Levels – There’s Power in Understanding your Health
Episode introduction
Most people are still consumed by thoughts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Josh Clemente of Levels Health is thinking about the next one. It’s an indisputable truth that people with chronic conditions like diabetes suffered more severely from COVID. That’s one of many reasons why Josh and his team are on a mission to cure the metabolic health epidemic. Josh is not afraid of thinking big – after all, he used to work under visionary Elon Musk on the SpaceX team. As a guest on The Story of a Brand podcast, Josh spoke with host Ramon Vela about why continuous glucose monitoring technology needs to go mainstream, and how Levels is helping to make that happen.
Show Notes
Key Takeaways
7:00 – Chronic illness: the new epidemic
Preventable chronic illnesses are increasing at an accelerated rate. We have gotten good at reducing infectious diseases, but gotten worse at systematically controlling chronic diseases.
“The rates of diabetes, preventable chronic illnesses including type two diabetes, are increasing at an increasing rate right now. It’s moving in the other direction of the infectious diseases, which even though it sounds bizarre in a pandemic, but the reality is that we’ve done a great job of controlling the infectious diseases that used to be the primary causes of death. And now the main foe is these chronic illnesses. So chronic lifestyle selection that lead to ultimately poor outcomes and accelerated aging. And these are increasing at an increasing rate globally. As countries develop and their younger populations start to adopt the less healthy sedentary lifestyles and the Western diets start to move outwards, we unfortunately are getting these really bad rates and younger and younger, early and earlier in life. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, for example, is skyrocketing in children as a result of the fructose and sugary beverages they’re drinking. It’s unfortunately a massive, messy problem that will take a long time and a lot of different approaches to tackle.”
8:29 – An agile approach to a mainstream solution
The technology to help prevent chronic illness should be mainstream. That’s what Levels is pursuing with their software, hardware, and business model.
“We’re going to take a very agile approach where we’re going to consider any option that would help accelerate the onset of this technology as a mainstream product. So if there are ways that we can do that in partnership with other business models, we will absolutely evaluate them. And given that there is a hardware component, you have to wear the sensor. But there is also the fact that the software is where that turns into behavior change. And so that’s beautiful. You know, software is very easily replicated and distributed. So I think we have the potential to, with time, turn around the trends in metabolic dysfunction and hopefully get to the point where rather than the current situation where we have 88% of us adults in the United States are metabolically unhealthy, we can get to the point where that number is flipped. And in fact, only 12% are metabolically unhealthy. So I’m hopeful and definitely looking forward to finding all of the paths that we can execute on.”
10:20 – The challenges of medical technology
The Levels technology is currently new, expensive, and prescription-only, while the software and hardware require regulatory approval. All of this slows down the process – for now.
“One of the big challenges is that the technology is still new and specifically designed for diabetes management and it’s very expensive. It’s given that it’s prescription-only here in the United States to have a continuous glucose monitor. That adds a lot of overhead. It requires specific handling of the devices. They have to be all accounted for in a certain way. The software that interfaces with the devices has to be approved by regulating agencies and any updates to the software have to be approved. This is a very tricky environment to be in when you’re a software company because software is a very easily and rapidly improved feature. Releases can be sent out on a continuous basis, but when you have regulatory overhead, it massively slows the process down. So it’s really important that we continue to innovate, we continue to work closely with people making decisions, to help them understand the specific use case that this technology, Levels in particular, is being used for. And to help overcome a few of the concerns around deregulating – or at least improving – the regulatory environment for a general use of not just continuous glucose information, but all health information that can be used in real-time.”
12:30 – From niche to mainstream
Once CGMs are affordable and mainstream, Josh believes we can begin to combat the metabolic epidemic.
“We want to get to this to a point where it’s not just a curiosity or something that only people with a lot of disposable income can access. We really need the unit economics to improve. We need the sensors themselves to become more affordable, and only then will this be something that will change the trajectory of metabolic dysfunction. So that’s a long process. It requires demonstrating that there’s a market, that there are people that are willing to pay, and that they are using the information effectively. It requires a lot of integrity on our part, continuing to follow through on our mission, showing that we are really in this to change the future. And handling information, according to all of the requirements with the person, the individual, the customer’s best interests, always at heart. We’re very committed to that. It’s just going to be a process of building confidence both from the consumers and from the regulators to show that the potential is there, and that we are the ones that can do it. I’m confident that we’ll get across all those hurdles.”
