September 17, 2021

Josh (00:00):

All right. Welcome to Friday Forum, September 17th. Jumping straight in. Jam packed week. I had to cut quite a bit of stuff, unfortunately, but sometimes I just can’t make it all fit.

Josh (00:13):

First off, the Metabolical Book Club. So Rob and Casey hosted this and it was a huge success. Besides just being a great live event with our community., It was also something that we then leveraged across the live sessions on the LEVELS podcast feed and also on YouTube. And the YouTube video has, in the first five days gotten 317 hours of watch time, which is an exponential leap across our YouTube assets suite. We don’t have a ton of engagement on that channel yet. And this was by far the biggest. And we also got a lot of great comments, which you can see over here. People were really excited and hoping that we’re going to do regular features. So it bodes really well for not only bringing our advisors more into our public face, but also these community opportunities to give people the front row seat and then expand on that across our channels.

Josh (01:03):

We’re bringing on our longtime contractor, Tony. Many of you have met with and or worked with Tony, but he’s going to join us as multimedia producer. We’ve sort of, with the in-app video and the podcast feeds and everything that we’re doing is clear that we need someone to alleviate Ben and the multitude of contractors we’re using. So Tony has been awesome. He’s very familiar with LEVELS and he will be joining us. We’ve also opened a support specialist role, and we are refining the product role that we discussed last week and will be going live with something in the coming days or within the week.

Josh (01:39):

Let’s see. Miz led a preparation of a year in review, so you can see the teaser there. But we looked back at the last year since we closed our seed round, which is 12 months ago already somehow, and just looked at the team growth and all the accomplishments across the major company objectives. And it was amazing. First of all, the execution on this, thank you Miz for the way that you wrangled the troops to get this thing done. And also just the pace and progress that we’ve made. It really felt like all of the accomplishments that have ever happened at the company were since just the seed i last October. It’s pretty wild. So a huge shout out to the team on that. And it will go into the materials that we’re using to push into our next round.

Josh (02:27):

We are currently onboarding our second Grove City research study. So this one, Dr. Tim Noakes is on the study team. And this is looking at performance, athletic performance, in high carb diet versus low carb diet athletes. And I believe it’s a crossover form factor, but the point is to look at correlations between output and performance and endurance in these athletes versus their dietary strategy. And they’ll be using LEVELS throughout. So we can pull some correlations with the metabolic score zone scores and glycemic control. So this is going to be a really interesting one. That’s currently onboarding and it’s IRB approved.

Josh (03:06):

And then nutritionist marketplace projects. So Tom will get to this later in the slides, but this officially kicked off huge week for projects generally. But the nutritionist marketplace is something that’s been on the back burner for a long time and tons of people have interest in it. Our members really want to have access to experts who understand the LEVELS platform, and that’s what this is going to lead into. And I want to shout out Jeff Jordan and Sandra Daniels, two of the experts in our network who spent time giving us guidance on marketplace development. So this is quite exciting.

Josh (03:38):

Let’s see. This week Kelly LeVeque is recording a whole new LEVELS podcast on nutrition and kids. She and Allison Hall, who is running the wellness study at the University of South Florida with LEVELS, they recorded Kelly’s podcast, Be Well By Kelly. So that’s a nice collision of two folks in our orbit. We got in touch with Tom Bilyeu, who is going to be using LEVELS in the near term and is very excited to potentially collaborate. Got a shout out from Kara Swisher on Pivot this week, or maybe it was not this week, it was two weeks ago, but that was awesome. Chris dug that one up and noted it, and that is exciting. Got some great feedback from Naval. Many of us are quite familiar with and follow Naval, and he was very excited about his experience. Definitely wants more in terms of the LEVELS insights, but awesome to hear that the program resonated.

Josh (04:30):

This is a snapshot of the Nutrition Marketplace project, what is to come in terms of getting people personalized guidance. We’re seeing a lot of user generated content featuring our assets from our other channels, so people are re-sharing, even old episodes of the whole new LEVEL, which is really exciting. Got a great comment here and a few other testimonials about the quality of the LEVEL swag, the motivation that it brings, and then that we have the best customer service, this individual who sits on several company boards, consumer company boards, has ever seen, which is amazing. The Ben Greenfield newsletter went out today, so we should expect some conversions from that. And then a nice little feature here from Twitter. People are saying that LEVELS is a total game changer and is one of the pieces of tech hardware that really excited them recently.

Josh (05:18):

And then lastly, we’re continuing to make user generated content with the metabolic mentor. And so this is one of our most recent affiliates on YouTube and we are getting some great stuff. He’s making unbelievably high quality content for us and we’ll continue to do so as an affiliate. So that’s exciting. All right, moving ahead.

Josh (05:39):

We are not yet recording, so I am starting now. That’s unfortunate.

Speaker 3 (05:44):

Oh no.

Josh (05:44):

Thanks Andrew for raising that. And thank you Murillo. Jumping ahead.

Murillo (05:51):

So a really big week for social features this. Week we actually launched the community over to our members. We have about 45 that have been in as bystanders. And from there about seven have reached out to us saying even more so they wanted to share own data with the social feed as well. And most of the community feed right now is actually composed of a number posts, which has been great. We’ve been getting tons of feedback as well on the new features. So it’s been really exciting to see everybody working on that. And right now we’re setting up analytics. So with the new Optout analytics that go out, we’ll have a good insight as to the degree to which people are using the new social features here. And on top of that, there’s a proposal coming together right now for what’s next, what the next iteration of this experiment looks like. So expect to see that really soon. That’s all for social.

