December 11, 2020

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

Transcript

Josh Clemente (00:00):

Okay. December 11th, 2020. Welcome, everybody. Another exciting week in the books here. Does everyone see that screen share? Okay. Sweet. All right. Yeah. Big week, some of the big stuff. Dr. David Perlmutter, who’s a world-renowned neurologist and author, I think he’s a five-time New York Times bestseller with Grain Brain and other similar books, is joining the Levels Medical Advisory Board. So this is super exciting.

Josh Clemente (00:33):

He sits on the Board of Directors of the American Nutrition Society and is a fellow there. And just generally, super aligned and has a ton of potential to help us just expand our network and of course, contribute to the research. We’ve got member referrals now live in the app, so people can generate their own code and share it with somebody that they’d like to get into Levels, which is exciting. And then the gifting process is live.

Josh Clemente (00:56):

Big shout out to Andrew and Tom and others for launching that process, and to Sam for manually processing them as of right now. So this is going to be a nice experiment for us. Sleep integration is live internally, David will touch on that. And of course, the Zone Show’s version two, which is exciting developments there. We’re testing a nutritionist guided program concept for Q1.

Josh Clemente (01:18):

Throughout the past few weeks and months, we’ve certainly gotten continuous feedback that people really love Levels, but they want to know what to do next. And oftentimes, there’s a human touch element there. So we’re going to work with Jessica [Duggar 00:01:30], who’s a dietitian and nutritionist, and a few others. Potentially, Lauren Sambataro is going to help us here and trial out what this could look like. And so that’ll launch in Q1, getting the details together now.

Josh Clemente (01:42):

Similarly, we’re scoping conversations with contract research organizations, the CROs. They run clinical efficacy trials. And so some early scoping conversations about what that might look like, to demonstrate what Levels offers in terms of actually producing medical outcomes. So this is going to be obviously, something that will be ongoing, but it’s very cool to see the initial stages of this happening.

Josh Clemente (02:09):

Salesforce, we’ve had Stan Dunlap in the program and he’s really loved what we’re doing. And so Salesforce has requested that we launch a January pilot for their Employee Wellness Program. This is just crazy and super, super, super exciting to see how quickly we’re getting access to very large companies. This was way down the roadmap type thing, but the fact is the product is speaking for itself already. And potentially, could be covered quite soon with these giant organizations, which is huge.

Josh Clemente (02:39):

And then Levels’ wait list exceeded 60,000 this week. So, pretty cool. Numbers are climbing rapidly. I think we grew like 11% this week on Instagram, which is also pretty wild. Couple other things we’re seeing here. So Casey is currently on a call with The New York Times. She’s being interviewed for a story there. We had a great call with the Chairman of Equinox, who is very excited about the program itself. He’s in it right now. And there’s some potential for a pilot there.

Josh Clemente (03:07):

We’ve got some exciting partnerships with folks from PGA. This gentleman right here was responsible for, or kicked off the need for WHOOP and PGA to partner. You may have known or you may have heard with COVID, the entire PGA Tour hooked up the athletes with WHOOP Straps in order to monitor for COVID symptoms. And so that was a very cool partnership. The NBA did something similar. So he’s also testing the program.

Josh Clemente (03:33):

We featured in Mindbodygreen’s Health Micro-Metrics article, which launched this week, which is really huge. MBG has a massive audience and this is a very cool one. And let’s see. Chris Kresser is in the program, Kelly LeVeque is starting. Matt Dellavedova, as you all know, posted this amazing shot of him starting off year eight with the Cleveland Cavaliers. This is super cool. He’s in jersey, he’s out there on the court.

Josh Clemente (03:57):

This is getting exposure to his teammates that is very hard to quantify. And we also have another call with Kevin Love later today, who is interested in not just being a supporter of us financially going forward, but also helping us to spread the word and become a voice for Levels. I spoke with COSLA and had a few other calls with Salesforce, 76ers.

Josh Clemente (04:24):

And lastly, Wellness Mama, this actually featured last week, but she posted a really awesome blog article, excuse me, about her experience using the continuous glucose monitor. And her audience is just massive as well. So tons of great exposure stuff and we’ve got some really big names moving through the program starting this week. David?

David Flinner (04:44):

Is that all, Josh? That wasn’t …

Sam Corcos (04:46):

Yeah, really.

David Flinner (04:47):

… a pretty weak.

Josh Clemente (04:48):

Sorry.

David Flinner (04:50):

Yeah. So, awesome work, Gabriel on Sleep Sync. We launched internally, the integration, our first movements to show sleep data. So you open up the beta app and you can see your falling asleeps and your wake ups on the Levels graph to gain context. And tap that and see a little bit of detail about your sleep. This is just the start.