15:54 – The collision of two pandemics
You are twice as likely to have a negative outcome from COVID if you are metabolically unfit. When a future pandemic strikes, Josh and his team want the world to be ready.
“It’s the collision of two pandemics that we’re seeing right now. If you look at the outcomes of COVID as associated with metabolic dysfunction or metabolic health markers, people that have preexisting metabolic dysfunction, especially glucose elevations, are twice as likely to have a negative outcome from COVID as those without. When you have the inflammatory environment of bad metabolic health, the immune system is very quickly one of the first things compromised. When you face the additional insult of a viral infection that attacks some of the same pathways, it immediately becomes a worse scenario. We can’t just vaccinate everyone to this pandemic and think that everything’s going to be okay. My co-founder Casey, she’s a Stanford-trained surgeon and functional medicine doctor and she drills this point that there will be another pandemic. It may not be next year. It may not be for a long time, but we have to take the lessons from this one and realize that we have to improve resilience, we have to as a society embrace individual health as one of the highest goods in order to improve society. It’s important that at all levels, not just at the individual, but at the government level and beyond. We have to embrace that and we have to make it possible. We have to give people the tools they need to ensure their resilience against both the chronic illness factors and also the viral ones.”’
18:25 – Collecting powerful data with a patch + smartphone
A small patch with hair-like filaments detects glucose molecules in the skin and a small wireless chip sends it to your smartphone. By logging details about your food, sleep, and exercise, you receive insights into how your choices are affecting you.
“First off, for the continuous glucose monitor itself, there are a few manufacturers out there. We can work with the big ones here in the United States. They each have a little patch, so it’s this little kind of plastic disc or oval-shaped. And under that patch is a hair-like filament. It’s this little flexible filament that directly detects glucose molecules in the skin. So you put that patch on your arm and it stays on for two weeks at a time and it has a little wireless chip in it that can transmit information directly to your smartphone. And that’s all protected and secure. But once it’s on your smartphone, you can pull that glucose information in and the Level system can then start to perform analysis on it. When you’re using the level of software itself, you are logging what we call activities and activities cover anything from nutrition, a meal that you would eat, sleep, the duration and the timing of your sleep, and the intensity of your exercise. So all of these different choices that you’re making every single day are basically collected in this app.”
22:54 – Making healthy choices less abstract
CGM gives you the ability to see how nutrition, sleep, exercise, and stress affect your body. When you know this correlation, it becomes easier to make good choices.
“I have this context for everything I do. And I have confidence that when I consume a certain meal, I know what’s going to happen. I know how to kind of mitigate the negative effects. And I also know now the correlation between all of these different levers: the exercise, the sleep, the nutrition, the stress. Let’s say I have to pull an all-nighter or I’m going to be taking that red-eye flight, or I’m a new parent and my baby’s keeping me up all night. I know now that when I’m compromised on one, the other three matter that much more. I have to make sure that I’m more intentional about selecting foods that are going to support good metabolic responses. Since as I mentioned, I’m kind of pulling out one leg of the stool with the sleep part. And so all of that is happening at the level of the system. We’re surfacing those insights. We’re helping you to process and understand the correlations of all of these factors in a way that is just understandable and approachable, as opposed to abstract.”
29:28 – Working with Elon Musk
Josh knows firsthand that Elon Musk believes strongly in creating a better future for humanity. Today he is channeling that desire for progress into his work at Levels.
“Personally, I’m a huge fan of Elon. I got a chance to work somewhat closely with him on and off throughout my time there. So I was able to be in recurring meetings and learn about how his mind works. And I think he has a very clairvoyant mind. He thinks about the future in a way that very few people do and is kind of able to navigate towards an outcome that he really believes will be better for humanity. And I think you see that with him wanting to have zero emissions, energy availability, and cars, and a second home planet where we can increase the likelihood that humanity will survive long-term. These are really big statements and I don’t think he is without blemish as a human being, but I really am glad to see success happening. I hope Tesla is not a bubble, but certainly seems to be overvalued at the moment, to say the least. I think he said so himself, so I just would love to see a success for that company. I have great friends. There are great friends and family at SpaceX still. I just really enjoyed the pace of progress, the technology innovation when I was there. I was overwhelmingly proud and positive about what we were working on. It felt like something that mattered and that’s really good.”
