April 9, 2021

Friday Forum is an All Hands meeting for the Levels team, where they discuss their progress and traction each week.

https://youtu.be/54vNedoY44s

Transcript

Josh Clemente:
All right. We’ll go ahead and kick off, and Anthony should join us in just a few minutes. All right, everybody. April 9th, 2021. Friday forum.
Josh Clemente:
This was a packed one. I mean, I always say that, but this was crazy. I have this prep document and this took up several pages of prep space, which is not typical. So right off the bat, team updates. So Alan McLean, our new lead designer, has begun ramping up. Super awesome. I’ve seen him all over the place already diving into documents, diving into Slack, and I’m sure making David very happy with his newfound force multiplication. So he will be probably onboarding or joining the forum next week and we’ll do a formal intro.
Josh Clemente:
In terms of product stuff. So David will jump into the details, but sleep details page is ready for internal testing. So excited about this. Google Play approvals are done so I want to just shout some people out here. We’ve got John, Marilo, Gabriel. All great work on the things listed here. Everyone else, appreciate the background work. Long zone research. Gabriel wrote a great document on this helping to break down the specifics of why long zones are an issue, the specifics of the issue, and then how we can maybe take some steps forward. Huge progress on dashboard V2. Alan was able to contribute there as well. So some really great stuff this week on the app and excited for some of the internal testing we’ll be able to do with this.
Josh Clemente:
On the community front, Sam had his member call this week. I have not been able to watch it yet, but these have been really useful for me so far. So I’m looking forward to that one. We added levels stickers to the shipment kits. Hopefully people don’t use these in place of the performance covers. I don’t think that should be a problem, but this was a recommendation from a couple people. And it was glucose week, so we had a bunch of people who poisoned themselves with 75 grams of glucose and then had crazy responses. Sam won this one handily. I think by 50% on the postprandial peak, hitting 300, which is wild considering it’s a Coke and a half. So thanks to everyone who contributed there. And we’re going to redo this with actually just a classic Coca-Cola next week.
Josh Clemente:
We did our first quarterly review. So that was sent out to the levels announced. We’re going to keep doing these things, I think. It was fairly popular. And then, swag 2.0. Thanks to everyone, Ben in particular, who has pushed ahead with the kit you see down at the bottom.
Josh Clemente:
Big inbound press week. So Kara Swisher reached out directly. So she’s probably the top Silicon Valley or tech reporter out there. She does opinion pieces for the New York Times. And then also, Recode Decode from Vox. Washington Post reached out. Staten News reached out. So really big week. We’ll have a bunch of publications, hopefully, coming from this. Stacy and David, I want to shout them out. They’ve been traveling all over the place doing a long levels photo shoot campaign, which is inevitably going to lead to some amazing photo assets.
Josh Clemente:
And then we’re evaluating a number of additional [analyde 00:02:59] options. So white labeling test kits, using existing test kits, potentially doing in-home testing. So lots of exploration happening in the background. We’ll definitely have some memos and some pilot projects coming out of this in the coming weeks.
Josh Clemente:
And then a couple other interesting conversations. So best by health. They have a really fascinating background health system that they’re building, which I did not know anything about, but our team had a good conversation with them and will likely explore a pilot. We’re in touch with Under Armor. Parsley Health is doing content collaboration with us. We’ve got Stephen Klasko from Jefferson, who’s known as one of the most innovative people in healthcare right now, is super fascinated by what we’re working on and he and Casey had a great call this past week, which is exciting. And then we had a couple other just conversations with folks. We’re in touch with Under Armor. We were put in touch with the CEO of Apollo Neuro, so we’re going to have a conversation there. We were on a couple big podcasts this week. Boss Babe with Casey, Just Raise with Sam. I was able to be on Acquired.
Josh Clemente:
And then, picked up a new affiliate, Mary Shenouda, who is the Paleo Chef. We’ve got a couple athletes from CrossFit and Nike trying out our product. The Boston Bruin sideline reporter, or I guess off-ice reporter, Sophia is using the product and loving it. And this was just a footnote from Andrew on Slack, but we are indexing 10 million health metrics per month, which I just wanted to highlight that because it’s a big number and it blew my mind.
Josh Clemente:
Lots of other stuff that we didn’t get to, but super solid week. All right. I saw his smiley face join the video chat, so want to welcome Dr. Anthony Gustin. Anthony has been a huge supporter of ours and also is just perfectly aligned, I feel like, in the philosophy of what we’re building. Founder and CEO of Perfect Keto and Equip Foods. Mike’s a huge fanboy. I can tell you at right now. Equip, I think, is 60% of Mike’s calories. And I can say that I love Perfect Keto bars more than anything else in a package. So I just want to appreciate Anthony for joining us. I was able to be on the Natural State podcast very early on, one of the first shows I did, and it was just an awesome conversation. Just appreciate your support throughout and would love to hear a couple words.
Anthony Gustin:
Yeah, thanks. It’s quite an honor to be on the call with you guys. I check out some of these updates probably every couple weeks, whenever I can get a chance to go through a full one, and, man, you guys team updates and your operations … I’ve asked Sam multiple times, holy shit. Can I get a copy of your guys’ obs track list? How well you guys run as a company with how early on you are is so phenomenal, and it just echoes the professionalism of the founding team and just the entire squad that you guys have pulled together.
