoothie or into a pressed juice. And one of the largest blood sugar spikes I’ve ever had was I was traveling. I had not slept well. I got to New York, I went to a pressed juice cart and I ordered what was called Health Drink, which I assumed it was, would be healthy. And it was a, it was just carrot, green apple and celery. And I watched lady prepare it. There were no additives. And I drank this over the course of a meeting. And at the end, my blood sugar was over 200 milligrams per deciliter, and stayed there for about an hour. And for reference, for those listening, the optimal range that Levels sets maxes out at 110 milligrams per deciliter, and the American diabetes association would say that you should not exceed 140 if you have a normal metabolism. And so being in that sort of very abnormal range for over an hour is quite damaging, especially when considering that this is something I had actively gone out of my way to select due to its health properties. And we see this regularly where people are assuming just based off what they see on the internet that, you know, for example, the healthiest breakfast food is oatmeal. You know, Google that you’ll see it on the top three, no matter what list you’re looking at. And so people are often making the choice to eat oatmeal every morning, even though they may not even enjoy it. And what we’ve seen in our dataset and I personally have seen is that oatmeal is often one of the worst offenders for people’s blood sugar. So you’re starting off the day. You want to be, you know, energized and ready to attack the day. And so you eat a big bowl of oatmeal and your blood sugar skyrockets, you stay elevated for a while. It comes crashing down, right, as you’re walking into your first meeting and you crash, boom 11:00 AM, and then you’re ravenously hungry for lunch. And these types of things, when we’re in the open loop are very challenging to identify, right? It’s like, you kind of blame it on, “Oh, I must not have slept well last night. I thought I did, but I guess not.” And now for the first time you can see the objective data, which is clarifying. Actually, it’s just a very simple tweak. Maybe you have avocado toast in the morning, which you enjoy far more anyway. And you can now optimize this metric and eliminate all that qualitative negativity.

Bilal Zaidi [37:24]                         Let’s talk about the actual process right now. So there’s, last time we spoke, you had like 22,000 people on the waitlist. I don’t know.

Josh Clemente [37:31]  We are at, we’re actually over 30,000 now.

Bilal Zaidi [37:34]                         30,000. Wow. That’s, that was like five weeks ago. So that’s huge.

Josh Clemente [37:37]  Yeah. It’s moving quick.

Host [37:39]                         That’s amazing. We’re going to dive deeper into the business in a second. Let’s first of all, talk about like the price for a user. So someone who wants to sign up. I think it’s like $200 a month. Right? So that’s still quite expensive for an average Joe, I guess. And even for myself, like I probably, if I’m honest with myself, like long run, would I pay $200 every month for it? I don’t know if I would. But I think for having a, for a few months, I think is invaluable. It’s definitely worth way more than that, but I guess the question is like how long will it be before we kind of drive that price down? Because a big part of that is not your fault. It’s the cost of the hardware.

Josh Clemente [38:22]  Totally. So the current environment is that these devices, again, they’re prescription medical devices. They cost a significant amount to develop. And the regulatory classifications come from lengthy approval processes that are again very expensive. And so the device manufacturers are trying to recoup all of that development costs, which totally makes sense. That being said, we’ve seen about an order of magnitude improvement in the device costs over the past five to ten years. And that process will continue as we’ve seen with every electronics revolution. You know, the microelectronics revolution in particular has brought down the component costs and will unlock, once coupled with the, you know, the supply and demand mechanisms of a larger market will unlock increasing improvements and in the device costs themselves. Today, our program is $399 for the first month. And, that includes, you know, the prescription consultation, the devices themselves, access to the Levels software and daily, weekly, and monthly reports. Then we offer the ongoing subscription at 199 a month. And you know, all things considered, this is significantly cheaper than a nutritionist or a nutrition program. And, you know, it’s guided by real-time data. So it’s much less subjective, much, much more driven by objective data. And so people are finding that this is extremely valuable and can easily pay for itself just in one month. And we really lean in there and say, you know, like definitely do this, learn quite a bit about yourself and then make the best choice for you. So it’s kind of like, again, meeting the individual where they are not necessarily saying that this is something you have to wear forever, but more so depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, whether you’re an athlete trying to train up for a major event and you want to be able to keep tabs on your fueling strategy for several months, somebody who wants to lose a lot of weight and want the accountability factor of seeing that real-time response to the foods you’re eating. All of these things can kind of guide towards making the choice that’s right for you, you know, whether both financially and for your goals. And so, of course we’re looking to bring this cost down as quickly as we can, but we understand that, you know, this is something that each individual is going to have to kind of choose what’s right for them anyway. And you know, today, I think that it provides significant value, but I can not wait until we can get to that more mainstream price point, which we’re estimating to be available sometime in, you know, the next 18 months time frame.