Episode Transcript
Host: [00:00:00] Recorded at Attention Agency Studios. This is not your average entrepreneur or e-commerce podcast, and he’s not your average host. This is The Story of a Brand with your host Ramon Vela.
Ramon Vela: [00:00:18] If you extrapolate that you’re talking about 30% of the human population, probably more that needs this type of device, not just here in United States, but in other parts of the world.
Josh Clemente: [00:00:29] Yeah. It’s a massive and, really, an unfortunate situation but the rates of diabetes, preventable, chronic illnesses, including Type 2 diabetes are increasing at an increasing rate right now. It’s moving in the other direction of the infectious diseases, which even though it sounds bizarre in a pandemic, but the reality is that we’ve done a great job of controlling the infectious diseases that used to be the primary causes of death and now, the main foe is these illnesses, chronic illnesses, so chronic lifestyle selections that lead to ultimately poor outcomes and accelerated aging.
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Hey, don’t forget to listen to part one of this amazing feature. Now let’s get back to the story.
Josh Clemente: [00:01:57] I think it actually felt like there was a lot to do at all times, even at those early moments, figuring out the regulatory strategy, like how could we effectively get access to these for people who did not have a diagnosis of diabetes. That’s a big question that touches on legal regulatory telehealth. A lot of research had to be done to just know where to start. But then we also had to ask the question, who would even distribute them. We know that there are regulations that we can’t handle prescription products ourselves. We don’t have the facility to do that. That’s a huge undertaking. So there was just a lot of research to figure out a business model that would allow us to manifest what we were imagining.
That really quickly filled six months in combination with conversations with initial investors. Sam is a very connected person having started several companies in the past. And so we were able to quickly kickstart some conversations with other investors and angels in his network to try to describe what we were planning on doing and when. And so there was a lot of frenzied scrambling around to meet people and have phone conversations while still carrying on this background requirement of getting across the legal and regulatory hurdles that we needed. That six months is it’s almost a blur to me.
I never recall a moment where I was frustrated and pulling my hair out. It was more of a hopefulness that we would find a way through and figure out a business plan, a business model that would work and be able to convince the investors that we needed to support us and get us through to the next phase. It was just a real intense hopefulness that I remember, “I want to be able to do this. I want to really be able to put in the work.” And I had already been at it for over a year self-funding and having only expenses. I was well on my way and it was feeling more and more possible with each day.
And so when we finally did get through that six months and had the structure in place and were able to get our first customer and accept our first angel check, it was really a life-changing moment. It was just like a piece of success that you would imagine for a very long time, and it was very gratifying and I was very, yeah, I just felt lucky right away to… It was like, “This is now unlocking the next phase,” which I’m very lucky to be one of the people to be able to try.
Ramon Vela: [00:04:16] Yeah. And I can imagine how that felt. I don’t want to jump the gun here, but I just feel like there is just so much opportunity for you. When I started thinking about, like once you have this available and so forth, it reminds me of… We interviewed a company called Mighty Audio and they’re like these little, small, little, like the old iPod Shuffles used to be, really small and square and just not a whole lot of features on it. But they designed it that way so that people can use them and disconnect from their phones. So they’re not having to meditate using their phone because the phone provides interruptions and here they can listen to music and just focus – usually for people who are exercising and working out and running and things like that. But one of the things he realized in creating this both software and hardware, was that the software was valuable to other people. So, not only to sell the hardware with the software already in place and you can just buy it and use it, but they started selling the software to, licensing the software to other people who are making other hardware devices and other things like that.
So I’m curious for you guys. I just see so much opportunity for you, not only to provide this service to others via your logo, your company, but I feel like this could potentially be something you license to other healthcare providers, because you’re talking about a lot of people here in the United States. Wow! If you extrapolate that, you’re talking about 30% of the human population, probably more, that needs this type of device, not just here in United States, but in other parts of the world.
