August 27, 2021

Josh Clemente: All right. Let’s go ahead and jump in. Last meeting of August 2021. I think it’s safe to say this year is flying by. And get right into it. So, this week we had a bunch of great progress on memos, [Miz 00:00:17] is going to dive into some of these specifically, but touching on roles in management, team building, and launch plans, which David pushed out. So, these should all be circulating in the next few hours and everyone should try and dive in. These are good ones. The in-app video project 1.0 is complete. So, shipped a bunch of videos. Casey and Ben, thanks for rocking this one real quick and getting those out in front of the community to get some feedback. This is going to be an interesting project and it will be ongoing. Josh Clemente: We hit 6 million in all-time revenue and 740 this month, which is a record for us. Again, we’re not in growth mode, but the interesting thing is that five weeks ago we hit 5 million and it took 17 months to hit 1 million. So, things are clearly accelerating, which is a good sign, given that we’re not putting a ton of effort into it. In the app, progress on My Data, Social / Me pages. So, getting more kind of profile stuff in there for community reactions on postings, and then positive scoring, which is a really interesting project I’m excited to check out. Meal Insight v2, featuring tags, which is a big step towards structured data, stripe ID, automatic forwarding and relay, subscription delays. Lots of great progress this week. Most of these are in flight, but should be shipping quite soon. Josh Clemente: We’re pushing ahead with an IRB protocol, so this will be the final documentation that would go in front of an institutional review board for a large study that could give us, potentially, realtime API access under the purview of that IRB. Again, a little more work to do, but we’ll keep everybody updated on that. And we had some really good strategy work this week on the free versus paid product offerings and membership model. So there’s a really interesting opportunity for us to have part of our product be readily available for anyone who has CGM or even people who don’t in order to get involved, learn and see what other people are learning from their data. So we’ll definitely be making some progress on this in the next few weeks. Okay. We had a really cool moment, at least for me. I’m a big nerd about The Drive Peter Attia Podcast, and we got a shout out. It was a small one, but it was a shout out this week. And that was exciting. It was an AMA entirely about CGM and zone 2 training, which is really quite good. Josh Clemente: I recommend it anyway. But it was an awesome one. And then let’s see, we got AgamaMatrix Glucomandy. This is another CGM that is currently available in Europe. They’re quite interested in Levels and would love to try to explore a pilot opportunity. I’m currently wearing that CGM on my arm. It’s a Bluetooth product. I would say that the aesthetics are not my favorite, but the functionality is interesting. This is just an example of other product opportunities that are out there, and we’re really making waves in the community. Everybody knows about us and wants their product to hook up to us now. We’re in touch with Terry Wahls. She’s a huge neurologist and quite an exciting person to be in contact with. I think Casey’s going to take lead on that. We talked with PROFUSA this week, they’re looking at future biosensors that are implanted in the ar. Sam and Rob spent some time together you can see there this week, talking about epistemology, I believe as Rob introduced. Josh Clemente: And then Danica Patrick had a nice post this week. Andrew Huberman loves Levels. We’ve been in touch with Fast Company and writers. David Sinclair has queued up to chat with Casey this week. Highly recommend reading Lifespan if you haven’t yet and reading about his longevity work at Harvard. And then we’ve got some cool stuff going on. This is the additive, or I’m not sure how we’re describing it, positive scoring. So the ability to build a score, as opposed to only being able to subtract a score through the day. Josh Clemente: And then we’ve got some tagging stuff going. Believe that’s the big stuff. Let’s jump ahead. Welcome to Ali Spagnola. Ali has been in our orbit for, I think well over a year now. I had the opportunity to join her on the podcast. Yeah, it must have been, I don’t know, 15 months ago or something. But since then, she’s been a huge proponent and supporter of Levels, has gotten involved as a content creator. You’ll know her from the start page videos and set page videos and has just been a huge, huge benefit to our members who are trying to get started with Levels and understand what and why they, are doing with CGM. So Ali, thanks for taking some time to join us. And we’d love to hear some words. Ali Spagnola: Yeah. Thank you so much. Long time listener, first time caller. So I’m excited to join in guys. Yeah. I’m going to talk a little bit about how I use Levels and my outlook on creating content around it. So initially my intention was to use Levels to make a product review video, which is generally what I do with new tech. And then when I experienced what you guys are creating, well, let me just say that there’s a reason that I’ve made 11 dedicated videos about Levels. Another one coming out on Monday and probably mentioned it in a dozen more other videos, unrelated to glucose. So when I’m creating content, I’m always looking for the story. I want to make something compelling. I have to figure out what do I highlight? What do I cut out? How do I make this more interesting? I’m constantly haunted by the little X right in your browser because I could lose people at any second. Ali Spagnola: So I’m always trying gripping and with Levels, the story just writes itself. It’s so easy to make videos about what you guys are doing. The immediate feedback is just so compelling. And of course, the fact that you put so much work into the gorgeous zone score UI is really helpful, but the fact that you have a zone score and a metabolic score, you’re simplifying these really complex things. So you’ve just made my storytelling really easy. So thank you for simplifying my job. And this story that I’m experiencing is not unique to me. This is what’s so cool is that everyone that uses Levels discovers on their own body, that this amazing