Maintaining Mental and Metabolic Fitness w/ Josh Clemente
Episode introduction
Josh Clemente worked as a lead engineer at SpaceX and Hyperloop One, but a discovery about his own metabolic dysfunction led him down the path of developing a health tech tool that would make real-time health data available to anyone. Josh is now the co-founder and president of Levels Health, a startup using continuous blood glucose monitoring to provide users with actionable data on how to improve their health through their everyday choices. On this episode of Behind the Human, Marc Champagne and Josh talk about the importance of providing people with their own health data, how we should plan our health like we plan our retirement, and how he maintains mental fitness while running a busy startup.
Show Notes
Key Takeaways
11:01 – Leading with inspiration
Josh learned from his experiences at SpaceX and Hyperloop One that the first step in building something new is to inspire people to think bigger.
“You know there’s a quote, and I’m going to butcher it probably, but it’s something like if you want to build the best boats, teach people to long for the sea. Something along the lines of inspiration is what drives people, not the task at hand, I think is what it’s kind of talking about. But zooming out and providing scope and providing context for one’s mission, so to speak, is really how it works in there. That was very much present at SpaceX. It was not about building vehicles or turning metal into parts and assembling them. It was about the next big leap for humanity into a multi-planetary species. And that really is the pervasive concept at SpaceX. It’s that what we’re doing here is going to be an evolutionary leap for the future of our species and for hopefully providing a backup option for preserving consciousness, which as far as we know, only exists here on earth. So there is no backup option today. And if SpaceX succeeds in its mission, there could be an insurance policy, so to speak. And that really demonstrates I think exactly what you were just talking about, which is that really driven, capable people want to work on impossibly big ideas.”
13:48 – Bringing those big ideas to Levels
Metabolic health is a global problem and Josh is hoping to inspire his team and the users of their technology to tackle it.
“It’s almost impossible to quantify how bad the metabolic health epidemic is around the world. Many, many people think it’s impossible to change, but you know, the way we’re approaching this is with an inspirational approach, which is to individualize access to one’s own health information and make it easy for the individual to know how to improve each day. And then you do that. Multiply that by many, many people and you have social scale change and improvement. So very different I think. Well in some sense it’s different than SpaceX, but at the same time, for human flourishing to happen and for the next phase or leap for humanity to happen, I think we need to create a society where people are healthy and effective and performing at their best and feeling good. And chronic illness in this country and globally, it’s a massive block to that sort of thriving, both financially and personally. People do not function at their best when they’re dealing with energetic breakdown. So I really hope to bring some of that SpaceX philosophy to life. And honestly, the team that we’re putting together and what we’ve done so far, I think is really, it’s amazing to be a part of. It’s been an equally enjoyable ride to SpaceX.”
17:14 – Levels is providing the context for our health problems
Metabolic health dysfunction is leading to chronic conditions in adults around the world, but the information on what to do about it is overwhelming. The tech that Levels is providing makes it clearer.
“The problem is that people are currently faced with a tremendous amount of uncertainty and contradiction in the literature on the internet. They don’t know what to do to improve their health and so they end up making decisions that are unguided by info or by data. And so they’re flying blind effectively. What Levels is doing is we’re taking real time blood biomarkers, in this case sugar glucose, which is circulating in our blood all the time and it is broken down from our food and used to power ourselves, and we’re providing real time data on the levels of glucose in the blood. This allows people to measure and respond or understand how their body is responding to the actions they’re taking each day. And these actually go beyond nutrition. So the big four pillars of metabolic sort of control our diet, exercise, sleep, and stress. And so with the technology that Levels is producing, people can see how their bodies are responding to the meals. They’re eating the quality of their sleep and the duration of their sleep, the exercise and timing of the activities that they have throughout their day. And then the quality of their mental control, in this case, mindfulness, stress management and all of these things stack up and create context.”
24:31 – People should have access to their own health data
Josh found out about continuous blood glucose monitoring while trying to figure out why he was feeling tired and run down all of the time. He learned that getting access to that type of monitoring wasn’t easy, but it turned out to be life changing in his case.
“I asked my doctor for a prescription because they are medical devices and he said, no, you know, you’re one of the healthiest people I see. This is for sick people and you don’t need this. And that moment, it kind of redoubled my desire to get access to this because it just felt like, well, this is my body’s information. And even though I may not need it, isn’t it still my own data that I can learn something from, or at least perhaps I can use it in the future. So I did eventually get a CGM, but at this time I had left SpaceX and I was kind of working on a new project. It was a different startup that I had been working on at that time. And I got this device, and within two weeks I found out that I was either pre-diabetic or borderline pre-diabetic, depending on who you ask. And that was due to the continuous nature of the data. So I could see my body’s response to everything I did. After most of my meals, my blood sugar was remaining in the super elevated pre-diabetic or above zone for several hours and then it would come crashing down in these waves. And during those crashes, I would feel that shakiness, that fatigue, the cold sweat, the mood changes all of the symptomatic experience that I had been struggling with for years now. And it became crystal clear: this is caused by my actions. And I then was able to use the same data to modify my behaviors and smooth out those metabolic rollercoasters, and that process just completely changed my approach to daily living.”