Josh Clemente: [00:05:52] Yeah. It’s a massive and, really, an unfortunate situation. The rates of diabetes, preventable chronic illnesses, including Type 2 diabetes are increasing at an increasing rate right now. It’s moving in the other direction of the infectious diseases, which even though it sounds bizarre in a pandemic, but the reality is that we’ve done a great job of controlling the infectious diseases that used to be the primary causes of death and now, the main foe is these illnesses, chronic illnesses, so chronic lifestyle selection that lead to ultimately poor outcomes and accelerated aging. And these are, as I mentioned, increasing at an increasing rate, globally. So as countries develop and their younger populations start to adopt the less healthy sedentary lifestyles and the Western diet start to move outwards, we unfortunately are getting these really bad rates, and younger and younger, early and earlier in life. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease for example, is skyrocketing in children, as a result of the fructose and sugary beverages they’re drinking. And so it’s unfortunately a massive, messy problem that it will take a long time and a lot of different approaches, I think, to tackle – a combination of just a legislative approach kind of cracking down on misleading marketing on food items and then of course the expansion of better information, empowering the individual to understand what specific decisions are doing to them. And so, we’re going to take a very agile approach where we’re going to consider any option that would help accelerate the onset of this technology as a mainstream product. So, if there are ways that we can do that in partnership with other business models, we will absolutely evaluate them. And I think that, as you mentioned, given that much of this…. There is a hardware component, you have to wear the sensor. But there is also, the software is where that turns into behavior change, and that’s beautiful. Software is very easily replicated and distributed. So I think we can, we have the potential to, with time, turn around the trends in metabolic dysfunction and hopefully get to the point where rather than the current situation where we have 88% of US adults in the United States are metabolically unhealthy, we can get to the point where that number is flipped, and in fact, only 12% are metabolically unhealthy. So I’m hopeful and definitely looking forward to finding all of the paths that we can execute on.
Ramon Vela: [00:08:22] Like I said, there’s just so much opportunity. So we’ve talked about some of the opportunities out there and the potential for this, but what are some of the challenges that you’re going to be facing and when you’re done after that, I’d love to, would you walk us through the actual… I know that’s not available right now, necessarily just for beta users, but I’d love for you to walk us through how someone would use this and what would they do and so forth, as much as you can.
But first I’d love to find out, with all this opportunity, what are the biggest challenges? What are going to be those things that are going to maybe stop you along the way?
Josh Clemente: [00:08:54] One of the big challenges is that the technology is still new and specifically designed for diabetes management and it’s very expensive and given that it’s ‘prescription only’ here in the United States to have a continuous glucose monitor, that adds a lot of overhead. It requires specific handling of the devices. They have to be all accounted for in a certain way. The software that interfaces with the devices has to be approved by regulating agencies and any updates to the software have to be approved.
This is a very tricky environment to be in when you’re a software company, because software, as I mentioned is very easily and rapidly improved, feature releases can be sent out on a continuous basis, but when you have regulatory overhead, it massively slows the process down. And so it’s really important, I think, that we continue to innovate. We continue to work closely with people making decisions, to help them understand the specific use case that this technology, Levels in particular, is being used for and to help overcome a few of the concerns around deregulating or at least improving the regulatory environment for a general use of, not just continuous glucose information, but all health information that can be used in real time. So anything outside of glucose that is able to be implemented in a similar platform to help people make better choices in real time, I think we have to make improvements to the regulations around them, such that it can be proliferated.
And so once we get across those hurdles, I think it’s going to massively lower the burden on hardware manufacturers so that they can produce technology and new sensors that are more affordable. This is key to the Levels vision is that, if we want to get to a point where it’s not just a curiosity or something that only people with a lot of disposable income can access, we really need the unit economics to improve. We need the sensors themselves to become more affordable. Then and only then will this be something that will change the trajectory of metabolic dysfunction.
So that’s a long process. It requires demonstrating that there’s a market, that there are people that are willing to pay, that are using the information effectively. It requires, I think, a lot of just integrity on our part, continuing to follow through on our mission, showing that we are in this to change the future and handling information, according to all of the requirements with the person, the individual, the customer’s best interests always at heart.
