Josh Clemente (00:00:00):
All right, I’m going to jump in. October 29, last one. We squeezed a lot of Friday Forums into this month. Okay, this week, four Whole New Level episodes were recorded. Casey’s Genius Life episode with Max Lugavere was released, and she recorded Whoop and Human Upgrade labs, or the Human Upgrade show with Dave Asprey, who is actually joining us on this call, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Phase one of tagging in logs is ready for internal testing, guided looping, which is the sort of day review experience is near ready. Those specs are moving quickly. We shipped a new Twitter river, which you can see over here, along with advisor bios to the website. Community manager and associate editor roles are ready to go. I think these are just pending an internal network outreach process, but JDs are ready. So, more to come on those roles.
Josh Clemente (00:01:00):
We’ve got, this week, a lot of analysis and internal research that came in the form of memos. We had some on paid partnerships performance, product market fit, NPS analysis, and groups like Paid but no Glucose. So, people who got their kits but for some reason have not linked with Levels yet. So, a lot of good internal stuff, recommend reading and internalizing. CSAT continues to rise with our member ops and ops team as we have slowed down response times. So, continuing to really get a ton of value from this experiment, which is pretty impressive. And apparently, our members are getting great value as well. Medical consult reminders are now automated, so we have this limbo experience where you can finish the checkout process, but you don’t finish the medical consult, and then nothing really happens unless our Member Success team takes some action. So, automation there is great.
Josh Clemente (00:01:54):
Phase two of membership model iterations. This was a lot of learning from the initial launch, tidying up our messaging, helping people understand what the membership is and what they’re getting for it. And then we launched our first reminder email campaign right here, which is kind of a step forward for the company overall. I don’t think this is retargeting, but it’s some sort of continuing to help people remember that they never finished the purchase process. Tom will have a Nutritionist Marketplace update, I’m sure, but the pilot was expanded to 700 new people, so we’re at about 1,000 total, which is great. This pilot is now pretty large in terms of the total volume of people who are using Levels. And then the IRB protocol document was signed and submitted as of yesterday. We expect a lot of feedback from the other stakeholders on this research and the IRB itself in the coming weeks.
Josh Clemente (00:02:46):
So, lots to learn still on that prep project, but it’s out there. We got a ton of really awesome feedback on what I want to highlight as one of the most tactically useful pieces of content that the team has produced just yet, the metabolic blood test piece. And I think early as of yesterday, there were 20,000 seven-minute views on this post, which just shows I think how desperate people are for better information about their bodies. And it really bodes well for the ancillary testing project that JM is leading. We also had some really awesome responses to the really tactical podcast episode, especially the inbox zero episode from Whole New Level. People were really actually eager to get even more. They want to actually watch someone like Sam, who this person, Sidney, referred to as the MJ in his prime of email, would like to watch them processing emails.
Josh Clemente (00:03:42):
People are very eager to learn how to do things more effectively, and I think the podcast is becoming this conduit for all different types of information, which is awesome. You can see here Bobby Parrish, FlavCity on Instagram, tons of very engaged followers, continuing to share great content. We’ve got a visual here of tagging B1, including these recommended tags right above the keyboard. And we had a Mind Body Green article launch. And then just again, some appreciation for how good the content is that we’re putting out. I think that kind of covers the page.
Josh Clemente (00:04:15):
Oh yeah, and we’ve got the next wave of internal patches going out. There’s a couple in here, the early days Levels, pork taco, some early seed investor patches. These are being assembled and should be shipping out. We’ve got a real collection going there. All right, jumping ahead. I want to welcome Dave Asprey to the Friday Forum. Dave and I have had the pleasure of doing a podcast episode together, Casey as well. And Dave is a huge supporter, investor in Levels, and probably the father of biohacking, Levels user himself, three-time New York Times bestselling author, and yeah, the OG biohacker. So Dave, thanks for taking some time. Love having you on the forum.
Dave Asprey (00:05:01):
Thanks for having me in. I am a huge fan of what Levels is doing, and we’re at this point, I look back 10 years ago at the Quantified Self movement, where I was active in that. I helped to bring heart rate variability in. Later, after that, I was a CTO and co-founder of the first company to get heart rate from the wrist, and we sold it to Intel. And now, it’s the same stuff that you’ll find in your Apple Watch. But the reason I cared about this is that there was a ton of people in the early days who said, “I want to measure everything,” but they’re like stamp collectors of data. Like, oh, you have a lot of stamps, can you mail letters? No. Or coin collectors, can you spin the coins? No. And so if it makes you happy, you should collect all the data, but you’re basically a digital packrat, in my perspective.
Dave Asprey (00:05:52):
What Levels is doing is the next generation. The reason that I wrote that first definition of biohacking, that’s now in Merriam-Webster’s as a new word in 2018, and it’s there because hacking is the act of tracking and doing something and seeing what happened. And what emerged from that track, what you hack ethos is that your compliance goes way up. And this is the good kind of compliance, not that I will force you to do it at gunpoint, because even for type 2 diabetics with a very high blood sugar, you could die, gun pointed at their head, they still eat their donuts and don’t take their insulin. Even threat of death doesn’t make people do it. But funny enough, motivation, going, “Oh man, I know if I eat this meal, I’m going to see my numbers go up, and I had this goal,” it actually changes people.
Dave Asprey (00:06:42):
And I’ve seen it in the Fasting Challenge. My last book, Fast This Way, we had 70,000 people sign up for the Fasting Challenge. I don’t offhand know the percentage that completed it, but I told them all about this, “Hey, maybe you should use Levels. You should do this because you’ll know that what you’re doing matters.” And everyone has been trained to do a whole bunch of stupid crap, like kale salads, that don’t really matter very much. They just do it because you heard it was good, with no feedback.
Dave Asprey (00:07:11):
I think this is really revolutionary because now, you can see when you slapped yourself in the face with your last meal and you didn’t know it. And I’ve found it to be helpful, and I don’t seem to have that big of a problem with motivation on stuff like this, but even then, it just makes it easier. So, my thanks for making a really cool app. Josh, I don’t know if I told you this upfront, I was a little bit skeptical. Like, I already can get the sensor. But when you shared the plan and the roadmap, and once I tried the app, I’m like, “Oh, you actually did the important stuff.” So, kudos, guys. You’re doing great.
Josh Clemente (00:07:47):
Well, thanks a lot, Dave. I really like a lot of the analogies there, especially the stamp collector analogy. I have known what it’s like to have reams of data and no idea what to do with it. It felt good while collecting, and it’s not actionable. Yeah, we’re relentlessly focused on not just the accessibility of the data, but then the actionability of it, so I appreciate as well that you of course know that from personal experience. Really appreciate you taking the time this morning. I know you’re a busy man and there’s a lot to do. Congrats on the Human Upgrade transition, and we’re eager to continue to be mutual supporters.