28:24 – Physical fitness shouldn’t be the only standard for health
People can exercise regularly and have good muscle mass, but still have metabolic issues happening within their bodies.
“I did not have the classic signs of pre-diabetes. I wasn’t overweight, although my blood pressure was actually at the time somewhat hypertensive. It wasn’t in the warning area and my blood sugar levels had not gotten to the point where they were throwing a red flag for my doctor. So when I walk in and I have decent muscle mass, you know, I look athletic, the concept that we have in society is that this person is not diabetic, nor are they at risk. Now, what I was experiencing was a massive downstream effect that was hidden from the sort of the standard assumptions, which are, I was experiencing the cognitive effects of glucose dysregulation. I was experiencing the fatigue of instability in my energy production systems. We now have a large enough dataset that we can start to see that individuals manifest metabolic dysfunction in different ways. Some people gain weight very quickly, but they might feel very sharp and they might feel energized because they don’t have this completely out of control glucose rollercoaster. Well, others are like me where it’s very spiky spikes and crashes all day long, which is affecting the hormones downstream of glucose and they’re experiencing all of the negative effects there. And so each person has these different struggles and we call all of these different symptoms or different things.”
32:01 – Small adjustments to our habits can make big impacts
Josh used to think that small, easy hacks like taking little walks throughout the day weren’t enough to make big changes to your health. He was wrong.
“I’ve always thought, no, that’s not going to do anything for you. You need to like, go to the gym and you need to put on your gym clothes and need to throw weights around for 90 minutes and be completely depleted and dead at the end of it for it to really count as exercise or be valuable to you. But with the real-time data that glucose tracking can provide, I’ve seen the way that my body and many other people’s values respond to a very indulgent sugary meal with and without exercise. So for example, just eating a meal and being kind of stationary on the couch or at your desk versus eating that exact same meal and walking around for 20 or 30 minutes and getting a little sunshine and moving your body. And the difference is profound because you’re using your muscles in real time while your body is digesting that meal. The glucose response or the rapidness of the blood sugar spike into your blood is very diminished, because your muscles are consuming glucose in real time. And so that damping effect is really powerful. So all of those downstream effects can be for the most part controlled with just a little bit more movement, for example. And so seeing this information really demonstrates the individual can make these micro-optimizations.”
33:32 – Good data is actionable data
Levels is trying to present health information to its users in a way that helps them understand what to do next.
“Now, what we’re doing at Levels is trying to ensure that every piece of data that we present or that we pull into the ecosystem is actionable. So we don’t just want this to turn into a data stream that is overwhelming and that, again, now you have to interpret all of the multivariable processes going on. We just want to bias towards limited cognitive overload and actionable data. So sleep data, simple activity data, glucose data. These three things can really give you a very deep and high resolution image of what three of the four levers of metabolic control, the fourth, one being stress, which is a bit harder to measure directly, but you can understand it through maybe heart rate or just subjective feelings. So we’re trying to keep like the amount of data minimal, but also ensuring that we do capture sufficient resolution so people can know which of these levers to pull on and what amount.”
36:00 – People should plan their wellness like they plan their retirement
Josh believes we may start treating our health data like our financial data with constant monitoring and long-term planning.
“I think that in the future we will be treating health data much more like we treat financial data. So rather than walking into the doctor’s office and getting a blood panel done, and two weeks later you get some numbers and all the decisions made are contingent on those recent numbers, you can have in your phone, in your pocket, all of your data going back years and projecting into the future modeled on a personalized algorithm that detects how you personally respond to specific lifestyle choices. You can share that with an expert that you trust and project that years into the future. For many of us who take our retirement planning seriously, or our planning for that financial future, this is the way that I think we will one day be confident that we’re going to be there to enjoy that financial future, so to speak.”
39:13 – Metabolic health equals mental fitness
Josh is focusing on tracking his metabolic health and keeping those values in check to improve his cognitive health.