And we are very committed to that. It’s just going to be a process of building confidence, both from the consumers and from the regulators to show that the potential is there and that we are the ones that can do it. I am confident that we’ll get across all those hurdles. It’s just unclear how quickly we’ll be able to.
Ramon Vela: [00:11:47] To me the little bit positive on regulations and things like that is that, we saw that during the pandemic, the beginning of the pandemic, when telemedicine things and telemedicine, talking to your doctor over video and Zoom, etc., a lot of those things accelerated simply because they had to and so to me, in some ways that’s good in the fact that much of this type of legislation or regulation hadn’t been making its way slowly through the halls of Congress and other places and it just felt like they were able to accelerate a lot of this stuff because they had to. It’s hopeful to me that other changes, I think hopefully could be made, because of what we’ve seen in this changing climate. People… We’re working remote and we can’t always visit the doctor and obviously our hospitals right now are inundated. So maybe there’s going to be a new focus on health and empowering people with their own data because we’ve had to just accelerate that sort of empowerment of how you see your doctor, how you talk to your doctor, how you work on your health and so forth and so on. I don’t know. I’m thinking that maybe there might be some goodness coming out of this that might be beneficial to you as well.
Josh Clemente: [00:12:58] Yeah. It was a really great signal when the telehealth regulations changed so quickly and from the highest levels of government there was an agreement that this is something that has to happen. And as someone who had been researching in the space for two years at that time, I had concluded like this absolutely must change the telehealth regulations. Telehealth is the future. We will be able to access exceptional care no matter where we are. That has to happen and quickly. And so to see that happen, just quickly happen…
Unfortunately it was due to a pandemic, but sometimes that’s the nature of things where urgency is the mother of innovation, they call it and looking at the state of metabolic dysfunction, what’s interesting is it’s the collision of two pandemics that we’re seeing right now.
If you look at the outcomes of COVID as associated with metabolic dysfunction or metabolic health markers, people that have pre-existing metabolic dysfunction, especially glucose elevations are twice as likely to have a negative outcome from COVID as those without. Essentially when you have the inflammatory environment of bad metabolic health, the immune system is very quickly one of the first things compromised. And so then when you face the additional insult of a viral infection that attacks some of the same pathways, it immediately becomes a worse scenario. And we can’t just vaccinate everyone to this pandemic and think that everything’s going to be okay.
My co-founder Casey Means, she’s a Stanford trained surgeon and functional medicine doctor and she drills this point that there will be another pandemic. It may not be next year. It may not be for a long time, but if we don’t take the lessons from this one and realize that we have to improve resilience, we have to, as a society, embrace individual health as one of the highest goods in order to improve society. And so, it’s important that at all levels, not just at the individual, but at the government level and beyond, we have to embrace that and we have to make it possible. We have to give people the tools they need to ensure their resilience against both the chronic illness factors and also the viral ones.
Ramon Vela: [00:15:00] Yeah. No. I love what you just said, improve and/or strengthen resilience. Like I said at the very beginning, this is sort of like democratizing your own data and liberating it in a way that you could use it and empower yourself, so it’s really like I said, this is so exciting.
So if I was a beta user, if I was a new user, once it’s available… Ideally I guess, maybe your target market, I think, you were talking about like people who buy Peloton or people who are into fitness and monitoring their health and so forth. Walk me through this. What does it look like? What does the software look like? What do they do? What do they use? How do they use it? And how will they make better decisions? I know we’ve talked about it, but why don’t we just go a little bit more granular and give someone an idea of what this is going to look like, or what does it look like?