Dave Asprey (00:08:27):
Oh, thanks. Thanks, Josh. I appreciate the support of the podcast. It’s still on the top something, 0.000 something percent, planning to keep it there. And we changed the name just because I’m doing a lot more than Bulletproof. I’m focusing more on lifestyle and fasting and on Upgrade Labs. And there’s probably a collaboration there as well. Upgrade Labs will have at least 100 facilities over the next 18 months around the world, mostly the US and Canada, where people are looking at their data, like exactly the customer base that you guys have. It’ll be one of those things where we can have a little pull card that says, “You got to do this as well.” I think it’ll be fun.
Josh Clemente (00:09:02):
I can see the wheels turning in Tom’s head right now, so I’m sure we’ll have plenty to do together. Thanks a lot, Dave.
Dave Asprey (00:09:09):
We will indeed. Thanks. See you guys later.
Josh Clemente (00:09:11):
All right, see you, Dave. Jumping into the next intro, Taylor Sittler, who has joined us. He’s going to be starting full-time in early 2022, but he’s getting ramped up with plenty of road ahead. And I’m going to intro Taylor as first of all, a founder, an operator, a medical doctor, but most importantly, I think a passionate person about making health an individual reality. And I’m going to let Taylor take it from here. Excited to have you on.
Taylor Sittler (00:09:42):
Yeah, very excited to be here, Josh. This is awesome. I feel like this has been a process in the making for over a year now. A little bit about my background. First, I’m a clinical pathologist. I did my training at UCSF. I spent my time the last decade building a couple of different types of tests, actually. Initially, I did some work with a guy named Charles Chiu to build a test that could identify any pathogen from a human sample, essentially replacing infectious disease lab. The test is now used by the CDC for outbreak detection. If COVID had been discovered in the US, they would have used it to sequence it and then figure out what to do. I then went on to do some work on cancer with a group at UCSF in Berkeley, a couple of computer scientists there developed a … Was co-founder at Color, building out genetic testing, trying to make genetic testing a part of primary care.
Taylor Sittler (00:10:39):
Really, I think the recurrent theme in my career over the past decade has been trying to make diagnostic testing more relevant for medicine, and bringing in new tests as they become important. Most recently, I was trying to start a company in women’s health, and that’s when I came across Levels, last year. And I was immediately hooked. And I mean for all the reasons that Dave just mentioned, I was like, “Yes, this is exactly what we need to do.” Basically, what I have found is making the test itself actually isn’t enough. You have to be able to contextualize it for people. And then as our ability to create diagnostic tests increases and improves, we’re moving more and more toward continuous monitoring. When I heard that Levels was building this service around glucose monitoring, I was like, “This is a no-brainer.”
Taylor Sittler (00:11:42):
I was able to connect with Sam. Actually, at my last company, we tried to do a study together with Levels. The company was dedicated to trying to make … There’s a real gap in women’s care around the time of menopause. There are huge shifts in hormones, and basically OBGYNs just leave women at the door. And it turns out by addressing all the issues that women have, not only do they feel better, but you can actually help prepare them for what’s going to be the second half of life. Because changing estrogen actually has a huge impact on their health, and it turns out, not surprisingly, that that impact is metabolic. Anyway, connected with Casey last fall, we were going to try to do a study together. That didn’t end up working out. The company folded for a couple of unrelated reasons, but then I was still really interested in continuous hormone monitoring and connected with Josh over the summer, and found out about some of the stuff that Levels is exploring in this space.
Taylor Sittler (00:12:47):
And so I’m super excited to get the chance to potentially work together. This has been really awesome, and it has just been so fun to watch you guys. It’s so rare to see a company that brings together such thoughtfulness with such execution. So, kudos. I’m really excited to get to know all of you guys better and to really explore how we can take what I think is going to be a phenomenal service for glucose monitoring and metabolic health and figure out how to expand it into a general kind of service.
Taylor Sittler (00:13:19):
What I’m going to be doing over the next couple of months is mostly reading, writing, thinking. Don’t be surprised if I contact you to have a quick call or something like that, and to learn a little bit more about what you’re doing. Starting in January, I’ll really be here full-time and running with you, so super excited. Oh, and yeah, I put a little sort of fun fact about … In between high school and college, I took a year and spent most of it over in China, and I found myself across a blackjack table from the mayor of Shanghai on Chinese New Year’s. And I have a couple more fun stories that be happy to share when we get a chance to talk in person. Thanks very much. Thanks, Josh, for the intro. Super excited to meet you all and work together.
Josh Clemente (00:14:07):
Awesome. Yeah, looking forward to some of those Shanghai stories. And enjoy the ski season. All right, well, thanks a lot, Taylor. Obviously, everyone on the team, feel free to, well, make yourselves available to Taylor as he ramps up and have those one-on-one conversations, and try to point him in the direction of helpful information as he gets started. And super excited to have another great addition to the team. All right, quick aside on the culture and kudos. We help you see how your food affects your health. It was interesting, actually. We had an anecdotal testimonial that came through our Slack firehose, and someone literally said this. They were like, “This helped me see how food affected my health.” It was nice to see. The prayer is working, even if subconsciously.
Josh Clemente (00:14:52):
On the US employee side, just a note here. Health insurance open enrollment is happening right now. We got to take action by November 1st. Miz sent a great thread about this, so please make your elections by that date. And then on the culture side, I want to highlight this Twitter debrief from Ben. Really what it is, it was an example of what you could call maybe a lightweight failure where we tried a project, we tried promoting a specific tweet to see what would happen. It didn’t meaningfully increase engagement. It did cost a lot of time. Ben did a nice debrief on this, and we took a different action. In a sense, this is a failure, or in one sense this is a failure, but in another sense, it’s a learning. And we now have more information, we can move forward in a more targeted way.I want to highlight this mostly because it’s okay if something doesn’t work in a stellar way. That’s still a lesson learned.
Josh Clemente (00:15:44):
Sam calls these two-way doors. Nothing was irreversibly changed by this experiment, but in another way, it led to Ben, I think, taking a deeper look at time and how much time he’s really spending on projects. And he then wrote this post up and he started recording himself with Loom to get a better understanding of exactly how much time it takes to do something. And I think this is actually a really interesting second order effect of what started off as promoting a tweet. So, I encourage everyone to be systems thinkers, try to figure out where things are breaking down, and maybe look at one concentric circle out from what you’re focused on and think, “Is there a bigger lesson to be learned here?” And again, we’re a team that’s experimenting often. This is not intended to highlight a failure. It’s intended to highlight a learning. All right, over to Andrew.
Andrew Conner (00:16:35):
Yeah, yeah, real quick. I promised Josh I’d be quick, but this builds on the culture and kudos quite a bit around the themes of increasing tracking and transparency in engineering, and so consider this more of a preview of what’s to come, but us being more mature about projects and being able to track them accurately and knowing where we’re allocating time, and then where are people getting hung up? Are they waiting on code reviews for a long time, and stuff like that? And so I proposed a few motivating questions here. Are we moving quickly? Are we minimizing overhead? Are we effectively organizing our time allocation? Probably about monthly or so, I’ll report metrics that we’re using to track these things. And in general, it’s not necessarily things we’re trying to optimize. It’s things we’re trying to be aware of. You can show next slide.