David Flinner (05:13):

We’re going to be rolling out other sleep related features to help you understand how bad sleep can affect your metabolic health for the rest of the day. And pairing that with in-app educational content. So yeah, really good stuff. Please try it out and so we gain confidence that it’s ready to go for our members. Next slide.

David Flinner (05:35):

I think Josh mentioned we rolled out the refer a friend feature that Jhon built into the wild. We’ve seen a steady trickle of people referring their friends, so that’s exciting to see it live and then in use. Next Slide. And just a quick screenshot of the gifting landing page that Tom really drove in and got this live.

David Flinner (06:00):

So, now for the holiday season, you can purchase Levels for a friend or family member. And that is I think it’s even fulfilling in December. So, cool to see that go live. Again, kudos to Andrew and Tom and Sam for doing all that. Next slide. Josh mentioned the Zone Show V2. So I don’t have the before version in here. But if you’re familiar, when you add a log and then you click on that zone that it’s added to, there is this page where you can see the details of that zone.

David Flinner (06:31):

And right now, it’s kind of a mess. There’s a lot of information and there’s not a lot of visual organization. So we put together a fairly simple reorganization of the content, just to make it a bit more visually appealing. And more importantly, it also opens up and solves two problems. It’s going to help enable us to solve two problems that we’re facing with our members. One is people don’t know what to do next.

David Flinner (06:55):

And so if you’re confronted with a bad zone score, you want to have more information on, what does this mean and what can I do next? So now, with this rewrite, we’re going to be opening up a whole bunch of space at the bottom of the above the fold area, where we can put in activity cards, content, little embedded widgets that if you tap it, it’ll explain more about what that means.

David Flinner (07:16):

And then also, the second problem is that people haven’t been aware of the Zone Compare feature. So we’re going to be embedding Xinlu’s more visual comparison widget into this page, because it’s a lot more obvious what’s happening. And yeah, give it a shot once it’s ready. It’s in development right now with Murillo. Next slide.

David Flinner (07:40):

So as you know, we’re building out in native experience for our content, and Jhon put together a in-app search for the content. So you can come in and type sensor or type something that you’re interested in, and it’ll filter all of our content down to just what you’re looking for, for faster access. So, very excited about that. And as part of this feature, he implemented pagination. So it’s going to load only a certain amount of articles.

David Flinner (08:03):

And then if there’s a lot, you can scroll down and it will just in time, load more after you reach the end of the scrolling, like an infinite scroll. And that’s going to be really useful for the catalog. So when Jeremy is finished up with the Persistence Zones, which is very soon, we’re going to have a lot more zones for our customers to show in the catalog. And this pagination feature will be critical there, too. So, excited to get your thoughts on the in-app search.

David Flinner (08:25):

Next slide. Small tweak to the blog, we’re adding author bio pages. So we have a lot of excellent guest authors and a lot of in-house excellent authors. And if you’re curious to learn more, as an eager reader just discovering Levels, you can now … Well, soon. This is not quite launched yet, but you’ll be able to tap their name or picture and then get more details about them, and see all the articles they’ve written for Levels. So, thanks to Casey and Mike for collaborating on this one to get it up and get it live.

David Flinner (08:56):

Next slide. And then again, there’s been a whole bunch of other stuff going on behind the scenes that I don’t have screenshots for, but bug fixes to make the products much improved. Hao pushed out some really nice changes to the program logic that made sure that we have complete coverage on the people who are finishing the program, making sure that they get their month end reports.

David Flinner (09:20):

And yeah, some other minor app fixes based on customer feedback. We, for example, now, in the copy past logs section, which we used to make you scroll inside a very tiny little widget, now you can scroll much, much more broadly because it’s not going to lock you into that like 50 pixel high surface, for example. I think that’s it from my side. Andrew, did you have anything to add?

Andrew (09:43):

Nope, that’s great.

David Flinner (09:44):

Okay.

Josh Clemente (09:46):

Awesome.

David Flinner (09:47):

Josh?

Josh Clemente (09:48):

Great update. Excited for many of those things. It’s so cool to see all the in-parallel projects. Mike?

Mike DiDonato (09:57):

Okay. Cool. So another good week for feedback and conversations with our members. This week we’ve had nine calls with our members. Again, I mentioned this last week, we’re going to be reducing the amount of calls and going deeper on each call. Two key themes from this week are around logging. So the first is, people really love and are pleasantly surprised about how easy it is to log.

Mike DiDonato (10:26):

Second part, we do have a segment of members that are asking for more structure. This tends to be coming from people that are using a third party nutrition tracking app, like a MyFitnessPal or a chronometer. And then the third part, some members are missing some of our features that make logging easier. A good example is the previously logged item function.

Mike DiDonato (10:53):

Had a call with someone yesterday and they did not know that that existed. And then the second key theme comes from Long Zones. We’re aware of this. A couple examples here from people that see this the most are individuals that are logging in a meal in the morning and then working out, and then have a snack and then they’re ending up with maybe one or two zones for the entire day.