“There’s strong research showing that acute cognitive function, like memory tests, are directly related to insulin resistance, which is the hormone that responds to glucose and glucose dysregulation. So people who are the slowest to clear blood sugar spikes out of their blood performed the worst on assessments, like word list recall or paragraph recall. So very simple tasks that we all deal with every single day. So those memory tests are associated with how well we metabolize our food. And so I commit to holding myself accountable on dietary decisions, nutrition choices every day as a technique to maintain mental sharpness. And another thing is the benefits of physical exercise for me. This one for me is almost entirely personality-driven. I think that I am a better person when I am consistently exercising my body, and I still don’t understand it super well. I don’t know what it is. It’s some sort of, probably some sort of hormonal mechanism, but it transforms me when I am consistent. And even in a single day, you know, I can be absolutely unwilling to go and put in a quick workout, but if I can somehow just go through the motions and get it done, my entire day and the following day are better for it.”
41:42 – Breath work can help lower stress
Josh has started to experiment with breath work for stress management and has seen profound results.
“A few minutes of focused breathing can completely change my heart rate and bring my blood pressure down and like all of these mechanisms. And so I’ve also seen it, I think it’s a direct stress management technique and I’ve actually seen this in blood sugar response. So cortisol can, it basically is a hormone. It’s called a glucocorticoid that elevates blood sugar. It’s like a fight or flight response to make sure you have energy. And so if your cortisol levels are high, if you’re feeling stressed out, your blood sugar can be elevated. You don’t want to be in that situation. And breathwork I think directly affects cortisol release and can bring glucose down. And so I think this is something I really want to study deeply beyond just me and the anecdotal sense.”
47:32 – Shifting your perspective can improve your mental health
When his thoughts become too cluttered or overwhelming, Josh aims to reach mental clarity with moments of stillness and silence. Another thing that works is reframing his thoughts with question prompts.
“One of the most important for me is just asking myself what’s the worst likely outcome and just being able to quantify that or verbalize it and what is the worst likely outcome of this, whatever this idea or this fear is that I have, or this change that’s coming? And then following on that, what is in my control? So there is only so much that I can do. Certain things are just entirely, it is impossible for me to affect them at all. And so it’s important to then zoom in on you. There are a series of choices that you can make and which of these are you facing today? And then just by, I think, chunking the problem into which pieces of this are in my control, it helps me again, reestablish my frame of reference and kind of ignore those pieces that are entirely out of my hands and I can just focus on being effective on the choices I do have to make. And then the last one, especially when things are feeling particularly uncertain, I just ask myself will this matter in five years. And that always for me works super well.”
Episode Transcript
Marc Champagne (00:10) All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Behind the Human. I am your host, Marc Champagne, and it’s my job to unpack these stories in mental fitness practices of people living at the top of their game, personally and professionally.
Today I’m speaking with Josh, who was a SpaceX lead life support systems engineer, CrossFit L2 trainer, Senior Engineer at Hyperloop One and now Founder and President of Levels, a company sparking metabolic awareness in pursuit of metabolic fitness.
I just love that line. I feel like I half understand it, so I probably love it in that sense to make sure that I want to unpack that with you. Welcome to the show, partner.
Josh Clemente (00:51) Thanks, Marc. Really, really glad to be on the show.
Marc Champagne (00:54) Yeah. You’re on the show, essentially, because I was listening to your interview with Kevin Rose, who’s been part of this show, actually, in the written form before it was even a podcast and I just really enjoyed the conversation and where you guys were going with everything. And definitely want to dive in a little bit more specifically on the mental fitness practices and everything related to Levels and metabolic fitness and how that all intertwines. But before we get into that, I’ve got to know about you and who you are. So who are you, Josh?
Josh Clemente (01:31) Well, this is, it’s definitely a tricky question to answer succinctly. But I think, to describe myself, I’m a person who is often trying to find balance between poles that are in tension or at odds with each other and an example is, I really dwell a lot on how much I love and hate in equal portion challenge and change. So I am constantly pursuing challenges and I thrive on uncertainty and impossibility, and yet, I also love rituals and routines and finding my stride, so to speak. And that’s an example, but the whole breadth of my life is I love people. I get a ton of energy from camaraderie and friendships, and yet I have my best moments when I’m alone in reflection or working on something challenging that I can really hit a flow state with.
I also have a ton of ambition and want to accomplish big things, but then I’m acutely aware of the shortness of life and the passage of time, which often cautions me just to slow down and savor things rather than constantly focusing on the next phase or the next goal. So that’s me, I’m constantly walking that balance beam between these different big life questions and I haven’t quite nailed it, but I’m really enjoying the process of learning and getting to that point in my life, I think, where I have a lot of introspective time and am on a path that I really feel fulfilled with.
Marc Champagne (03:05) I love it. There’s some big themes and big topics in that response. I’d love to know where’s that coming from? Did you grow up with mentors and people around you instilling these thought processes or these principles to life because these are – You probably mentioned three or four really big ones that some people never actually get to in the course of their life, or get to them in massive walls that they hit or so forth. So, yeah, I’d love to unpack a little bit of that, if you don’t mind.