Anthony Gustin:
My background used to be a sports med clinician in San Francisco. Knew their classic Silicon Valley, San Francisco thing that there had to be a better way to help people out and get them better results in their health. So I started making some product companies to be able to help people accelerate their journey on getting access to real food and just using it more. So the way I’ve always thought about it is, yeah, we sell products and they’re packaged food and I get that. But we’re trying to create a bridge for people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to the information. So making products that are just as good or better than what exists, and then giving them that through education. And so, I always thought about Perfect Keto, Equip as primarily education companies that just use products to sell to able to fund the education further.
Anthony Gustin:
And so, when Keto was launching I think we were one of the first keto brands. There was Keto OS, which is an MLM operation. And then keto content, no one was doing content. No one was doing affiliate work. And there was this urgency that we need to get out in front because metabolic health is so important. I mean, this is the cornerstone of every chronic disease that I was treating in my clinic is metabolic problems. When people regulated their blood sugar and got control of the metabolism, everything else would just fade away. And so, I saw, oh, keto’s going to be exploding. This is a chance where we can get people’s attention and wrap it together in a way where we can really make a change with education.
Anthony Gustin:
I was really afraid of the if it fits your macros crowd taking keto and bastardizing it. So food quality has always been really, really important to us. I’m sure you guys have seen. People, even if they eat low carbs, sometimes food quality can destroy their blood glucose. Especially over the long term. So huge emphasis early on for the company as far as really, really indexing on, how can we get a stranglehold on the public perception of what’s going on here? And I think that you guys are in an even more important role and are doing a phenomenal job already getting started to look back at … Obviously, there’s a lot of great work that was done by researchers. See Dom here on the call. Shout out to people like that. But there wasn’t a lot of brands that singularly took the keto thing and made it accessible in a way for the masses.
Anthony Gustin:
And I saw our stuff … Originally, I was a little annoyed that all of our products were being copied and all of our content was being re-shared and copied and plagiarized. But at the end of the day, that was amazing opportunity for us to really shape the conversation around keto. And I think we’ve done a lot in that space that you guys are also at this pivotal point where metabolic health at large, glucose tracking at large is going to be so important over the next 5 to 10 years.
Anthony Gustin:
And you’re really the first and only company that’s doing this in a way that I would be proud to be associated with. I mean, your standards are incredible. The amount of work that you guys are doing is so important, and this will be influencing research. This will be influencing tons of things. More content. Affiliate. You guys probably are underestimating now the amount of impact that you’re going to have by putting out great products, but also great content. It is going to be an avalanche over the next five years. I’ve seen this before with keto and paleo, CrossFit, and a couple other trends. This trend is coming and you guys are at the forefront of it and, be great stewards.
Anthony Gustin:
I mean, you guys are already doing a phenomenal job and I’ve been really, really proud of how you guys have grown and responded way faster and better than we had over the last five years at Perfect Keto. So if we have the impact that we have, I mean, you guys are set up for extreme success. So yeah, just really, really excited. I’ve been a huge, huge fan as soon as Sam and Josh told me what they were up to. I don’t know if it was like two years ago now. I thought, wow, great. There’s a company that needed to exist, but these guys are way smarter and better at running companies than I am so, great. Can I invest? Can I be a part of it? And so, yeah. Just been absolutely blown away by everything you guys have done since day one and super excited to see the influence you have on metabolic health over the long run. I think it’s going to be super important.
Josh Clemente:
Amazing. Yeah, I really, really appreciate the kind words and appreciate, like I said, all the support from the very beginning. So you recently went on a pretty wild trip, and would love to point the team in a direction to read about what you’ve learned from tribes people who are still living in a technologically untouched society. Where’s the best place to go for reading about this?
Anthony Gustin:
Yeah. So Paul Saldino, who’s a carnivore guy, and I went to stay with the [Hadsa 00:10:23] tribe in Tanzania who are one of the last hunter gatherer tribes left in the world. It was a crazy experience, and all the last 15 years of me searching into truths about health where … So when you read a book and you understand something, but you don’t actually learn it until you experience it. So many dots connected and so much stuff happened there. It was amazing.
Anthony Gustin:
So on the podcast, there’s two episodes that we did back to back around our experience there with the Hadsa. And then also on my Instagram, just /dranthonygustin. I have some stories saved there. It was a wild, wild experience. But yeah, I mean, at the forefront of health, I think that one direction with them having zero technology and you guys at the other end, which is really cool. And I think technologies in health really make a difference when you try to restore what is natural and makes sense. You just [inaudible 00:11:12] and natural state. Every natural state in an organism is health, and you guys are helping people get that feedback loop and restore their awareness around what they’re eating is a normal amount of glucose or not. And the body doesn’t lie. And so, it’s interesting to have the experience I had with the Hadsa, and then also really be championing your guys’ technology because it brings people back to their normal environment.
Josh Clemente:
Love it. Yeah, definitely. I have those podcasts queued up and excited to get the rest of the team queued in. It’s a pretty awesome concept. Thanks a lot, Anthony. Really, really appreciate it.
Anthony Gustin:
Thanks, Josh.
Josh Clemente:
Let’s see. Quick culture and kudos here. So we’re on a mission to solve metabolic health crisis. We’re going to say this weekly. Some interesting back chatter about how to make this statement even more concrete. So stay tuned for that. We want to put numbers to our goals here.