Mike DiDonato (11:18):

And then the second piece, which is maybe a quicker fix is, a lot of our members are starting to utilize the notes capability, but were confused when they get a score and also extends their zones. I know we’re working internally to solve both of these issues, but these are basically the two key themes for the week. And it was an awesome week for excitement and engagement. It’s all I have.

Josh Clemente (11:45):

Nice. Love it. Any questions on the customer success stuff? I know I like this theme break out here. And the Long Zones, I’ve definitely personally been explaining this to a lot of users who text me and email me.

Josh Clemente (12:00):

This is definitely a key area to focus on. I’m not entirely sure personally how to make this more intuitive, but other than just saying eat less often, initially. So, good stuff. Jumping ahead to ops.

Michael Mizrahi (12:17):

All right. So, update today. I’ve mentioned this a few times over the past few weeks, but wanted to dive into a little bit more detail now that we’re getting closer. So we’re adding the Truepill Provider Network to Levels. So what we’ve been doing in the past for the last year or so is we’ve got about five or six physicians that Josh and Mike have personally managed and met.

Michael Mizrahi (12:37):

I think we recruited some through a Facebook group with Casey. So these independent physicians have been partnering with us and we call this the Levels Network of Providers, about five or six of them. And these are the physicians that are reviewing consults. Each physician has their own licenses across a bunch of different states. And with a bunch of patchwork, we have pretty good coverage. But that group of physicians is pretty small.

Michael Mizrahi (12:57):

And so next step is to add in the Truepill Physician Network, which is starting as soon as next week. What this means is that we’re going to get access to a few dozen more physicians. So quite a bit more coverage that our physicians that partner with Truepill, and they work with a number of different brands and different customers. Levels will be one of those, and each of those physicians is trained up on what Levels does and what our consults look like.

Michael Mizrahi (13:23):

So along with that increase in the number of physicians, we’re moving over to the new Truepill EMR. We’re on what they call version 0.1. And if anyone has seen it, it’s a little bit janky, kind of difficult to use for the physicians. A lot of information on a lot of different pages, a lot of scrolling vertically, horizontally, all sorts of directions. And so they’ve built version one of their EMR, which looks like this, with all the contents on this single page.

Michael Mizrahi (13:49):

As part of this transition, we’ve made a few little tweaks to the consult form. We’re asking a lot more information upfront, if patients or customers, or members rather, answer no, to some of the questions. And so if they have had a fasting glucose above 126, we’ll ask for details on why, just to reduce the amount of back and forth that today, happens over email between physicians and customers, and really slows down the process.

Michael Mizrahi (14:12):

So a lot more information up front should get these consults through a lot more quickly. They’ve committed to an SLA here. So about 80% of our consults should be seen within 24 hours, if not much, much sooner. So we can handle a lot more, a lot more quickly. And additionally, the pricing is improved on what we’re paying today. So we’re continuing to work with the Levels Provider Network. We’re just adding on the Truepill Network on top, to give us quite a bit more robustness. So a quick screenshot of what that looks like here.

Michael Mizrahi (14:40):

Shot out and thanks to Andrew for a lot of the work on testing this with the Truepill team, and pinning down exactly what’s changing and what needs to be updated. Because we’re on a three-week delay from when consults are scheduled to send to the EMR, most of this impact will start to be seen early in the new year. But we do have a transition period where we’re going to be using both EMRs. And we’ll communicate pretty clearly with our network on what that means.

Michael Mizrahi (15:06):

That’s it on that exciting addition. It’s a big improvement over what we’re doing today, and unlocks a lot of things for next year. So looking forward to this. And then finally, just everyone on support update, thanks to Sam for doing the first session with us this week. They recorded a video of it. So if you want to get a taste for what this feels like, you can find that on that notions page.

Michael Mizrahi (15:24):

And then a bunch of other folks have signed up, which is great, through January. So we still have some open slots. Keep it coming. And Mercy and I look forward to topping on with you and showing you around, and doing some support there. That’s it for me.

Josh Clemente (15:39):

Nice. Yeah, exciting. I’m looking forward to a native messaging function in that EMR at some point sent, too.

Mike DiDonato (15:46):

Plus one.

Josh Clemente (15:48):

Okay. Quick hiring update. Going to be iterating on this page in the future, but just trying to capture … And actually, some of this data is a little bit inaccurate. I think that we’ve got a few more. Well, we have engineering, basically in an ongoing conversation and intro phase.

Josh Clemente (16:07):

But besides that, just showing what we’ve got going on on the hiring side, you can see this week versus to date, we’ve got a ton of volume coming in for the Head of Growth role. It’s by far, our most interesting role it seems. We’ve gotten a lot of signal boost from our network on that.