Andrew Conner (00:17:21):
Sam has led for a while now a development velocity check-in. Things like this. Some of them are subjective, some of them are objective. Scott set us up on a tool called Sleuth. I’m working out some kinks with the way they are measuring it, but it’s things like, are we able to hold SLAs for code review time? To start, we’re going to have a 24-hour poll review, poll request review, SLA time, and targeting an eight hour average. That means within a workday, someone is actually getting feedback on their code review and can get it in.
Andrew Conner (00:17:52):
And the other end of this is more than one deploy a day. This makes sure that deploys are staying fast, that they’re staying incremental, these kind of things. This number is going to go up over time. More engineers means this number goes up. And Scott and I have been playing around with a tool called Linear that Justin and Steph are using now for their project. More of you will get looped into this. Gives us a lot of insight into where time is being spent. Hope that was quick enough, but a little preview of more to come.
Josh Clemente (00:18:23):
Nice. Thank you, Andrew. Okay, Scott.
Scott Klein (00:18:31):
Oh, sorry, was on mute there. Okay. All right, consolidated active priorities. I did a little bit of bold treatment just to help orient people around the things that we’re actually working on. We’ve got these buckets of priorities, but the bold stuff is what’s actually going on. All of the exceptions and the unplanned stuff are coming along quite well. Ideally, we just have as few of these as possible. I think I took off one of the exceptions because it actually technically rolls up into guided journeys. Hopefully, we can just check in on this slide briefly every, single week to give you a preview of a little bit of the exception stuff and the unplanned stuff. Scoring changes are set to go out next week, barring any catastrophe with user testing. Yeah, next slide. All right, the second thing just for me really quick on Guided Journey is that we’re not going to be talking about Guided Journey in its entirety very much anymore.
Scott Klein (00:19:21):
We’ve split out into the four groups of things that we’re going to be doing, as we talked about last week. David has slotted in to be the responsible individual on the core looping side. He and Alan are going to be picking that up from here on out. That is it for me. Oh, sorry. One more slide. Just to let you know, the priorities database has been updated, so I’m eventually going to take the Guided Journey thing off, but we should see drafts, stubbed out pages for all of the Guided areas with responsible individuals filled in. Helena is doing a lot of the insights work right now.
Scott Klein (00:19:55):
And a new project status called Split. Hopefully, as part of the responsible individual structure and the process, we need to have these little detours or eject points around, hey, it doesn’t look like we encapsulated the project quite well. We need to pull up or pull out, figure out what to do about it, so introduce this new Split status. You might not see this in the default view because it just shows active priorities, but as we continue to build the process out, you’re going to see the priorities database get a little bit more rich in data. And this is just one example I wanted to highlight.
Josh Clemente (00:20:23):
Nice. Thank you, Scott.
Scott Klein (00:20:26):
I think that’s it for me. Yeah.
Josh Clemente (00:20:27):
Cool. Okay. In-app video 2.0.
Ben Grynol (00:20:32):
Okay, this is an update. To recap, this slide that this nice stamp is pasted over is the last slide that was posted for August 27th, was the last time this project was addressed. It was the in-app video 1.0 project, where to recap, Casey and I recorded a bunch of videos that pertain to specific lessons, the top performing articles or lessons in the app. And the idea was to provide some different multimedia content where people could engage with it. Qualitatively, we’ve heard, or Mike has heard on a lot of the feedback calls, that the videos have been very helpful. Quantitatively, they’re telling a different story. And that is partly due to the way that we shipped it, which was using the existing rails and not doing a ton of product work. The downside to doing that was there’s not a ton of discovery. People have to really dig deep to actually find the videos.
Ben Grynol (00:21:24):
We also posted the videos on YouTube, and they have limited traction there. It’s better than in app, but it’s still not great enough traction to actually go into 2.0. And so what was 2.0? The idea was we were going to go deeper into the now what, and we’re we are going to record videos with different advisors to test that out. And so when assessing this, Scott and Sam and I had a conversation this week and looked at it from a project debt standpoint. Should we ship 2.0 where we do these videos and we bury them in the app? And we invest … It would have been just over 20 hours of team time, which isn’t bad. Or do we build products so that they have a better chance of discovery, to actually give them legs? And that would have been roughly 170 hours of teamwork, which sounds wild, but as soon as you start to break it down and record yourself on Loom, you realize that across design and engineering and product and RI, that the time adds up pretty quickly.
Ben Grynol (00:22:20):
We decided to deprecate the project in the near term. And it doesn’t mean that we won’t revisit it, but this is such an integrated aspect of Guided Journey that if we took it upon ourselves to build out 2.0, we would be doing something further down the scope of Guided Journey as opposed to focusing on things like onboarding. That’s the status of this project. Expect to hear about it sometime in the future, and knowing that things always change in startups, that could be tomorrow or that could be in six months from now. That is an update on video.
Josh Mohrer (00:22:50):
Blood work. The headline here really is the blog post, really fantastic post, getting a seven-minute read time, which is tremendous. It’s a pretty long one, but seven minutes is really terrific. On the engineering side, we’re moving forward. I was hoping to get the slide this week, but Truepill threw a little curveball, and we’re going to need one more week on that. Murillo is a champ, and this is going well. I am particularly excited about this one, more than my average excitement level. I think this is going to be a big hit. I’m putting a stake in the ground on that. Finally, on membership on the next slide, we’re moving forward on the next phase, which is going great. I do want to highlight an experiment that Josh called out at the top of the meeting with a purchase reminder email. This, so far, seems to be failing.
Josh Mohrer (00:23:45):
It’s really cool that we have the tech ability to do this. Jeremy and Andrew pushed a bunch of information to Drip that makes this kind of self-service, for someone like me to be able to do this without engineering. But for whatever reason, after about 200 sends, it’s unclear if we got even one sale from that. We did get four support replies, which is potentially useful. I’m going to let that cohort age a bit before I shut it off, or I’m going to shut it off and let it age a bit and then decide the next steps.
Josh Mohrer (00:24:18):
On engineering, the next steps are scoping out eCommerce functionality for when we’re selling other products and services, and starting work on in-app registration to make the flow convert better than it does now. It has been a little bit weak, a little bit lower than before membership. I’m scoping out a video that could appear in one of the pages that casually explains what we’re about, working on all that stuff to try to get the conversion rate to a better place. But really, so far good. We’ve got a couple of hundred new members in the last week, so onward. And that’s all for me.
Josh Clemente (00:25:01):
All right, Jhon.
Jhon Cruz (00:25:04):
Yes, we completed phase one of the tagging project. Most of it involved working on the database stuff and on the mobile application UI. The last task of phase one was a suggested tax component above the keyboard. You can see how it looks in the screenshot there. Additionally, we added some improvements on unit tests to the auto tagging logic, and how started working on the tax manager retool application as well. Once we have this retool application working, we can start adding the global text that are going to be suggested, and auto tag it, and then we can test it internally. And finally, we increased the scope of the project a little bit with a new feature where tags are useful. It’s called activity-specific icons. Instead of having the same, generic exercise and food icons, we are going to use tags to automatically detect what the log is about and display a specific icon. For example, we could show a bike or a swimming icon instead of the number one. That’s it.