Speaker 5 (06:53):

Awesome.

Josh (06:56):

T.G.

Tom Griffin (06:59):

All right, so we kicked off a new, looks like my emoji’s not coming through there, the salad emoji on the top. But we kicked off a new project officially this week, which is called Nutritionist Pilot v2, subtitle Marketplace. The reason it’s V2 is we ran a V1 earlier this year, which was happening offline. We manually connected members to Nutritionists for further advice and guidance on top of what we provide in the app. And the goal of this pilot is really twofold. So continue to test demand and more specifically willingness to pay. We’ve heard anecdotally from our members that they want this, but will they pay for it? And then number two is learn about marketplaces. So both the demand side as well as more about the supply side, which is how to add value to nutritionists.

Tom Griffin (07:49):

We’re moving quickly on this project. Our goal is to have it released to a subset of members within a few weeks by early October and some great initial progress this week. The initial design and engineering work was completed, required to actually start building next week. And then I’ve been handling everything ops and partnerships related, including managing the relationships with nutritionist. So yeah, more at levels.link/nutrition. And I’ll let Alan talk through some of those design mocks that you see a little bit later on in the deck.

Tom Griffin (08:22):

Next slide. One more quick one. Just a shout out to a couple of our investors. Josh mentioned this at the top of the meeting. So got to speak with Jeff Jordan, as well as Sandra Daniels about just what we should be thinking about when considering building a marketplace and hard to imagine two better people to chat with than people who have led companies like OpenTable, eBay, and Thumbtack. So grateful to our investor network. That’s it.

Josh (08:50):

Awesome, thank you.

Justin Stanley (08:53):

For table stakes design experience, we’ve revised the target date for completion by one week in advance. So now it’s Friday, October 15th. Alan had scoped out all the iconography changes or what we’re going to do and the cards. And he’s working on scoping out some more stuff today, I believe. Steph finished up all the scroll indicator margin fixes on the rest of the app, which you can see in that first gif. And she’s starting on the iconography stuff now. And I had replaced on the right, you can see the LEVELS logo is the all white version there for the launch screen and the top bar there. Next slide.

Justin Stanley (09:43):

So for my data, I spent a lot of time on stuff this week, so lots of changes. First is, when you scroll on the chart, on that first gif, scrolling side to side, if to change the time range and the average score to represent whatever is currently in the window. The sleep report zone score had a really old look, so I’ve just changed that to look like the existing zone score badges. When you tap on the three stats that are on the day review screen now, it’ll show little explainers thing, which is on the right there in that gif. The text, the sleep summary showing on the wrong day, refreshing the glucose in the tiles on a review there because it wasn’t updating as glucose was being imported. Now that’s working fine and moving things around so that we have different tabs there and getting rid of stats and all that stuff. So hopefully we’re ready to maybe get this out to members, start getting feedback in next week.

Josh (10:43):

That looks great. Thanks Justin. Jeremy?

Jeremy (10:52):

Just a small one here. Well, small engineering wise. Prescription renewal is now ready for testing, which is really, really exciting. The dates, the months there that you see there towards the middle of the slide, those are how many prescription expirations we have coming up. This has not been a big problem because it’s been onesie, twosies, but it’s really going to take off. And so this will make everyone’s lives a lot easier. So it’s ready for testing. That’ll start next week. Ops folks, keep an eye out for messages from me about how to do that. Then we’ll add a little bit of automation to get rid of the problem almost entirely. So, super excited.

Josh (11:36):

Feels like not a moment too soon. It’s awesome. All right, David?

David (11:44):

This is a quick call to this one. We talked about it last week, but it’ll be going out today in the build that Apple has approved. So I’m very excited to finally get the quantitative data on this. Thanks a lot, Xinlu and Murillo.

Josh (11:57):

Awesome. Thanks team. Scott.

Scott (12:01):

Guided journey. Just a quick update, still working through high level stuff around concept formation data and customer discussions. Wanted to have a much larger fun discussion about the conversations that I’m having now. So next slide. Little locker room talk. This company is filled with people that have full hearts. I just want to call that out. It’s a big reason that I joined, but we all know that full hearts alone do not win football games. Next slide.

Scott (12:30):

This is the pinnacle of TV in my opinion, and I have been spending two weeks having conversations where clear eyes have been very necessary and very eyeopening, I guess you could call it. So I wanted to walk through this, in a light way though, because I think that so much of what we do here on the Friday forum is celebratory. And I think I’ve had a rare opportunity to talk to people who, in their own words, hated the LEVELS experience. And so I just wanted to bring some of that forward because it’s good for us to stay close to these conversations. So next slide.

Scott (13:04):

We stumbled upon some data here this week, which we thought was really interesting, showing us that about 20% to 25% of people at any given time just don’t get the sensor on their body or they don’t get their glucose data into LEVELS. The point is that we don’t know, we’re in the process of figuring it out, but I think that when we focus on, we have growth updates, we see revenue numbers, we see membership numbers, we see wait list numbers, it’s not really indicative of if we pull back the covers, what’s actually going on. And so part of doing this is just baselining and benchmarking in a way. Where are we even at with our customers in terms of adoption, features, how long they stay on the sensors? We want to make sure that we know what these numbers are so that as part of the guided journey work, we’re knowing that we’re making these numbers better. So this is a red flag. And so we’ll chase that one down.