Josh Clemente (16:22):

And then we’re going to be starting to look into some additional roles here in the next few weeks. Lead Designer, we’ve got some early applicants there. Chief Legal Counsel is starting to initiate conversations there, just exploring who’s available and on what timelines. And then Chief of Staff role is also something that we’re exploring.

Josh Clemente (16:38):

So we’ve had a few intro conversations with folks, to see what that might look like and what type of profile might work. So anyway, this is a snapshot. We’ll try and make this as useful as possible. So please send feedback after this meeting on whether this is valuable and what other info you’d like to see on hiring progress. All right.

Josh Clemente (16:58):

Yeah. We’ve been having some good conversations on the clinical strategy doc. And just generally considering the approach that we’ll be taking for everyone’s awareness, just from where we are today, which is a beta product showing general wellness information to, what does the future look like?

Josh Clemente (17:13):

And how do we work with these various regulatory entities and also demonstrate efficacy so that people can place confidence in us? And so, starting with these initial studies with like the Ben Bikman trial, and of course, Angela Hall and Dr. Dom D’Agostino’s study, and then moving into the CRO large scale efficacy trials. And eventually, potentially into a therapeutic space.

Josh Clemente (17:36):

Basically, we’re threading that together and looking forward to seeing how that IRB approval goes. Okay. Quick beta trends here. So you can see the partner codes. We had Dave Asprey and Ben Greenfield, both added us to their gift guides. And we had a nice boost there, temporarily outshone Broken Brain. So we’ll see how long that sustains. Overall, a good week. Lots of volume, lots and lots of partner codes going through.

Josh Clemente (18:04):

It’s crazy to see every week how many we have converting. And then we’ve got some big volume this week for outgoing orders. I think we had last week, or starting on the 7th, we had over 600 shipments go out, which is pretty, pretty massive. So, huge volume. Thanks, everyone for keeping things moving. And generally, I don’t think we’ve had any major concerns crop up on this amount of throughput.

David Flinner (18:30):

What’s the HS access code? Do you know, Josh, off hand?

Josh Clemente (18:34):

I do not know that one off hand.

Mike DiDonato (18:37):

I do. It’s when we get inbound requests to sign up from Help Scout.

David Flinner (18:46):

Ah.

Josh Clemente (18:46):

Got it. Nice. Okay. Sam?

Sam Corcos (18:51):

Yeah. It’s also related to the gift guides thing, I learned something from Tom. Tom said that we need to make sure when we have these gifts, we give people the ability to purchase it for themselves, because most people actually purchase it for themselves and not as a gift. And it turns out that is true, which I did not know about gift guides.

Thomas Griffin (19:15):

That’s an insight into the selfish nature of my mind.

Josh Clemente (19:21):

Learned something new.

Sam Corcos (19:21):

Yeah. In terms of revenue and cash, we still have 10.4 million. On track to have a really good December. We’re only 11 days in and we’re already well on track. Next slide. We had another great week, last week.

Sam Corcos (19:44):

Last week would have been a record three weeks ago. And now, it’s just like a pretty normal week, so that’s how it goes. And this week, we’re on track to have another great week. So very positive all around.

Josh Clemente (19:59):

Awesome. Yeah, that central anomaly there is pretty amazing. That was Broken Brain, right?

Sam Corcos (20:05):

Yeah, that’s right.

Josh Clemente (20:07):

Amazing. Cool. Okay. Social update. Mercy?

Mercy (20:14):

Yeah. So this week on social, we had a lot of good feedback. It’s nice. Now people are not only sharing their perfect scores, they’re also going and starting to share the things that either surprised them, like Todd Andersons where his body hates rice cakes, and that was surprising to him.

Mercy (20:30):

But it’s also cool they’re also showing how stress impacts them. And then obviously, Dave Asprey over there on the left. Next slide. But one more thing on Instagram, we gained like 990 followers just this past week, which is a record. Okay. Now, next slide.

Mercy (20:49):

Sorry. Yeah. And then this week on Twitter, we gained not a ton of followers, but it’s also nice to see people using the comparison scores. Delhi’s photo was a huge success, a lot of people. You can see like 100 … What is that? 1.4 or 5,000 likes.

Mercy (21:06):

And then Tanya Sam, who’s actually on Real Housewives of Atlanta, she shared multiple stories on Instagram and then did a tweet thing on Twitter. That was pretty cool as well. And that’s it for me.

Josh Clemente (21:21):

Nice. Yeah. Still getting tons of organic traction here. And yeah, Tali [Lerner 00:21:26] has been throwing out just some really awesome personal examples on the achievement slide I showed his progress in the past week alone in improving average glucose. And it’s really amazing to follow along with people who are so intensively exploring. All right. Tom?