Josh Clemente (00:26:20):
Awesome, thank you.
Tom Griffin (00:26:24):
All right, just a quick update. We rolled out the nutritionist feature to an additional around 700 members yesterday. Actually, we changed one thing, which is that now the nutritionists themselves appear in random order every time that you open up the feature. We did this just because we wanted to remove the potential variable of most people just clicking on or engaging with the nutritionist at the top of the list. We did see within a couple of hours, I saw about 10 messages come through. So, quite a bit of volume. We’re still seeing that the majority of people are messaging Lauren Sambutaro and are most interested in the one time, one call, least expensive option. Again, I think we need to, as JM would say, let the cohort age a bit more before we’re drawing any major conclusions. But that is what we’re seeing so far. And then starting next week, I’m going to be collecting feedback from members, which will be helpful. That’s it.
Josh Clemente (00:27:26):
Awesome. Very excited about this project. Table stakes design, Justin.
Justin Stanley (00:27:33):
Okay, this is our second-last week of the project. We’re going to wrap it up next Friday. Quite a bit of stuff happened, made a brand-new base component that you can see in that first GIF there for text input, based on Alan’s designs, and redid the sign-in flow, the welcome. The button at the bottom of the welcome screen says Get Started now instead of sign in. It’s a bit more inviting. And completely redid this screen plus the screen where you have to confirm your account, which some members might hit if they have not done that. Replaced all the legacy full-width buttons, like that sign in button, that were throughout the app with the new component. And also on the cards, there’s a new, little, mini button instead of a full-width button. The health integration model, which is on the right in the GIF, shows the new bottom sheet design, and the touch effect for some of the lesson cards and articles is just a bit more subtle and not like a complete bait out. And that’s about it.
Josh Clemente (00:28:36):
Great. Oops. All right, David.
David Flinner (00:28:40):
Sweet. Yeah, Alan’s going to give more insight onto this in a bit, but we are nearing design completion on the initial setup we think is the foundation for the core looping that you’ll go through day by day, that we think is going to be the foundation for how you form a better relationship with Levels, that two-way relationship where you’re getting more value out of what happened yesterday, what are the opportunities looking forward. Next steps on this one, I’ll be working with Alan to spec out the concrete details of what this looks like before we hand it off to engineering. This is stuff around what is the logic around who this is shown to, when it’s triggered, what specifically will be showing up on the positive encouragement sections, and what would the phasing look like so we can roll this out iteratively? Yeah, I think as Justin mentioned, the table stakes design is going to finish in a couple weeks. And that’s when the guided looping will be starting.
Josh Clemente (00:29:38):
Amazing. This reminds me of a more whoop-like experience. I always do the day review for my whoop data the following morning, and it’s really helpful for me to actually grasp what happened yesterday as opposed to missing some of the lessons available. Thanks, David. Alan.
Alan Mclean (00:29:56):
Right. Focus areas this week, we’re looking more deeply at the day review. As David was just talking about, finding a way to get in a cadence with members. Next up, we had a ton of triage and design work, visual design iterations that we were working on, and some future work potentially with David on how can we get the dashboard and the zone review to more closely connect what’s happening in the graph to the data below it? Looking at defining a framework for how we communicate with people. We’re going to have a lot of content, so we’ve got to figure out a way to create these tiers of content for people. And then of course, some work on hiring this week. Next slide, go into it. As I said last week, members have different priming for mornings and nighttime rituals. And so I think last week, we had this great learning that maybe it’s better to have this log resolution in the evening when you’re wrapping up the day and you’ve got a little bit more time, perhaps. The mornings are always a bit of a rush. Next slide, please.
Alan Mclean (00:31:02):
Whereas in the morning, yeah, you’re on the go, you’re waking up, you’re trying to get started. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to have a big log resolution, but it does make sense perhaps to have a bit more of an optimistic feel, set up the day, motivate people, get them ready for what’s to come. Next slide. These are some wire frames, and I grayed them out on purpose, just so you know that they are in progress and the general cadence, as I mentioned before, was have a bit of a reveal on the score, give you some context for it, show you how you compare to others. Next, identify some opportunities, what was most impacted your score yesterday. It’s also a chance for us to explain why the score was what it was.
Alan Mclean (00:31:45):
Third screen, celebrate. There’s always going to be something positive happening even just for being here. And so we want to identify those and really call them out, and also just give people something to look forward to. In this example, we’re looking at a little badge, it’s seven day streak, perhaps, for logging for a week in a row. There’s all kinds of different things that we could do here. And actually, a fair bit of my time next week will be breaking down the design for each one of those, potentially getting some badges drawn and so on. And then finally, tips, education. And we’re going to start out sort of naive and we’re going to build the smarts into this. These suggestions will eventually become more intelligent, and for now we’re going to leverage some of the existing content that we have to provide some education and get people ready to be successful during the day. Next slide.
Alan Mclean (00:32:36):
There’s all this stuff, all this great content, and a lot of it already exists. And thankfully, David and the team has spent a ton of time putting that together. And right now, that exists primarily in cards and education, and that’s at the bottom of the app experience. And so as you’re logging through the day, these get pushed down further and further, and we think potentially people are not seeing this. And as I was mentioning about figuring out a framework for communication, we want to find a way to ensure that more people see it. We spent some time last night just rewriting some of it and my God, there’s a lot of work that goes into that. I think just also a kudos to David and team for putting that together. There’s lots of good stuff there and we don’t want people to miss it.
Alan Mclean (00:33:17):
Next slide. I think just starting out, we’ve got a simple urgent or high, medium, low priority for content. And urgent material is going to probably be a bit more assertive. We’ll take advantage of this modal treatment, we’ll take over the screen, and this will primarily be for mitigating bad data or customer support issues like sensor transitions, bad sensor data, or maybe calibration at the beginning of the journey when you first put that sensor on. You also hear a lot about sleep, and so that will be another one on the left there, showing a little modal come over and take over the screen. Perhaps one day, if we get to push notifs, some of those will become push notifs. For now, it’ll be a little bit of a modal takeover. We’ll have to define some cadence so that we don’t annoy people and constantly be flexing our user experience muscles on them. But for now, that’s how we’ll present really urgent material. Next slide.
Alan Mclean (00:34:14):
There’s also time-sensitive content that right now, is going into cards. Perhaps you log something that has alcohol in it. It does get pushed onto the stack, but people again are missing it. And so we think that potentially, this kind of material could belong in some sort of notif drawer up there. It could potentially also be a card, but I think we’re going to see what we can do about getting people to open that notif drawer and see alcohol and glucose, for example. This is a good learning opportunity. Other moderately interesting material changes that we just launched, so we’ll have to figure out a little bit about what fits in that medium box. But I think having this notif drawer is going to be a great way to get attention from members for things that we think are timely and interesting.