Josh Clemente (03:42) Of course. Yeah, my parents – I was actually homeschooled from K through 12. And so my mom was a high school teacher before she and my dad got married and she decided she wanted to homeschool. And I’m from a large family. So I’m one of nine kids. And growing up it was great because my parents were very intimately involved in my life and my development process and in some ways they influenced it, in other ways they challenged me to develop my own perspectives on things. And when I got out of school and I went to the West Coast and started working at SpaceX, I met a new profile of person, which was really formative to help fill in a lot of gaps that I didn’t have growing up, just new perspectives.
Marc Champagne (04:35) Okay.
Josh Clemente (04:35) So I don’t think that I hit this point where I was really thinking about the big questions of life. Certainly my parents guided me towards thinking about family and about what really matters, but some of the other things about ambition and the extrovert-introvert balance, that really came through by meeting a few key people in my professional career who became very close friends and just getting into the world of deep conversation with people who I consider peers and mentors. And that’s been super formative in my life.
Marc Champagne (05:13) I love it. I love it. So let’s back up a little bit. At one point – Nine kids, that’s almost like there’s this whole school going on in your house, essentially.
Josh Clemente (05:23) Yeah. Exactly. All the grades.
Marc Champagne (05:27) Yeah. Exactly. What was the catalyst to go down the engineering route that I’m assuming brought you to a place like SpaceX?
Josh Clemente (05:38) Well, the catalyst was – It’s hard for me to tell specifically. I know that I have a predisposition. It’s in my family to enjoy building things. I’ve had – My great grandfather built buildings in Brooklyn and my dad is a mechanical savant. He’s not an engineer by training, but he’s phenomenal at construction. He was a home builder and then he moved into law enforcement. And so there was always building happening around me.
But then also being in the chaotic day to day that a homeschool environment with, say, seven or eight kids simultaneously can be, I was always finding my space by getting out and being outside and oftentimes building things, small projects. And these eventually became cars and became motorcycles and the projects got more complex and the machinery got more complex and I just became obsessed with machines. It was my mind.
I realized that I think I have a very geometric mind. I can think about shapes and about how things fit together and how mechanisms function much easier than I can envision abstract concepts like mathematical concepts. And so even though engineering is oftentimes math, I chose to go down a very hands on specific focus, which is mechanical engineering.
And it was never really a decision. It was, once it came time to apply to college, it was like, all I do in my spare time, is build things. I love welding. I love making metal into a concept that I just had floating in my mind. And so it was a no brainer. I didn’t think twice about what I was going to do. And I never had a second thought about it when I was going through school. And it’s interesting, reflecting back on it. I can’t think of any moment where I decided to go into engineering. It was just, that was what I was going to do.
Marc Champagne (07:34) It just flowed.
Josh Clemente (07:35) Yeah. It just flowed right through.
Marc Champagne (07:37) Interesting. And the reflective elements of your life or what you mentioned in the opening question, that started to come in when you were in California, essentially, when you met some colleagues? That’s where those worlds started to interlap.
Josh Clemente (07:54) Yeah. That’s really where – A lot of it, I think, has to do with age and maturity, but once I was hitting my stride professionally and just seeing all of the capacity that a place like SpaceX has, it’s hard to describe, but you just have all these different people who are coming together and accomplishing unbelievable things very quickly. And so seeing that process happen and seeing individuals who are really moving the needle, so to speak, it really drew me to them to try to learn how to improve my own output.
And oftentimes, these people spent very little of their time talking about work or talking about effectiveness at the desk. They were thinking about much bigger concepts. They were thinking about how to have mental models that work effectively, whether at work or in life. And that was a new thing to me. Rather than having a very focused problem-solving mindset, it was more so about how do you think about thinking? Or how do you think about problem-solving? And so that meta nature of the conversations I was having with people who are much smarter and much more capable than I, is what started influencing me to start focusing on improving there and training myself. I may not have the same hardware, but I can certainly learn from these people that I have a once in a lifetime opportunity or a very rare opportunity to be close to and to watch in action. And so I really embraced that and did everything I could to spend as much time as possible with the people who I connected with personally, who I also looked up to professionally.
Marc Champagne (09:40) Sure. It reminds me of – As you were saying that, because I can only imagine. It must be such an enriching environment. I’ve never interviewed anyone from SpaceX or who has worked there. So I’ve always wanted to ask that question to see how it felt and I feel like you described that. But it made me think of –
I was interviewing Naveen Jain at one point, earlier in the year. He was talking about just solving billion dollar – No sorry, not billion dollar, billion person challenges. And his biggest point that he left, whether that’s with Viome, or his space program and in all of that, it was like, If you can dream up the idea and visualize that and like what you’re discussing, thinking of these higher level concepts, then the people will follow you. The people will – It’s not a matter of – because I asked him, “Okay. Yeah. You’ve, you’ve gotten that far with your idea. You’ve asked the right questions. You’ve uncovered the root of the problem. Now you need people to come on the journey with you.” And that was his point was that if you can deliver that with conviction and people are on board, you attract the best in the world to come and solve the problem, because it’s big in nature. Which it seems like was your environment?