Thomas Griffin (21:43):

Yeah, Tanya is great as well. I didn’t even realize she was on Real Housewives, but that’s good to know. She’s psyched about Levels. Okay. Quick podcast update. We have one released, three recorded, four additional secured this week. No major ones to call out here.

Thomas Griffin (21:59):

I made a note on the bottom of this slide that we are resurfacing the conversation in earnest about what it would look like to start our own podcast. This would require quite a bit of resources to do this successfully. So we’re not taking this decision lightly.

Thomas Griffin (22:16):

Casey and I had a call last night with the Editor-in-Chief of A16Z, who produces and manages the podcast network over there. And it was a really helpful call. So most likely, we will do a pilot at some point in Q1, but we’ll keep everyone posted on this. And we’ll likely solicit feedback on topics. Next slide.

Thomas Griffin (22:41):

This is a centralized table for all influencers. So these are influential individuals that are using Levels across social media, podcasts, athletes, affiliates. We may also be adding others who are currently not captured here, like press or executive VIPs.

Thomas Griffin (23:03):

And in addition to making my life far easier and more organized, and just allowing for more discoverability internally, this also allows us to just help partners and others in our network when we’re sharing lists and making introductions. Next slide. All right.

Thomas Griffin (23:23):

Some miscellaneous partnerships update. Josh covered I think most of this. We are relying on a couple of gift guides, Ben Greenfield and Dave Asprey, most notably, and then a couple smaller ones, too. Scott Stallings, he’s a pretty big deal. He’s won on the PGA Tour three times.

Thomas Griffin (23:41):

He became really famous for losing I think it was 60 pounds and 15 to 20% body fat in the middle of his career as a PGA Tour professional. A lot of features in major publications, including Men’s Health. And he had an awakening when he went to the doctor and found out his blood work really didn’t look good.

Thomas Griffin (24:05):

So he’s become this gatekeeper for technology and wearables for the PGA Tour, and other players turn to him to look at what to do in terms of health, fitness and nutrition. So I had a great call with Scott. I won’t tell that story right now, but I called Scott and he’s hyped about using Levels. And he’s starting to.

Thomas Griffin (24:25):

And then Devon Levesque is a big deal in the health and fitness space. He’s got 440,000 followers. Most recently, he became even more well known for bear-crawling a marathon. That’s just what it sounds like. He bear-crawled 26 miles to raise money. And it was also in collaboration with WHOOP, which was pretty cool.

Thomas Griffin (24:50):

The conversation with Equinox continues to progress and it’s going well. Most of their top executives are using the product, including the Chairman, the COO, the Head of Equinox Ventures. Josh and I had a call last night with their Chairman, as well as Head of Innovation.

Thomas Griffin (25:07):

And Harvey Spevak, the Chairman is really engaged with the product. He’s extremely motivated to get his scores up, which he’s not happy with as a competitive person. And I think probably in Q1, we’ll likely be doing a pilot with their E-club members, which is their premier membership in the Hudson Yards location.

Thomas Griffin (25:27):

So we’re excited about that. And then yeah, the Head of Performance of the 76ers joined the program. And he’s actually a huge proponent of CGM, and has written multiple blog posts about using CGM for wellness and for athletic performance. So he’s really excited and wants to help us out in any way possible. Next slide.

Thomas Griffin (25:50):

Then a quick press update. Most notably, Mindbodygreen article went live. This is a huge platform. So this is just a really big win and shout out to Casey for managing this from start to finish, I believe. We’re featured alongside other brands like WHOOP and Oura Ring and Apple Watch, so it’s great exposure for us. And they also have a top tier podcast that we’re going to be looking to get on.

Thomas Griffin (26:15):

New York Times, strong interest. Josh mentioned the interview with Casey today. Anahad O’Connor is the journalist and he’s really the guy at The Times. And when he found out that what we’re trying to do in terms of making CGM mainstream, he called it groundbreaking. So this is promising for us. Nothing totally in the works yet, but we’ll see.

Thomas Griffin (26:35):

Men’s Health, we will be featured in a Future of Fitness feature article in March 2021, alongside a bunch of other brands, probably similar to the Mindbodygreen article. That’s going to be huge exposure for us. And then otherwise, doing a lot of 2021 planning in terms of our goals and strategy for the next year with Jack Taylor. So more to come on that in probably the next couple weeks. That’s it.

Josh Clemente (27:00):

Huge. Great update. Thank you, Tom. Okay. Haney?

Mike Haney (27:07):

Yeah. So in the content realm, we have one new piece up so far this week. We have another one that’ll hopefully go up today, a really good new ultimate guide to inflammation by SD, one of our advisors. But this was the one we got up earlier, Josh’s great interview with Jack Johnson, not the singer, which every time I’ve said this name in my house, my wife was like, “Oh, you guys have the singer?” No, the hockey player.