Josh Clemente:
But on the shoutouts front, just closing the loop. So I think it’s going to be a trademark of levels is closing loops across the entire business. Two examples. Very different. Tom sought some advice from Juliet A16Z about, essentially, corporate wellness. And so, then he wrote a memo incorporating this and other feedback. And then just closed the loop with her and shared the memo for her to review and provide another iteration of advice and synthesis. So that’s much appreciated from her. She sees the outcome of the effort she put in. And then also, for us, we get another round of advice from these experts.
Josh Clemente:
And then, another really exciting one was just a very simple thank you that a member had just given us a piece of product feedback, and Ben and Lori hooked him up with a nice gift. Ben Bickman’s why we get sick and a little note. And he posted it all over Twitter. It got quite a bit of attention and just, that’s another example of a loop closure that really benefits the levels brand and shows members that we care and we’re not just extracting value from them in this beta stage. So keep these types of things in mind. Anywhere you can do a loop closure, let us know.
Josh Clemente:
David.
David Flinner:
All right. So the dashboard V2 is ready to launch as soon as Apple approves it today. Hopefully we can get that out there today. And yeah, this is the first step on a lot of upcoming features that we’ve been working on. So an easier way to understand your data at a glance, easier access to the activity cards that are so pivotal to our members in the first month and help set the stage for what they’re seeing and guide them through. And then the rails for future features. So some of the upcoming levels lessons content that I’ve been talking about for the last few weeks and the in-app program experience.
David Flinner:
One thing to highlight too here is that we asked Alan if he had any lightweight suggestions for … Not changing any of the inflight features too much, but if he could improve some of my initial designs, to have at it. And he jumped in and made some really awesome changes that are going to make the app look a lot more consistent. And yeah, I was just super thankful to have him starting part-time this week to help out with this. So great work, John and Marilo and Allen for this, and looking forward to getting customer feedback on this after we get it out there. It’s a pretty big change. So that’s the first thing.
David Flinner:
Next slide. Can you play the video, Josh?
David Flinner:
So Gabriel is pushing out a change today that will enable essentially the sleep show, like the zone show but for sleep. And what’s cool about this is that now you can visualize your glucose history for the entire duration of your sleep. And then we’re also introducing some new sleep metrics. So your average glucose throughout the duration of the sleep and the glucose you had when you woke up. And this is going to be useful because it lets you see for the first time in levels just any correlations you might notice amongst your sleep and your heart rate and your glucose trendline.
David Flinner:
And again, it’s a first step that we’ll have for helping people gain context on how their choices affect their sleep. So you can imagine if you eat a huge dinner, go to bed right away, and then you see this, you can see how your glucose was volatile all night. And then correlate that with how you’re feeling. It can be a pretty powerful experience and I’m thinking that this might be a good surface for us to continue to iterate on, pulling in maybe some of those recent zones before you go to bed and adding sharing functionality to it so people can tell their sleep stories and whether it was messed up or aided by their metabolic choices. More work to come here.
David Flinner:
We’re also expanding out on the ability to add and edit sleep logs beyond what we have now, which is just integrating with Apple Health and Google Fit to automatically ingest them. And then some higher level insight cards that we have queued up to, depending on what we detect in your sleep, we can give you more insight based on that.
David Flinner:
Next slide. Next slide, Josh.
David Flinner:
Quick shout out to John and Marilo. They shepherded us through a very complicated and long Google Play approval process, which took several iterations with their approvals team to make sure that we got access to importing the health data that we need for our Google Fit integration. This is like heart rate, body measurements, things like that. And it takes a lot of effort in the background, and there’s not a lot visual right now but what this enables is that now our members on Android can re-access their Google Fit integration, which was temporarily disabled. So thanks for your work there.
David Flinner:
Next slide.
David Flinner:
And then, as Josh alluded to … Oh, interesting. The pictures didn’t come through. There’s a great doc you can review in the end Slack channel. I must have accidentally deleted them. But yeah, Gabriel’s been looking through what causes long zones and what are some ways that we might be able to change a product a little bit to minimize them. Long zones, they’re not the majority case. They’re a minority, but when they happen they’re very frustrating. When you want to get a zone score and then you chain it on with another log, and that happens. You get one long zone score for the day is an experience that many of our members have. And if we can try to get those shorter, we can help people understand their choices more throughout the day.
David Flinner:
So some of the interesting things here is that there was no silver bullet, but there are probably a handful of things we can do to make incremental change that will add up to progress here. More to come on that. There they are. There’s just an animation.
David Flinner:
All right, next slide.
David Flinner:
And Jimmy’s been working on some improved authentication with retool to better unify the levels authentication system with the retool. Have been set up and make sure that you have both at the same time, a level super user credential and a retool admin credential. So that’s going to be a win for our ops team and just a general level security.
David Flinner:
Next slide.
David Flinner:
And just one more plug. Thanks for everyone who’s reviewed some of the roadmap visualizations that Sam and I put together over the last week. If you haven’t yet, please take a look later today and jot in some quick feedback at the end of the notion doc. Let us know what you think. I’ll be putting together a visualization of the roadmap based on this, so your input matters.
David Flinner:
Next slide.