Scott (13:53):

I also had a lot of opportunity to talk to people about their initial experience, people that didn’t make it through two full sensors because they just were done with it for pain or misunderstanding or whatever the case was. So as part of that, I think as we look at the responsible individual work that we’re doing, it’s establishing scope. And I think I had a rare case where I had in my head written off a bit of work that I was going to maybe going to select for later that we could do in phase four and five, but it’s really come to the four and probably something that we’re going to do as part of phase one, and that is onboarding. So next slide.

Scott (14:28):

So I pulled some actual quotes from people that when they did their initial unboxing, including one of my best friends here, she ordered it and I sat with her. She unboxed everything for the first time. She was very excited. These are not all her quotes, these are just quotes from other customers that I’ve talked to. So did they send me the wrong product? What is a Libray? They thought this was a mistake. They don’t know who Truepill is. It’s written all over the prescriptions. One person thought they needed to go drop it off at Walgreens to keep going with the product. The vast majority of people just scrolled right by the 11 minute alley video.

Scott (15:04):

So even though it’s nice and it has all the information, I think they’re actually so excited, so excited to get LEVELS on. They’re like, you know what? I’d rather just fumble through it myself than sit and watch a 11 minute video. And then the needle was really, really, really a thing that I think we need to maybe start to prep people on and give them some good confidence, that it’s actually not going to hurt because we don’t mention it the whole way there. And then it’s staring them in the face as we are having them put it on their body. So next slide.

Scott (15:33):

And then, cool. Now we’ve got three apps to download. We’ve got to connect two of them up. Some more quotes here. I wish you would’ve had me do this sooner. Again, they’re really excited to get the sensor on and now it’s like they’ve got 45 minutes to an hour of setup. We tell them 15 minutes. I think that’s quite generous in terms of our thinking. So is the connection to LEVELS working? They’re not sure. Again, with the hour delay, another person thought the NFC was just to get the thing activated, but that it should have been Bluetooth. And so they were waiting for data for hours and hours and hours and it wasn’t coming in because they weren’t doing it with Libray.

Scott (16:09):

Next up. So I just wanted to set the stage for why this is maybe very acute for us right now. And the way that I think about of general startups is you have your early adopter set. We think about this as layers of the onion. You’ve got your early adopter set, which are for us would’ve been our biohacker, quantified self people. And then the next layer out is you get your friends and family, you just rope them in, you sit, you help them out, you can bootstrap the stuff. And then v2, you get the next layer out, which might be not quite biohackers, but maybe tech enabled, people that are really curious and want to know about their health. Go to the next slide.

Scott (16:51):

We have had this massive content machine that has just catapulted us to one of the outer layers pretty quickly. So yesterday I spent an hour talking to a 65 year old man who is very pre-diabetic and he’s very concerned about his health and he is very, very frustrated at the LEVELS app because we’re giving him all this data and he has no idea what to do about it. It’s actually stressing him out more than it was before he had the app. So I just wanted to call out that we are reaching an audience, I think, because our content and editorial team are doing so incredibly well that we’re reaching audiences that most startups that would’ve taken them months or years to even get access to as time has gone on. And we’ve leapfrogged that. So I think this project’s particularly important because the consumer grade of the app that we need to ship is much higher than maybe most people would have time to or afforded to them to do. Next slide.

Scott (17:46):

All right, lessons we’ve learned so far. So the last couple weeks I’ve set the stage on hey, here’s some of our assumptions of what we’re going to do. And a lot of them turned out to be false and I just wanted to highlight that as a part of a, hey, here’s our product process, here’s part of the responsible individual process. We come in with some conceptions and hopefully a lot of those get blown out of the water. And some of them have here. So I just wanted to enumerate those. Next slide.

Scott (18:09):

All right, so first thing we thought was we were going to do some phased or baseline onboarding. So we break it up on the decks [inaudible 00:18:15]. You got 10 days to explore, 10 days to optimize, 10 days to accountability, whatever you want to call it. The second one was maybe we graduate you into the day score. It’s a common confusion. Maybe we have a checklist of things to do to unlock it. The third one was, we could do some goal tracking around glucose and that being the main indicator that we let you set goals around. And then the fourth one is just, food tagging, it’s going to feed back into Onboard or sorry, Guided Journey eventually, but maybe not right now. And all of these have been either just completely gotten rid of or changed in some way. So go to the next slide and we’ll talk about where we landed.

Scott (18:50):

Oops. Instead of the phase or baseline onboarding, I think we’ve landed on more of a self-paced discovery. So if you’re a really power user and you want to blow through all the content and really go through the app in the first 60 minutes, by all means, go ahead. Not everybody has that amount of time. Structurally, they have issues with their life where they just want to slowly use LEVELS and go at their own pace. We need to support that and enable that. It’s become very clear in customer calls that people have very different paces by which they want to explore the app. And so we want to just roll things out as they’re ready for it.

Scott (19:24):

I think our current working opinion around the metabolic score is that if we move it to a rolling seven day week score, it might actually be better because people, again, have structural issues. They have poor food choices at work, and so they get into the weekend and their scores are better. It’s unclear that they can make it better on the weekdays. If we do a seven day rolling window, it’s more encompassing of what their life is structurally. And so we don’t want you to get whacked when the structure of your life changes. And so that may be a good way for us to go about doing this. It also lets us baseline a little bit through the first week of where they’re at.