Mike Haney (27:29):

Equally cool. But it’s a really great piece. He had some really interesting things to say. What you’ll see in this piece is that this is an example of some kind of new formats we’re going to be trying out to do, what I call the people stories. So whether that’s interviews or advice or testimonials. So we were able to do it here, because he had so many interesting things to say.

Mike Haney (27:50):

Just do it as a first-person piece, so it’s his words. This is a pretty common editorial device, but they’re pretty powerful because it’s clear to the reader the passion that they have when it’s in their own words. And his lesson that I thought was really interesting that comes out here is, here’s a guy who had a really, really, really strict diet before, as a professional athlete and been trying it for years.

Mike Haney (28:11):

And what Levels actually did for him was open up more choices and teach him how he could eat more things. And as somebody who’s been restricting my diet for the past two weeks, as a new Levels customer, I found this pretty inspiring. On this point about profiles and people’s stories, I just want to put the call out to everybody. Mike obviously does a great job sending these [inaudible 00:28:31] from the interviews.

Mike Haney (28:31):

But especially as the customer interview process will now be changing, anybody who knows folks who are using the product, who you think might make good candidates for us to profile or talk to for the site, please send them our way. Send them to me and we’ll add them to the editorial calendar. And just a note that we really would love to get some more diversity in every respect, age, socioeconomic, cultural, but also experience, people who bring unique things, unique perspectives, unique backgrounds.

Mike Haney (29:04):

We have somebody coming up who was hypoglycemic as a child and brought that baggage to using this. We have somebody in the works who has PCOS and brings that to the experience. So anything we can do to help fill out and create relatable points for the readers in these profiles, I think will be really powerful. Next slide. And then the other thing, just a heads up on some stuff that’s coming, or this is actually one thing that’s there already.

Mike Haney (29:29):

So within the content wiki, which we keep expanding with new documents, we added this page called metabolic news sources. And this is really just where I and Casey primarily get our information about what’s happening in this world with new studies, new kinds of things. So I put this out there both as a resource, if anybody’s interested. There’s news sources, study sources, but also as a call to if you guys have cool sources that you look at, or places that you find interesting stuff, please let me know and I’ll add it to this.

Mike Haney (30:00):

I think this will be super useful for getting people up to speed when they come on board, and just for all of us to follow along. And there’s a lot of good topics, specific emails you can get out of these sites. Next slide. Yeah. Then finally, just a preview of an article that’s coming probably next week, we’re going to launch a new monthly article type called Metabolic News Roundup, or hopefully something catchier than that.

Mike Haney (30:21):

In which we’re going to take either three recent studies, or three fairly recent studies around a particular topic, summarize what they found and then Casey is going to provide some kind of Levels perspective on what these mean. And the first topic we’re going to tackle because it’s super timely, is the idea of increased glucose being a real marker for COVID morbidity.

Mike Haney (30:42):

And there are some really interesting studies that have come out about this. One I know circulated on Slack this week. So look for that article, probably next week. That’s all from me.

Josh Clemente (30:52):

Love it. The roundup is a great idea. I think I’m on a few of those that are typically on Fridays or Mondays. And so I think we could do Metabolic Monday or something similar. Cool. On to the individual contributions. So 10 seconds, something we’re excited about and personally encouraged. Jhon?

Jhon Cruz (31:10):

On the Levels side, I was a bit concerned about the application we are using for our in-app content, regarding performance issues. But we have managed to fix those issues and we are good now. So, that’s exciting. And personally, I will be going to Bogota this evening to meet some friends, so that’s exciting, too.

Josh Clemente (31:34):

Awesome. That’s good to hear. Miz?

Michael Mizrahi (31:38):

Yeah. I was in and out this last week in Joshua Tree. I’m literally the only person there, so pretty empty. An awesome nice, little trip. Excited to catch up. Looks like a ton happened this week, a ton of docs, a ton of notifications. A lot of long form docs to read through, so looking forward to getting back into the mix and finishing the year strong.

Josh Clemente (31:59):

For sure. Haney?

Mike Haney (32:01):

On the Levels side, I’m really excited about what Casey is doing right now in talking to The New York Times. I’d say during this week, I think if Anahad writes a piece that’s positive about us, it’s going to be an absolute rocket ship. So I think that’s super cool.

Mike Haney (32:13):

Personally, I’m I guess excited, at least interested in my kid who has his first piano recital over Zoom this weekend. And he’s going to try to plunk out up on the rooftop, which is sort of recognizable as a tune right now. So I think that’ll be fun to watch.

Josh Clemente (32:29):

Nice. All right. Casey I don’t think has been able to join. She’s probably still on that interview. So it sounds like it’s going well. Yeah. So on my, let’s see, personal front, I am excited to build a fire on the beach tonight. It’s a really nice, clear night. Apparently, the Northern Lights may be visible from New Jersey over the next few days. So I’m hoping to catch a glimpse of that.