Bilal Zaidi [40:44]                         Let’s go back to the time where you had the idea and you actually wanted to make this a reality. So like this isn’t a regular app that you can just say, “Hey, I’m going to create an app over a weekend and share it out. And people can just play around with it.” This has got that regulation involved hardware. It can be life and death for some people, if they’re using your data for what they’re, how they’re living their lives. So like, I love for you to be able to take me back to that moment and share how you actually thought about starting this.

Josh Clemente [41:17]  Yeah. So it goes back to my own experience, just discovering that there was metabolic dysfunction underlying that neither I, nor my doctor was aware of because we were using these single point measurements once a year. And so getting my hands on a continuous glucose monitor and seeing the rich high resolution real-time data, and then using that to make better diet, exercise, sleep stress choices was the moment that I understood the potential for this product. And then already having a good understanding of how rampant metabolic dysfunction is and the negative consequences associated with it, and how it’s truly ravaging much of the world. I understood that there’s a huge demand for this and that also it has a massive potential to change people’s lives for the better. And I’m a type of person who, you know, I really thrive on big problems. And I like to be challenged with the impossible. You know, that goes back to basically every problem I’ve tried to work on has been on its face impossible, or it has been said to be by the previous industry. So, the beauty of this to me was that it’s decentralizing the problem. It’s putting the power in the hands of the individual. You multiply that by enough educated individuals and now society changes. And there’s a lot of downstream positivity there. So I knew that I wanted to work on it almost immediately after discovering that the potential to improve behavior in myself.

Bilal Zaidi [42:37]                         And to clarify, you had a job at this time, right? You were at Hyperloops, still?.

Josh Clemente [42:41]  So I had actually transitioned out of Hyperloop, and started a different business. So I left Hyperloop after a year to develop a company, actually working on tactical equipment for SWAT teams. And I patented a system there that helps people gain access to say airplanes on the ground, if there’s a hostage situation or into third story windows, if people need to get in and out very quickly. So this is for, again, military and SWAT applications. And that was a great project- project. It was just something that was ultimately overshadowed by my personal passion for an interest in this space. And you know, coming from a mechanical systems background, it certainly, it was not right up my alley. I’m not a medical professional. However, I spent probably about a thousand hours in PubMed, just reading primary literature on metabolism and physiology and felt very well equipped to lay the groundwork for this company. And so I wrote a white paper that described the philosophy and the rationale for doing this and proliferating access to this real-time biomarker information. And then I set about basically trying to build it on my own, which was took about a year and I made some progress, but ultimately I just understood that there was a mismatch between the potential for the concept and my approach. So I was kind of attacking this potentially world changing problem as an individual. And going back to my experience at SpaceX, you know, ultimately the team is what makes a company and makes a company successful. And so I kind of turned my attention to finding the ideal founding team. And Sam, my co-founder and CEO of Levels is, you know, he’s a good friend of mine. We had known each other for several years and I kept in touch pretty consistently. And he, and I, basically just had a conversation and I described what I was doing. And coincidentally, you know, he was looking to get into the world of health and wellness, and saw this as an exceptional opportunity and he kind of dropped everything. He’s a multi-time founder and software guy. And so he was just the ideal fit for the job. And so we teamed up and then set about building a world-class team. And of course, focusing on engineering, data science and in medicine, you know, brought on David Flinner from Google, Andrew Connor from Google, both product and engineering. And then Casey Means. She’s a Stanford trained former surgeon and now functional medicine doctor and, you know, she rounded out the founding team. And since then we’ve grown to about 14 and gone from, you know, pre sort of pre-concept, pre-product to starting a beta program without anything really to sell, just convincing people to give us money based on the concept and then going from there to where we are today.

Bilal Zaidi [45:28]                         That’s great, man. And if you don’t mind me asking, like, how’d you find something like this? You know, you just mentioned to me that you guys are probably going to raise money, I guess at some point, but like this isn’t something, again, that you just make in a bedroom. It costs money, or I guess, did you have to convince those people with equity? Like how does that work when you’re going through that process?

Josh Clemente [45:49]  Well we, you know, we did kind of start in a bedroom in the sense that, you know, originally we had no product. But what was beautiful about it is that by leveraging the existing hardware, you know, we could basically take a concept and demonstrate it with essentially a prototype experience with almost no effort. So what we initially did was focused on setting up a relationship with the tele-health network, such that we could arrange consultations. And then, if prescribed, we could get people’s CGMs and then communicate with them about their experience and understand what they would like to see in the future version of this. You know, when we have an app, when we have an interface. And so that very prototype process, you know, we were actually revenue positive within literally a month of starting the company, because we, you know, we kind of moved very quickly on that prototype. From there, you know, we had a vision. People could experience it and we were able to raise some money from angels and you know, strategics quite quickly on safe notes. And so that was like the original way that we kind of brought in cash and demonstrated the potential. And from there, we raised more money on a safe at, some pre-seed terms. And now we’re looking to raise our seed, which would be a priced round.