David Flinner:
Yeah. Just a summary of the things that are inflight or launched. So a few other ones to call out. Ongoing subscription work. That’s a continual process there with [Miz 00:19:13] and Jeremy. The great stuff for our members. And Howl is working on some user data infrastructure projects as well that are more back end facing. And we’re working on some updates to our net promoter score analytics. So right now, as you know, in Slack we get notified whenever someone fills out our survey. But there’s some interesting questions on who is not filling out our survey, either because they never saw the monthly report which is when you actually get the survey request or because they decided to skip it. And what we’ll do is try to figure out what is our overall percentage rate of people who fill out NPS, and then try to do some interviews with people who are skipping it and see if they had a bad experience and what we can do to improve. That’s it.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Thank you, David. Thanks eng team and product team. And onto a quick hiring update. Nothing major. By the way, can everyone see this little strand here? The red thing? Or is that just on my screen? Yeah, there’s an emoji that’s stuck on my screen.
David Flinner:
It’s not on my screen.
Josh Clemente:
Anyway, so, quick hiring update. Things are still working great and workable. Please continue to add your updates there. I think the biggest thing is just, this can be a little out of sight out of mind. So when you have a contact with a candidate, please add your evaluation and move them into the next phase so that we can keep this moving. Four currently open positions, one of which is revolving with the software developer. That’s a number of positions in one. Alrighty. Mike D.
Mike Didonato:
I do see the emoji or the red line. Okay. Sorry. It was another great week connecting with and receiving feedback from our members. One theme in particular I wanted to highlight, which has already been talked about a couple times in the call, revolves around zones. Specifically those one long zone or two long zones throughout the day. It can make the data less actionable and the experience not that great. I know we’re thinking through this a few different ways and excited to see Gabriel’s doc about the research.
Mike Didonato:
Other quick update. We are doing more debriefs with our nutritionist pilot participants. I started posting those call notes in the general channel in Slack to make it easier to find than the regular feedback channel. We have another one today. A couple more early next week. And then we’ll put together the findings or the lessons learned memo to circulate to the team. And I think that’s it.
Josh Clemente:
All righty. Thank you. Over to Miz. Or Brayden?
Michael Mizrahi:
Going to take it away this week. Go for it, Brayden.
Braden McCarthy:
Yes. So quick update for support for the month of March. Overall, as we’ve slowed member growth, support volume has tracked that and stayed steady for the past few months. And response time has improved since February and overall is down 21%. So it’s trending positive direction there. And then, our customer satisfaction score has been hovering on the 90% mark. It’s down slightly from last month. And then, over the past few months, we’ve had pretty consistent themes on issue types for different questions from members, mostly around order timing, subscriptions, and replacements. And with the new subscriptions update, one exciting thing we’ll be tracking is we’re expecting to see a drop in questions around subscriptions as self-serve options are rolled out, and it’ll be improvement for members as one less touch point with support. And then, finally, one quick call out is our use in saved replies in support. Right now we’re 72% of all of our interactions use a saved snippet, and this is great because it leads to quicker resolutions with members and less handle time for support.
Josh Clemente:
Nice. Could be an opportunity there if there are recurring snippets to maybe incorporate that into a product feature or something to resolve. But love that finding. Great. Thank you, Brayden. And thanks, support team. Just crushing it. Ben.
Ben Grynol:
All right. Growth. Really strong week as far as recognized revenue. So $95,000. Pretty aggressive in the front or in the fact that we have such a thorough pipeline because of all the cash generation month over month. And so, we’ll continue to see strong weeks moving forward. From a monthly perspective, we’re halfway to our goal already and we’re a third of the way through the month. So pretty exciting to see that. And cash, we’re at 10.4.
Ben Grynol:
Next slide, please.
Ben Grynol:
So this is driven from community and really interesting takeaway. So as we’ve had more of these community calls and started to get a little bit deeper in things like wearable challenge or the Facebook group, you really start to see some of the insights thematically. And Mike has talked about these week over week, but there’s this missing factor, this yearning need for what people want, what people need, and what people love. And it seems to be something that we can continue to design for, and that’s high touch or coaching personalization.
Ben Grynol:
And so, you can see there’s three bites from the Facebook group. Is anyone from levels actually in this group? It’s got 49 comments. That’s a pretty incredible amount of engagement given that. We hear this come up qualitatively in the calls that we do all the time.
Ben Grynol:
The next bite is the need. I’m still trying to interpret my results, and so people will lean to the Facebook group if they even participate there because they’re looking for somebody who is verified or somebody who they feel they can trust. And that’s a levels team member in this case because we don’t have any verified levels ambassadors at this time. Except we do have some people who are pretty active whom we are closer to. And so, Gabe Mendoza is the last one and he is very active. But you can see he responds to people and they love the engagement and they start to get these pretty long and thorough threads about, what does diet or fitness or sleep have to do with my glucose levels?
Ben Grynol:
And so, the takeaway is, how do we continue to be influenced by these insights from a growth perspective? From a content perspective? From a product perspective? From a business model perspective? When we think, how do we design to it? So pretty interesting. There’s always lots to be done with community, but we’re starting to ramp it up more.
Ben Grynol:
Next slide, please.
Ben Grynol:
So theme of the week is lean on me. This is Bill Withers. He is the person who wrote that famous song. And where this stems from is we’re starting to undertake some pretty thorough website changes. The proposed statement of work, line item by line item’s pretty easy to walk through and go, yeah, it looks good. And there was a point where we had a lot of technical information in it and it would’ve been easy to expedite it and be like, let’s move with velocity on this project. Andrew, as busy as he is, stepped in and deconstructed all of these line items and said, do we really need this? And so, the theme is we should remember that we all have a lot of people we can lean on in this group. There’s a ton of smart people. And so, if you don’t know something, make sure we are always asking because it has steered the project in a different direction. So that is growth for the week.
