https://youtu.be/VQ2TAdGiKGU
Transcript:
Josh Clemente: Cool. Jumping in. March 19th. Hard to believe March is going by so fast, but great week, off the top we’ve got a couple people who are out this week. I think Mizz, David, probably missing one or two, so possibly a lighter week on content, but it’s all good. We’ll spend more time elsewhere in the meeting. Some big news is Doctors Mark Hyman, and Sarah Gottfried have both signed on as Levels Advisors. This is really exciting. They’re both obviously some of the biggest names in our space and have been instrumental in several of us getting to where we are and understanding what we know about metabolic health and its crucial importance to overall health. So Dr. Mark Hyman is at Cleveland Clinic, he does quite a bit. We’ll be announcing a press release for him. And Dr. Sarah Gottfried is at Jefferson University, building a new integrative medicine practice there, which is going to drive a lot of research in the metabolic health space. This is really exciting.
Josh Clemente: We’ve got subscriptions now migrated to Stripe. Beautiful new subscription form is now live. This is really quite exciting. I think it was the last shreds of the G Suite [inaudible 00:01:14] form integration that we had built the business on long ago, so on to the new phase. Dashboard V2 is live internally. So this includes some interesting updates that are down at the bottom right there. Everyone should update and spend some time in this new Dashboard mode, try to get some insight cards, push and or sign up with a new account so you can get the Glance cards delivered. But this is going to be, I think a transformation all change to the way that people initially onboard into the app and experience it. So test it out, leave feedback for the product team.
Josh Clemente: Pretty exciting, we’ve got US Special Operations Commands. This is the Special Force of the United States Military pushing forward with a small pilot of about 10 people. Hard to say where this type of thing goes, but with entities as large as the US military, it’s always a multiyear roadmap. So getting people interested in what we’re doing now will lead to unknown opportunity in the future. So this is exciting. Nothing likely to happen quickly there.
Josh Clemente: Tom’s going to give a special shout out, but I want to mention that the Whoop team has been unbelievable, especially this week we’re learning a ton from them. And developing both our partnership and research roadmaps, but also our awareness of where to focus our resources, so we don’t make mistakes we don’t need to make.
Josh Clemente: A culture kudo shout out, but the team continues to impress candidates specifically, people love the transparency of the hiring process. The execution rate is sometimes hard for them to believe, that they’re seeing a lot of work being done very quickly. And the assumption is that we’re like a 50 person team that they’ll be joining. And I think a designer was mentioning that he wanted to know how large the design team would be that he would be joining. And Sam had to correct him that this was only one person, part of their time. So it’s great stuff.
Josh Clemente: And then a big week for community. We had our first member call. We got five weeks of these calls booked. The intention here is to start to develop a communication pathway for synchronous calls and other events between the Levels team and our members. Our clubhouse that happened last night, shout out to Ben, Casey, [inaudible 00:03:29] Allen, Kelly, for all participating there.
Josh Clemente: Then the Facebook group, which is growing quickly. And it’s becoming a really powerful resource for people. You can see an example on the top right of the screen, there’s 12 answers to this question and a lot of them are very detailed and thoughtful. And I think it’s really nice to see that organic membership material emerging, and we need to build on it. A couple of things worth mentioning here. I’d really like to point out this testimonial from a wearable challenge participant, “it’s pretty wild to see somebody lose 13 pounds in 28 days without a specific diet to follow”. So this is the type of thing that we’re still learning quite a bit about, the opportunity for these specific segments like weight loss. But it’s amazing to see people learning things they had probably never thought deeply about until seeing the data from their own bodies.
Josh Clemente: Good Morning America reached out and is interested in potentially, well they’re going to potentially trial and we’ll see where that goes. Tim Ferriss shouted us out in his newsletter. We had the Cy Young award-winning Trevor Bauer create some more user generated content this week. Nutritionist for the San Francisco 49ers using the program. And then a couple of big names in the world of triathlon and Olympic training.
Josh Clemente: All right, quick culture. Oh, I meant to rename this slide. Culture and Kudos. So just to restate, we’re on a mission to solve the metabolic health crisis. We’re going to restate that every week just to integrate it into our subconscious. A really cool week for a couple of different shout outs that we got. I mentioned the transparency, on the left here you can see a testimonial from a candidate. Just the transparency of the interview process and the mission coming through and the materials people are getting, is huge. So thank you to everyone who’s working on the hiring pipeline and making that type of material available, putting so much intentional thought into it.