Bilal Zaidi [46:49]                         Oh yeah. And by the way, if you’re listening to this and there’s some dog barking, this is a, you know, we’re in a lockdown situation right now. So everyone’s, we’re not in a studio, so don’t worry about that.

Josh Clemente [47:09]  Yes, there is.

Bilal Zaidi [00:47:10]                No, no. It’s all good. No, that’s great. So you found your team, you convinced them, you had this vision, you actually wrote a white paper, which is interesting because I think it makes a lot of sense for what you’re doing. This is like, you know, medical related and science related, which is probably more of your background. That’s how you communicate ideas versus here’s a pitch deck or a wire frame, which someone else might do in another product. And then talk to me about like the first three to six months, what were you guys working on? Is it just getting this prototype together in terms of like the app?

Josh Clemente [47:47]  Yeah, so the, you know, the first three months we had assembled the founding team, which was just absolutely critical, you know. We know that to accomplish impossible things, you need motivated people that hate to fail and who, you know, are just pure self-motivated executors. And so it’s been, it was very, very focused on assembling that core founding team and then continuing to build on top of that with just world-class talent. So, that was the initial focus and then doing the due diligence and understanding the legal and regulatory environment, arranging the physician relationships such that we could, you know, arrange consultations with our customers. And then ultimately, you know, setting up a supply chain. And by six months in, you know, we had just emerged from stealth mode. So this was, we had run some customers through the prototype, we’d received their feedback, we’d raised a little money. And by January of this year, we launched our very first, our website and the first version of the app, which, you know, in retrospect it was very different than what it looks like today. It was quite basic, but it was a, again, like Concept One. And so we’ve definitely been really leaning hard into the build, test , iterate approach. And, you know, we’re shipping things that frankly, you know, in terms of the app very early on, we were, they were quite experimental, you know. It was like, “This is something I probably don’t feel super comfortable pushing up the door. This is going to reflect on me and the team.” But at the end of the day, people loved it. And the experience of connecting with their bodies and understanding better how to make good choices was really outshone any, you know, any sort of limitations on the app side. And so over the past, let’s see, from January until now, which I guess has been eight months somehow, we’ve released over 500 iterations of the app and our waitlist has grown to 30,000 people just through organic traction and social sharing of the product. And we’ve pushed almost 2000 people. Well, about 1500 people through the beta program and we’ve had over 2000 customers purchase. And so we’re, you know, we’re rapidly scaling up and moving. Basically our eyes are set on the launch date, which we anticipate to be towards the end of this year, and moving out of beta phase and into our, you know, fully available mode.

Bilal Zaidi [50:00]                         That’s exciting, man. Exciting, but also scary because I think the other company I think of, which I think we talked about on the phone was this company, The Oura Ring Company. And this is a great device. I really like it. It helps me measure my sleep. So very similar in concept, but of different part of health. And I remember right in the beginning when it just wasn’t really available and it took, I think I waited like months and months and months for this. And I remember my colleagues were like laughing because they’re like, “You’re waiting like six months for a ring?” Like $300 ring or something like that. And, but like I use it every day and it’s been a great investment. I guess, just to go back to the business, so once you’ve created this, you’ve now, you’ve got all these people that are banging on your door to try it, like myself. I just did the quick maths there and if 30,000 people all signed up and they were paying $200 a month, let’s say, and I know that’s the extreme end, but this isn’t also including people who are going to sign up later. This is just your initial waitlist. That’s like already a $72 million revenue a year company. Again, we’ve viewed caveats that not all those people’s converting, not all of them are going to be doing it 12 months in a year, et cetera, but still there’s clearly huge demand here.

Josh Clemente [51:25]  Yeah.

Bilal Zaidi [51:25]                         That goes back to your initial bet that this was going to be beyond, go beyond someone who’s just a diabetic and kind of like moving beyond that small little piece, which is obviously actually a huge piece, but there’s all these other people like myself and yourself who are like, actually, I just want to use this the same way I use a Fitbit or Oura Ring. Like, is that something you had to consciously think about in the positioning of the brand early on? And I guess the product as well.