Josh Clemente: [00:15:46] Yeah. So first off the the continuous glucose monitor itself, there are a few manufacturers out there we can work with, with the big ones here in the United States. They each have a little patch. So it’s this little plastic disc, oval shaped and under that patch is a hair-like filament. So it’s this little flexible filament which senses… It directly detects glucose molecules in the skin. So you put that patch on your arm. It stays on for two weeks at a time and it has a little wireless chip in it which can transmit information directly to your smartphone and that’s all protected and secure, but once it’s on your smartphone, you pull that glucose information in and the Level system can then start to perform analysis on it. And so when you’re using the Level software itself, you are logging what we call activities. Activities cover anything from nutrition (so a meal that you would eat), sleep (so the duration, the timing of your sleep), exercise and the intensity of your exercise. So all of these different choices that you’re making every single day are basically co-located in this app. So you take a picture of your meal, for example, we interface with Google Fit and Apple Health to pull in workout data. We pull in sleep data from those two systems. So we are combining all this information in the context of glucose. So when you eat that meal, you take a quick picture and the Levels algorithms analyze from that moment, how your body responds to the meal. So we look at a bunch of different factors about how your blood sugar changes, and from those we can approximate other factors, like what’s happening with hormones like insulin. But essentially we can score how your body responded to that meal. And then if you choose to add additional activities… Let’s say that you eat a meal, you have a very bad blood sugar response. You have a big spike and then a crash and you feel shaky, that introduces this concept of interoception where you feel that shakiness and now you have some data to tie that to. And that reinforces your awareness of these physiologic little kind of background tweaks that are happening. And so then, you have that meal, you have that negative response, now you can try it again and add an additional activity which we can recommend. So we can surface these insights to say, ” That didn’t work very well for you, but maybe try it with a walk next time.” So you eat the same meal again, and this time you take a walk around the block, 15-20 minutes and this time we’ve still been analyzing the glucose data as it’s happening and now, since you took that walk, for many of us, our legs actually metabolize the sugar in our blood much more quickly. And so it basically supports the digestive system and the metabolic function or the metabolic fitness of the individual and helps them to clear that glucose more effectively. So rather than having this big blood sugar spike, you actually had a very controlled response to the same meal just by taking a walk. And so we then can surface and compare those two examples and show you the power of very simple light exercise after a meal.
And this goes across many different types of functions. So you can see the effects of a short night of sleep versus a full eight hours. So you take a red eye flight and now your blood sugar is elevated all day and your responses to meals are much worse, and this has been studied in the research environment, but we can show individuals how specifically it’s affecting them and compare days where you got a good, restful night’s sleep versus a very poor night’s sleep.
We can show you how specific foods… We talked, we touched on that research earlier on where two people can eat the same food and have equal and opposite responses. We can help you compare specific foods across your diet and you can basically try them on their own. So you try a banana, you try a bowl of oatmeal, you try different types of dressings and you can see and compare all of these responses to each other and find the ones that best support you. Maybe for some of us, like myself, I tend to actually do really well with berries, but a banana is similar to candy for me. So I tend to avoid bananas unless I’m on a workout, which I know actually I respond very well if I’m cycling or running, to that banana because I’m able to use it for energy immediately.
So I have this context for everything I do. And I have confidence that when I consume a certain meal I know what’s going to happen. I know how to mitigate the negative effects and I also know now the correlation between all of these different levers, the exercise, the sleep, the nutrition, the stress. So if I’m compromised on one… Let’s say I have to pull an all nighter or I’m going to be taking that red eye flight, or I’m a new parent and my baby’s keeping me up all night, I know now that when I’m compromised on one, the other three matter that much more. I have to make sure that I’m more intentional about selecting foods that are going to support good metabolic responses because, as I mentioned, I’m pulling out one leg of the stool with the sleep part.
And so all of that is happening in the Levels of system. We’re surfacing those insights. We’re helping you to process and understand the correlations of all of these factors in a way that is just understandable and approachable as opposed to abstract. And of course, we’re still in development and things are rolling out consistently, but we’re at a stage now where people are really learning about these in just 28 days.
Ramon Vela: [00:21:00] I’m just so excited by this, man. I feel like I want one already. It’s like I wish you were already out, because it just sounds so empowering. I think this is going to be a hit, man. I think this is… I honestly, I’m not just BSing here. I think, like this is the early stage of something that’s just going to be huge. I think you’re going to do amazing and I’m just so glad that I can play a little part of this in the very beginning here before you launch. But it’s just so exciting because you’re, like I said, you’re giving us power, the power to see our own data, to be able to take that data and understand it and do something with it and obviously have a positive change and a positive effect on this. So to me, this is mind blowing, but I’m just so excited for you. I’ve interviewed a lot of people and I love so many of the different brands that we have on here, but I love when I’m so excited about something, I just feel like, wow! This is amazing.