story too. They realize that walking after a meal is so effective and they figure it out with their own self, that mixed meals is important and that responses are unique to them. Ali Spagnola: So everyone of your users is living this interesting story as the protagonist. And my personal story, I couldn’t believe that I got a 0 on oatmeal and a 10 on pasta. And I was eating oatmeal every day because I was told it was healthy. That sounds fake, you couldn’t write a better story and I loved telling people about that. And then I also love telling them immediately after that they could have a completely opposite response, which is not what conventional wisdom would tell you. So one of my favorite things on my podcast is having on specialists that debunk misinformation, and you all are doing that on the daily to lots of people. And as I’ve noticed, you’re not even in growth mode yet, but the way that you’re doing it… Sorry, was someone… someone has some of that? Okay. The way that you’re doing it is such a rich and personal experience for everyone that it sticks so it makes real change for people. Ali Spagnola: Which leads me to one more thing. When I am making my videos, I am so obsessive about visuals and angles and dressing the set. And I want everything to be clean and minimalist. I even wear my shirts inside out because I don’t want text getting in the way of the story though, over a year ago, as Josh mentioned, I put on my first sensor and this patch has been in every single one of my videos since. And it’s because what you all are doing is so cool. And the problem that you’re solving is so important that I’m just stoked to be associated with you and your mission. So thanks. Keep it up. Josh Clemente: Love it. It’s amazing that that little patch has been seen by millions of eyeballs now, which is pretty wild given that it was… It was definitely thought about, but I never expected it to be such a hit in terms of the visuals. And your platform is one of the main forcing functions for getting it in front of so many people. So thank you for making, first of all, awesome and interesting stuff. I love watching your videos. But also for boosting Levels, as part of your platforms, it’s really been… it’s been awesome. And as several people have just chimed in, many of them thought that you worked here, and I think that’s because the quality of your content. And then also your deep understanding and awareness of what we’re doing is so compelling. So, yeah. Thanks again. It’s just really awesome to have you on our team. Ali Spagnola: Heck yeah. Thank you guys, too. Josh Clemente: Cool. Jump in ahead here. Company priorities. We’re still working on subscriptions and migrating to a membership model, launching social product experiments and iterating on the guided journey prior to launch. We do have a notion page for all of these, where these are tracked and discussed in more detail. Okay. Culture and Kudos. So, first off I want to congratulate Casey and Andrew who are both hitting their two year mark this week, at least on paper. I mean, I think we were… We definitely were talking and they were basically part of the team prior to that, but on paper September 1st and 2nd are their two years, which is huge. These are obviously two of the most important people to getting Levels to where we are today. So thanks to you, both for continuing to be a huge part of this. I need to circle back and say the prayer. Josh Clemente: So we help you see how food affects your health. That’s a key little one liner there for everybody to remember. And I’m curious to hear how people describe Levels in a quick elevator pitch, if it’s not like this. So we always want to be iterating and making this as approachable as possible. Eager to hear feedback. Quick shout out to Braden. So Braden took a really nice step towards making things more accessible for the team. So it’s often challenging to catch up on one hour Loom videos of calls, especially these interesting ones with our community. So Braden went and he used this app called Grain and pulled out highlight sections. And so he was able to distill this down into a 15 minute highlight reel, which is huge. I mean, we’re all about efficiency, really appreciate this type of thing that just helps everybody stay up to speed without having to kind of set aside larger chunks of time. All right. Over to Miz Michael Mizrahi: Great. So a few quick announcements are Q3 assemblage is on the books at Friday, September 17th. So just about three weeks. We’ve condensed from a three day program into a one day program using a lot of feedback and we’ve got the best hits. Group fitness trivia, team trivia hosted by Sam. Jao’s going to lead us in a cocktail making session. We’re going to do dinner, not a cooking class this time. We’re going to encourage you to order in from your favorite spot. And then we’ll have a mystery session and a fireside as well, somewhere after the forum. So full day, but asking you to kind of block off that day and have the opportunity to connect with one another and just connect virtually. Still looking forward to that. And then also announcing in conjunction meetups, there’s been a lot of questions about whether or not we will do an in-person meetup as an entire company. Michael Mizrahi: We’re not doing that at this point, but we are encouraging individual teams to meet up. And so a lot of thought went into this, and this is kind of a open invite for responsible individuals and for functional leads to schedule team specific meetups at some point in the next quarter or two, these are entirely optional. We really want to stress this is not where the work is happening. It’s really just about building working relationships in person, because we know there’s a desire to do that. And so a lot more thought in the memo and I’ll send all of that out shortly later today. One more slide, Josh. One other memo coming your way, this will be announced in threads. We’ve seen the team kind of evolve over the last few months and wanted to formalize some of the roles that exist just to add some clarity as to who’s responsible for what and who does what. Michael Mizrahi: And so the core memo here is manager expectations, what it means to be a manager at Levels and also what it doesn’t mean to be a manager at Levels. You want to have those anti-expectations too. We prioritize autonomy, love that people can