Josh Clemente [51:53]  I think this is what it comes down to for most founding concepts is that it is a lot easier if you have a personal experience and you can lean back on that, anytime that you feel that sort of doubt and questioning the business model and philosophy, you can lean back on that personal experience. And so just knowing that this was in my life the most actionable piece of data I’ve ever had. And knowing that I’ve completely changed my life, someone who is very ingrained in their ways. And it’s not just limited me. It’s not some sort of disciplinary product where I feel like it’s scolding me all the time. It’s actually quite the opposite. It’s unleashed all this potential to live my life with confidence and make the correct choices so that I can be both optimizing for long-term health, but also just experience today. You know, minimizing these crashes and optimizing my energy and getting off coffee as a crutch and all of these benefits, right? So, that really drove home for me the potential here and, you know, looking at the future, like, in a world, you know, we just fundamentally disagree that you should wait until something’s broken to try and fix it. I just completely disagree with that on its face. And I argue the complete opposite. You know, this is not a technology that is for people who are sick. It’s for people who don’t want to get sick and who want to be making better choices every day. You don’t have to be, you know, an extreme hypochondriac or someone who is like, you know, a biohacker, testing crazy things on themselves all the time. You just have to be someone who doesn’t want to be unhealthy. Right? And that’s basically all of us. I don’t believe that the majority of people, you know, just looking at the statistics, 88% of people are metabolically unhealthy. Well, I don’t think 88% of people want to be unhealthy. I think it’s exactly the opposite. It’s just that we’re currently flying blind. They don’t, there is no feedback loop. You know, if you don’t have the money for weekly doctor’s visits to check up on your biomarkers, how are you knowing whether you’re making the right choices? And so you know, I’ve always felt extreme confidence in the concept. And I feel even more invigorated by obviously the organic traction, just the enthusiasm that our early adopters have shown for us. So, suffice to say that, you know, I think that the future is really bright and will be not just in the space of, you know, metabolic awareness and metabolic fitness, but you know, in the future where people are not, you know, we’re not dealing with this large scale social epidemic and metabolic dysfunction. You know, this is a technology and the concept of real-time closed loop feedback from one’s own body is here to stay. And so in the future, it will be used for optimization and you know, no matter who you are, whether an athlete or someone who’s already just quite healthy living their lives, it will be used to make tailored choices to you depending on your genetics and your current environment and context. And hopefully we’ll be fighting disease to a lesser extent.

Bilal Zaidi [54:36]                         We’re going to switch gears to the future a little bit, and we’ll just kick off with your company itself. We’ve kind of just touched on that briefly there, but I also saw you are now hiring a head of marketing. It was on your Twitter or something was, someone else shared it. And so if anyone’s interested, you should check out job description. I also loved how detailed the job description was. And you talked about the process of what it’s going to look like in better than most people do. So really you can tell you guys have thought that through. Like, what are you currently thinking of as your marketing plan? Obviously that person who comes on will help shape that, but just from the team listening, from the current team, like how are you guys thinking about that?

Josh Clemente [55:20]  Yeah. You know, we have, again, we, the product we’ve built very intentionally to be aspirational and to be very goal oriented again. So we’re similar in concept to the Peloton where we have a hardware and software experience. It’s elegant, it’s at home. It’s something that is convenient, it’s outcome oriented. And you know, we want to provide a delightful experience along the way. So, you know, positioning ourselves in a premium health seeking bracket for now, but ultimately, you know, the product applies to everyone, no matter where they land on the metabolic health spectrum, as I’ve mentioned, you know. So finding ways to reach our audience where they are, and helping to educate on why this is important for everyone. And it doesn’t have to be so that you’re, you know, an athlete out there trying to break records. It can be for someone who’s again, just trying to get through the day without massive energy crashes, like I was. Just trying to choose what to bring to the lunch table or to the dinner table every evening without needing a PhD. And so, you know, bringing that marketing team together that can identify opportunities for education and to show people why metabolic health again, is the foundation beneath physical health and mental health. And so a lot of this is like, it won’t be the standard, you know, paid marketing where you just kind of pay the Facebook machine and hope for the best. It’s very much deliberate, intentional, education oriented. And so anyone who reads our blog will see that we put a huge amount of effort into those articles. They’re essentially scientific literature. You know, we’re also taking on podcasts like this one to reach out and have different audiences kind of hear the message and understand the value proposition. So arranging that tech, that sort of strategy and you know, finding the different audiences that are out there and kind of meeting them in a community environment where, you know, it’s very obvious that, you know, ultimately if we can just educate the market on why this matters and people just take action, even separate from using Levels, we will be successful. And, you know, not necessarily tracking ROI on every ad we run, for example, or on every marketing decision we make. If instead we’re tracking a conversation around metabolism, you know, I think that’s key. And so I think this is definitely a non-standard role in the sense that there’s a ton of flexibility to try alternative, you know, out of the box thinking and really bring what I consider to be the future of health to reality. Right? And be a part of that. So, anyone who’s resonating with that type of message, like definitely reach out and we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Bilal Zaidi [57:46]                         Yeah, no, definitely man. It’s definitely one of those roles that’s like if you’re passionate about this, this is the company, this is the role that you’d be looking for. So really exciting time to join as well. So, awesome man. So, one thing I wanted to touch on is kind of the future of health tech. If we can call it that. Or wearable tech, health wearable tech, I don’t- What phrase do you use actually, before I just make one up?