Alan Mclean (00:34:57):
Next slide. And then finally, education. And I think this comes back to some visual design stuff that I’ve been thinking a lot about too, is I’m reintroducing color here because these are the screens that are done, but finding ways to make the experience feel a little bit more optimistic and start the day off right. And so how can we make this content on the right feel a bit more engaging? We’ll probably go full screen with some of this great imagery that we’ve got. Yes, as David noted, it’s shareable. We want people to look at that stuff rather than feeling like it’s advertorial or just dropping in an image in the middle. So, making it a little bit more richer, a little richer, a little fresher. Next slide.
Alan Mclean (00:35:41):
Some more examples. This is an interesting aspect of designing experiences that have a lot of data and a lot of charts, is that sometimes, it can feel kind of empty and kind of cold because it’s primarily graphics and stuff. You’ll often see products use a lot of imagery, and this is I think an approach that we should adopt too, is getting a bit more of this richer content front and center for people, and adapting the cadence a little bit so that it looks really fresh and engaging. I think that’s it for content or for design. Is there another slide? I can’t remember. Oh wait, so sorry. Design triage, yeah. Icons for activity and food, I’m excited to see that eventually roll in. I’ve always wanted to have icons and activity right, and so excited when I see that. Excited to see that.
Alan Mclean (00:36:28):
This was something that David was pushing on too, is getting icons to represent what was in the meal. And it’s not going to be something that we can do perfectly, but when we have confidence, especially things around alcohol, or something very specific like pizza, this is a great chance to connect back to the graph on what’s happening in that particular meal. It’s more iterations on the dashboard and the third screen. So, looking at how we can make, again, connecting those cards back to the graph a little bit more explicitly. And then of course, the scoring stuff, looking at the rings and a little pop of color there. I think that’s it.
Josh Clemente (00:37:05):
Beautiful. Love all of it. Thank you, Alan. Okay, quick hiring update here. We have Matt Flanagan starting on November 1st. Taylor Sittler, shown on this call, starting in January, and Jeff starting in January as well. Currently, we have two open roles, visual designer, software engineer. This is a quick breakdown of where those roles are at. I know Alan is spending a lot of time sourcing people for the designer role. And then we have two coming soon, the community manager and associate editor. Look out for those to be posted shortly. And for those who are interested, you can go to Levels.link/careers and send a general inquiry. That’s it, over to Chris.
Chris Jones (00:37:50):
All right, on member insights. On the member insights front, Josh talked about the Order but no Glucose, or the Paid but no Glucose data. That is the chart on the far right. The key takeaway, we’re still getting data, but 80% of people that have given us money and we don’t see data said that they still plan to use it. So a lot of them are, “Hey, I have the box, I haven’t opened it yet” or, “I opened the box but I didn’t try to apply the sensor.” And in the deep dive, most of them are planning to use it. Now, the issue we’re running into with this cohort, these are people from January to April 1st, is their sensors are now likely expired. They actually shouldn’t be using the sensors anymore. We’ll think about as we do an ongoing drip for this of do we actually use, at least for the first sensor or over time as we hit the API and can track it sensor by sensor, can we send someone a reminder of, “Hey, this sensor that you ordered, it got a month left to expire”?
Chris Jones (00:38:52):
And use that as a reminder for people. That way, they don’t waste it. We’re going to have to think about our policy around how we respond to this and how we handle it. As people say, “Oh, I didn’t know there’s an expiration date. I now opened it and I can’t use it. What do I do?” On the product market fit, this was a topic that came earlier on. We put this as a second question in some of our NPS. That’s the chart on the top. With a sample size of 67, our product market fit was 52. What this means is when you ask how would you feel if you could no longer use Levels, 52% are saying very disappointed. And the goal you’re going for is anything above 40% is really the bar to say that there is market fit. So, that’s good numbers.
Chris Jones (00:39:38):
Our N is small, but we’ll continue to track this. Also in the same survey, we started adding the NPS to week one through three drip. So to say, we had a hypothesis around if we’re indexing on people that have gone all the way through the full month, are we skewing to those that are more engaged? The overall score for those three cohorts was a positive 57, which is still very strong. Maybe five or six points below our main number, but also still the N is fairly small. The good news is it wasn’t this wow, people at week one don’t get it and you have to get all the way through it. I mean they’re coming out of the gate with strong feelings. That’s great news. As Josh mentioned, we continue to experiment with being slower and slower with support.
Chris Jones (00:40:23):
I think we have more room we can go on this one to push it, as our CSAT, our customer satisfaction, which also we call happiness score, continue to be in the 97, 98% range, which is awesome. On the ops side, I think a lot of you just got your Skin Grips, the next batch. There was a number of issues that we knew about this batch before we got them. They realized we gave them certain spec, and they actually gave us an old version. So, they knew when they shipped it of, “We made a mistake, do you still want them?” And we said, “Sure, we’ll take them.” As we got them into hands, we realized that a lot of them were upside down but they still fit, they still work. These were the six that I got, where four of them were upside down, two of them were right side up, but one of them was crooked.
Chris Jones (00:41:09):
I sent this feedback to Skin Grip and basically, what they’re going to do to try and make it right is they’re going to give us 20,000 free patches with the spec that we want, and they’re going to build a lot more QA. So, we get 20,000 free patches that will be shipped in a couple weeks. That’s them trying to make this right.
Chris Jones (00:41:30):
And lastly, on the Truepill service level, which is our SLA, at eight week high, we still have a long ways to go with this one. The big thing that they’re changing, they still have staffing issues, but they’re actually making new policies around people that call out, the people that say, “Hey, it’s sunny out, I want to go to the park, I want to go on a picnic, I’m just not going to go to work today.” They actually have more of a carrot and stick approach. This is something very common in call centers or manufacturing, where you’re just like, “Hey, it’s not okay that you just randomly show up for work,” whether you’re getting on probation or different policies. That’s actually probably having the bigger impact, is them putting in policies in addition to trying to hire more people. And that’s the update from member experience.
Josh Clemente (00:42:10):
Cool. I will say on the patches, they are a better form factor overall, in my opinion. I think generally, the sizing is right, but we can get a few tweaks on the aesthetics and they’re going to be a good product. Okay, Ben.
Ben Grynol (00:42:26):
Growth. Weekly recognized revenue at $97,000 for the month. We’re at 582. No changes to cash, debt or runway. Next slide please. Growth theme of the week is reciprocation. This is our most viewed piece of content. As of last night, it had 3,386 views. And what this is is Sam with a throwback to his collared, white shirt days, as you can see in the bottom left corner. This is him walking through task management with his calendar and in Notion. Why does this matter? Next slide, please. This creates what we can call our talent flywheel. We’re creating all of this content by recording these Looms randomly. We end up sharing it with others because people will email Sam, or the way Alan has done some of the design ones and they get shared through Twitter. And people engage, they end up DMing us, or sometimes they’ll share it through their own distribution channels, and they get value out of all of these things, things that we just sort of take for granted.