Scott (19:56):

Second thing, on that call yesterday, this poor man was really concerned that his weight was going down. And I just asked him how his energy levels were doing. And his wife ran into the Zoom and said, “He’s doing great. Just tell him he’s doing great, please.” And it was a really an indicator to me that I think just even prompting people for these questions to get them to think about how good you feel about your knowledge about your food or how good is your energy right now, if we don’t put that front and center, they might not actually think about that and they may still be stressed. And so I think alongside glucose and weights, we might be wanting to track energy and knowledge as well.

Scott (20:31):

And the last one is just my personal opinion. I am really convinced that food tagging has come front and center. I’ve had to block it off, rope it off from this project. But every single conversation I’ve had, without a doubt, eventually centers around food logging, what insights come out of that. And so the quicker we can get to some structured tagging where people can do some exploration and we can do some targeted outreach to them about how to change things, the better. So that’s it for me. Clear eyes, full heart.

Josh (21:01):

Awesome segment. Scott, thank you. There’s a lot in there to unpack, so thanks for surfacing. All right, Alan.

Alan (21:10):

Hey everybody. Great recap, Scott. I’m always enjoying the intros that you have there with the gifs and so on. And so what’s design doing? Process, nutritionist, journey, membership, coherence, lots of projects this week. Next slide please.

Alan (21:28):

So these were my focus areas this week. It was largely looking at how do we scale design. There’s only one of me, so how do I scale myself looking at pain points in the process for design? And I also had a nice chance to do a recap on the week or on the work so far, looking at Nutritionists, got a journey, membership, which they tends to have a fair bit of overlap, I’m discovering. And some of the design coherence work with Justin. So next slide.

Alan (21:57):

So on process, I think we’re realizing, or I am realizing the limits of my capabilities here. And so I thought it’d be a good chance to look back at the year. So far, it’s been six months just crossed the six month threshold. There’s a little thread around this where you can look at sort of before and afters and what we think is next. I think some learnings there was we need to adapt some of our process to allow more people to jump in design, be it freelancers or new hires or even engineers and product people on the team. And also, I’m going to start experimenting with how time is allocated. For now, I’m going to try to dedicate given days per project. That doesn’t mean necessarily five days per week there’s one day per project necessarily, although that’s how we’re starting. But I think what I’ve discovered is I’m doing a lot of context switching between projects in the day and I need to have of dedicated focus time per project. Next slide.

Alan (22:54):

So actually, nice example of how that really works well is Nutritionists. This turned out to be what I thought might be a big project, turned out to be a one day effort. We cranked through some visual designs yesterday that basically brings a user into Nutritionists, gives them an opportunity to see different people available to them to help them with their eating. They can connect with them. And just speaking to the design a little bit, I think this is the first interaction people may have with a human being. And so we’re giving it a slightly different look. I knew this light theme experimentation might come in handy someday. And so we’re going to try looking at this different visual expression of the brand for when you talk to human beings. And that is a little bit lighter, a little bit more colorful. Next slide.

Alan (23:46):

So Membership, Onboarding, Guided journey. There’s a lot of overlap between this stuff. I think what we’re discovering is, we’ve got a lot of different touch points as a user in the experience. And so what we want to find a way to do is potentially centralize that in the product, in the app. Can we get device presence for you sooner? And can we make that a little bit more streamlined? And also with respect to the guided journey, we need to know a little bit more about your goals and bring those to the four in the product experience. And so a lot of this has been less traditional design and more looking at the flows, looking at pain points, identifying how you get from point A to point B. Next slide.

Alan (24:29):

Design Coherence. Oh, back one. So there’s an enormous number of different kinds of cards and visual treatments in the app for different kinds of content. And so we’re wrangling that, we’re bringing it together and pretty excited about where this is going because I think the more systematized, the more structured our cards and content and visual treatments are, the more it’s going to allow other people to make their own work without me, which is I think a good thing. So we’re building the Lego pieces for the team and that’s making good progress. I’m going to be focusing today for the rest of today on that. Next slide.

Alan (25:07):

So next week. As I mentioned, dedicated days per project. Next week I’m going to be focusing a lot on the Guided Journey and Membership. So probably three days next week on those two and two days on just wrapping up Design Coherence, to be in a good place for Steph and Justin to continue working. So that’s it. Thank you.

Josh (25:29):

Awesome, thanks Alan. All right, quick hiring update. So we’ve opened a new role for support specialist. This is up live on Workable right now. Chris Jones is taking point on this, so if you have any questions on the role or have anyone you would like to recommend, either send them to that page or ping Chris. That’s it.

Chris (25:52):

Quick update on Member Experience. The first insight I had is, I need to stop following Alan and all his design, pretty, beautiful pictures. It just makes my slides feel like blah. Or I got to up my game like Scott’s doing. So that’s my first insight. A round of text analytics. You’ve heard me talk about some of the pilots we’re doing. I wrap that up, I’m going to be recommending Thematic, so I’ll probably be pulling in some people across the team just to evaluate security, privacy as a good platform contracts. So I’m going to be looking to move into, trying to onboard them, but I was super impressed with their platform and also the value they provide. So looking forward to a lot of insights we can claim from that.