Josh Clemente:
Nice. Let me wrap things together. Thanks, Ben. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente:
Okay. Instagram and social. So we grew to 25,600 followers this past week, which is up about just under 1,000, I think. It was 900 since the previous Friday. So that’s pretty crazy. Common theme really on Instagram this week was just people really loving the features in their app. This one member says she just loves seeing all the learn stuff. We had a few others that tagged us and they said they love when there’s a little question mark on their graph and levels is asking, did something happen here?
Mercy Clemente:
Another exciting thing is Emmy [Rossum 00:27:57]. I don’t know if this was planned ahead of time, but she tagged us in a screenshot of the levels app sharing to her … I think she has a few million followers, about how much she loves it. So that was pretty exciting.
Mercy Clemente:
There was a clubhouse event this past Tuesday, which was really interesting. That’s more on the whole remote culture topics. Twitter, we’re at 13,100 followers. People are just spreading how much they really are enjoying the program and how much they’ve learned. So yeah, pretty solid week on social. That’s it.
Josh Clemente:
Thank you. All right. Growth shoutouts. Tom.
Tom Griffin:
Yeah. Quick shout out just to Kelly Lavec. Kelly has really been just a model investor and partner for us. So she’s made a number of introductions to high profile clients of hers, including Emmy Rossum. That’s how we got connected to her. Bunch of other people in the pipeline so hopefully we’ll see some more Instagram posts. She’s also just been incredibly generous with her time. So she’s been doing media interviews and written interviews for the press, which has really accelerated some of our efforts on that front. And then just really thoughtful about content creation, and we’ll have a number of upcoming promotions with her, including a podcast episode being released in a couple weeks from now.
Tom Griffin:
On that note, next slide.
Tom Griffin:
All right. So been a few weeks since we provided a podcast update. So just a snapshot of where we’re at. We had a few released this week. As mentioned, Acquired, most notably, which is a very large and popular show in the technology community. And then, over the next six weeks or so we have a number of pretty big episodes dropping that will include professional links. So we should see a steady uptick in partner code redemptions, so we’ll keep an eye out for these. Boss Babe is the next one, which is going to be released next week.
Tom Griffin:
Next slide.
Tom Griffin:
All right. Just some highlights from this week. Lots of good connections and conversations with both influencers as well as top organizations and brands in the health and sports performance space. And I think one thing to just highlight is how we think about some of these longer term partnership opportunities, whether that’s with a CrossFit or a Parsley Health or even an Under Armor.
Tom Griffin:
So just in terms of time horizon, I’m usually thinking on two parallel tracks. Both what is the ideal outcome for a relationship like this over the next, say, one to three years? And then, also, what might we be able to do as soon as, say, the next one to three months?
Tom Griffin:
And then, secondly, often these partnerships are falling either within the bucket of a brand partnership or as sales and distribution opportunity, and sometimes both. So just a quick example of this week is Parsley Health, which probably most people have heard of it but it’s one of these new primary care membership models that focuses on a more holistic functional medicine approach. And we’re still very much in the early stages of figuring out how, over the next one to three years, we might integrate within the healthcare system broadly. Physicians and physician networks who might want to prescribe levels and use our product and how this might be a distribution channel for us.
Tom Griffin:
But in the meantime, while we explore that, we’ve also finally got them over the goal line for some content collaboration. So Haney is working on a blog post with them about the future of primary care through the preventative health lens. So beginning to create brand association and alignment with a very premium brand and player within this up and coming space. That is it.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Thank you, Tom. Haney.
Mike Haney:
Yes. On the content side, two pieces up this week. Also, shout out to Casey for coming up with this nice slide format while I was out, which I’m going to use moving forward. Really nice piece on fruits and vegetables. This was a gift from … A functional medicine doctor posted this on his own side and offered to share it with us via Casey. A really nice piece and tackling a topic we hadn’t really been thinking about, but is perfect for our audience.
Mike Haney:
And then, we just this morning got approval and posted up the Mike Barwis interview. If you haven’t read it, wait till you need a moment of inspiration in your life and then go read it as you guys probably remember from Mike’s appearance on this forum a few we weeks ago, he’s just so inspiring and interesting to listen to and had a lot of interesting things to say about his own experience with CGM, which is what I really wanted to get at. He’s somebody who thinks a lot about other people’s performance and training other people. And so, it was interesting to listen to him talk about his own health routines and what he’s learned from CGM, which was quite a bit for somebody who’s been studying this space for so long that he still had learnings, I think, is really a testament.
Mike Haney:
So some really interesting stuff coming up. What you’re going to see in the next … Really ongoing, but particularly I think in the next month is, we’re starting to vary up the intensity of the content, the depth. So we’re going to continue to do these really long pieces and we’ve got a bunch of really good in depth, deep dives into some topics like cold therapy. We got a cool piece on the future of CGM. But then we’re also going to start incorporating some shorter service based pieces.
Mike Haney:
So we’re starting a new column called foods we love. This was inspired by the assemblage when everybody was chatting after our dinner about chia, and my wife was listening in and said, you guys should write about this. You have so much internal knowledge about some of these foods that I’m sure your users would love. And so, this is going to be a chance to isolate certain foods that we know are great for metabolic health, that really have benefits to people, and just share some of that knowledge. How it works in your body, what the science is behind it, but also, how do you buy it? How do you store it? How do you use it? And so, you’re going to see those coming up a lot more.