navigate the company on their own, pick their own projects, work on efforts that are impactful and line up with their skillset. So all of that’s defined in that memo. For specific roles to call out, we have the IC role. Everyone is an IC as well. Says individual contributors contributing to work, moving projects forward. We’ve got functional leaders that have formed. These are the heads of areas. So everything from content to growth, to operations, to marketing, all these heads of functions. Some “heads of” are also people managers and have reports, and so we’ve defined those expectations specifically in this memo. Michael Mizrahi: And then finally the responsible individual, which has formed through some of the work that David’s been putting out and that we’ve been forming around certain product and project efforts and priorities, and that comes with a whole set of expectations. And so building off of this from the previous slide, the assemblage functional leaders, people leaders, responsible individuals can put together any of those meetups as well. So a lot more in the memo, I’ll send that out. And if you have thoughts as always very welcome and invited. Please add into the bottom for the discussion. But this is kind of an interesting and important step in formalizing some company building. Looking forward to sending that out and keep an eye open and see you on September 17th for the virtual assemblage. Josh Clemente: Thank you, Miz. All right, David. David Flinner: I think Ben’s going to kick it off. Ben Grynol: Okay. In-App Video 1.0. So that bar leapfrog from last week, we were just over halfway through the project and we managed to get a lot of things done this week. So Casey and I recorded on Wednesday for less than two hours. We focused on doing five videos. We wanted to get iterations out. Hat-tip to Casey. The last two videos are a single take each and the other ones were only two takes so we just hammered it and the point was to get these conversational videos out, as opposed to have something that felt scripted and overly polished. David got everything uploaded into the app yesterday so we put them through production, did all the editing, thought it was going to take a couple days to do it, but managed to get it all done yesterday. Ben Grynol: So everything is already in the app. It’s integrated into lessons and where you’ll see the videos is they are… That’s the, I guess the screenshot there. What used to be the header image for an article or for a lesson is now a video and they apply to everything that has the same title. So it’ll be cool to see how people engage with the content and that’s one thing that we’ll do as far as next steps, we’re going to analyze over the next couple weeks to see what the performance actually is. What’s the watch time? What’s the completion rate? What’s the engagement rate? And are people finding value out of these? And then there is some qualitative feedback too, which is doing things like asking members in feedback calls and asking people in the Facebook group. So we’ve got everything in-app and then we’ve got everything in a playlist called metabolic insights and they are the basics or metabolic health basics, I think they’re called. And so if you actually search Google, we get indexed pretty highly on the word metabolic health basics, which is cool. Ben Grynol: So that’s the current iteration of the videos we shipped ahead of schedule. They’re supposed to be done September 10th, but we’re ahead on that so that’s nice. What we’re going to do for Videos 2.0 is go deeper into the “Now what?” We don’t want it to have… to be prescriptive medical advice, but we want deeper thought in the “Now what?” That would be things like, well is spike to 180 that comes back down quickly, better or worse than one that has a prolonged period for three hours of time? That’s not something that we wanted to touch on, but that’s something we can go deeper into with our advisors. So we’ll think through what some of those videos look like and the goal is to summarize this whole thing, do five videos, not 20 and get them wrong. Do five and do five more and do five more. So we’re going to keep iterating on this to learn as we go. And that is In-App Video Project 1.0 closed out. Josh Clemente: Nice. David Flinner: On membership, similarly, not a lot of work done on my side this week, but we are moving towards a November 1st launch. Which is very exciting and continuing to flush out the details for that. Finally, with blood work, hoping to get this live for the next couple of weeks with the phase two, had a chat with Alan about how the results page will work, but generally I’ve been out so not a lot of progress there. Really, really looking forward to hitting the ground running on all this stuff in September. It’s going to be a fantastic fall and I hope you’re all doing well. Thanks. Josh Clemente: Thank you, Jan. David Flinner: So Marillo is not feeling well today. So I’m going to pinch it for his update. And this is the update on the additive scoring or positive scoring effort. And the TLDR is… We’re iterating pretty fast in an effort to try to figure out if we can find a solution that improves the metabolic score in a way that helps makes a different score that empowers our members to feel like they have control and agency and that they can actually kind of gain points throughout the day instead of only losing them. So just to reiterate, as you may have seen in the velocity and quality memo, this is something where we don’t really know the solution yet. So we’re trying to move very quickly and have a bunch of concepts and see if anything feels right and then make progress on it. David Flinner: Sort of like what Ben was talking about with the videos. So next slide. The TLDR is that we did V1 and we learned that it’s probably not the right way to… It’s probably not the right way for us to move forward with it. After we felt… Alan did some really quick designs on it, Merlo did some really quick engine implementation. And then we saw it in the app and we thought when it was in a mock, it seemed really good. But then when we felt it in the app, we learned that there was a lot of lag and latency and that we actually felt out that there wasn’t a lot of actionable agency and that also the single hour representation was a little stale and not very engaging. So every hour you kind of see just the