Chris (26:37):

On the support side, huge shout out to Kunal on the delay your subscription. So that was a new thing that we added, which within a week reduced our call volume for that topic by 47%. So we would get lots of people that say, “I’m going to go on vacation, can I pause my subscription for a while and come back?” And that was all manual. So this was a huge automation, as well as the work around renewing your annual subscription that Jeremy’s doing. So we appreciate all the love from engineering. And refund churn and contact rates continue trend in the right direction. These are all great metrics. It’s early, but showing not just a week, but three to four to five weeks of continuous, in the right direction, shows great improvements.

Chris (27:18):

And lastly, on the Truepill… One more thing I forgot to mention on the bottom, similarly to how Scott talked about or I see and JM talked about onboarding and the flows and people getting into using the app. We started, JM put together a dashboard looking at the onboarding conversion funnel. So people, as they start to sign up and give us their credit card and just each of those screens. So that’s a new metric we’re going to be tracking. So thank you JM for building that dashboard. As we start doing experiments, looking at language, how many steps in the flow that we want to know every place people are falling off and why, so we can iterate an experiment on it.

Chris (27:59):

Then lastly, on the Truepill side, we are talking to a number of 3PL’s as we look to move to more of a non-prescription product. The good news of Truepill is, super supportive of supporting us in that journey, but it’s going to come up with a different contract proposal in terms of making sure it makes sense for them. So we’re working on a new proposal to help hopefully keep them as our 3PL as we move into non-prescription products. And that’s it for Member Experience.

Josh (28:30):

Awesome numbers here. Thanks a lot Chris and thanks team. Ben.

Ben (28:36):

Okay, weekly recognized revenue, $97,000. So strong week. We’re at 315 for the month of recognized revenue. So surpassed our goal, sitting well there. $8.2, as far as cash in the bank, no changes to debt. 42 months of runway. Well, next slide please. So Growth Theme is Eusociality. Why not talk about ants? Because ants are absolutely fascinating. And if anybody’s ever watching David Attenborough talk so eloquently about them, there’s lots to learn from logistics, to the way that they work. Next slide please.

Ben (29:10):

So what does that have to do with our team? Well, we’ve been undertaking different content opportunities with thought leaders like Dr. Lustig, sorry Rob, Dr. Gottfried, we’ll refer to her as that and Kelly LeVeque, this week. And so when we’re doing that, we’re putting forth an effort as a team to say, hey, if we go a lot deeper and start to cut sub assets, I mean this is nothing new. It’s something that we’ve talked about as far as creating derivative assets and putting them out through different distribution channels. But that’s not enough to just say, “Cool, we’ll do that.” What’s happening and how this relates to Eusociality and what that is, is the way that teams or the way that ants work together, where there’s just this understood division of labor, where everybody picks up a shovel, where bridges together and makes a bridge to get across from one leaf to a branch.

Ben (30:04):

And so when we’ve been creating this content, it’s this all hands on deck and it’s this understood thing that he’s like, “Cool, I got the transcript. If we want to ship this fast, I’m just going to write the blog post internally.” A lot of things that seem inefficient in the near term but are actually allowing us to get iterations in. So what does this actually mean? Well, metabolical, when we put out that video, so that five days into it it had 317 hours of view time on it. That is an absolutely incredible amount of intention to have, given that only has 11, well it’s our top performing video on YouTube, but 1,100 views. So if you think about the watch rate versus the number of views, that is incredible. And then you can see the comments here. Favorite is at the bottom talking about Dr. Robert Lustig is king and how he’s changed people’s lives and all these great things. We had all these assets go out, video, podcast, transcript, blog is coming up. And then we’ve got social distribution.

Ben (31:06):

So if you go to the next slide please to summarize on this. And Josh alluded to it in the beginning, we’re starting to see a lot of UGC around this content. So we’ve got Casey shared Subcut through her social, through IG and they started getting reposts. And there was an incredible amount of them. We’re seeing resurfacing of this episode. The middle one is episode 10 of a whole new level. And we’re on 24, I think. 24 or 25 is coming out next week.

Ben (31:38):

That’s pretty cool to see that episode 10 is getting re-shared and people are still immersing themselves in that. And even, this is, what we see is just re-shares. There are people who are, and we can see in the analytics, people who are listening to episode two and episode three every week. So the Lindy effect is, the longer it stays around, the longer it remains relevant. And we saw that even with Mike’s episode on Mindset in Metabolic Health. So very cool to see that all of our Eusociology work as a team is coming together to create this flywheel of a lot of UGC. So that is ants for the week.

Josh (32:16):

Thank you David Attenborough. I have been jumping ahead. Partnerships, Tom.

Tom Griffin (32:23):

That was great Ben. All right, some weekly highlights. So we’re in touch finally with Tom Bilyeu’s team. Tom has been one of our remaining whales, if you will, in the health and wellness influencer space, has an absolutely enormous platform. And had a call with their team this week and they’re very interested in collaborating in a variety of ways across a variety of platforms. So Tom should be using LEVELS soon, which is very exciting. A couple other updates. So Whoop and LEVELS, as I think everyone knows, we wrapped up a case study with their team. We found a correlation between our metabolic score and their recovery and sleep scores. Not a randomized controlled trial by any means, but an initial interesting data point.