Josh Clemente: There’s this shout out of course, from a design candidate who is amazed that David’s the only designer, but then also this really cool example here that I wanted to point, which just represents our member and candidate facing team. We had a detractor, this is a normal part of building a consumer facing product. People sometimes don’t have the best experience and this person was a detractor. They gave us a 4/10 which is fairly harsh on the NPS score. But Mike took a call with them and went about convincing them to apply for a position at Levels. Probably not intentionally, but I think that the way in which he represented the organization and the thoughtfulness that was conveyed through the conversation convinced this person, that Levels does intend to accomplish our primary goal of solving metabolic health crisis. And that is a worthy objective and that they could potentially contribute. And I think that’s super powerful.
Josh Clemente: And I just want to shout that out, say thanks to everyone who is currently working on the member facing and candidate facing side, it’s representing our brand in an incredible way. And it’s hugely appreciated. All right, jumping to Andrew.
Andrew Connor: So David usually does a great job surveying through things. I do less good of a job, but I wanted to touch on a few different things that are really exciting. As Josh mentioned, Subscriptions are out. This is absolutely phenomenal. I think this will save tons of time on the ops team, enable us to scale up a bit and do a much better job. I think when we have manual process, it’s easy for mistakes to be made. And so this will automate a lot of that. Everyone knows about Dashboard V2. There’s been a couple more updates. Xinlu actually updated our database version and it was trickier than expected. But this will improve some performance, get us basically more up to date, more features are available to us.
Andrew Connor: Another really neat thing that happened recently was, we have a way of pushing code without an app update. And so we can do it for emergencies. And John was able to exercise this for the first time. And so this was, I guess good foresight that we would need something like this and be able to push out emergency code updates and it worked great. And so that’s fantastic. Also calling out Murillo’s work with Offline mode and Hao has started working on an audit log. It’ll allow us to have much better history for orders. Or anytime one of us, if we ever have to look at a customer’s data, it’ll basically be like a log of every major event that’s happening inside the system. So yeah, I think it’s a good summary of what we’ve been up to.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Thank you, Andrew. All right. Quick hiring update. We have closed the position. The Lead Designer role is no longer up. This is an exciting thing, more to come on that formal announcement. But we also have transitioned over to Workable, which I think has already been a huge win for our ability to see our process and track candidates through the pipeline. So again, please make sure that everything that you do that is candidate facing is logged in Workable, and we’re continuing to pull in great candidates for our software developers and general counsel. All right, Mike weekly feedback.
Mike Didonato: Thanks Josh. So two quick themes to highlight for the week, the first one revolves around Dashboard and our Education and Insight cards. So it’s definitely not something that we haven’t heard before. Basically in this example, individual said they come into our app and it’s just blank. And at times their education or their actionable information is pushed all the way to the bottom of the app. It’s pretty interesting, John and I actually had a conversation about this on Tuesday, and then I have back to back calls about this. So I know we’re working on a few different things, and to Josh’s and Andrew’s part, I think Dashboard V2 should help. And I’m excited to roll that out to members to see if it does change things, given the two different views.
Mike Didonato: And then the second theme around zones, again we’ve heard this before, definitely added it to the theme tracker. I think it revolves around two different things that we all already know. A) it doesn’t capture everything within the activity or B) the zone is just too long. Again, it’s on the theme tracker. I know we’re doing some explorations on the back end to see what we can do to fix this for members.
Mike Didonato: And that’s it for the most part. As always I’ll include the weekly write up tonight, that’s it.
Josh Clemente: All right. I’m doing Mizz’s update this week since he’s out. So quick operations’ overview, the Auto-Subscriptions launch is essentially complete, we’re at about 95% early next week, as expected. So again, this is huge. The new sign up is live at the Levels.link URL. And then we still have some edge cases that are manual, including employees, but that’s to be expected. So really the bulk of the volume is moving and that what’s most important. Continuing to add detail for the work board, that’s ongoing. So thanks to the team, specifically I want to call out Jeremy for all of the transparency on this process. It’s been so helpful to be able to track that. And yeah, thanks for keeping that updated and to the ops team for working, in parallel with this, to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks on the edge cases.
Josh Clemente: We’ve got some, no center adhesive patches, which have arrived at Truepill. These samples will be distributed. Basically what’s going on here is, as you know the current patch has a little centered disc, which you want to leave on the patch as you’re applying it and that keeps it from adhering to the sensor. We have a new version that does not have any adhesive in the center, so you don’t have to worry about that center piece of paper. Some people accidentally peel it off without knowing. And so this should be a much better experience in terms of applying the patch without accidentally adhering it to your sensor, which allows these covers to be replaced midway through.
Josh Clemente: You can see we have a continued decrease in an overall order flow, shipments out, particularly from Hayward. Brooklyn is staying relatively flat. This is expected as we’ve touched on a few times, we’ve pulled back a bit on throughput as we’re focusing on the product development and member feedback side of things. Okay. Believe that’s the big stuff on ops. Ben.