minutes picking up. But what really stood out was that the hero was more of the cumulative hours. David Flinner: So it’s more interesting how many hours had you racked up throughout the day in stable periods versus each hour we’re setting. So where we go from here, we’re trying two different concepts that we brain together as next many iterations. One of them is a take on the current one. So we’ll flip the main unit from being a hero unit, taking up the full screen, like the primary action to being a secondary unit. One that’s more complimentary to the 24 hour graph to see if we de-emphasize it a little bit. It’s still valuable, but not main metric. We’ll feature the cumulative hours in the day. So instead of seeing just the same 0-60 recycling all the time, you would see it only go up like 1, 3, 13, 18, 24. We’ll see if that works. And then the other concept that we had was tweaking the metabolic score. David Flinner: We know the metabolic score works really well for many people. But it doesn’t work well for everyone. And especially… It typically only goes down. So the idea is, could we make the metabolic score easily recover? So if you did have a big spike in the morning, could those penalty points decay very quickly so that the score looks like it’s going up very fast after your meal so that you can recover midday and it’s still achieve the positive, good metabolic score. So we’ll try these two things. Hopefully I don’t know the exact timing because Merlo is out, but we’ll have an update for that next week and see how it goes. Next slide. Last thing I wanted to call out was the velocity and resourcing. So this project for V1 moved very quickly. But one thing that we discovered is if we wanted to move ultra quickly like intraday iterations, we may have a… may have the bottleneck that come up. David Flinner: One of the goals with the project owners responsible individual structure was that we wanted to do more projects all at once and then have a system that highlights resourcing and constraints. So in this one, Alan’s been doing a lot of projects across the company and Merlo was only doing this one and it quickly came to the front that if we want to do multiple iterations in the same day, we might have some constraints there. This is just a really good example of surfacing that, and I encourage everyone as we embark on this new structure, when you see bottlenecks, whether it’s on ops, engineering, myself, anyone it’s really good to highlight those. Because then we have to signal that maybe we need to hire more or rally key resources or something like that. So very positive on this side. Next slide. All right, Justin. Justin Stanley: Okay. So my data update. We’ve got anomaly handling, which is new. So you can see in the video on the right there, a popup comes up as you… well actually below the chart we add the anomaly kind of detection there, and then you can tap on the little row and it asks you the question about whether you want to or something happened and then whether you want to handle it or not, and you can say yes or no. And if you say no, then it’ll remove it. And if you say yes, it’ll add a log and you can put what happened. So that’s available now internally. And then we also… I did the average metabolic score trends on the screenshot on the left. The header there without the chart. But as you click on daily, weekly or monthly, it’ll show your average score for that period. Justin Stanley: And then once the chart’s there, it’ll kind of allow you to swipe through and it’ll update the score based on the visible range and also remove the target or sorry… Remove the target max line so it’s always above the… There was a black fill underneath the chart. So it was kind of covering it if you ever had a really high scores in the day. So now it’s kind of just going to show above and below and below the glucose line, but still block out the… The black fill will still block out that little zone highlight that’s there on the chart. And then yeah, next up is the interactive chart for the thing on the left. And yeah these changes here are part of the project, which I’m the responsible owner for, or individual for, which is the table stakes design experience. So we’re coming on that next week. Probably. David Flinner: Awesome. Love it. All right. I’m going to briefly just touch on the next three slides, I think, but Alan’s going to get more into this later. So we’re still working on the social experience. So basically here, John was working a lot on letting you tap into the zones and then Jao and John were working on interactive emoji reactions, setting the stage for feature things like comments and things like that. Next slide. There was some really awesome work from Gabriel and you can play the demo video here. So we’re finally bringing people under the app. So profile pictures are working on Gabriel’s workstation. And hopefully we can test this as a company, but you can see here, you tap this, you can choose to take a photo, choose from library, assign your photo, and all of a sudden now your identity is right there with Levels and sets a stage for just forming your identity imprint with Levels and all the foundation for these social experiences. So really excited to test that one out myself. Next slide. David Flinner: And yeah. I’m going to leave this one for Alan because basically the synthesis on all the social things kind of came to a head and something that Alan’s working on. We really need to update the zone page to make a new space for the social interactions now that you can tap into it as well as a new surface for the insights now that we have meal insights. So it’s kind of getting overloaded. Next slide. Next slide. Yeah, this one was in progress, so… But Alan has the best visual updates on this one. Josh Clemente: It’s hanging up for me here, sorry. Here we go. David Flinner: Okay. Last thing to notice… Last thing to mention is that John started working on a proper notification system for Levels. And so the first thing that we’re going to be trying is meal ready notification. And so this would be a push notification to pull the user back into the session when there’s something cool for them to see essentially. But it’s the basic scaffolding that will enable things like when Mike looks at my zone and drops me a thumbs up emoji, I’ll get a push notification for that, knowing that someone engaged on