Tom Griffin (33:09):

And what’s really awesome about this is we’re going to produce a ton of content as a result of this case study. So we’ll be on the Whoop podcast, which is a pretty big podcast at this point. We’ll have them on our podcast, we’ll do IG lives and an AMA in their app. So lots of exciting stuff that’s going to happen between LEVELS and Whoop. And then we’ll start to also explore what the timeline and relative priority looks like for potential app integration. And then lastly, just another shout out to Metabolism Mentor Austin McGuffie. He’s awesome. He released a new video this week and just really unique and great content. Had a call with him and he’s going to be producing a bunch more stuff for LEVELS. So excited about that.

Josh (33:53):

Fantastic. Big stuff. Thanks Tom.

Haney (33:59):

So three new articles up on the blog this week. Were back to our Foods We Love series. We had a little pause, but we got more of those coming up. Tahini, which everybody loves. A nice five questions. And then the third one here about, “Too much exercise doesn’t likely damage metabolic health,” is another one of these study breakdowns by a guy named Matt Laye, who’s a metabolic health researcher. And these are really great. We’re going to keep leading into this, where he basically picks apart a study. And in this case it’s one that came out a couple months ago. Got a lot of headlines that I think misrepresented the study and Matt did a really good job of breaking down why that is. So, really good. And then really want to call out a new everyone on content piece that came up.

Haney (34:41):

This was really the first one that has emerged from our new process of having Erin, our writer, interview folks on the team, glean the insights from that. So she talked to Mercy going into it. I said, “Mercy does a ton of stuff here, I don’t know what you’re going to want to talk about.” And she said, “It’s fine, we’ll figure something out on the call.” And what we got was this great, really servicey article that really gets specific about what Mercy does. And I think it’s a reflection of the rest of the team to have such great customer support calls. So this is up on Medium now. Go out and take a look at it.

Haney (35:14):

Some other cool stuff in the works. We started working with artists to do some new graphics for the blog posts, long overdue, help break up our very long text and help people get through them. As been mentioned, we’re going to do a couple of these Q&A posts, these derivative posts from these conversations. We’ll edit Metabolical Book Club down into a post. And same with the Kelly thing. And we’re going to work on what we’re calling the LEVELS Food Manifesto, which is going to be a way to really articulate how we think about diet and food and how we approach these things, which I think is a question we get a lot. So good content coming up.

Haney (35:48):

And finally, stat of the week, this just emerged from the year and review thing. I thought it would be interesting just to see. We’ve got about 156 articles now up on the blog. So, more to come. That’s it for me.

Josh (36:00):

Incredible stuff. Thank you Haney. Thank you team. All right. We got time and we’re rolling right into the fireside after this. So Rob.

Rob (36:12):

To let everyone know I’m probably not going to be on the call next week or the week after. Next week, I’m actually going to be in Atlanta for a meeting of the American Academy of Oral and Systemic Health and one of the other speakers happens to be Dom D’Agostino. So I will definitely be hooking up with him. And of course, LEVELS will be at the top of the list.

Josh (36:38):

Love to hear it. Powerhouse. Alan.

Alan (36:43):

So work-wise, I’m actually really surprisingly optimistic about experimenting with process. I’ve been process resistant in the past, but I think generally, I’ve arrived at this point where having a process doesn’t guarantee success, but not having one sets you down a path to failure. So I decided to be trying out how time was allocated and how we work. And I’m going to try, I had a failed 100 or a failed century last weekend, ended up walking my bike up and down downtown on gravel paths. So I’m going to try again this weekend. Looking forward to that.

Josh (37:23):

Nice. Keep us posted. Miz. No Scott, sorry.

Scott (37:30):

Work-wise, I am excited about people that are of raising their hand to be responsible individuals. I mean I think coming into a role like that when you don’t have PM experiences is rough. And so I just enjoy that. I have teammates that are willing to do that. So we’re definitely in the storming phase of this and so I know we’re going to get to a better place with it and it’s been good. Everyone’s been super optimistic. Personally, I need to go catch up on some sleep because the kiddos are not doing well right now.

Josh (37:59):

Enjoy. Miz.

Miz (38:04):

On the work side, excited for assemblage today and also really excited by the velocity of hiring. A ton of really great interests, amazing candidates, really interesting roles. So happy to see that. And then on the personal side, I’m off the grid tomorrow through Sunday, going zip lining and then sleeping in a tree house in the Redwoods up in Sonoma in Guerneville. So never done either of those. It’s glamping, there’s a bathroom in the tree house and stuff, but still getting out there.

Josh (38:33):

The nature is what matters. That’s going to be awesome. Ben.

Ben (38:38):

LEVEL side. So massive, massive hat tip to Miz. I feel like it’s this consistent theme every week, but there was so much going on. There’s assemblage, there’s this investor year and review process and all this documentation where we came together as a team. Very, very cool. Back to Eusociality. And then this offer out to Tony yesterday. Miz is just working at this incredible pace, but he is this glue that just keeps sticking things together. And so I really, I’m just grateful for everything that he does. So that is LEVELS. And then personally, I just started this new book that dropped from James Dyson called Invent. And it’s very cool, so super stoked on that.

Josh (39:21):

Nice. I’ll have to read it. Mike D.

Mike D (39:24):

Definitely excited for the rest of the events today with assemblage. I said this last week, but definitely the Guided Journey, what Scott’s doing, he and I chatted for an hour this week and I think it’s something we’ve been talking about for a while. So it’s pretty awesome to see it come to life. And then it’s definitely pretty cool to have Tony come on full time. I remember when, I think Tom connected us for the sizzle reel last year. And then he is obviously done so much, so it’s pretty cool. That’s it.