Ben Grynol (00:43:28):
It’s us doing our workflow, they feel a need to reciprocate. So, they DM us and they’ll say, “Hey, I would love to just help you out in any way possible. Can I make some intros or can I do whatever it is?” And we get people introing us to engineers, or designers, or name a role. And that new talent sees the content that we’ve created, and then they want to come work with Levels, or they share it themselves. And then they come and they create more content, and then we share it with others and then people reciprocate. It’s a very cool thing to see how this amazing team is at the center of this weird talent flywheel that we’re creating ourselves by just recording us on Loom. We’re sharing Notion docs. Just wanted to give everyone a nod because it is amazing to see. And that is growth for the week.
Josh Clemente (00:44:15):
Ben, Tom.
Tom Griffin (00:44:18):
All right, weekly highlights. Josh touched on a few of these, but on the podcast side of things, a few tier one shows in the mix. Just calling attention again to Casey’s episode with Max Lugavere, which was released this week. The show was a bit unique in that Max pressed Casey on some tough questions. I just listened last night and this morning. Things like, surely berries cannot be bad for you? What’s your reaction to that, if you spike a bunch from berries or sweet potatoes? Or is one single spike really that bad? And Casey did an awesome job answering these questions. So, highly recommend listening to that episode. And then Whoop and Bulletproof, aka Human Upgrade, recorded this week. We mentioned this a few weeks ago, but we officially locked in a full season sponsorship of David Sinclair’s upcoming podcast, which starts in January.
Tom Griffin (00:45:09):
It’s going to be eight episodes over the course of two months. Each episode is going to be on a different topic related to longevity. We’re excited about this. It’s very much a brand identity and awareness play. Hopefully, we also see some conversions, but it’s really about aligning with a thought leader like David, and introducing Levels to millions of people who are the type of people who want to listen to someone talk for two hours about peptides or NAD. Those are our types of people. And then lastly, just some organic partner content over there. I’ll highlight Mind Body Green article went out, and we actually onboarded them as an affiliate partner this week as well. So, a lot of potential there. Next slide.
Tom Griffin (00:45:51):
Okay, and then just calling attention to this doc that I sent around this week, which aims to look at the performance of paid partnerships, promotion, specifically in terms of return on ad spend, aka ROAS, which is just a fairly simple metric that looks at how much money you’re making off of a promotion relative to how much you’re spending on it. Ideally, you want to be generating more revenue than you’re spending on it. And the doc is very preliminary, I would say, for a variety of reasons, including just the fact that we haven’t spent that much money to date and tracking attribution is kind of difficult at this point. And at this point, we’re really looking just broad brushstrokes, how are our partners performing? And the takeaways there on the right side. Overall, they’re profitable. We’re making a lot more money at this point than we’re putting into these partnerships.
Tom Griffin (00:46:44):
Podcast interviews are still absolutely generating the majority of revenue relative to some other types of promotions. Ideally, I think these remain kind of tent pole marketing and awareness events that are happening on a quarterly basis each year over the next few years. I mentioned that attribution is pretty tricky at this point. For example, if a Ben Greenfield code conversion comes in, we don’t know if that’s from a podcast ad or it’s from someone who listened to Josh’s episode a few months back. And this is a trade-off that we’re very well aware of. We don’t want to go through the time of setting up really sophisticated attribution at this point in time. And then lastly, just that return on ad spend is not the only important marketing metric. It’s just one kind of narrow way to look at the value of a particular marketing activity. But at this point, as we all know, we’re very much focused on awareness and education and brand identity. If you want to dig in more, that’s the doc.
Josh Clemente (00:47:42):
Awesome. Thank you, Tom. Appreciate these deep documents. They’re huge for learning lessons across the team. Haney.
Mike Haney (00:47:51):
Right. On the content side, a couple pieces up so far this week, back to one of our five questions. And the other one is a really nice piece that arose organically from Matt Lay, who’s a metabolic researcher we’ve been doing a lot of work with. He has been doing some study breakdowns. He has just been a really helpful addition to the content team, and this arose out of conversation between he and I and Casey about how to actually read a study and make sense of it. Peter Atea has got a great, really deep dive into this that we actually link to in the piece, but Matt’s piece is just a really simple, 10 questions to think about as you’re reading these studies. I’d really love it if this is an area we can continue to push. I think the more literacy people have around how to read scientific research, no matter what their interest is, the better.
Mike Haney (00:48:37):
For the stat of the week, I played a little bit with the category headers this week in the blog. I change these occasionally. I added a section called Metabolic Basics, where try to pull together some of the just high level what is glucose? What is metabolic health? kind of content for folks. We’ll dive into this more when we get to the blog redesign. But as part of that, I just pulled up in analytics what sections people go to. This is essentially of those top headers that are on the blog, what areas do people go to? And I just thought throw this up as an interesting thing. I think it’s interesting that Ultimate Guides scores really high, even though that’s not a topic, necessarily. And those are sort of deep dives. I haven’t done a further analysis to see then how much people read once they go into these.
Mike Haney (00:49:22):
But anyway, just an interesting stat there. Next slide. The other thing I just wanted to call out, I was looking at social stuff this week, is we’ve talked about before, we’ve really had a change in our approach to social, really based on some good feedback from Stacy after I’d been doing this a few months, of how we promote our content on social. Initially, I was really writing captions that were tease-y and we’re like, “Hey, you should come check out this article to really learn what’s going on.” And a really nice piece of feedback was, let’s just deliver more value in the post itself. And that’s something we’ve really leaned into, and you’ll see a lot of the posts now are slide posts, where we’re trying to just give people the gist of the article. And I think I’m not really smart enough to know whether or not this is a true attribution here, but just observationally you’ll see here that what we’ve seen from doing that appears to be that the actual engagement with post goes up, at least as measured by likes, which is what I’m just looking at there.
Mike Haney (00:50:21):
What’s interesting is I thought, well, I’ll really make this slide strong by going out and grabbing some analytics that shows how much traffic this additionally drove. And that’s the little thing down in the corner. It actually hasn’t really affected traffic that much. And I think that’s because we’re delivering a lot of the value in the post itself, so people aren’t necessarily as incentivized to go read it. And I think that’s okay. The real learning for me and having the shift in how we think about social is the goal of the content is education. It’s not hitting some kind of traffic number, it’s not some particular metric. It’s the more people learn about this stuff, the more they take in, the better. And if they’re getting that through what we’re delivering in the post, then that’s a win. And if some people choose to come and dive deeper or come back later, that’s great. Anyway, more to come on this. Probably more analysis. Maybe there’s a separate thread we can start to dive into this, but thought this was just an interesting view on this. That’s it for me.
Josh Clemente (00:51:18):
Fantastic update. Totally agree with the lesson learned there. Also with breaking down these primary literature articles, I think it’s really important to give the tool set, but also I think there’s an opportunity for us to take specific high signal studies that come out and give a deep dive on them to help people. And I know Peter Tee does that as well, but even in a slide format like this, just breaking down a study could be a real tool for the public good. Thank you for continuing to do this. This is awesome. Okay, we’re pretty close on time here. We do have the monthly Friday Fireside after this. I think we should jump straight into it and do individual contributions. Miz, let me know if you think that timing is not going to work out. Okay, cool.