Mike Haney:
And then, yeah. Some good stuff coming in the other happenings. Tom mentioned Parsley. We also talked to Routine this week about a content partnership, and then I’m going to interview Drew Manning next week, the Fit To Fat head, about his experience with level. So that’s it for content.
Josh Clemente:
Nice. Excited for the foods we love. That’s going to be a great one, especially if we have tactical differences between the team members. Some of us buy five pounds of chia and others buy it by the serving. So that’ll be great. Stacy.
Stacy:
Yeah. Jumping in here because we’ve had two full days of photo shoots in the last week. Just wanted to give a quick preview and a shout out to all of the members and levels team members who have been a part. Matt Alston shot hoops in the Presidio and played tennis against himself for some photos. We’ve got really great content from that. We followed our very own Miz through the Presidio to capture him on his road bike. Worked with Casey Manes to capture some of her amazing recipes that are plant based, and we think that she really needs her own cookbook as a result of this shoot. And then, worked with Will and Steph Hamblin and their very cute dog this week to capture some couples photos. So next up we’re heading to Austin, Dallas, and Seattle for photo shoots that range from local food haunts to surfing. So it’ll be great. Yeah. More next week.
Josh Clemente:
Huge smile on my face. This is awesome. Thank you team for making this happen. The fact that almost all of the creative we have built this brand on is internally sourced is just incredible. So thanks for keeping it going. All right. Sweet. We made it. Haney, you’re kicking us off.
Mike Haney:
Yeah. So professionally, I guess I’ll just say on the content side after taking a week off and coming back in the midst of a glut of really deep pieces, and it’s been an opportunity to check what I know and to realize that I still have a lot of learning to do and really been having a good time working with Casey, digging into these pieces and solving this challenge we have of taking really complicated topics and making them understandable. It’s a hard thing to do and not a lot of their folks are doing it, but I think we’re making progress. And on the personal side, my son goes back to school on Monday, which means I get my day back and I’m very excited about that.
Josh Clemente:
Well, welcome back to full days. Dom, I don’t know if you’re still on the call. I think you jumped in and out. If you are. There you are.
Dominic D’Agostino:
Yeah. I just called in actually just popping in.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome.
Dominic D’Agostino:
Yeah. I am just getting back from Alaska and it’s good to get caught up on everything. I’m actually just coming from sending out some blood work. Been doing some self-experimenting, looking at fasting, low carb, and a moderate carb diet and correlating the CGM with insulin and a number of other markers. So that’s been my little project going on, in addition to teaching and all the stuff we got going on in the lab.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. The Alaska trip looked amazing. I followed along on Instagram. And thank you, by the way, for putting us in touch with ZRT. Speaking of insulin and other biomarkers. Yeah. We had a great chat this week, so I appreciate that.
Dominic D’Agostino:
Yep. Sent them out some stuff this morning. So I worked with them quite a bit.
Josh Clemente:
Beautiful. All right, John.
John:
Yeah. I’m excited to finally push the new version. Of course, it’s a big push. Lots of changes. And I’m looking forward to see the reaction of the members. On the other side, I’m excited to start working with Alan on the other side, on the mobile application. Great ideas, great contributions on their first week. So that was exciting.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Anthony, we’re doing 10 seconds each on something we’re excited about. Go ahead. Jump in.
Anthony Gustin:
Yeah. I’m heading up to my farm that I got outside of Austin here, about 45 minutes out, and getting 11 beehives. I’m going to be a bee father soon this weekend, so it’s exciting getting that up and rolling. We’re going to do some open fire cooking and stay in a tent because the house is being remodeled. So little camping in my property.
Josh Clemente:
That sounds amazing. Have to check that out sometime. Lori.
Lauri:
As usual, it’s exciting to hear the updates for each department. Personally, I’m looking forward to allergy season being over for me. Everything on my property is blooming right now and it’s beautiful, but it takes its toll. So I can enjoy it from in the house, but when it comes inside, not so good.
Josh Clemente:
Feel better. Stacy.
Stacy:
It’s just been a blast meeting members, meeting Miz for the first time this week. The photo shoots are always a highlight.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. This week, I was just really excited about the inbound press, particularly. I don’t know. It’s just wild when, Kara who interviews Elon for her day job, is asking to interview Casey. So pretty unbelievable. And then, personally, I’m just absolutely loving the spring. The weather’s amazing. Walking around this morning for an hour with a coffee was just such a relaxing experience. I didn’t realize how much the cold was burdening me. So, yeah. Been enjoying it. Hao Li.
Hao Li:
Yeah, I’m really excited about dashboard V2 releasing. I’ve been testing it. It’s pretty good. I like the new look and the new homepage. And personally, I’m going to do some knife sharpening over the weekend. I find it’s really a stress relieving activity and I’m going to do it at night by my kitchen window. So I hope my neighbor won’t freak out.
Josh Clemente:
Good luck with that. We’ll stay tuned to the Canada crime channels. Casey.
Casey Means:
That one’s hard to follow. I’m very excited about Alan joining. I think the highlight of the week was my conversation with the Jefferson team. Steven Klasko. I’d read his book on healthcare in preparation for the call, and it’s just such alignment between what this huge hospital system is doing and what we’re doing. And so, it was really fun to brainstorm about that stuff. And then, of course, the photo shoot was amazing and getting to hang out with Stacy all day. And so, yeah, personally, I’m heading to Arizona this weekend to work for my brother and his wife’s new house in Phoenix, which I’m really excited about.