Josh Clemente (32:52):

And then on the professional side, I don’t know where to start really, but I’m pretty staggered by the Salesforce thing. That conversation is amazing. If we start getting employee wellness programs going with massive names like that, that’s just huge. It’s hard to overstate.

Josh Clemente (33:09):

And then I really love the conversations and the digging into the data, and just the direction of our research and the potential for this to continue gaining traction, and making Levels the thought leader and the most efficacious program in general wellness. So it’s just exciting to think about the future there.

Josh Clemente (33:27):

I think Evan is not on the call. Just a quick update there. Andrew sent out the note, but Evan is going to be focusing on some personal obligations. And so this is his last day with Levels so definitely give him a shout. Send along your email, stay in touch. It was great working with him obviously, and we’ll make sure we do a little something for him as he takes off. Mike?

Mike DiDonato (33:51):

Yeah. So Levels related, I could say many things, but I’ll have to piggyback on what Josh said. The call that we had with the Salesforce team yesterday was pretty awesome. Not just what was said, but the tone, super encouraging. And to even think that that’s happening now, just grateful.

Mike DiDonato (34:15):

And then on the personal side, I don’t like drinking. I have not liked drinking for quite a while because it destroys my recovery and my sleep. So I purchased some Dry Farm Wine to see what all the excitement is about. So I’m curious to test it. And it just came in yesterday, so I’ll report back with some info.

Josh Clemente (34:38):

I’m suspicious, so definitely I’m open to being surprised. Mercy?

Mercy (34:45):

I’m also excited for the gifting process. That is huge. There’s been a lot of people that have been messaging us on social and also through Help Scout, that have wanted to do that. So, that’s exciting. Personally, I’m just excited to not really do a lot this weekend. Finished decorating for Christmas. That’s probably it for me.

Josh Clemente (35:04):

Nice. Gabriel?

Gabriel (35:08):

Yeah. So on the Levels side, excited about hopefully getting sleep logs on the chart out to customers soon. On the personal side, my wife has been organizing a gift drive at her school for people here in Chicago this week, and she’s been having about three hours sleep per night. So I’m excited about spending some time with her this weekend, and relaxing and catching up on sleep.

Josh Clemente (35:29):

Very nice. Tom?

Thomas Griffin (35:34):

I’m really excited that David Perlmutter is joining the Medical Advisory Board. In a classic small world series of events, I had met with James Murphy, who’s an investor of ours, and also works directly with David Perlmutter, probably six years ago in my first job out of college, which had nothing to do with health and wellness.

Thomas Griffin (35:58):

So it’s super random that I was meeting with James one on one at his office in New York. And he gave me Grain Brain, which was Perlmutter’s first bestseller. And that particularly renewed my interest in neuroscience and health and wellness, which is what then led me to go work at a neuro technology company a couple years later. And then that indirectly led me to Levels. And now, with Perlmutter joining our board, it feels full circle. And I’m excited about it.

Josh Clemente (36:26):

That’s pretty wild. Cool. Very similar to my Dom D’Agostino story. Hao?

Hao Li (36:33):

Personally yeah, I will see if we can find the Northern Light tonight. A little bit cloudy here.

Josh Clemente (36:43):

Very cool. Laurie?

Laurie (36:46):

I’m excited that I’m going on vacation starting next Thursday. So, that should be nice. We were going to drive across country, but the family that we were intending to visit, they’re uncomfortable with the COVID situation right now. So we’re flying to South Carolina. It’d be nice to see my daughter for the first time in two years. So, really excited about that.

Josh Clemente (37:11):

Wow.

Laurie (37:11):

And finishing everything Christmas by tomorrow. I don’t know how that’s going to happen, but it will. I’m excited.

Josh Clemente (37:19):

That’s great.

Laurie (37:19):

So I’ll see you guys in a few weeks. And golly, Merry Christmas to everyone of you.

Josh Clemente (37:26):

Same to you. Thanks, Laurie. Sam? Finish this up.

Sam Corcos (37:29):

I cannot believe this guy bear-crawled a marathon. That does not make any sense. I just watched a brief video. Anyway, I think the thing I’m most excited about is how our development velocity just seems like it just keeps increasing, which is pretty incredible that often as you increase the size of an engineering team, things start to slow down. And we just seem to keep shipping stuff. That’s really incredible. So I wanted to thank everyone on the engineering team for that.

Josh Clemente (38:04):

Definitely. Plus one. Okay. Story of the day is Jhon, this week. So Jhon, let me know if you need me to share my screen, or stop sharing my screen rather.

Jhon Cruz (38:14):

I will share my screen. Can you see my screen now?

Josh Clemente (38:24):

Yes.