Ben Grynol: Cool. So for growth, on that note of throughput, if we’re looking at the financials from a weekly standpoint, we’re still generating quite a bit of cash and recognized revenue. And what that’s going to lead to in this controlled growth mode is that the orders will just go further down the pipeline. We don’t want to get to a point where the pipeline becomes 10 to 12 weeks of fulfillment, because that’s not going to be a good experience either. So it’s balancing everything with that in mind. From a monthly standpoint, we’re on track to hit our goal of $300,000. We’re going to surpass it. We’re at $221,000 right now, and then we’ve generated 310 in cash. So this doesn’t include subscriptions right now. As for cash in the bank we’re still at $10.4 and sitting well. Next slide please.
Ben Grynol: I will keep reiterating this because it’s so important that we don’t ever forget how important our partners are to us and how we value them as not only an important part of the ecosystem, but as a driver for growth. At the beginning of March, we turned off the tap on all media that had any of our main partners, Dave, Kelly, Mark, anyone who drives a significant amount of growth for us. And so when looking at the partner codes this week, holy smokes, Dave’s driven $16,000 of revenue, which is, it’s almost 40 signups. Considering we don’t have ads running, people are finding the links through old podcasts and through newsletters and through all these things. So it shows how important these partners are and that we really have to make sure that we keep them close as a strategic way of growing down the road.
Ben Grynol: Next slide, please. Growth Theme of the week is Community. It’s something Josh touched on at the beginning. And what we’re doing is… To reiterate, community is one of the four pillars of growth. So the four pillars are members, partners, content, and community. And community is doubtlessly the most underserved of all the pillars that we work within, just because it hasn’t had the attention put to it as the other pillars have. And so we’re starting to undertake a few initiatives with the goal of learning, connecting, and engaging members in different ways.
Ben Grynol: This is very much an MVP approach, but three things that we are continuing to iterate on are community calls. So we’ve got five weeks of calls booked with five members each. And the goal is to really just hear members’ stories and learn more about what they’re doing and why they’re connected with Levels and give them a chance to actually ask questions of our team. Anything, whether it’s personal or company related, it’s a meaningful touch point that the most engaged members will go back into the community and feel like they’re more connected than ever.
Ben Grynol: From a connection standpoint, the Facebook group has, over the course of March, it’s really picked up as far as members connecting with other members and answering questions. So it’s really neat to see how this is happening organically with a private and closed platform.
Ben Grynol: Then from an engagement standpoint, we’re looking into Swag 2.0. The goal with that is as Dorothy Kilroy, to give her a hat tip, as she likes to say, how do we engage the members who would get a Levels tattoo? And there probably are a couple, I’ve talked to some that are just so engaged in what we’re doing. How do we make sure that they feel like they’re a part of the experience?
Ben Grynol: So the insights are that members want to connect with our team, members want to connect with other members and members want to access other thought leaders and experts in the community. And so our takeaway is that as we build out what we’re calling an NPS Unicorn with a goal of impacting as many people in the world as possible. How do we continue to build upon community and make sure that member experience is such an essential part of making this happen? And so these are all considerations as we’re iterating on growth, and we’ll take these lessons and scale it as it comes. And that’s it for growth.
Josh Clemente: Thanks Ben. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente: So social this week, Instagram we’re at 23,600 followers. A big theme on Instagram this week was comparisons again. And people explaining the reasons behind their comparisons and the differences, the changes they’ve experienced. So Gabe Mendoza, the far left photo, he shared the difference between a fueled workout and a fasted workout. And he did a quick little blurb on, your liver needs more glucose or demands more glucose when you’re fasted. So that was interesting. And then Twitter, we’re at 12,800 followers almost to 13. So that’s exciting. On Twitter, it was just another thing, small discoveries, little things that people notice, like sushi rice being the worst impact that Chrissy Cowdrey has experienced so far. So just small things like that, but growing slowly. So it’s exciting. That’s it for social.
Josh Clemente: You got to get in there with a rebuttal to Gabe on that fasted versus fueled workout. Looks like you’ve got the opposite data. All right, Tom.
Tom Griffin: All right. We’re moving quickly this week. As Josh mentioned, quick shout out to the Whoop team. We chatted with them this week really to pick their brain across a few different business areas. Specifically the corporate wellness market, professional sports partnerships and podcast and influencer advertising. So thank you to Kristen Holmes over there, AJ Baker and Henry Regan. Whoop is really the gold standard in the wearables market, especially in terms of marketing and partnerships. So it’s incredibly valuable to just get their take on all areas of their business. They’re a few miles down the road, on the exact road that we’re currently walking, so super helpful. And then just shout out to them for being a great product. We’ve got about half of our team, you’ll see on the right side of the screen, a little leaderboard. I think there’s about 10 of us on Whoop right now, which has been really motivating. I
Josh Clemente: Thanks for throwing me under the bus there Tom.