Josh Clemente (11:00) That’s exactly right. There’s a quote, and I’m going to butcher it probably, but it’s something like, if you want to build the best boats teach people to long for the sea. Something along the lines of, inspiration is what drives people not the task at hand. I think that’s what he was talking about. But zooming out, and providing scope and providing context for one’s mission, so to speak, is really how it works in there.
That was very much present at SpaceX. It was not about building vehicles or turning metal into parts and assembling them. It was about the next big leap for humanity into a multiplanetary species. And that really is the pervasive concept at SpaceX is that what we’re doing here is going to be an evolutionary leap for the future of our species and for hopefully, providing a backup option for preserving consciousness, which, as far as we know, only exists here on earth. And so there is no backup option today. And if SpaceX succeeds in its mission, there could be an insurance policy, so to speak.
Marc Champagne (12:10) Wow!
Josh Clemente (12:11) And that really demonstrates, I think, exactly what you were just talking about, which is that really driven capable people want to work on impossibly big ideas. They love solving problems and will always find challenge, but you’ll attract the best people. And also, you’ll receive the best output of their efforts if they feel fully aligned with the outcome and I think it really has to be a huge vision. That’s at least my experience.
Marc Champagne (12:48) Yeah. I love it. I’m just… You can’t see me, but I’m smiling here. You’ve got my mind spinning, just these concepts. So I imagine then, and we can back up to how you went from there to – You had a couple of, I think two other positions after, before starting Levels. But I imagine a lot of that environment and way of thinking and leadership or the confidence and what you would want in a team? I imagine that’s translating over to your work now.
Josh Clemente (13:24) Definitely. Yeah. It’s –
Marc Champagne (13:26) Or you could say, “No. It’s not, but –“ “Nope. It sucks.”
Josh Clemente (13:31) It’s not the same for sure. But it definitely is the way that we’re approaching our work here at Levels. Our goal is to reverse the trends of metabolic dysfunction globally and that’s a very large problem. And it’s almost impossible to quantify how bad the metabolic health epidemic is around the world. And many people think it’s impossible to change. But the way we’re approaching this is with an inspirational, I think, approach, which is to individualize access to one’s own health information and make it easy for the individual to know how to improve each day. And then you do that, multiply that by many, many people, and you have social scale change and improvement.
So yeah, very different, I think. Well, in some sense, it’s different than SpaceX, but at the same time for human flourishing to happen and for the next phase or leap for humanity to happen, I think we need to create a society where people are healthy and effective and performing at their best and feeling good. And chronic illness in this country and globally is, it’s a massive block to that thriving, both financially and personally. People do not function at their best when they’re dealing with energetic breakdown. So, yeah, I really hope to bring some of that SpaceX philosophy to life and honestly, the team that we’re putting together and what we’ve done so far, I think is really, it’s amazing to be a part of. It’s been an equally enjoyable ride as SpaceX.
Marc Champagne (15:13) Well, my hat’s off to you and the team because at one point there is a select percentage, I’d say, of the population that you could probably consider them biohackers or people that are really dialed into health and trying everything – essentially like a Kevin Rose or Tim Ferriss and whatnot.
Josh Clemente (15:35) Yeah.
Marc Champagne (15:37) But if there’s one thing, one benefit that has actually come out of this wild pandemic and COVID is just, I think, a wake up on how bad in general our health is.
Josh Clemente (15:50) Yup.
Marc Champagne (15:52) I don’t think anyone needs any proof at this point that we’re not healthy and if we could – And there are steps we can take, obviously, to help and Levels is obviously one of those solutions to start getting to a point of at least being aware. I talk about this all the time on the mental fitness side of things. You can’t – If you’re not aware of what’s happening in your mind or you’re aware of the thoughts that you’re thinking or the emotions that are potentially on autopilot, then you can’t make the change. You have to be first aware. And I feel like it’s no different with our body.
Josh Clemente (16:28) That’s totally right.
Marc Champagne (16:28) So why don’t we, just in case people don’t know what Levels is, you should probably give a little description.
Josh Clemente (16:33) Yeah. So I’ll start off by just quickly describing what metabolism is because I mentioned that just a minute ago, but sure. So metabolism is the set of processes in our bodies that produce energy from our food and environment. So basically taking the molecules in our food and there are environmental factors like sunlight and turning them into energy production for all the tissues in our bodies.