Josh Clemente [58:12]  We call them bio wearables right now with-

Bilal Zaidi [58:14]                         Bio wearable. Okay.

Josh Clemente [58:15]  Yeah, I think it might develop. You know, it’s basically the concept that we’re going lower than skin deep. Right? You can measure your pulse with your fingers. You can count steps, but now we’re measuring chemicals that are shielded from the outside, right?

Bilal Zaidi [58:27]                         Yeah. So, okay. So if we’re looking at that world, we’re in a world where if we took one step before that, before getting underneath the skin, we’ve got Oura Ring, Fitbits, we’ve got mattresses, we’ve got all these different things that are helping us monitor our health. And then we’ve got like these platforms like Apple Health and Google’s got their version. They’re all, not necessarily really speaking to each other at the moment. Do you think we’ll ever get to a stage where we’re able to have like one underlying place that can pull the strings?

Josh Clemente [58:58]  Absolutely. So, you know, all of these, the value in all of these different metrics is that they all communicate with each other. So right now, tracking one’s sleep is useful, but it’s even more valuable when you understand the acute insulin resistance that happens after you skip a night of sleep or have a very short and uncomfortable night of sleep. And so, you know, sleep data maximizes the value of glucose data and glucose data maximizes the value of sleep data because glucose dysregulation also leads to restlessness and inflammation, which can lead to a poor night of sleep as well. So this is a closed loop, and this is the same across many different wearable metrics that we’re looking at. Body temperature, you know, again, our exercise levels, the amount of metabolism or the amount of energy we’re producing through fat oxidation, glucose oxidation, what’s powering exercise versus sedentary behaviors. All this stuff comes together and it’s crucial that we bring it all into a single environment and place it in context with one another. And so we’re working with, you know, our friends again at Eight Sleep. You mentioned mattresses. So Eight Sleep is a sleep science company that has a smart mattress measuring temperature and other heart rate variables. You know, we’ve got Whoop and Oura, and the other, you know, risk-based monitors. And so you know, bringing together a health stack that allows you to plug in whichever metrics you’ve got and increase the resolution of the picture. Right? All of this is important to us. The most valuable metric is how does that play out in your metabolic health? And so we are working on integrations with several of these in real time. And genuinely, I see the future where this is very closely integrated and, you know, we have real-time information that can be used to both, you know, guide better choices as it relates to what you’re eating, but also your sleep hygiene, your exercise habits. And of course your mindfulness and stress. You know, apps like Zero Fasting Kevin Rose has developed and so on.

Bilal Zaidi [01:00:49]                 So you feel like that data would just move freely between the apps and then people can just say, “Okay, I’m using the Levels app. It’s already pulling in my sleep, fasting, et cetera, data into this one.” Not necessarily a third party like Apple or Google.

Josh Clemente [01:01:04]Well, I definitely think Apple and Google are, they’re kind of working in this direction, but as of now, I would not say that the sort of health kit Google fit approach is that hub. So what we’re building at Levels, you know, we’re just building it, we’re building the hub of lifestyle information. And so, bringing in sleep data to put in context with glucose data, bringing, importing workouts from Apple health kit, you know, we currently have that launch. We have a whole roadmap of integrations that we’re slowly but surely working our way towards providing that hub for lifestyle. And so, although we want this to be open source to the maximum extent possible, we want people to be able to access the information that helps them make better choices, depending on which platform they prefer, you know, our core competency, again, is interpreting glucose information and presenting it in an actionable way. And so I think it’s, you know, that is the foundation and then bringing in the other metrics that are, you know, sort of involved in co variables with glucose is really important to us. And, so we’ll be pushing full speed ahead, you know, to make sure this health stack exists.

Bilal Zaidi [01:02:06]                 Oh, that’s awesome. I didn’t realize you guys are thinking of it as your own. Like you would want to do that yourself. So, that’s cool. I’ll definitely look out for that, man.

Josh Clemente [01:02:13]Yeah, you know, it’s super important to us that it’s actionable. We don’t want to just produce data for data’s sake. Right? So we need to make sure that concrete behavior change comes out of whatever new data stream we add. But of course, things like sleep and exercise are crucial to lifestyle.