Mike Didonato: I didn’t even make the list. What was I at? Like 30?
Casey Means: Dito Dito.
Tom Griffin: Josh, 63%. That’s like one of your best scores, man.
Josh Clemente: Exactly. That’s why I feel attacked. All right, moving quickly past this slide.
Tom Griffin: Podcast and Clubhouse update. We had one show with Josh, millionaire interviews released this week. That middle column is largely the same. Those are the Tier one shows that we’re tracking on for release in March, April, and May. Lots going on again on the Clubhouse front, Ben is leading the charge there and doing an awesome job. He moderated a conversation late last night past my bedtime, on women’s health and fertility with Casey and Christa Allen and Kelly LeVeque, which I heard was great. Next week, Ben correct me if I’m wrong, I believe still on March 23rd is going to be the first episode of a series that Sam is doing with the head of Remote at GitLab, focusing on Remote Culture. And then on April 2nd, Josh is penciled in for a conversation with Mena Massoud who played Aladdin on the future of Health Tech. So lots of good stuff on that front, next slide.
Tom Griffin: And then just a few updates this week, as Josh mentioned, we’re moving forward with some initial testing with Special Forces personnel, as well as some Booz Allen consultants who are managing a project for Special Operations Command, as they’re trying to figure out what are the next generation of wearables. So as Josh mentioned, this is a multi-year project, but really important to get in the door and begin these conversations.
Tom Griffin: Now, similarly on the Equinox front, they’ve been doing testing. I finally got a response back this week that they had a really positive experience. So I’m catching up with the head of innovation at Equinox this afternoon, which will be exciting to hear his thoughts. Couple other new video shout outs as mentioned. And then just a quick shout out to Peter Kaufman over at UCAN, he’s introduced me to probably 10 or 15 professional athletes, dieticians, pro sports staffers, metabolic health researchers. So thank you to Peter. Next slide.
Tom Griffin: And then lastly, just a quick press update. The active pipeline right now is really, really strong as you can see from all of these logos. So just take a minute to scan through some of these names. These are the outlets that we’re actively in conversation with. Most of them are testing levels or recently signed up. And so just a couple of shout outs. Casey and Josh, this stuff takes a ton of time, answering questions constantly from journalists and long form documentation, getting on calls, managing follow up. Obviously Jack Taylor for sourcing a lot of these opportunities and then managing them on a day to day basis. And then just to our partners and advisors, Kelly LeVeque jumped in this week with two opportunities and then Dom turned around 10 in depth answers on basal metabolic rate and fat loss and muscle development in 24 hours. So thank you for that Dom. That’s it.
Josh Clemente: Thank you, Dom. Thank you, Tom. All right, Haney.
Mike Haney: So the big news from the content department this week is we finally signed a new SEO agency called 97th Floor. I’ve had a lot of conversations over this first four months, looking for a partner that got where we’re at in our journey and what we to do, since we’re taking a little bit different tack than a lot of companies take in our rigorous editorial focus. But 97th Floor is a friend to the company and just really great. So we finally got signed with them. This is some of the stuff they’re going to be working on for us in the coming months. A lot of it is helping us figure out what kind of keyword should we be ranking for? One of the things that’s a little unique about what we’re doing is that we’re not letting search, drive entirely our editorial strategy.
Mike Haney: It’s an input to our strategy, but we’re also trying to keep in mind what we know our members want to know, what kinds of education people should have, even if they don’t know that that’s what they want to know yet. And things that will get good social shares. So we have a lot of other inputs that are coming. But we can definitely use some more rigor on the search side to figure out what terms people are looking for. And to really understand, how are they phrasing things when they’re looking for a certain piece of information. We live in an interesting space because a lot of the queries that come in related to our content are related to diabetes. And since we serve a population largely without diabetes, trying to find that intersection of folks who want to know about cinnamon lowering blood sugar, but not because they are diabetic is a unique search challenge.
Mike Haney: And so 97th Floor is going to help us optimize the content we have and really help us optimize stuff moving forward. And then also just help us with some technical stuff on the site, and the low hanging fruit. So really excited to kick off with them this week. Next slide.
Mike Haney: And then just a quick bug in everybody’s ear, I think I’ve reached out to everybody, if I haven’t you’ll probably hear from me soon. About ideas for everyone on content pieces and lots of really great stuff out there as we knew, and we started brainstorming this, everybody’s got so much cool expertise to share, and I know this is not super high in the list of things that everybody has to do. But just reminding folks, this opportunity is there, if we have talked about a piece, I’ll probably gently nudge you in the coming month or so, and see if there’re ways that I could help you move it along.