And so Levels exists to answer the question of what should I eat and why? And right now, that question can’t be answered individually because – or certainly not without a PhD, for example, in nutrition or cell biology. And the problem is that people are currently faced with a tremendous amount of uncertainty and contradiction in the literature, on the internet. They don’t know what to do to improve their health. And so they end up making decisions that are unguided by data. And so they’re flying blind effectively.
And what Levels is doing is we’re taking real time blood biomarkers, in this case, sugar, glucose, which is circulating in our blood all the time and it is broken down from our food and used to power our cells and we’re providing real time data on the levels of glucose in the blood. And so this allows people to measure and respond or understand how their body is responding to the actions they’re taking each day. And these actually go beyond nutrition.
So the big four pillars of metabolic control are diet, exercise, sleep and stress. And so with the technology that Levels is producing, people can see how their bodies are responding to the meals they’re eating, the quality of their sleep and the duration of their sleep, the exercise and timing of the activities that they have throughout their day and then the quality of their mental control, in this case, mindfulness, stress management. And all of these things stack up and create context. And that context is the metabolic control that our bodies are experiencing. And without this information, we see the effects.
And so globally we have diabetes and heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease and cancer, increasing at increasing rates. And all of these, the CDC here in the US, describes as chronic illnesses, most of which are avoidable. Cancer is the one that I think has some other underlying factors, but the others are driven by lifestyle choices that compound over years and decades. And so without this feedback loop, people are – It’s not that they want to be unhealthy, it’s just that they don’t know which choices are working in opposition to their goals, and Levels is here to –
Marc Champagne (19:13) While there’s an acceptance.
Josh Clemente (19:15) That’s right.
Marc Champagne (19:16) Yeah. I think there’s a whole generation and there’s a lot of my own family members in this boat. This is not holding judgment. This is just their ways. Just like, “Oh well, yeah. I’m going to have high blood pressure the rest of my life. This is just I’m getting older.” Right?
Josh Clemente (19:33) Yes. And I’m glad you mentioned that because that right there is a pervasive concept that metabolic health is binary. I’m either healthy or I’m not. And the reality is that we’re on a spectrum and this is metabolic fitness, which is, each day, you’re going to do a series of actions. You’re going to take lifestyle decisions and through focus, effort and repetition, you can improve your metabolic health, your metabolic fitness, just the same as you can improve your physical fitness by going to the gym or your mental fitness by practicing a meditation or mindfulness practice. And so this concept applies equally.
And it’s just that people don’t have a feedback loop for metabolism, which is why they don’t know that it’s possible to have an influence. It really feels like out of your control. And so by having objective data and closing that feedback loop on the order of minutes, people can now understand that everything I do influences the responses, the reactions my body experiences. And this is actually quite straightforward to understand and improve each day.
Marc Champagne (20:37) Hey, just wanted to thank you for being here. And if you’re enjoying the show, drop us some lovely stars, wherever you’re listening. They really make a huge difference. Also, after requests from you, I’ve put together some mental fitness training packages in collaboration with Thrive Medicine. I’ll work directly with you to help implement and personalize practices and routines to ensure your mind is thriving. Shoot me a message directly or check out the link in the show notes. Thank you, as always, and back to the show.
I love it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but essentially, you backed into this company or this idea of from your own personal experience of – I think it was around the SpaceX or Hyperloop time – of just not knowing why you were so depleted in energy. Is that correct? Or is that one of the aspects?
Josh Clemente (21:30) That’s exactly right. I do not have a background, as we covered, in metabolism or medicine or human physiology. What happened is that I was working on a very stressful program at SpaceX and I came to the realization that even though I didn’t necessarily look unhealthy – I am a CrossFit trainer, I’ve always valued physical fitness and I’ve considered it to be the best approximation of overall health – I got to the point where I was essentially unable to perform every day and that was both personally in my relationships with people I care about and professionally. I was struggling mentally and physically with waves of fatigue and generally feeling this malaise that I had never experienced in my life. And I honestly, I told some people in my close friend group that I think I have a terminal illness. This is bad enough that I oftentimes want to just escape under my desk and sleep the day away because I physically feel like I can’t drag myself into the next meeting or into the next project. And so –
Marc Champagne (22:39) Scary.
Josh Clemente (22:40) Yeah. It was a very strange realization. It was a juxtaposition because I didn’t have the markers of poor health. I had good body fat percentage, decent amount of muscle mass. I was able to hit the gym and perform well in workouts, but it was in that moment, that separation of how I look versus how I feel that I started to understand, okay, there’s more to this than just physical fitness. Something else is underneath the hood. So I started to read about metabolism specifically because I was having these energy issues and metabolism is the energy production system.