it or Dr. Casey leaves a comment on Josh’s meal and says “Hey, what’s up with this? You should swap out that.” It’ll kind of add that interactivity layer. It sets the foundation forward, at least so nice working that John. And I think with that it hands off to Alan. Alan McClean: Actually, no updates this week. David Flinner: Oh no. Okay. Sorry, I saw the slides. Are there slides there still? If you kept that through or did they get removed? Okay, they’re not there anyway. Let me just briefly summarize one quick thing then. So John and Alan were working on a redesign for the Zone Show, which is going to feature… It’ll basically have a landing page, a very obvious landing page for you to jump into the social reactions or to jump into the deeper meal insights. So we know that the main purpose of the zone is to help you understand and unpack that meal and learn from it so that you can make improvements. So now we’ll have a dedicated page that really features the meal insights, sets the stage for the feature tags and other things that will be doing to suggest swap. And then the other one being the social landing page where you can engage with people to learn more that way. Yeah, I think that’s, that’s it then. Josh Clemente: Okay. Jumping ahead here. Hiring update. We are closing out the head of clinical product role. We’ll have an announcement for this, but we put an offer out, offer was accepted. This person has great clinical experience and we’ll be bringing with them the capacity needed to be not just a head of clinical product, but a generalist project owner, which is quite exciting. And other than that, we are still pushing ahead with offers and interviews across growth generalist and software engineer positions. So please keep referring people in. We’ve got plenty of work to do. Chris. Chris Jones: Wow. I have to up my game and actually get some videos and some great footage to give these updates now. This is going to be the boring one with just stock slides. A couple updates on member experience. Quick reminder, we announced last week that we joined the member insights and support group. So a couple updates on the member insights. Mike D. did a new executive summary for feedback interviews. So trying to really highlight and bring out the key takeaways for that. So be looking for that and love your feedback on it. And secondly, I’ve started doing some investigation on text analytics. So specifically starting with our NPS and comments around why are people promoters or attractors? This is a technology I’ve had almost a decade of experience with, but a lot of new players in this space. So this is purely under investigation, just more research mode. On the support side Operation Metrics 2.0 is now live. Chris Jones: So thanks for the feedback and I’m glad that’s useful today. I’m sure lots of changes coming on it. Braden recently updated the help scout categories with lots of input from the team so we get better reporting. It’s a two layer categorization, so kind of high level themes and drill downs. So hopefully that will enable a lot more questions to answers for quick analysis versus the manual reading of comments like Jesse had to do. And a new bug logging guidelines that just went up this morning. And then lastly, on Truepill, continuing to work the relationship with them specifically working on how do we process overnight issues first and how do we give them a signal so it’s not first in first out? But how do we actually say “Hey, if this is a VIP member, we want to go at that.” They hit that first. Chris Jones: And they’re working through some staffing issues specifically in Brooklyn with a lot of companies are due to COVID, but they’re trying to close it as fast they can so they can give us more weekend coverage. And then lastly, on the right, we just turned on the helpfulness flag for FAQ. So now users on our FAQ content can let us know if articles are helpful or not. So we can not only look at what people are viewing, but is it actually helping them in their journey? And we can tweak and use that as an input to update content or find new gaps. And that is the update from member experience. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you. This analytics insight is amazing. Ben. Ben Grynol: Okay. Levels shows you how food affects your health. Got to reiterate, we are not in growth mode. Hat-tip to Sam. Growth shout-outs. So Julia Lipton constantly gets shout-outs but very well deserved. She has spent so much time with talent intros and having conversations with growth generalist candidates so we can’t thank Julia enough. She’s just been such a helpful part of our cap table. And so truly thank you, Julia. Next slide please. Financials for the week. So 1/10 of recognized revenue. We’re at $750,000 of recognized revenue for the month. Very significant increase from last month and the previous months where our goal as you can see is $300,000. About 35% of that revenue was driven by Mark Harmon so you can see the impact that the podcast Casey and Mark did together had on our overall. We are not in growth mode for the month. Ben Grynol: Cash on hand 7.8. So Miz has allocated the capital to Truepill to square up on the invoices that were outstanding. That leaves us at around 42 months of runway and that runway is made up of a burn of roughly $450,000 a month. We’re being pretty conservative in our burn to make sure that we’re not underestimating. So you’ll see that number stays at remains around 42 so that we’re not fluctuating by a month here and there north and south. Next slide please. Ben Grynol: So growth theme of the week. This is Kevin Kelly. I’m sure many people are familiar with Kevin. He was the editor of WIRED for many, many years. And Kevin came up with this saying “A thousand true fans.” I’m sure Ali is quite familiar with it. A thousand true fans. This doesn’t just apply to community. This actually applies to an insight that’s been driven by everything pertaining to the Friday forum videos, the investor updates, the culture videos, the notion memos and the podcast. What we’re starting to realize is that we’re creating a very different relationship with people, especially from a community or a talent perspective who say, I watched that forum from whatever it is, July of 2020, and what really resonated with me was X or I listened to a podcast with Casey and Haney, and I loved the way they