Bilal Zaidi [01:02:28]                 I think you guys take, have a better approach where there’s the complexity there if you need it, but it’s designed to be simple. Like for example, if you use like MyFitnessPal and type in all your calories with all the foods, that takes a lot longer than just taking a picture of a food that you then see in your app. I might not get the calorie data, but I get the response there, which is what I’m really looking for, I guess. And then just to kind of close things off, I guess, looking at more of a macro scale, like I’m a European, I’ve lived here for seven plus years. And talked about this on the podcast before, but, you know, I love being in the States. I’m not complaining about it at all, but of course, everywhere there’s pros and cons. And one of the big things here that I’ve had a hard time dealing with is like the healthcare system as a whole. Of course, I feel that we’re very good at fixing problems when we’re right at the end, but in terms of how that actually translates to access to health care and the health insurance and that whole system is very different to say in Europe where everyone just gets free healthcare. It was paid out of your taxes. I’m just curious, like, this is something that I guess there’s a bit more of a philosophical or macro question. Is this something you’ve thought much about like, what are the problems of the healthcare system? And if I gave you a magic wand to fast forward five or ten years, and you could fix certain things like, how would you approach that?

Josh Clemente [01:03:55]Yeah. Healthcare is really tricky. You know, I can kind of see, I could see arguments on both sides of the debate in terms of like maximizing access, and you know I genuinely believe that everyone should have access to sick care for sure if they’re sick. But I think where we’ve gone astray is we’ve required that the medical system be responsible, not just for sick care, but also for prevention, right? It’s the doctor’s responsibility for me to be healthy, long-term. And I disagree with that. And I think, unfortunately, I can’t put any blame on anyone because right now there’s just no access to better information. But you know, if I look ten years in the future, I want to see data being used more consistently and more objectively in our approach to prevention. And I wouldn’t say that I would put that entirely on the medical world. I would put that on the individual. Right? So this goes to our philosophy is, you know, if you have real-time information and you’re making choices that are driven by it, it is certainly possible that you can modify the outcome well before it ever happens. And then when you do, if you do develop, you know, something that needs the, you know, some sort of medical care walking in with context that is, you know, years of data, you know, metabolic data, sleep data, diet data, lifestyle habits, and that, the conversation can be grounded in how you’ve lived your life for the past few years. That’s a great starting place and it’s a much more educated starting place than where we are today. And so generally speaking, you know, this is the direction we’re going. People understand the value of personal health information, they want this, they’re leaning heavily into it. And it’s not even necessarily that in the future, doctors will have to, you know, comb through years and decades of CGM data. And that’s where, you know, like the data analytics that Levels is producing can help. Like we can throw processing power at this and show, you know, pull out these conclusions that can then be used by an expert to help you, you know, navigate whatever sort of health conversation you’re having. So yeah, I think generally, no matter what direction we go in this country around, you know, the healthcare system specifically, it’s on the individual to help alleviate the burden, right? I mean, diabetes represents a $300 billion a year annual expense today, and that’s expected to hit 600 billion by 2030. You know, we’re talking about fast acceleration of this fiscal demand and the healthcare system cannot support that. We’ve got to take a different approach and so, you know, just optimistically that doesn’t have to happen if we increase the, or if we empower the individual to make better choices in the moment, you know, we can divert and potentially alleviate a healthcare system that is currently just in debt across the board. And hopefully that will unleash some resources internally to really amplify care for cancers and other diseases and disorders that we haven’t quite cracked the code on. You know, chronic illness should not be a problem. We need to resolve that first and foremost. And secondly, you know, those, the more mysterious illnesses that we haven’t quite figured out, you know, we can reallocate the resources there.

Bilal Zaidi [01:07:00]                 Yeah. I love that message, man. It’s a great reminder, even for myself, just asking the question was like, kind of like, “What can we fix?” But it’s really down to, you know, a lot of these diseases are preventable in a lot of ways. And I think we can all take a lot more responsibility than we do and find our own balance, wherever that means. So, I love that. We’re going to close off soon. I did want to just have the last section be kind of like a quick fire round, almost as much as we can get for around, you know, you’ve done your thousand hours of research plus by this point, for sure. You’re getting access to this crazy data set. You’re speaking to customers, people going through these lifestyle changes. And again, knowing that we can’t give advice necessarily, I have heard you in other conversations see some commonalities. So I’d love for us just to go through those four parts of health and say like if there were some common themes you’ve seen, like what they might be and if there aren’t, that’s completely caused. So I’ve got them broken down to food, exercise, sleep, and stress. As I think you also mentioned a few times. Is there anything else that I should include in that?

Josh Clemente [01:08:13]Those are the big four.