Josh Clemente:
Nice. Enjoy. Tom.
Tom Griffin:
Yeah. I wasn’t planning to say this, but the glucose 75 experience was overall positive despite it being also extremely negative for me. I actually had never had a tangibly hypoglycemic event before, so I was always nodding along when people talked about that but hadn’t actually experienced it. So to get the full extent of real shaky hands, sweating, even blurred vision after that experience was … I feel like I can now empathize, which is great. And then, personally, just that life is being injected back into New York City. Friends, family, all moving back in. My brother just moved into Brooklyn so he’s having a big rooftop party tomorrow. So all just exciting stuff on the social front.
Josh Clemente:
Love to hear it. Enjoy that. Mike D.
Mike Didonato:
I was definitely going to say a few different things. Dashboard V2 was there. But after seeing Haney’s update about the foods we love column, I think this is something that’s been asked … Basically all our members have asked for, and we talked about in different ways for a little while. So I’m definitely excited to see that come together. Personally, I guess, it’s just nice to be back on the east coast. Spring’s happening. My sleep quality’s up and yeah, it’s awesome.
Josh Clemente:
Sweet. Ben.
Braden McCarthy:
Yeah. Pumped to have Alan join. Also really pumped on all the work Andrew’s doing to manage the engineering interviews that are coming in. So on top of leading the team, on top of helping out across the company, he is going through a long list of really talented engineers. So hat tip to Andrew, because yeah, it’s immensely helpful and a ton of work. On the personal side, which actually crosses into levels, so stoked on the Acquired episode because it’s like watching your favorite band do a reunion show. It’s just something that … It’s pretty cool. So big fan of the podcast and the people, and so it was really meaningful. Pumped on that.
Josh Clemente:
Nice. Yeah. We’ve got a follow up conversation on next Thursday thanks to Ben with the Acquired community. So it’s going to be great. JM.
Josh Mohrer:
I’m excited to present my story in a minute and I will yield the rest of my time for that.
Josh Clemente:
All right. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente:
Professionally, I’m excited because I just found out about the beta beta app. So I finally am using that. So I’m getting to see the new features that are not yet rolled out. So that’s exciting. And then personally, my sister and her husband are redoing a house, so I’ve been helping out with that the past few nights and that’s where my weekend will be spent. Yeah.
Josh Clemente:
I know you enjoy that. Gabriel.
Gabriel:
Yeah. So just to echo some things that have already been said. Really excited about dashboard V2 going out. Big congrats to John and Marilo. And also really excited to have Alan on board. Personally, just whatever everyone else has said. It’s Spring in Chicago, weather’s getting warmer. People are being outside more. It’s really nice.
Josh Clemente:
Great. Sam. Yeah.
Sam Corcos:
I really enjoyed the community call that Ben set up with a handful of our members. At a different stage in the company, I was doing 25 plus phone calls with members and potential members per week, and it was a good reminder that I haven’t done that in a very long time. And it was good to just get a finger on the pulse of how people are experiencing it. So I’m going to be doing those again weekly. So I really appreciate Ben for setting those up.
Josh Clemente:
Definitely. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi:
Yeah. I’m going to go with dashboard V2, even though there’s a bunch of things. But that feels like a very meaningful change to the app. A pretty big step change from where it’s been for the last three weeks. We’ve released a lot of features, but this one feels like it’ll set the stage nicely. So no, there’s a lot of work behind the scenes on that, on the end product design side, which are all awesome. I give it back to Marilo.
Josh Clemente:
All right, Marilo. Close us out.
Marilo Nicacio:
Yeah. So excited about dashboard V2. Excited to have John and Gabriel back. Last week was intense. Nothing bad happened, but it was intense knowing I was the only mobile engineer around. And yeah, personally, Portugal is finally opening up. So restaurants and things like that. Just resuming a normal life. So super excited about that.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Love it. Worldwide. We’re starting to get back. All right. It’s JM’s week.
Josh Mohrer:
All right.
Josh Clemente:
I am going to yield the share.
Josh Mohrer:
Great. If you can actually spotlight me, I’m not going to be doing the normal share function. Or you can pin my video on your side. Perfect. Okay, guys. We’re going to talk about the Rubik’s cube today. So you’re not thinking about it the whole time, I’m going to do some Zoom wizardry using an app called Mmhmm, which lets me share a bunch of things at the same time. Again, Mmhmm, terrible name for an app.
Josh Mohrer:
But basically, here is how we’re going to spend the next eight minutes or so. I’m going to tell you a bit about the cube and it’s history. We’re going to do some maths, talk about God’s number and group theory. And if you eat all your vegetables, the dessert at the end will be me facing off with a world record holder right here for you on Zoom. But let’s get to it.
Josh Mohrer:
So the Rubik’s cube, if you’re not familiar with it is a puzzle game invented it in 1974, and it is now actually the best selling game of all time, which is amazing. I’m sure everyone’s touched one, but as of January about 10 years ago there have been 350 million sold. There are actually a bunch of other Rubik’s type things. Rubik’s Magic, which I was super into when I was eight and nine. If anyone here has had experience with Rubik’s Magic, I’d love to talk to you about it. And then, there have been all different sizes of the cube. The 3x3x3 is the traditional one, but there’s also 5×5, 7×7, all these crazy sizes based on the success of the original cube. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. We’re doing all sorts of shares.