Josh (39:58):

Justin.

Justin Stanley (40:00):

LEVELS wise, I’m really excited to be able to ship my data in some way to the members so they can start using it. I think it’ll be really cool. And I’m also headed over to do some hanging out with friends on the weekend, which I haven’t seen in a while. And should be good.

Josh (40:22):

Nice. Down.

Dom (40:25):

Everything is great on the research front. Excited to see Rob at the conference next weekend. I think I’ll be flying about this time next week. So missing that. I did a podcast, Work Hard Play Hard Podcast, and Rob Murgatroyd was a host and he was using LEVELS, so it’s pretty cool to see that.

Josh (40:46):

I’ll hand that one to Tom to follow up on Rob. Let’s see, Kunal.

Kunal (40:51):

It’s a good sign. On the LEVELS marketplace, it never ceases to amaze me how much people will lean into their projects and care about their work here. I love seeing a lot of the presentations, especially Scott, on the Guided Journey. And Ben with the ant analogy. Loved it all and I’m looking forward to the nutritionist Marketplace project as well. And on the personal side, just looking forward to relaxing weekend, maybe some long runs.

Josh (41:25):

Nice. Mercy.

Mercy (41:29):

Professionally, the assemblage stuff, I love assemblage, it’s my favorite part. And then just all the design things have been huge and the subscription change, there’s just a lot of changes that made drastic differences that I’m excited for. Personally, not much going on this weekend. So pretty low key.

Josh (41:49):

Vinay is not with us. Helena?

Helena (41:53):

I’m really excited about the Guided Journey project. I think that there will be a lot of insights and potential improvements on our end that will come out of it. And I’m also super excited for assemblage. I have all my cocktail making ingredients.

Josh (42:11):

Looking forward to it. Steph.

Steph (42:14):

Professionally, I am super stoked for first assemblage and a huge shout out to Justin for just being so helpful and a great mentor. He’s always willing to answer my questions and clear things up for me, and so thank you. And it’s been exciting to see efficiency start to ramp up and the design stakes task is so good for that because I’m getting to touch a lot of different points of the code base.

Steph (42:38):

And so, just super excited about all of that. And personally, Helena and I were talking about this this week, but it’s so cool to be around such motivated, awesome people on this team. I feel it affecting my personal life as well, with just fitness motivation is at an all time high and professional motivations at an all time high. So I’m a big believer that you become the people you surround yourself with, so it’s great to be able to work at a place that has such a positive impact on my personal life as well.

Josh (43:10):

Love it, especially in a remote environment. That’s great to hear. Chris.

Chris (43:17):

On the LEVELS front, super excited about assemblage, especially the cocktail hour, a plus one on Jeremy’s comment. On the personal front, last week I got my very first chainsaw, so after day one I had it smoking like a hot rod on a Saturday night burning rubber. So had to figure out all the issues with that. So I’m looking forward to fixing that this weekend. Have lots of new gear to sharpen the blades, to make some firewood because winter is coming.

Josh (43:50):

Yes it is. In my experience, chainsaws aren’t intended to last longer than 10 days, they’re disposable. So good luck with that. JM.

JM (44:00):

On the LEVELS front, even though our velocity is so high, the year in review doc was really inspiring to read through, to see everything that we’ve done in the last year obviously. It’s really, really something. On the personal front. This time last week I thought my running season was over because I had some pain in my heel that I couldn’t really shake, but I learned some new stretches recently and got something to help with that and I had a really good week running and that will continue this weekend, which makes me very happy.

Josh (44:31):

Awesome. Jesse.

Jesse (44:34):

I’m excited about assemblage today. It’s off to a great start. And plus one to what Steph said, I feel like this team has really motivated me in my personal life as well in fitness schools. The Peloton was drenched and was in a pretty bad mood after the bike ride, but it was worth it because my well blood sugar was high, but it was good. And really excited about the Guided Journey work and I think that’s going to be awesome. Personally, I’m going Denver this weekend. I’m going to spend some time my best friend from school and really looking forward to that.

Josh (45:06):

Awesome. Enjoy the trip. Sam, are you still on? I think he had to jump. Tom.

Tom Griffin (45:15):

I was also very inspired by the year interview process and documents. Had a great coffee and walk with Kunal Williamsburg, which was awesome and very excited about Tony coming on board, who I’ve known for a little while. And then personally, had friends in town from various states and countries. So I was pretty stretched thin this week, but it was great. And also got a new computer, which I’m excited about. I messaged Miz and asked him if I had a computer that was five years old with a lot of the keys coming off if he thought I needed a new one. And he said, “Yes, absolutely.” Here’s my E key, I’ve got a few keys that aren’t on my board anymore.

Josh (45:53):

I don’t want to hear it. I have a 2009 IBM. Until that thing is giving you trap muscles from carrying it around, I think it… I was kidding. If you have hardware that is making your life worse, definitely, definitely get it replaced. Get new stuff. And Miz can help out with that. We should all have comfortable remote work setups, so definitely do that. Hao.

Hao (46:21):

LEVEL wise, really excited about the assemblage, for sure. And awesome project we’re happening right now. So it’s really looking forward to see the reaction. And personally, just get ready for my big trip next week. I’m going to camp at Canadian Rockies, with minus five Celsius, 23 fahrenheit degrees. So we’ll see how that goes.