Sam Corcos (38:26):

Yep.

Jhon Cruz (38:27):

Then you see sports in Colombia, right? Okay. So this time … Okay. I always like to take these opportunities to show more about my country, especially things that normally do not appear on Wikipedia or in the news. This time, I want to talk about sports, the sports we practice the more in Columbia.

Jhon Cruz (39:08):

I’m not going through the traditional explanation of these sports, but I want to show some variations of them and how the normal Colombian people practice these disciplines. And also, what is the sport that you can find only in Colombia? So let’s start with soccer. You know that soccer is king in most of the Latin American countries, and Colombia is not exception.

Jhon Cruz (39:47):

Most people like it a lot, even women. And it’s primarily because it’s a very cheap sport that doesn’t need very special equipment to practice it. You just need a ball. So there are two variations of soccer. I don’t know if you see the video here. So the first variation is very common in Latin America.

Jhon Cruz (40:21):

It’s called micro-fútbol, or futsal or fútbol five. This discipline was created in Uruguay. And the good thing about Colombia is that you can find a micro-fútbol field anywhere. Even in the most remote places or poor places, you can find always a field. They are made from cement, or they could be synthetic. Teams in micro-fútbol consists of five people each, and this is how it looks.

Jhon Cruz (40:57):

The second variation of soccer is called banquitas. And I am almost sure that this only exists in Colombia. It’s a smaller variation of micro-fútbol that is normally played in traditional neighborhoods. So each team consists of three or four players, and I think it got the name because the benches of the parks were used as the goals.

Jhon Cruz (41:29):

And as you can see in the video, people just close the streets and just play there, which is not legal, by the way. But this is what they do. And this is very typical. The name comes from [foreign language 00:41:45] or [foreign language 00:41:46], which means bench. And banquitas means little benches.

Jhon Cruz (41:56):

The next sport is cycling. Columbia is very well known for having some of the best cyclists in the world. Most of the people are just obsessed with that. And one of the reasons we are good at that is because the bicycle is the perfect alternative when you cannot afford a car, or when you want to avoid the bad transportation system we have here.

Jhon Cruz (42:26):

But I think that the main reason we are good at that is because of geography. You know that the Andes Mountains go all across South America, from Chile to Colombia. And where most people live in Colombia, it’s in the surroundings of the mountains. Meaning that you see mountains everywhere here. And towns and cities are normally located in high altitudes, especially in the central region of Colombia.

Jhon Cruz (42:59):

So we have a great training place for cycling. The photo on the right is in Bogota, where every Sunday or holiday, the main streets are closed to cars and they are open to cyclists and pedestrians, so they can safely go for a ride or for a walk around the city.

Jhon Cruz (43:28):

The next sport is called tejo and it’s Colombia’s national sport. It was created like 400 years ago by Native people living here. It consists of a lane, if you see the picture on the right, a lane with two targets made of wood and clay. They are on each side. And each target has what is called a [foreign language 00:44:10], or a rounded piece of metal in the middle of the target.

Jhon Cruz (44:18):

And this is the place where these pink triangles are put. These triangles are called [foreign language 00:44:27] and they are basically explosives. The idea is to throw a weighted steel disc, this one here, towards the target and make the [foreign language 00:44:42] explode when there this impact. Every time you hear an explosion, that’s a point for your team.

Jhon Cruz (44:54):

And as you can see in the video, tejo is more about dancing and drinking beer than actually playing it. It’s kind of dangerous because combining high alcohol with throwing a steel disc of 1.5 pounds from a 50 feet distance is not safe at all. So yeah, but it’s funny.

Sam Corcos (45:23):

With explosives.

Mike DiDonato (45:25):

It honestly looks so awesome.

Jhon Cruz (45:29):

So yeah, that’s it.

Josh Clemente (45:32):

That’s amazing. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this game before. The fact that this isn’t rampant on college campuses is going to change quickly.

Sam Corcos (45:41):

Yeah, really.

Josh Clemente (45:44):

Awesome. Yeah. I love these shares, Jhon, because they’re increasingly convincing me that I need to escape to Columbia ASAP. So yeah, Levels off site some point soon.

Jhon Cruz (45:57):

You’re welcome here.

Josh Clemente (45:58):

All right. Well, yeah. Awesome week, everybody. What’s that, Tom?

Thomas Griffin (46:03):

I was just going to tell Jhon, I played a ton of futsal growing up when I wasn’t in main soccer season. And I had no idea of the origin, so that was interesting to hear that word again for the first time in a while.

Josh Clemente (46:15):

So cool. All right, everybody. Well, we’ve got five minutes back and so I’ll leave you here. Thanks for great work this week. And another great week, I think next week? And then it’s Christmas week. So December is rapidly, rapidly moving. So anyway, have a nice weekend. We’ll talk soon. See you, everybody.