And so I was reading about this and learned about glucose and learned about fat oxidation, which is the other molecule that we can get most of our energy from, and I found that there’s this fingerprick technology that you can get, which is typically used for the management of diabetes and you can measure your blood sugar levels. So I got one of these and I started obsessively pricking my finger and treating it like a science experiment, just plotting everything in Microsoft Excel and I was pricking my finger something like 60 times a day. But it didn’t really, I didn’t know enough to understand what I was seeing. And so this is –
Marc Champagne (23:58) This is an engineer coming out.
Josh Clemente (23:59) Yeah. Exactly. Treating it very much as a project. And it took months and months for me to develop an understanding of what was going on. And I read a book called Wired to Eat by Robb Wolf and in this book he describes a newer technology called continuous glucose monitoring, which also was developed for diabetes management. And this tech, you wear it full time and it streams your blood sugar levels right to your phone. And I was like, “Oh, that’s great. My fingers are black and blue. I need that.” So I asked my doctor for a prescription because they are medical devices and he said, “No. You’re one of the healthiest people I see. This is for sick people and you don’t need this.” And that moment redoubled my desire to get access to this because it just felt like this is my body’s information and even though I may not need it, isn’t it still my own data that I can learn something from or at least perhaps I can use it in the future.
So I did eventually get a CGM, but at this time I had left SpaceX and I was working on a new project. It was a different startup that I had been working on at that time. And I got this device and within two weeks, I found out that I was either pre-diabetic or borderline pre-diabetic, depending on who you ask. And that was due to the continuous nature of the data. So I could see my body’s response to everything I did.
And after most of my meals, my blood sugar was remaining in the super elevated pre-diabetic or above zone for several hours and then it would come crashing down in these waves. And during those crashes, I would feel that shakiness, that fatigue, the cold sweat, the mood changes – all of the symptomatic experience that I had been struggling with for years now. And it became crystal clear, this is caused by my actions. And I then was able to use the same data to modify my behaviors and smooth out those metabolic roller coasters.
And that process just completely changed my approach to daily living. And I started to value sleep. And I started to value mindfulness and stress control because I could see the effects. And through that renovation of my life, I realized this is something more people need, and the sooner we can get it to them and the more context we can provide along with the raw data, the easier it will be for people to make fast and consistent behavior change.
Marc Champagne (26:21) I am so glad that you didn’t quit at the point where your doctor was like, “No. You don’t need that,” because to me that example just proves the point on how much correction needs to be made in the healthcare system in general. I remember I used to have these conversations, it used to drive me nuts with my dad, because he’d be – just imagine a stereotypical North American eating the standard diet, not healthy, diabetic, the whole nine yards. So it was always this constant battle of, “Okay Dad, we’ve got to get you healthy.” If I could somehow convince him to be motivated to do that. And then someone will be featured on the news or in the newspaper, marathoner dies. On the outside super athletic person dies of heart attack or something. It’s like, “See! Why would I put myself through all of that? They’re just dropping like flies.”
Josh Clemente (27:22) Yeah.
Marc Champagne (27:23) He used to drive me nuts. But I think you prove the point. From the outside, it doesn’t necessarily mean the inside is healthy. We need the full picture.
Josh Clemente (27:33) That’s right.
Marc Champagne (27:33) And yeah, so I’m so thankful that you continued that journey.
Josh Clemente (27:38) Yeah, me too. And one of the interesting things and something that I’ve since learned a lot more about and look forward to learning even more about, is the way that human beings – So we are chemistry sets. That’s what the human body is. We’re a bunch of chemicals that are released in response to other chemicals and that’s how we function. And so you can imagine, if you think about the mental model of that, it’s like a bunch of literal chemical compounds that our bodies are sensing which chemicals are, in what proportions, and then releasing other ones to try to manage how we use those, existing ones. And so the way that each individual human being responds to the chemical environment in their body is unique.
And so, in my example, I did not have the classic signs of pre-diabetes, I wasn’t overweight. Although my blood pressure was actually at the time somewhat hypertensive, it wasn’t in the warning area, and my blood sugar levels had not gotten to the point where they were throwing a red flag for my doctor. And so when I walk in and I have decent muscle mass, I look athletic. The concept that we have in society is that this person is not, they’re not diabetic, nor are they at risk. Now, what I was experiencing was a massive downstream effect that was hidden from the standard assumptions, which are, I was experiencing the cognitive effects of glucose dysregulation. I was experiencing the fatigue and instability in my energy production systems.
We now have a large enough data set that we can start to see that individuals manifest metabolic dysfunction in different ways. Some people gain weight very quickly, but they might feel very sharp and they might feel energized because they don’t have this completely out of control glucose rollercoaster. While others are like me, where it’s very spiky, spikes and crashes all day long, which was affecting the hormones downstream of glucose and they’re experiencing all of the negative effects there. And so each person has these different struggles.