talked about whatever it was. Ben Grynol: You start to realize that we are creating a very different relationship with people where they’re very engaged for a long period of time with some of the content we’re putting out and people aren’t saying, Hey, I love that tweet that you did, or that LinkedIn post was great. That’s very important, but we’re not building engagement based on brand marketing. We’re building it based on some of these intangibles and the content that we’re creating. I think the full circle on it was Dorothy was on the podcast. I think it was this week or last week, whenever it dropped. And people reached out to her cold on LinkedIn who are Levels members and just said, I love the podcast that you did. That’s a very interesting relationship. So the growth theme is we are building a thousand true fans. People who will drive 200 miles to have IRL meetups with us and people who come to the chef’s tables that we put on eventually. So let’s make sure that we keep doing that and creating content that really engages the people that love Levels. Josh Clemente: Couldn’t say it better myself. Thank you, Ben. Braden McCarthy: Okay. So the Metabolical Book Club is now two weeks away. This will be the second large community event that we hold and people are very excited for it. We’ve had 30 members sign up and these are core Levels, community members, ambassadors, and some of our longest subscribers. Hat-tip to Mike for sending them each copies of Metabolical. And yeah, I know this is a fan favorite among our team. So it’s going to be a very cool opportunity to share a discussion with core members of our community around the book and Dr. Lustig’s work, as well as providing opportunity for these members to connect directly with Dr. Lustig. Yeah, so stay tuned for more updates in the next couple weeks, but looking forward to a great discussion. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thanks for organizing all that, Braden. It’s going to be really fun. Casey. Casey Means: Awesome. Okay. So content and press updates. So three great new pieces on the blog this week. The first on the left here about research shows, why you should exercise after breakfast. This is a type of article, a new type of article that we’re going to be doing, which is an in-depth research review of a specific research paper. And this is collaboration with Dr. Matt Laye who’s a PhD in exercise physiology from college of Idaho, and he is really an amazing science communicator and he is passionate about helping people learn how to critically analyze research papers in the nutrition and exercise space. And this is generally part of a bigger picture effort to break down on complex metabolic research for people and synthesize take home points. And this one is really great. It feels like a mini journal club in written form. So please check that out and let us know how it lands with you and if it’s useful andd if you like this format. Casey Means: The second piece here in the middle is a great member experience piece from Holley Oregon, and the third on the right it’s a piece we’ve been working on for a very long time on Alzheimer’s, dementia and metabolic health. So this has actually been outlined since the first months of our content operation and thanks to Haney and Dr. Perlmutter and Emily Banham, who’s our writer and our [punner 00:34:16], our fact checker. It’s come to fruit, it’s really strong. It really takes a village to get the pieces out. Also please check this one out and let us know what you think. Next slide. Casey Means: So a quick high level view of some of our initiatives in press. These are in conjunction of course with JTPR. So on the left here, here’s a list of our active media relationships that either involve interview that have happened recently or articles that are in progress. In the center here, we have a constant stream of submissions for awards that we are sort of always submitting to bring more visibility for Levels. So these are the ones that have either been submitted or are upcoming submissions. On the right we have two sets of pitches that we’re actively working on right now. The first for is COVID-19 and blood sugar. And this is currently being circulated with press. And several of our advisors have kindly been willing to be involved in this pitch, meaning that they would be available for press if the journalist wants to move forward with it. Casey Means: So many thanks to them for being so helpful. And then we’re going to be doing PCOS women’s health and blood sugar for September as a pitch and going to be pitching out more of our everyone on content pieces. And then lastly, in terms of conferences, our upcoming conference is Code at the end of September, alongside Elon Musk and Sam Harris and some other great speakers. So that’s what’s happening in the press world. Josh Clemente: Super exciting. Thank you, Casey. All right. Individual contributions, Lori. Lauri Morrison: Hi. I’m not excited to have an allergy attack, so I’m probably going to keep this short. But yeah, everything looks exciting. So nice to see Ali. That was really great. Josh Clemente: Feel better. Lauri Morrison: Thanks. I will. Josh Clemente: [Paulina 00:36:14]. Helena Belloff: Yeah. I’m really excited about diving into our database and I’ve got a couple different data science projects that I’m beginning this week. And then I guess on a personal note, I have some friends coming into town this weekend. So hoping the weather holds out for that. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Enjoy. Alan. Alan McClean: Yeah. I’m excited about… Honestly just starting to really dig into the guided journey work. It feels like something that’s been burning on the back burner for a while, and really starting to put more arrows against that. So for me, that’s something I’m waking up and thinking about every day, I got a bit of a cold, I was hoping to go for a ride this weekend. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll just lie around here. So yeah. Nice chill weekend. Josh Clemente: Nice. Did you make it across country? Alan McClean: No. Still in the Bay Area. Moved out. We’re in a temporary place. Yeah. Not quite East Coast yet. Josh Clemente: Got it. All right. Well, feel better. Stacy. Stacie Flinner: On the Levels front, I really love adding emoji responses to food logs and different logs. I think that’s really fun and whimsical. And then on the personal front, we… David and I are going to go antiquing to this amazing antique store that I wanted to visit in New Hampshire for a long time. And we had actually tried last weekend, but our car broke down. And so that was a failed attempt. So trying again on Saturday. Josh Clemente: Good luck. Chris. Chris Jones: On the Levels front. Really kind of more on the PR side. So one, having people like Ali join these calls feels like every week is like who’s going to be the celebrity that we get to bring in. Huge shout-out to Ali. And then also on the… Looking at the PR slide from Casey, she throws it up like, oh yeah, this is the week of who we’re going to have articles with. And I’m including that list of any startup would be so envious to get that within a five year period. And it’s like, oh yeah, that’s what we’re doing this week. So huge call up from the PR of just the momentum of the company. External validation is awesome. Chris Jones: On the personal side, it’s got a really nice surprise from [Jinlu 00:38:33] who was out traveling to Glacier and she’s like, Hey, are you in town? And we went hiking 16 miles in Glacier yesterday. And it was incredible and so much fun to get, to spend time with a team member. So that was great. She felt like doing a four day hike. So I wimped out and let her do it by herself. And then tomorrow I’m leaving for San Diego for a friend’s wedding. Josh Clemente: That is awesome. I’m not sure why you and Jinlu didn’t go for a long hike though. Chris Jones: I Know. Cause I was with her. She was like, okay, I’ll take it easy on him and not break this guy. Josh Clemente: Yeah. That’s awesome. See for me, I am excited about all of the projects moving so quickly. A couple I want to shout-out, like the tagging concept and the… Let’s see tagging concept and the positive scoring. I’m very interested to see how these land and personally very excited about them. And then I had a cool call this week with a sensor company PROFUSA who are doing these embedded fluorescent fibers, which can measure potentially multiple molecules. But what was so exciting was how stoked they were that we reached out to them. They were just like, I can’t believe that you guys are taking interest in our technology. This is amazing. We would kill to have an opportunity to work with you and your community. So it was a different type of call than I think most companies are used to. So there’s that. And then personally I’m excited for some rain. I’m hoping it’s going to cool down around here. It’s oppressively hot, humid. I can’t handle it. D Dominic D’Agostino: Yeah. On the Levels front research is going very well at the university. I got a team call coming up at 13:00 and thank you, Casey, for connecting me with Farmers Juice. I am testing the Focus Greens right now, about halfway through my CGM response on that. And personally, my wife will be landing in Hawaii for the HI-SEAS Space Analog mission, which is like a DARPA-NASA collaboration. So we have a project going out there that’s starting up now. So I’m excited about that. Josh Clemente: Awesome. That sounds like fun. Jesse. Jesse Lavine: Yeah. On the Levels front, I’m excited for the additive scoring and also hat-tip to Ben and Casey for those videos that were just posted to the app on YouTube. I watched them all last night and got really fired up. On the personal front, I am running the longest distance that I’ve ever run before, 12 miles on Sunday. So I’m going to look for a cool audio book from our podcast, from our recommendations and jam out. Josh Clemente: Very nice, good luck. Ali. Ali Spagnola: Professionally, I’m excited about my Levels video coming out on Monday. My girlfriend and I test if berberine affects a spike to bring it down. Spoiler alert, it does not. And personally, I’m excited that my girlfriend’s dog’s birthdays today. So I get to watch him excitedly eat puppy cake, which is great. And thanks again to you all for having me. Josh Clemente: Well, thank you for joining and excited to see some video of that puppy cake action. John. Jhon Cruz: Levels wise, I’m excited about the new Zone Show designs. Great job there, Alan. And personally, August is kite month here in Columbia because it’s very windy. So I’m excited to go this weekend with some friends and with the kids, fly some kites and go for a hike. Josh Clemente: Very nice. I thought you were going to go kite surfing or something, which I have been dying to do for a long time. Miz. Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. On the work side, I’m consistently impressed by the podcast. Very, very interesting to see how it’s evolved and just how quickly we can build something with so much momentum at such high quality. So props everyone that’s participating there and Ben for spearheading that. Really, really awesome to see. On the personal side, started experimenting with fasting again. I’ve dabbled in and out, but never truly mastered it or reached any level of proficiency. So here we go again. If you have any tips or support, happy to have some accountability. Josh Clemente: Plenty of support. How long are you going for? Michael Mizrahi: Right now I’m just on a [15-8 00:42:56] which feel fine. So I think it’s just a matter of going longer or more consistently. Josh Clemente: Cool. I’ve been thinking about doing a longer one. Maybe we’ll spin up a thread for that. Casey. Oh, no. Sorry. Zach. Zac Henderson: Hey. Yeah. On the professional front, I think I… Honestly, these Friday forums, I could just say the Friday forums are what I’m excited about and that would be accurate. But I’m especially excited that sort of this week and next week I’ll be digging into a lot of regulatory stuff and also finally planning out what our compliance program needs to look like. So that’ll be fun. On the personal front, my wife and I are kind of poking around looking for a new place to live. So that’s always fun and exciting. And I’ll probably say this a lot, but y’all we’re at 31 weeks. I’m going to be a dad soon. So that’s going to be kind of my big personal thing for the next forever. Josh Clemente: Pre-congratulations on both. Yeah. Those are huge life moves. Casey. Casey Means: Yeah. Congrats Zach. So let’s see some of the things this week. I’m so excited about the in-app videos and just Ben’s momentum. No one ships faster than Ben and it’s so nice to work with him on projects because I’m like, no, we need to get it perfect. Oh my God. And he’s like, we’re doing it, we’re doing it. We’re doing it. And I’m like, this is… I need you in my life. So shout-out to Ben and I’m really excited to interview Sarah Godfrey for a whole new Level next week and just dive deep into this amazing project that she’s working on that’s sponsored by Levels about multiomic basic characterization of prediabetes. So there’s going to be some really interesting early research insights that we’re going to talk about in that podcast and I’m so excited cause I feel this is part of the purpose of the podcast is to get that stuff out early. Yeah. That’s it for me. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Jao. Hao Li: On the Level side, I’m really excited to probably push out the emoji reaction next week. Finally, we finished the backend, so just need to merge the code. And personally my puppies just grown so fast and before we send them to the Forever Home for… To their Forever Home, I will just enjoy dealing with the midnight wake up by their screaming. Josh Clemente: Sounds somewhat sarcastic. So I hope we get some rest. Gabriel Gabriel: On the level side, I’m really excited about the zone score changes. That looks super interesting and encouraging. And personally, the lake is a really nice temperature for swimming right now in Chicago. So I’m hoping to spend some time in the lake. Josh Clemente: Cool. Justin. Justin Stanley: Levels wise the in-app videos being done so fast is great. And I love video content. So excited about that. And this big guy, he’s getting super big and so [inaudible 00:45:49] we’re going to my girlfriend’s cabin after work and just going overnight and see how he does. Josh Clemente: Nice. Mike is out. Merlo. David Flinner: He’s out too. Josh Clemente: Also out. JM also out. Tom out. Sam. Sam Corcos: All right. There are too many things, but I think one that I’m most excited for is the new responsible individual structure and how that’s coming together. I think it’s done a really great job of… For those who read the Phoenix Project, it’s a lot of talk about surfacing constraints and I think it’s done a really good job of doing that, where there were always gaps and failure modes, but it’s a lot better when you know that they’re happening and you can resolve them instead of just silently having failures. So I’ve been really encouraged to see that initiative come together. Josh Clemente: That’s fun. [Kanal 00:46:52] Kanal: Yeah. It’s been really cool on the Levels front seeing so much momentum on so many different projects with the in-app videos, the social feed, the zone scores, the emoji reactions. Those are all real neat. I’m looking forward to leaning in more into what’s going on in the… On the social feed and social front. And on a personal side, I have some friends coming to town this weekend. So I look forward to spending some time with them. Josh Clemente: Very nice. Rob had to jump. Scott. Scott Klein: Hi. Professionally, I am pumped for Book Club. I think as the team continues to grow, it’s nice that we are having large scale discussions about things that we need to do and where we need to level up our operational stuff. Personally, we rented a boat for Sunday. Kind of feeling summer slipping through our fingers day by day. So we’re going to go try to get one more day out on the water. Sam Corcos: That book was triggering. Josh Clemente: Yeah, it was. Also triggering that summer’s about to be over. Mercy. Mercy Clemente: Professionally, just the design updates. Super cool. I like the whole idea of being able to add to your score rather than negating, which is awesome. And then personally, I am going to go spend some time with my two nieces this weekend. I haven’t seen it in a couple months, so excited for that. Josh Clemente: Nice. Steph. Steph Coates: Hey guys. Levels wise, it’s awesome to have Ali on this call. When I was interviewing at Levels this summer, I watched so many of your videos and it built so much excitement around Levels for me and so awesome for that. Onboarding has been great. I have really enjoyed getting to know everybody one on one. We’re continuing to do that this week and ramp up on engineering. And then I also had a chance to watch some of the community calls that were posted on threads yesterday. And that was so cool too, to actually see actual members getting excited and seeing it impact their own lives. And so getting a window into that has been fantastic. And personally, I spent the week in Salt Lake, which was great and I’m going to Lake Tahoe next week for a month. So I’m really excited about that. Josh Clemente: That’s amazing. Tahoe’s beautiful. Haney and Jinlu are both out, I believe. Ben. Ben Grynol: Okay. Too many things. So stoked Ali’s here. Thank you Ali for joining. The opportunity to do those videos this week with Casey was very cool and just felt… It was really rewarding to be able to do it. And you’re sitting there listening to a clear expert, talk about metabolic health. So it was nice to nod along and pretend that I was right in line with everything she was saying, but we got them done. Growth candidates, lots of great talent in the pipeline. And the last thing to share, I guess on the level side is those culture videos. So Campbell Baron did those interviews with everyone. And when I was reviewing them, I got a little bit lost in them so I was watching them as a viewer. And then I snapped out of it for a second. I was like, wait a minute, these are all people I work with. Ben Grynol: It was a very weird moment where I was like, this is the team that I am a part of. This is wild. So anyways, I wanted to share that. It was just a really special moment to recognize how much admiration you have for everyone. So that is Levels. Personal front, we’re taking our first ever family vacation. We’ve never taken the kids anywhere and we’re going to the lake. Taking a week off apparently and it’s supposed to be raining all weekend and that’s some of my favorite weather at the lake. It’s raining and go fishing and stuff. So stoked for that. And that is it. Josh Clemente: Fantastic. We are right on time here. It’s always a production, always a ton that happens this week or each week. And as a team grows its just really cool to hear from everybody at the end here. So thank you all for contributing and have an awesome weekend.