Michael Mizrahi (00:52:06):
All right, will do.
Josh Clemente (00:52:08):
We’ll start from the top. I know Dom is not able to join us. Believe Helena is with us. Actually, not. Helena is not. Ben.
Ben Grynol (00:52:18):
Levels-wise, hot tip two. Jesse and Lori for all their work on mission patches, it’s very cool to see that project coming together. On the personal front, finished Dave Grohl’s new book this week, and it was a nice, introspective reflection on generosity with time and humility. Yeah, just really enjoyed the book and it was very cool to read it.
Josh Clemente (00:52:41):
Very nice. Stacie.
Stacie Flinner (00:52:47):
Just really excited about the beautiful design mocks and how aspirational they feel. And personally, we’re moving again into our new home this weekend, so this one is permanent. We own it.
Josh Clemente (00:53:02):
Congratulations. So cool. Justin.
Justin Stanley (00:53:07):
For me, it’s all the design stuff, like the Morning Reveal is really great and personally, but also work-wise, I have finally replaced my five year old MacBook Pro with a new one and it’s coming today, so I’m super excited to set that up this weekend and use it next week.
Josh Clemente (00:53:25):
It’s a quick turnaround on the delivery there. It’s going to be a fun toy. Lauren.
Lauren Kelley-Chew (00:53:31):
Very excited about just getting to know everybody, and hoping to meet many more of you next week as well. And on the personal side, my birthday is November 1st, so Halloween is always a very exciting holiday for me. I’m going to be doing some Halloween, COVID-safe festivities this weekend.
Josh Clemente (00:53:46):
Awesome. Happy birthday in advance.
Lauren Kelley-Chew (00:53:48):
Thanks.
Josh Clemente (00:53:52):
Tom.
Tom Griffin (00:53:52):
Yeah, I’ll go with the recent blog posts. I finally was catching up on them yesterday on a flight, and they’re just incredible. And I sent them around to a bunch of family and friends. And then personally, down in New Orleans for a wedding, and then heading back to New York tomorrow and have friends visiting New York City for Halloween weekend. So, very busy weekend over here.
Josh Clemente (00:54:13):
Nice. Hao.
Hao Li (00:54:17):
I’m just super excited to catching up all the Levels podcasts I missed during the trip. Yeah, I’ll have quite a bit of listening over the weekend.
Josh Clemente (00:54:29):
Yeah, I caught up, and now I’m somehow behind again. There’s just too much volume. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (00:54:35):
Yeah. Happy to be back after vacation and get caught up again. Some exciting progress for the last two weeks. I’ll plus one on the podcast. I think after listening to Casey and Sam and Ben, I just opened my inbox and went to town for the next few hours. So, really good feeling there. I think Jesse was doing the same, so thanks for the encouragement there. And then also, Alan, the designs are looking great, and really appreciate your expertise there. Not just throwing graphs at everyone, but actually having an opinion on what actually works. So, excited to see that all come to life.
Josh Clemente (00:55:05):
Ditto. Scott.
Scott Klein (00:55:07):
Work-wise, I feel like recruiting is starting to really heat up again. I know you all might not see it, but we’re talking to a lot of really good candidates and we’re getting a lot of really cold inbound, which is great. I think Ben alluded to a good bit of it, but just people that are pretty impressive, reaching out. That’s all good. Personally, Halloween is always fun with the kiddos. We’re doing the older, the three year old girl as Princess Peach, and the eight month old as Toad. That should be pretty fun this weekend, and go get hopefully not too much candy, but yeah.
Josh Clemente (00:55:37):
Nice. Rob.
Robert Lustig (00:55:39):
All right, it’s Halloween, so you know what I’m going to say, so I won’t say it. I’m looking forward to working with Lauren on the IRB protocol. Also, I want to mention that there’s going to be a metabolic health conference in Seattle in June, and I want to know whether or not Levels actually has any collated empiric data on improvement in metabolic health because of the use of the app? Do we have that data yet? I know we’re working on it, but it does it exist? Because if so, we can plan a session to show it.
Josh Clemente (00:56:18):
Might be worth digging into this offline, what we would need to show and how many resources we have available to dive in. But I know we don’t have something presentation-ready at the moment.
Robert Lustig (00:56:29):
Okay.
Josh Clemente (00:56:29):
But yeah, let’s definitely follow up on that. Thank you, Rob. And thank you for the advice to go big on candy this year. Alan.
Alan Mclean (00:56:40):
Well professionally, just very excited that Taylor and Lauren have joined us. Just feels like our game is up with Rob and everybody, it’s just really impressive team that we’re putting together here. Personal side, yeah, kids, candy. Just before they went out today, my daughter asked me, “Is the Switch Witch real?” A Switch Witch is the person that we make them exchange all their candy for a toy, and then eventually I end up eating it, some of it, all of it. And so now I’ve got to answer this question of who is the Switch Witch? And I don’t think that is an actual thing anymore.
Josh Clemente (00:57:17):
Uh-oh, a come to Jesus moment coming soon. Let’s see. From my perspective, I want to highlight Zac. There’s a lot of work that is happening constantly behind the scenes to power many projects, and to avoid many landmines. And Zac has just really taken on so much quietly, and keeping things humming along. And I just want to give him a quick shout-out. No line item would summarize all the stuff he has been doing lately, so thank you for that. And then just generally, the team growth. Taylor joining, having Dave Asprey on our Friday Forum. There’s just a lot of fun people that bring amazing insights, and I think the team growth could not be better. That has been awesome. On the personal front, I’m going to head out to Bozeman this weekend for a couple of days and help my dad build a road on our property. That’s it. Kunal.
Kunal Shah (00:58:14):
Plus one to some of the stuff people have said about team growth, and as well as the designs coming along, I think they’re really bold and really exciting. That’s really cool to take a peek at, as well as catching up on podcasts. And beyond that, on a personal front, I finally cracked open Lifespan by David Sinclair, and I’m only through the introduction but already, I’m pretty excited about the bold claims he makes about people in our generation being able to indefinitely prolong their own lifespans and health spans. So, excited to dive deeper into that one.
Josh Clemente (00:58:50):
Yeah, that’s an inspirational read. Mike.
Mike Didonato (00:58:55):
Oh yeah, I’ll try and keep this quick. Three things. Definitely content plus one, the blog pieces are super timely too. Podcast and blood work, I had a huge smile when the phlebotomist came to my apartment to draw my blood. I’m probably one of the few people, but I’m super pumped to share that with members. And then the third one, I think it was either Sunday or Monday, Ben put out the piece about … Forget if it was his productivity hex. And it was how he gets to inbox zero, how he does a document, all these different things. And it made me remember when I first joined, Sam spent a lot of time with me. I remember he hacked into my Mac and made it work the right way, got rid of my menu bar, the dock, all these different things, and it’s just super cool. I went really deep. I saw that now Sam has this gigantic, whole, Notion database of all his productivity hacks. Just really neat, really cool to have those resources, and doing on our own time. It’s just super helpful.