Mike Haney: And then also just the lifestyle incentive program and the product experiments that I think is also easily forgotten, but I would still love to find ways for us to write about the stuff we’re using. Seeing how many folks are on Whoop for instance, or some of the other products. I know Josh has tried a couple of things. I’ve been working with one of the training apps, personal trainer apps that I want to write about at some point. So just reminding folks this opportunity is there, if you have ideas please reach out to me. And if you haven’t or we haven’t talked yet, you’ll be hearing from me soon and hopefully we’ll keep moving some interesting ideas through. That’s it for me.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thanks Haney. All right. We’ve stormed through this week’s meeting mostly due to the fact that we are missing a couple key contributors. So that’s fine, we’ve got extra time here on the individual contributions. So Sam, why don’t you give us 10 or more seconds on something you’re excited about?
Sam Corcos: Yeah I think the thing that I’m most excited about, which is what I was telling people earlier this week, is how nice it is to have confidence in your teammates. We had an important proposal that we needed done this week that Josh and Casey took lead on. And the final result was really excellent work. And they even specifically, and separately responded to us with how impressed they were with the intro video and all of the work product from it. So it’s incredibly exciting to work with people, where I feel really confident that when people take things on it’s executed at a really high level. So it’s a really good feeling.
Josh Clemente: Cool. Yeah, dito in the other direction. Casey.
Casey Means: Yeah, I would plus one to what Sam said, I think exciting progress with the Universal IRB this week and getting to work with Josh on that was really fun this week. And just being so blown away by the incredible competence and work ethic of people on our team. I’m also super excited about our new advisors, Sarah Gottfried and Mark Hyman. And to see that literally the top people in the field are interested in working with us and developing these relationships. It’s just very exciting to see. And then last thing I’ll just plug that as exciting is the content that Haney’s getting up every week. I mean, the content channel in Slack is just blowing up all the time. And some of these pieces, especially the most recent, resistant starch piece, this is incredibly high quality, really well researched content, some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen written about these topics. And we’ve got a few more are in the pipeline and it’s just really exciting to see how he’s taken it to the next level. Huge kudos.
Josh Clemente: Dom
Dominic D’Agostino: My Level’s hoodie, I’m wearing that. I’m excited about that. We’re going on our fifth anniversary to Alaska next week and I’m bringing my hoodie and some other things up there. So I’m excited about that.
Dominic D’Agostino: I have been taking a deep dive into biomarkers and I’m putting some content together to send over to you guys. I have some talks with companies that have a skin acetone ketone measurement continuous, and a couple other companies that are looking at insulin. So I want to[inaudible 00:28:09] keep me in on a couple different companies. So I’m doing an overview of the different things on the market for continuous measurements of these biomarkers. And we’ll send over some information on that. The pilot to our IRB study is going very well, and we resubmitted our IRB that was an expanded protocol. And that’s being reviewed, should be finalized today. So I’m confident that’ll get approved after quite a bit of revisions on that.
Josh Clemente: Congrats on the anniversary. Looking forward to that biomarker stuff and jealous and about Alaska. Murillo.
Murillo: Level side I’m really excited about the continuing work, just getting my bearings. And now finding myself as more of a part of the team and seeing opportunities for improvement across the app and seeing the work get pushed out and you go back and you fix it and all of that.
Murillo: Personally, Lisbon I think is finally entering into the early stages of spring. So yeah, I’m looking forward to the better weather and it’s opening up after COVID. So I’m also looking forward to just going outside more.
Josh Clemente: Yeah, agreed. Laurie.
Laurie: Well as Jeremy, Braden, and probably everybody’s excited about the subscription situation, so I’m very happy about that. And my husband and I are going to see family in Carolina next week. So we’ll be in South Carolina for about seven or eight days.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. That’ll be fun, enjoy. Haney.
Mike Haney: On the Level side, I’m really excited about the SEO agency, this has been a long process coming. And then I’ll also just mention, kicking it back to Casey and Sam’s point about the people we work with. You know, Casey’s been such a useful partner on this content stuff, and that was something I didn’t think I was going to have when I started this job. I thought it was just going to be me on my own. But the reason this stuff is so good is largely because of that partnership. And because she’s really able to read it with such a good critical eye and push me to add more stuff or make it better, refine it or ask good questions. And so that’s my experience of this high quality teammates’ thing that we have here at Levels within Content. And it’s great, it really makes the job much more fun.
Mike Haney: Personally, I’m excited we’re going tomorrow to a wildlife sanctuary here called Lions Tigers & Bears. And so I’m excited to go see some lions and tigers and bears.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente: Just going to second the subscriptions, that’s super exciting. I was talking to Braden the other day and we were just talking about how much has changed really. First it was manually filling orders and now that’s automated and now subscriptions are getting automated. [inaudible 00:31:12] It’s crazy to see just in the short few months that I’ve been here, how much has improved and really changed. So it’s super exciting.
Mercy Clemente: And then personally I’m actually going to see, Josh and his girlfriend are coming down this weekend. So it’s going to be nice to just hang out and stay home for a bit. That’s nice.