All right. I want to be respectful of your time. I know you’ve got other things going and I really appreciate you spending some time with us. Before we go, I have a couple last questions. Like what I just alluded to right now. There’s probably people listening right now who are thinking like, “Wow! I really want this device.” But I think you’re in beta and you also mentioned you have 68,000 or some huge number of wait list. What’s the next step? If someone wants to know how to get hold of you or who wants to get on that list? Who wants to be notified when it’s ready and so forth. What do people do? Where can we send them?
Josh Clemente: [00:22:23] Yeah. So I highly recommend anyone who’s interested please go to the website levelshealth.com and add your name to the wait list. You can sign up, you answer a few questions and help us understand who you are and why you’re interested. And we actually, as you mentioned, we do have a large wait list right now, but we are inviting people off that wait list based on specific things that we need to learn. If there’s a certain feature we need to test with people that are interested in diet, as opposed to weight loss. We do invite people off the wait list and we’re constantly increasing the volume. So, definitely sign up there and then that’ll also add you to our newsletter and we’ll be releasing updates on content that we’re writing.
We have, I think, a really fantastic blog, which helps to further break down all of the concepts I’ve touched on here much more eloquently and with a much more rigorous citation process, but, you can jump on our blog and learn a huge amount about the way that metabolism touches each of us. We are all approaching life in different ways. We have different goals and that’s where this information can, I think, come home for people and they understand how this affects them. So I definitely recommend touching on the blog and being a part of the newsletter and over time, as we move past our current stage, which is, as you mentioned, beta, into the first phases of public accessibility and growth, we’ll be releasing all of those updates and details through our social media, which is on Twitter and Instagram @Levels and through our newsletter. So we’ll be keeping people in the know. I’m really optimistic that 2021 is going to be the year we’re going to be able to finally open the flood gates and get this to many, many more people.
And so, yeah. I just appreciate anyone who is interested getting in touch with us and following along. It’s going to be a fun journey.
Ramon Vela: [00:23:59] And that was actually one of my other followup questions, which is, if there was any timeframe. So I guess it’s basically crossing our fingers that you’re able to launch in 2021. Right?
Josh Clemente: [00:24:10] Yeah, I think we’re going to be able to get a lot of people from our waitlist through the program. And there’s a few key product milestones that we’re working on. A couple of them touch regulatory things, and so it’s a little bit of schedule uncertainty right now in terms of when that exact launch date will be, but I think we’re on track for maybe later this year, summer, maybe early fall.
Ramon Vela: [00:24:28] Wow! Like I said, I feel excited that we’re interviewing you right now, because I think in a year or a couple of years from now, you’re just going to be, you’re going to blow up, man. I just think this is just such a cool thing that you’re doing and it’s exciting and I know… I’m not even… I love exercising and things like that, but I’m really focused on my health right now and so to me, this is really… If you had it available now I would sign up for it right away and I think a lot of people feel that way too, so I really appreciate it.
And you know what? I did have one last question for you, which is, I wanted to wait till the end, because this is not necessarily, this is more of a digression, but given your history, I’m curious. All this talk right now, there’s all sorts of talks about SpaceX and Tesla and Elon Musk. What are your thoughts on it since you have experience working for one of those companies? I know this is a digression. I’m sure you get this question, but thought I’d wait until the very end to ask this.