Bilal Zaidi [01:08:14]                 Big four. So let’s just start with food, knowing that there’s bio-individuality, if that’s even a word, like are there still some common things that you’ve seen that should still just be avoided or how people can start if they don’t even have access to this technology at the moment?

Josh Clemente [01:08:32]Yeah. So, I mean, first off context definitely matters. It’s, I wouldn’t say that there’s anything that should be objectively avoided other than just straight up candy, like just don’t pour straight sugar into your mouth anymore. That’s just not a good idea. Other than that, you know, we’ve started to learn that generally the best approach is to eat balanced meals. And so to mix in healthy fats and proteins into a meal completely changes the way that you metabolize those. And you know, another- So for example, like if you’re going to have a banana in order to power a workout or something, maybe have that with an almond butter, which also has some protein and fat in it. And so we’ve seen over and over again that that improves the response. Another nice thing is, you know, the macronutrient content and order also really matters. So, there’s a study that shows that if you eat the same meal that has, let’s say, a salad, you know, a protein and then a carbohydrate, if you eat that meal in different order. So let’s say you eat it with the carbohydrate first and then the protein, and then the vegetables last versus the other way around, you can improve your insulin response and your blood sugar response by close to 50% to that exact same meal by simply putting the vegetables first. So, it’s key to have fiber and to pay attention to, again, like the order that you’re eating things and not, you know, kicking your system directly with a lot of carbohydrates, especially if you’re a sensitive responder, and instead to maybe like work your way up there, and the fiber seems to help to slow the process of digestion and absorption. So those are some key ones that you can just start today, you know, make sure you have mixed meals.

Bilal Zaidi [01:10:10]                 I love that. Moving swiftly on exercise again, obviously more movement the better, but like, I guess we’re in a situation now where people have been stuck indoors, they might not have their regular schedule, gyms have been closed. Is there something else you’ve noticed that it just would really help easily add into people’s routines?

Josh Clemente [01:10:31]Yeah, I mean, I’ve completely kind of adjusted my perspective on exercise after seeing blood sugar information. And what you mean by that is that you don’t have to go 110%. You don’t have to be swinging kettlebells and throwing barbells to make really meaningful improvements in your metabolic health. And the biggest thing, like if there’s any one easy takeaway that you can, that I would recommend, it would be light exercise, especially around meals. So move more often, more times throughout the day. You don’t have to go to the gym and have a one hour session. It should be, if you can get five minutes to walk around the block, or if you can get even better 25 minutes to walk around the block while you’re on a phone call, optimize towards that. And especially as it relates to indulgent meals. So if you’re going to eat a meal that you know you’re sensitive to, or that you know is quite rich and high in carbohydrates, taking a 20 minute, 30 minute walk directly after that completely changes the way your body’s metabolizing it. And the reason for that is that your muscles, the biggest muscles in your body, your legs are able to absorb glucose without insulin, and only when they’re being contracted. So when they’re being used. So, you know, finish that meal up, stand up, go for a walk, and you’ll potentially avoid that slump, that crash thereafter, and also really improve your glucose and insulin response. So, yeah, light exercise, especially around mealtime, do it as often as you can. There’s no going wrong with that one.

Bilal Zaidi [01:11:52]                 Love that, man. Yeah. I think a walk after dinner, especially, it’s just like one I’ve integrated as, especially during this recent time and it changes everything. It’s a really great addition to the life, to the routine. Really quickly, sleep. I know this is a hard one to do in such a short time, but are there any quick things that you’ve been able to integrate into your own thing into your own life that have helped your quality of sleep?

Josh Clemente [01:12:20]Yeah. I mean, I use a Whoop Strap to monitor my sleep. I also use a Garmin Watch and I’m generally just paying attention to sleep hygiene is key. I mean, I discovered that I was getting really bad sleep and what I needed was a darker room. And so just like basically closing the curtains, having no light interrupting me, I improved sleep quite dramatically, but honestly, as it relates to metabolism, pay attention to your sleep. Like if you know you got a terrible night, like you got home super late, maybe you had alcohol in the evening, which kept you tossing and turning all night. Your body will develop acute insulin resistance from the stress of a poor night of sleep. And this has been demonstrated over and over again. We published some content on our friend’s, at Eight Sleeps blog about this, but you can have a 40% higher insulin response to the same meal after just six hours of sleep versus eight hours. So if you know you slept poorly, try to be more conscientious about the foods you’re eating that day. And so, you know, pick carefully your meals, try to eat those mixed meals, get a little more walking and exercise in and just be very aware that sleep has a very strong impact on your metabolic control.