Josh (46:50):

That sounds awesome. Enjoy. For me, I’m really excited about the project Velocity, still just seeing all of the work starting to build into a wave of progress across the product and all the different ideas we’ve had for so long. It’s like building inertia and I think we’re going to see this step change in what we’re presenting to members really soon. So it’s awesome. Personally, we’re approaching D-day for wedding time, so I’m just trying to keep the nerves together and get all the final details done. So this weekend is going to be another planning weekend, but it’s good and I’m keeping up with the marathon stuff. Murillo.

Murillo (47:38):

All right. So I’ll plus one the Guided Journey. I got unreasonably excited at Scott’s clear eyes approach, just love seeing the soberness to it. It’s an important project, so it’s really good to see how thoroughly he’s thinking about things. Personally, taking a road trip this weekend, just before we head out to Brazil. So me and my fiance can enjoy the last weekend together, just the two of us. So should be fun.

Josh (48:14):

Very nice. Stacie.

Stacie (48:17):

On the LEVELS front, I’m so excited Tony is joining us. I got to spend three days with him last year. He, at the very last minute, joined a photo shoot that I had planned and produced this sizzle reel to announce our raise and who is just phenomenal. So that’s amazing news. I’m so excited. And then on the personal front, we have this house and I’m thrilled. So, as David said, we’re just going to clean all weekend and I’m very excited.

Josh (48:46):

That’s awesome. Congrats. Zac.

Zac (48:51):

On the professional front, I would say year review was awesome to read and super excited for assemblage today. Personal front, I have some family in town, so excited for a relaxing weekend with my sister-in-law.

Josh (49:05):

Nice. Enjoy. Haney.

Haney (49:08):

Work-wise, I love the work that Scott presented. My head just naturally always goes to, “Yeah, but what do the people who hate us think?” I love that that’s being quantified and thought about in such a thoughtful way. So much good to come of that. Personally, it’s the kid’s 8th birthday tomorrow, so birthday festivities here all weekend long.

Josh (49:30):

Happy bday. Laurie.

Laurie (49:33):

I love assemblage. And the thought of spending most of the day with you guys is really exciting to me. I too really loved listening to Scott because I think it’s really important to listen to those individuals. And the fact that he spent so much time with that elderly gentleman, isn’t that cool? He’s put so much into him. That man is going to look at LEVELS completely different. And his little wife popping her head in, I think that’s a sweet story and it’s a wonderful thing that we do. Personally, I’m just comfortably gliding through life right now and it’s very nice. There’s no flat tires, there’s no broken washing machines. The dog hasn’t thrown up lately. Things seem to be going really nice. So I’m just going to enjoy that right now.

Josh (50:27):

Wow, love to hear it Jhon. Sorry, Gabriel.

Gabriel (50:33):

I’m also really excited for assemblage. I’m also excited to work more on the nutritionist marketplace project next week. Personally, I have a friend in town this weekend and we’ve got a big bike ride plan that I’m looking forward to.

Josh (50:49):

Nice. Jhon.

Jhon (50:53):

Plus one on the sound batch. I’m not going to make it my story event today, but looking forward to the other activities. And I’m going to be a responsible individual of the tagging project from next week. So really excited about that.

Josh (51:11):

Awesome. That’s great. Casey.

Casey (51:16):

So plus one, super excited about Tony coming on board and how this is going to just totally empower our multichannel content distribution process. I think it’s going to be huge. Video clips, audio clips for everything. Really easy to do. It’s going to be great. I also had a funny week where three different friends who work for companies or startups were talking to me about frustrations they’re having with their companies, especially communication and meetings and this and that.

Casey (51:44):

And I’ve, being at LEVELS, become this defacto person that people now come to ask about processes for how their companies can do better. And I basically, am just sending everyone the medium posts and how LEVELS does meetings. And none of it, I can’t relate to any of what they’re talking about because everything we do here is so efficient and it’s so pleasant how we manage our schedules. So getting people on loom and threads and all these things. And it’s just really exciting to not be able to relate to the things that these people are talking about and just how common the frustrations are with communication and synchronous work and stuff like that. So I think we’re so lucky and I feel so grateful all the time.

Casey (52:24):

And I guess the last little thing is, we’re gearing up for, the next six weeks we have probably more tier one externally facing opportunities, a higher density than we’ve had ever. So we’ve got code, Whoop podcast, mindbodygreen podcast, Dave Asprey, Max Lugavere, Mark Hyman part two, New Yorker interview. There’s a lot going on and millions of people are going to be hearing about LEVELS over the next couple months. And so it’s just really exciting that these opportunities are coming forth and how the team has rallied to make this happen. So really excited.

Josh (52:58):

Thank you for carrying that burden, Casey, you’ve been crushing it, so I think we’re all in good hands. With that, Sam, wrap us up.

Sam (53:10):

I think the thing that I’m most excited about is having some visibility in people’s calendars and just realizing how incredibly capable everyone is on the team and how many balls everyone is able to juggle at the same time. I think the decision to bring on Tony was me having a conversation with Ben about how many different projects he was doing. And I didn’t really know how many until I looked at his calendar and saw how many there were. So I’m just really grateful for the team that we have.

Josh (53:39):

Ditto.