Josh Clemente: [00:25:20] It’s an interesting situation given how much his companies have blown up and personally, I’m a huge fan of Elon. I got a chance to work somewhat closely with him on and off throughout my time there. So I was able to be in recurring meetings and learn about how his mind works. And I think he has a very clairvoyant mind. He thinks about the future in a way that few people do and is able to navigate towards an outcome that he really believes will be better for humanity. And I think that you see that with him wanting to have zero emissions, energy availability, and cars, and a second home planet where we can increase the likelihood that humanity will survive long-term. And these are really big statements and I certainly… I don’t think he is without blemish as a human being, but I really am glad to see success happening. Tesla certainly seems to be, I hope it’s not a bubble, but it certainly seems to be overvalued at the moment to say the least. I think he said so himself. So I just would love to see success for that company. I have great friends there, great friends and family at SpaceX still and just really enjoy the pace of progress, the technology, innovation. When I was there, I just was overwhelmingly just proud and positive about what we were working on. It felt like something that mattered and that’s, I think really good and I think it’s really good for people, even if you’re not at the company, it’s good to have, I think, interesting projects that you can smile about. It’s positive just to see the star ship flights and even if they’re blowing up, it’s something interesting that takes your mind off the rest of the things happening in the world.
Ramon Vela: [00:26:52] Yeah. This might sound anathema to folks who are Elon Musk and Tesla and SpaceX fans, but the same way that I am excited about when I read concepts about what Tesla has done and what SpaceX has done and I know there’s a lot of stuff within the story that isn’t really known to a lot of people because in both of those industries you were fighting against an old school or, an industry that hadn’t changed in many ways. So it’s like you’re bumping heads and you’re trying… You’re disrupting these industries. And so there’s a lot of really cool things that I know have happened in the background that a lot of people don’t know about.
But the thing is you get excited about these long views and the potential of this technology and what it could do and how it can change our lives and so forth. In my roundabout way of saying this, I feel that same way with your company. I am excited. When you think about what the the technology that Tesla’s done and then SpaceX and so forth and how they disrupted the companies and you’re excited I may or may never, ever… Obviously, hopefully we’re going to Mars and they start moving people to Mars, but in my lifetime, I probably will never ever do that. But it’s still exciting. It’s still and it’s like, wow! It’s this potential. It could change the way we do things. It could change our lives and so forth and feel excited that way about your product, because I feel like you and this product has a potential to really impact people’s lives.
Now obviously, you were talking about the unit economics, so it can become less expensive for users of all different economic levels. And that’s actually what I’ve heard Elon Musk say. So I got to tell you, man, you guys, in many ways, Elon and what they’re doing at Tesla and what they’re doing at SpaceX, I think you’re kind of riding along maybe subconsciously. I don’t know, man. What you’re doing to me is very similar and is equally as exciting.
Josh Clemente: [00:28:46] Yeah. I have to admit that we definitely did pay attention to Tesla’s approach there of starting off with a premium brand or a premium product, the Roadster, and slowly but surely financing the more affordable entry, the Model 3 ultimately, and then even a more affordable one coming. And so we actually wrote a Levels secret master plan, so kind of a tongue-in-cheek rip off of what Tesla wrote to describe that plan, or what Elon wrote. And so yeah, definitely taking a few notes from the playbook and making it a bit of a joke, but in a very serious sense. I think it’s a demonstrated way to bring new technology to a new market and I really hope that we can replicate even a fraction of the success.
Ramon Vela: [00:29:24] I think you guys will, and I think this is going to be huge.
Josh, thank you so much for being on the show and I am just so grateful that you’ve given us an opportunity to have you on here in the early days, so when I say I knew him when. So I really appreciate it, man. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Josh Clemente: [00:29:41] Ramon. Thanks so much for having me on, I genuinely enjoyed this conversation.
Ramon Vela: [00:29:46] And I did too. And everyone, we have just had Josh Clemente, who is the founder and president of Levels and we’ll give all the information on our podcast subscription, but you can find them at Levels Health, that’s levelshealth.com. Take a look at what they’re doing. This is so exciting and I can’t wait to see what the future looks like for this company. So if you appreciate people like Josh and others that we have on the show, do me a favor, leave a rating and a review. It helps me so much. I say this each and every time and the reason why I say this, is that it helps. It helps us get more streams, more advertisers and it helps us to keep the show going, which I really love doing. So do me a favor, go there and leave a rating and a review. It takes 15-20 seconds. Other than that, everyone, please stay safe, stay healthy, stay strong, and stay sane. We’re almost out of this. I see a light at the end of the tunnel, but just stay maxed up and stay safe. And thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to another episode of The Story of a Brand.
If you haven’t already make sure to listen to part one of this amazing episode.