Josh Clemente: Yeah. David is out. So Mike D.
Mike Didonato: Cool. Yeah. So I’m going to repeat things, definitely Haney in the content, it’s pretty awesome. I feel like it’s every day there’s something new and it’s really exciting to share that with people. And then definitely about working with amazing people. Definitely have to shout out Braden, Mercy and Laurie, Mizz is out for a couple days. I checked-in in the ops only channel to see how things are going. No problems, no issues, everything was running smoothly. And then the final thing, just excited about our sick family, I meant our company, the mission and what we do and our values. That detractor, I didn’t really say anything special, I definitely didn’t sell them on a job. I listened, I told him about the mission, what we’re doing, what we’re working on. And it’s just pretty awesome. It’s pretty easy.
Josh Clemente: Nice. JM.
Josh Mohrer: Yeah. So I’m finishing up my third week here. I’ve had the chance to chat one on one with almost everybody, I’m doing a few more next week. And I think that means I’m officially not the new guy anymore. So I’m fully ramped, you should throw things at me as you will. It’s been really great. Obviously probably everyone I’ve spoken to has heard my, oh my God I love this so much spiel, so I’ll keep it short. But it’s been a real change for me coming back to the operator side from the investor side. I’ve done my first really deep work and thinking in many years and that feels good and I really missed it. And it’s been really fantastic.
Josh Mohrer: On a personal note, I got my second vaccine shot last night. I feel fine, my arm hurts a bit, but I’m looking forward to everyone getting it and having some normalcy. Dom was in my ear for the hour or so that I waited, listening to a podcast of him, I think from over the summer, which was great. The really one on one would be even greater, so I might follow up with you on that when you’re back. But thanks everyone, have a great weekend.
Ben Grynol: Awesome. Tom.
Tom Griffin: Yeah. So many things, definitely conversations with the Whoop team was a real highlight. I had been trying to connect with them even since my days at Halo, a couple years back and they were hard to pin down. So finally I spent a bunch of time with their team this week. And yeah, there were parts of the conversations that were very surprising in terms of their takeaways and advice that they gave. And then also so much that was just incredibly validating in terms of the work that we’ve done already and the path that we’re on. So that was cool. And then I’m excited for think week next week.
Tom Griffin: And then personally, I was mentioning this to Casey and maybe someone else, but I babysat on Wednesday for my niece and nephew who are six months and three years old. And it was an amazing day, but it was incredibly difficult. So I have newfound respect for anyone with kids. I was telling people that, no joke I think it was probably five times as exhausting, maybe 10 times as exhausting as a normal work day. And I work pretty hard I promise. So that was illuminating. And I think that’s it. I move next Friday. So I’m really excited for that as well.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Congrats on the move. Ben.
Ben Grynol: Yeah, hat tip Josh and Casey for all the work on the IRB proposal. I think anytime that we’re undertaking things like this as a company, it’s difficult work. And when you really have to apply yourself to it, to hear the feedback that it was received really well it’s, to Sam’s point, it just shows how incredible everyone is. So hat tip for getting that over the line.
Ben Grynol: On the personal standpoint, the snow has melted here and we have our first soccer kick around tomorrow, which I am super excited about because our season got canceled, I think it was in August last year, we were like almost finished. And so I have not kicked a ball in a while and I’m pretty pumped on that.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Gabriel.
Gabriel: Yeah. So Levels wise, I’m really excited to see the Dashboard V2 released internally. Huge props to John and to everyone else who worked on that, it’s really exciting.
Gabriel: Personally, restaurant week is starting in Chicago, got some patio dining booked. Hopefully the weather will stay somewhat nice. So I’m excited about that.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. I think that’s going to be the best restaurant week ever, that’s my guess. John.
Jhon Cruz: Yeah, next Monday is a holiday here in Colombia and we are preparing a short trip to Guatavita Lake, which is 40 kilometers from here. It’s a really beautiful place. One of my dogs likes to swim there and we all like to have picnics, play soccer outside and probably get a boat ride. So, excited to go there.
Josh Clemente: Great, enjoy. Hao.
Hao Li: Yeah, plus one on that base score update we are going to have, it’s really exciting. And personally our campsite around the province is finally open for reservation. So I’m going to hunt some spot for May.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Yeah camping. I forgot about that. I need some of that in my life. For me on the professional side, generally just waking up excited to get after it, which is just great to experience. But then in particular, the uniqueness of what we’re building here and the out of the box approach we’re taking is really a flywheel in and of itself where I feel people are willing to suggest and recommend rare suggestions. We’ll put it that way. And an example would be the memo that Sam put together this week on potential business models, just an exploration. And I found it really thought provoking in a way that I think is probably rare. So there’s a ton of opportunity for what we’re building and there’s so many different ways, all of which I think will bring positive outcomes to the space and to society.