Josh Mohrer:
So let’s talk about the language of the cube. So you basically have six sides and so you’ll see … I have a pointer here that I can use. So we’re going to talk about different algorithms in a minute, but basically they’re written in this language. U is turn the top layer one turn. D is the bottom left and right. You get it and the result is you have these algorithms that can basically move different … They can make patterns or designs, and we’ll talk about how people use them for solutions.
Josh Mohrer:
But just as an example. So I’m going to do this one here. U2 is turn the top 180 degrees. That’s turning it a second time. D2 F2 B2 L2 R2, and you get a checker board. And then any algorithm can also be done in the reverse to restore state to the previous color. There’s a really hard one here that I’m going to try to do. So it’s F, L, F again, U prime, R, U, F2, L2, U prime, L prime, B, D prime, B prime, and L2. And I screwed it up, but I have extras so we’re going to just move on.
Josh Mohrer:
But basically, this has been a really interesting toy for math people. And actually, since it’s creation in the 70’s until about 10 years ago there was a no question about what is the space of all the potential configurations? And how far are we ever from a solution? So I’m actually going to jump around a little bit here. So here you have if you were to lay out the cube, this would be the only way to see every square on it. And a turn like the things I showed earlier. If I make a turn, I’m one step from the original position. And so, if you think about the space of all the permutations that a cube could take, now this would not be the full random 45 squares, all random. It’s a subset of that.
Josh Mohrer:
And so, one of the things … I want to talk a little bit about things about the cube that maybe are not super obvious. One is that these the centers are fixed, right? So blue will always be opposite green on any cube, no matter how much you shuffle it, it has to do with the mechanics of it. And there are certain configurations that you would really never have, like one square only out of position. That can only happen if someone breaks it and puts it back. You can’t really achieve that on your own. And so, mathematicians spent a bunch of time proving that 20 is actually the most jumbled you can go. So said another way, any position could in theory be solved in 20 or fewer turns. Most random shuffles are going to be in this kind of high, 15 to 19 range.
Josh Mohrer:
And actually, a 20 position. One that is as far in the space of configurations as you can get, is called super flip where every edge is actually flipped. So it’s all the corners are correct, but the edges are all flipped. I am not going to attempt to demonstrate that, but I did want to talk about … There’s been this math problem that folks have been spending a lot of time working on. It culminated more or less in 2010, and I’m going to not talk about the heavy math in this. But you can trust that 20 is as far as you can go from the beginning.
Josh Mohrer:
Now, how do people use this to solve the cube? I don’t expect you to know how to solve it after this presentation, but I want to give you a framework for how to think about it. So the screwdriver method is you take a screwdriver and you pop off all the squares. This is one move, one algorithm. Very easy. My kids love to do that. Then there’s the layer by layer way, which is how I do it and how I’m going to do it. And I can typically solve a cube in about 100 moves. So, remember, that’s far more than the most efficient way, but it does work. And I only had to memorize about 10 algorithms to do that.
Josh Mohrer:
I got this when I was in high school. I had a long subway ride every day and there were no iPods or iPhones or anything like this at the time. There were CD players, but I can only bring so many CDs with me. And so, being that young guy on the subway doing this got me a lot of attention, and that has been my hook. But there are more advanced ways if you can memorize 100 algorithms or 200 algorithms. These are all algorithms for doing little things to fix the middle and top layer when you’re solving it. I have one algorithm for all these things that I can deploy repetitively.
Josh Mohrer:
So basically, efficiency is balanced with how much you’re going to memorize. But then, of course, a computer using a brute force, just trying everything can get you closer to God’s number. It doesn’t really use algorithms. It just goes for it as only a computer can.
Josh Mohrer:
So what’s really interesting. And I’m going to show you a couple of videos, we have a couple minutes left. But even since I started solving the cube in the late 90’s, there’s been an incredible progress. This is the record set by year, and these are averages of five attempts. So these are consistent. People are consistently able to solve this fast. And it’s been getting better and better. And I just love examples of humanity progressing. This is obviously not a very important thing, but I think it’s still pretty cool. So let me show you a couple of videos. I’ll play this for 30 seconds.
Josh Mohrer:
And what was interesting about that is that you saw, he looked at it for a while and it didn’t start until he started solving. But these guys, their brains are so amazing that they just look at it and then get the game plan in their head and are ready to go. So I have a meeting starting really soon that’s rather important, so I’m going to race this guy. Here we go. And I did say I’d be racing a world record holder. I’m going to race the guy who can juggle three cubes and solve them while he’s juggling, and I’m going to solve one and I’m going to win. All right. Here we go.
Josh Mohrer:
All right, that’s it. I got to give a shout out to my daughter, Lily, who helped me practice this and sound check all the various pieces. Have a great week. Thanks, everybody.
Josh Clemente:
I’m going to recommend everyone just do some breath work to come down from that one. You’re giving us glucose spikes. Good, Lord. That was awesome.
Josh Mohrer:
I hear you, man. I hear you.
Josh Clemente:
I just want to go ahead and end this by saying, that is not the bar for your weekly share. Person who’s up next, don’t worry. You do not have to beat JM at Rubik’s cube or weekly shares. That was awesome. Thanks, everybody. Killer week. Thank you, Anthony, for joining us and everybody for crushing it. Have a great weekend.