Josh Clemente (00:59:59):
Yeah. Helping the team get better at things is in all of our best interests. Thanks to those of you who are good at stuff. Tony.
Tony Milio (01:00:08):
On the professional side, really just love seeing those new designs that Alan shared. Those were pretty amazing. Also on another note professional-related, Halloween would be exactly a year that I’ve been collaborating with the Levels team, when I was previously on a freelance basis and actually meeting the Levels team, so that’s a cool feeling. And then personal side, just love Halloween. Excited to just stay in, watch some horror movies.
Josh Clemente (01:00:40):
Definitely. We’ll have to repost that sizzle reel, actually, now that I’m thinking about it. Taylor.
Taylor Sittler (01:00:46):
Hey professionally, I’m just excited to be here. This is awesome. And personally, I’m most excited about my daughter’s deer costume that she just put on and went to daycare with. And also, I’m going to definitely be using the Switch Witch hack. I think I just got a couple of years out of that because she’s one and a half. This is going to work really well. Thank you, Alan.
Josh Clemente (01:01:13):
Love it. Chris.
Chris Jones (01:01:16):
On the Levels front, the theme of the week I would say is execution. I continue to be amazed at, even as we grow, the number of the great content, insights, blogs, posts that come from the team. I can’t even keep up reading all of them. I just need to block more time, whether it be a podcast or a deep dive from the team. Just so much great stuff. I just continue to be impressed by the team.
Josh Clemente (01:01:41):
Gabriel.
Gabriel Brady (01:01:45):
Hey. Yeah, to echo what Tom said, I also recently had a long flight and caught up on a bunch of Levels blog posts, and really enjoyed that. Excited about that. Personally, I’m back in Scotland for the first time in two years, so great to catch up with family and friends.
Josh Clemente (01:02:01):
Amazing. Enjoy. JM.
Josh Mohrer (01:02:05):
On the work side, blood. Really, really pumped about it. On the personal side, I don’t really have a joke about this, but Halloween is horrifying if you have children. It’s like they become crazy and obsessed, and it shows kind of firsthand all the things we’re doing wrong in that regard. So, wish me luck, pray for me. I don’t have a Switch Witch like Alan, but I might try. It’s dark times over here, and it’s my daughter’s half birthday, which is a thing. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know, guys. Have a great weekend.
Josh Clemente (01:02:42):
Good luck from all of us. Zac.
Zac Henderson (01:02:46):
Yeah, so much to be excited for. Especially excited for Taylor to join, and excited to have Miz back. On the personal front, I got my piano tuned after multiple moves, so it’s playable again. That’s exciting. And I have started a new Super Metroid art project, so that has been pretty fun to squeeze in when I have a minute here and there. I’ll share that later.
Josh Clemente (01:03:11):
And I know that you don’t have many minutes here and there, so I’m impressed. Casey.
Casey Means (01:03:18):
Yeah, plus one. Just so happy to have Lauren and Taylor joining this team. The caliber of people joining Levels is absolutely mind-blowing. Also, in the wake of the cholesterol post going up, I just am feeling so grateful to our advisors for A, contributing so much deep knowledge to that post, but also being so willing and enthusiastic to share the article after it came out, within about an hour of me emailing them with the links. Sarah, Rob, Dom, Ben, had all shared it on their social channels, no doubt driving a lot of the traffic. So, pretty incredible and just so grateful to them. Personally, I’m recording six podcasts between this week and early next week, so just back to back on the podcasts, which is awesome. It’s so fun to talk about Levels nonstop. And I closed on my apartment last night, sold it, selling my car tomorrow morning to Carvana at 1:30 PM, and so I will officially be a digital nomad as of 1:30 tomorrow. So, following in Sam’s footsteps.
Josh Clemente (01:04:26):
Congrats. That’s huge. Excited to see what happens next. Haney.
Mike Haney (01:04:32):
Yeah, on the professional side, it was nice to pull together the job description this week for the associate editor. I think how other people have found this to be true, it makes you think about why this is a great place to work as I was writing the description out. I was like, oh, this is a really appealing job because it’s a lot of really good things about working here. And it was just fun to write that out. On the personal side, I’m with JM. I’m a Halloween Grinch, so I’m excited my kid will have fun. He’s going to be a stormtrooper, he’s going to eat a bunch of candy, he’s going to get grumpy. But I will be in the house with the door closed, and the no candy sign out front.
Josh Clemente (01:05:08):
That’s great. I don’t think Braden is with us. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente (01:05:13):
Professionally, the design stuff. I know I’ve been saying that I think literally every week for the past month, but it just amazes me to see all these crazy designs and how much the app is going to change in a really awesome way. And then personally, I had my first Levels in the wild sighting, but it actually turned out it was Mike Didonato, so a little disappointing. I’ll be honest, Mike, I was ready to post it, but it’s fine. But yeah, that’s about it for me.
Josh Clemente (01:05:40):
Yeah, Mike has been reported to me as a Levels in the wild sighting about five times in Philadelphia. He is a prolific runner and never moves without his Levels patch exposed. Thank you, Mike, for representing. Jesse.
Jesse Lavine (01:05:56):
It’s getting really hard to choose something, just one thing to be excited about. But for me this week, it’s going to be all of the IRB stuff. There’s so much awesome work that has been put into that, and as a soon-to-be master’s in public health, it’s very thrilling to step in and do some work there. On the personal side, I was sick this past week, so I am officially healed, which feels great.
Josh Clemente (01:06:19):
Nice. Sam.
Sam Corcos (01:06:22):
I think the two things that come to mind for me is one, Haney’s documentation, scaling up the content org. It’s going to be pretty cool. We have a lot of interesting ideas on how we can do more on that front. It seems like there’s just an endless amount that we can do on content. It’s also related to what Haney and Ben are doing, is the number of cold inbounds that I’m getting. I think Scott mentioned this as well, of really exceptional people who want to join Levels. And a lot of it is because of our blog. A lot of it’s because of our podcast. Just the amount of stuff that we’re putting out there into the world is really starting to pay dividends.
Josh Clemente (01:07:05):
Yeah, 100%. Jackie.
Jackie Tsontakis (01:07:09):
I have one of those productivity sessions with Sam later today, which I’m really pumped for. Mike D, when you mentioned that, I’m like, okay, this is going to change my life. I kind of knew that already, but I’m even more excited now. And Casey, you’ve been a machine on these podcasts. I have so much to catch up on, so I’m excited to do that this weekend, personally.
Josh Clemente (01:07:30):
Remember, Jackie, when you see Sam operating on his inbox, don’t feel shame. Just try and draw out the lessons.
Jackie Tsontakis (01:07:36):
Good advice.
Josh Clemente (01:07:38):
I don’t think Steph is with us, so I believe we made it. We can stop the recording here.