Josh Clemente: But there are ways that I think we can maximize those benefits across, like some ethical standards and just reinforce some other claims, which are different than many companies. Driving towards member benefit and NPS, as opposed to revenue bottom line, is an interesting proposal. And anyway, it really excites me to be able to chew on these things and consider all the ways we could experiment and really push the industry to adapt.
Josh Clemente: And then personally, took delivery of a Peloton this week. And I am totally hooked on the thing already. It’s crazy addictive to be able to jump on for 30 minutes and get a really good workout in, with literally zero prep time and zero downtime afterwards. So I’m excited to learn about the Peloton culture and community as well.
Sam Corcos: Josh, you got to write about it.
Josh Clemente: I know, it’s going to happen. It will be a writeup. It’s crazy, I wake up and I’m like, ah I can’t wait to jump on that Peloton. All right, with that we are onto the story of the week, which is Gabriel this week.
Gabriel: I have slides, so I’ll share my screen. Can everybody see?
Sam Corcos: Yep.
Gabriel: So this week I’m going to talk about The Right to Roam, which is a legal right that exists in Scotland, where I’m from. And it’s quite different to how things work here and in other parts of the world. So let’s dive in. The Right to Roam is a right of public access to privately held lands and waterways in Scotland. It’s based on traditional rights. So it’s based on a system that’s existed for most of recorded history in Scotland, of private people being able to access the land that constitutes Scotland, for transportation and recreation. But it was formalized for the first time in 2003 in the Land Reform Act, which incidentally, my father Paul Brady was one of the lead figures, he’s a Scottish civil servant. But these rights didn’t start in 2003. They’ve existed for pretty much the whole time Scotland’s been a country.
Gabriel: So it’s easier to start off talking about the restrictions. So if you’re in Scotland and you want to go somewhere to walk, there’re certain places you can’t go. You can’t go to private residencies, makes sense. Private gardens immediately surrounding residences or other types of private buildings or the area immediately surrounding private buildings. You can’t go to dangerous places like mines and quarries. You can’t go where your presence would immediately interrupt what’s happening at the locations, like a sports fields or an airport, whatever. And you can’t go to tourist attractions or other places that are historically charged for entry. So like private gardens, theme parks, other types of visitor attractions, you can’t go on.
Gabriel: But on the other hand, if you’re a farmer, you can’t start charging for access to your lands, just to stop people from traveling to it. Because it’s not a historically recognized commercial activity to charge, to walk across a field. So those are the main restrictions.
Gabriel: Those restrictions aside, you can go pretty much anywhere. If you’re in Scotland, you can walk on any undeveloped land, moor, heath, hills, mountains, regardless of who owns them. You can also go to any forests. I believe that’s not the case in England. In Scotland, any forested land, regardless of who owns it, you can go to it, you can walk in it, you can access it. It even includes fields or agricultural land, including where animals are being grazed. You can’t bother the animals, but you can go in the fields. Any fields left fallow, even fields being used to grow crops. You’re allowed to travel around. You can go in the margins of the field, you can’t disturb the crops themselves.
Gabriel: And then any kind of waterway. So any locks, burns, rivers, canals, lakes. If you’re into that, you’re allowed to swim in or otherwise traverse. And the entire coastline of Scotland. So if you want to, you can walk literally the entire coastline of Scotland from one side to the other. It’ll take you a long time and you’ll get rained on quite a lot, but you have the legal right to if you so wish. Again, regardless of who owns the underlying land, any point.
Gabriel: Here’s some photos of me exercising my right to roam in Scotland. Some coastline, you can see there’re some cows, but you have a right of access, no problem. Here’s some other animals. Here’s a goat in the background and a sheep in the foreground, getting the whole Scottish menagerie out there.
Gabriel: And what can you do when you’re exercising your right to roam? You can walk obviously, you can ride your bike if you so wish, you can even ride a horse if that’s what you’re into, anywhere that you have the right to roam, you have the right to also to ride your horse. You can canoe, you can row, you can swim. You can basically access any of the waterways in any kind of non-motorized transportation of any kind. You can camp. There is a requirement that you leave no trace, but you can camp overnight. You can have a fire as long as you cover up afterwards, again on kind of land, even in agricultural land. Farmers often don’t particularly like it, but you do have the legal right to do so if you wish to.
Gabriel: And then yeah, generally any kind of non-motorized activity. So you can’t take a dirt bike or an ATV or anything. These rights extend to air travel, so you can do paragliding and parasailing, but you can’t do microlight flying, which is like a para sail with a little motor on the back. And you’re not even allowed to use a drone or anything, has to be completely non-motorized activities.