Bilal Zaidi [01:13:23]                 The blackout curtains were a big game changer for me as well. The other thing that I know is, cause I drink a lot of caffeine, I’m British and Pakistani. So we have tea like 50 times a day. So I’ve had to, I’ve basically switched all my black tea and coffee pretty much to decaf. And then I still get enough caffeine because I’m having so much, but that, and after like lunchtime, I try not to. And that made a big difference to me as well. So it might be worth trialing for some people. Last one, stress. This is a hard one, but you know, I know exercise helps stress, but just, are things that have helped you in your own journey?

Josh Clemente [01:1400]Mhm. Yeah. I mean as, again, as it relates to metabolism, like I’ve seen in, I’ve been doing quite a few podcasts lately, just trying to get my reps in and early on, they were quite stressful and I have a few examples in my blood sugar data where my blood sugar exceeded the normal range. It went over 135 over 140.

Bilal Zaidi [01:14:17]                 What, because of the podcasts?

Josh Clemente [01:14:18]Just from stress. And so the mechanism here is cortisol. So when your body is stressed out, you flood the system with cortisol, which basically inhibits insulin. And what it’s doing is it’s ensuring that there’s enough energy available to you in the bloodstream to escape the danger, right? It’s like a fight or flight response. And so cortisol, especially if we’re dwelling in a high cortisol environment day in and day out is really damaging. I mean, this is how you gain weight. This is how you basically interfere with your sleep, interfere with your metabolic control. Ultimately you can have a ton of glucose dysregulation and all because you aren’t paying attention to your stress environment. And so, I’ve personally started to kind of explore mindfulness. I’ve never been interested in it and I’ve only now been kind of considering it because I understand the physiologic mechanisms. I can see it in my own data. And you know, there are other ways to experience this, you know, basically that short night of sleep that we talked about causing glucose elevation. Well, that’s also considered to be a stress response. So your body is in an increased stress environment after a poor night’s sleep, hasn’t been able to recover. And so that’s what you’re seeing in the elevated glucose the day after. So all of these things are very closely intertwined and you know mindfulness, again, I think exercise is very closely related here. Going for a quick walk, jumping in the water, if you’re close to a body of water, anything that will help bring that stress down and center you, I think, is going to really help with metabolic control.

Bilal Zaidi [01:15:42]                 Amazing man, thanks for going through that so quickly. Cause I know we’re running out of time, but I did want to give people some actionable things that they can at least think about and hopefully they can try out Levels and figure out a lot of this for themselves, but that’s a great starting point. Where can we send people to follow you and Levels?

Josh Clemente [01:16:00]So check us out at levelshealth.com. I highly recommend the blog, which you’ll find a link to right on the homepage. If you’re interested in staying in the loop and joining the newsletter, et cetera, please sign up. The sign up link is right there on the homepage as well. And then you can follow along. You know, we post a ton of social proof testimonials from our early users on our Instagram and Twitter, which are both @unlocklevels. And yeah, I mean, please reach out to us on all these channels and stay in the loop where we’re moving quickly. We’re going to get this product out and available to a wider audience as soon as possible. And really just appreciate the support and thoughts of anyone who’s interested.

Bilal Zaidi [01:16:36]                 Josh, thanks so much, man. This has been amazing and something I’ve wanted to do for, like if I was checking my Evernote and I’ve started writing about CGMs like four years ago, and I’d heard about it way before from Tim Ferris, probably. And Kevin Rose, who you were just on his show as well. So I’m really grateful for you sharing all this knowledge. I know this is a bit of a different episode for people. It’s a combination of business and also growth ‘cause there’s, Creator Lab is all about business, creativity and growth, whether that’s growing a company or yourself. And this is a combination of all of that. So, thanks again for being on the show, man. And I’m looking forward to seeing your progress, man. I’d love to help in any way I can.

Josh Clemente [01:17:16]I really appreciate it. I love being a part of it. And thanks for having me on. This is, you know, this is key. So just having these conversations is super enjoyable for me.

Bilal Zaidi [01:17:30]                 I hope you enjoyed the show. Make sure you subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. You can also watch all of these visually plus bonus clips on youtube.com/creatorlabFM. I’ll have an episode for you every week. These are raw uncut and actionable conversations with the greatest business minds and creators in the world. So make sure you’re subscribed. If you enjoyed the show, let me know what you think. You can say hello to me on Twitter. I’m @bzaidi. B-Z-A-I-D-I or Creator Lab FM on any other channel. I really appreciate your help spreading the word with your friends and colleagues. It helps to get this out to more people and allows me to get better guests for you guys. And lastly, if you want access to exclusive content and free giveaways, like the recent books that we gave out, make sure you’re subscribed to the email list. I’ll send down an occasional email with lessons learned from the episode. So if you’re interested in that, and of course the free giveaways. Who doesn’t like those? Go to creatorlab.fm/subscribe. Until then, I’ll see you on Twitter and speak to you next week.

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