Gabriel: And yeah, you can forage. So even if you’re on private land, you can gather nuts and berries, plenty of those in Scotland, mushrooms. You can’t fish or hunt. And in England, there’s a lot of restrictions around lands used for hunting, like grouse hunting and deer hunting and whatnot. But in Scotland, you can access the land itself as long as you don’t gather any game when you’re there.
Gabriel: And as a result of this Scotland has stuff, or the UK generally has things in private land, which I haven’t seen as much here in the US, maybe they exist. So in the background here, this is a stile, which is one of the types of fence traversal mechanisms that farmers put in to meet the legal requirement that their lands be accessible. So this is a type of stile. You also get kissing gates and rambler gates, which are like self-closing gates to keep livestock in while still letting people through. So in Scotland, it’s illegal to fence in land without these kind of accommodations for people to access it. Because otherwise you’d be depriving people of the right to access your private lands.
Gabriel: And you also get Bothies in Scotland, which are often privately owned and often on private land, but are a type of publicly accessible camping accommodation. They’re often disused buildings, even sometimes ruined buildings that exist often on private estates that are historic used by campers and walkers as overnight shelter. Many of them are now maintained by a nonprofit Bothy association. It’s improved the ones that it has access to quite a lot.
Gabriel: So 20 years ago they’d often be literally ruined buildings that you’d be allowed to go in and sleep in with your tent. But now many of them, this one is near Glencairn I believe. I can’t remember where this one is. Now they’re like little cottages, often have stoves inside. This one even has some rudimentary kitchen equipment. And yeah privately owned, on private land, but used exclusively by the public. There’s no booking system or Rangers or anything. It’s just literally a building on a big bit of open land that you’re allowed to go in, with the expectation that you keep it clean and you leave some firewood when you go.
Gabriel: And yeah, that’s it. Any questions about The Right to Roam in Scotland?
Ben Grynol: I have one for you, Gabe.
Gabriel: Sure.
Ben Grynol: How long is it going to take until Sam is taking a call from a Bothy?
Gabriel: I’d love to see it. Yeah. Cell reception, not always the best, but otherwise perfect.
Josh Clemente: Star link.
Sam Corcos: I did just Google Bothy, so… I have some definitional questions. What is a moor, a heath, a lock and a burns. Those are all words that I’ve never seen before.
Gabriel: So moor and heath are both different types of treeless open undeveloped land. I’m not sure I could give you a strict differentiation between a moor and a heath. I think a heath has more vegetation than a moor does, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it. But yeah, both like prairies, but without the grass. A lock is a lake in Scotland and a burn I guess is like a creek, I think would be the closest American term. It’s not a river. It’s like a small, fast moving stream, I guess is a burn.
Casey Means: This was so fascinating. I did a trekking trip in the Cotswolds in England a few years ago. And I think the fact that we were allowed to do what we did, was basically walk through private land for days on end, I think probably is because of this rule. I wasn’t quite aware of it, but there were lots of stiles and the kissing gates and whatnot and all of that. And the map was pretty funny, because it would be like walk a hundred yards through a cow pasture and then climb over a stile and then turn left, and you’re just walking on peoples land.
Casey Means: But something I noticed on that trip was that despite the fact that we could basically walk on people’s farms, there was no litter, there was no trash. It was very beautiful and it seemed like people really kept a high standard for protecting the land. It just seemed like there was quite a bit of a leave no trace ethic, but there were no signs about it. Is that like the general ethos of people there? Do you think there’s this elevated sense of respect because of the access people get or what’s the culture like around that?
Gabriel: I think to an extent that’s true. I know there are some problems. Lock [inaudible 00:50:14] is part of a national park equivalent. And I know that they increased restrictions on camping because they were having some litter problems. I think for a lot of places where the Right to Roam is really exercised, they’re quite hard to get to. And you can’t do a lot of recreational things there, aside from walking and horse riding and stuff. So I think a lot of people that end up in those places are people who really enjoy the outdoors. And I think because of that, maybe have a greater sense of responsibility for keeping it clean and not leaving a trace.
Gabriel: I think in places that are more accessible, like places that’s easier to drive to and stuff, Scotland has probably the same problems that everywhere else has. Maybe not to the same extent, but yeah, I think certainly Bothies and stuff, usually it’s the kind of thing you have to walk many hours to get there, often in not very good weather. So the people that end up there tend to be people who really value the experience of being outdoors and that’s why they make more of an effort.
Josh Clemente: Super interesting. Gabriel, thank you. I appreciate you putting that together on short notice. I know that I didn’t get through to you fast and enough to give you the normal full weeks notice. So I appreciate that. And I’m going to try one last time, everyone thank you, we’re right on time here. Appreciate all the contributions. Crushing it again this week and good luck to those of you in the midst of packing all your belongings into boxes. Have a great weekend, talk to you guys soon.