And we call all of these different symptoms different things. For example, we talk about hanger all the time. Hanger is a thing. You’re so hungry and you’re angry. We talk about cognitive decline. We talk about Alzheimer’s disease, which is now being called Type 3 diabetes. We talk about heart disease and cardiovascular disease, which are the number one and two complications of glucose dysregulation. We talk about PCOS and sexual dysfunction, PCOS being the leading cause of infertility in the developing world. All of these things have metabolic dysfunction underpinnings. They’re closely tied to glucose dysregulation and to poor chronic lifestyle choices.
And so there’s this massive spectrum of problems that we’re all dealing with day to day, just trying to get through our quality of life experience. And although we haven’t yet to find a single node that we can change to improve for everyone. We do know that since it’s an individual outcome, you can also change the inputs for the individual. It’s just that that person needs to know the connection between their lifestyle choices and these effects they’re experiencing. And so closing that loop with data, I think, is a really elegant way to empower that individual.
Marc Champagne (30:49) Oh, for sure. And then the next, I think the next big piece in the puzzle is to have some solution – which obviously you guys are working on this – that is able to make some sense of the data or that is able to include the other factors as well, on top of your glucose monitoring. But I don’t know if you’re meditating, or journaling, or doing all these other activities and logging this somewhere. We’ve got apps obviously out there in the ecosystem, capturing mindful minutes and things like that and then your exercise. It’s like, at one point, we need some central database with all this stuff. I feel like there’s just so much. Right?
Josh Clemente (31:39) Yeah. Exactly. It’s like I said, that there are those four big levers and a prime example of the way that real time data can change your perception. Or at least for someone like me, I’ve always been somewhat skeptical about the easy hacks, things like take little walks throughout the day. I’ve always thought, no, that’s not going to do anything for you. You need to like go to the gym and you need to put on your gym clothes. You need to throw weights around for 90 minutes and be completely depleted and dead at the end of it, for it to really count as exercise or be valuable to you.
With the real-time data that glucose tracking can provide, I’ve seen the way that my body and many other people’s values respond to a very indulgent sugary meal, with and without exercise. So for example, like just eating a meal and being stationary on the couch or at your desk versus eating that exact same meal and walking around for 20 or 30 minutes and getting a little sunshine and moving your body. And the difference is profound. So because you’re using your muscles, in real time while your body is digesting that meal, the glucose response or the rapidness of the blood sugar spike into your blood is very diminished because your muscles are consuming glucose in real time. And so that damping effect is really powerful.
And so all of those downstream effects can be, for the most part, controlled with just a little bit more movement, for example. And so seeing this information, it really demonstrates, the individual can make these micro optimizations and that was just one example, but there are many. And you can get receipts on them and you can then understand the power that you have to just tune very small moments throughout your life and the net effect, the compounding effect of that over years, will be a very different outcome.
And specific to what you were saying about all the different data sources, what we’re doing at Levels is trying to ensure that every piece of data that we present or that we pull into the ecosystem is actionable. So we don’t just want this to turn into a data stream that is overwhelming and that, again, now you have to interpret all of the multivariable processes going on. We just want to bias towards limited cognitive overload and actionable data.
So sleep data, simple activity data, glucose data – these three things can really give you a very deep and high resolution image of what three of the four levers of metabolic control, the fourth one being stress, which is a bit harder to measure directly, but you can understand it through maybe heart rate or just subjective feelings. And so we’re trying to keep the amount of data minimal but also ensuring that we do capture sufficient resolution so people can know which of these levers to pull on and in what amount.
Marc Champagne (34:38) Yeah. So it’s so important, just the actionable advice. I think the other thing behind that is just the hope that is behind that. It gives people hope that, “Okay, yeah. I can make some changes.” And to your point about the basics, it’s been coming up. You met some of the guys over at Thrive Medicine. It’s been coming up in our work. You came up in the last episode with Apollo, back to the basics. We don’t need to make this super complicated. We have all this incredible technology and these solutions to give us the information, which is fantastic. But to your point, like take a walk, 15/20 minutes just moving around. At least it’s a starting point and we can all do that. I think that’s the big part.
Josh Clemente (35:26) Yeah.
Marc Champagne (35:27) It eliminates the potential for excuses to come up like, “I don’t have time to do all these different things.” But these small little tweaks and then when you see the results real time, that’s a whole other level.
Josh Clemente (35:41) Exactly.
Marc Champagne (35:41) So yeah, it’s amazing stuff. I’m excited to see where this whole space goes. I feel like just personalized health, in general, is really the way of the future. And there’s some great people working on it2, yourself included. So it’s exciting.
Josh Clemente (36:00) Yeah. I think that in the future, we will be treating health data much more like we treat financial data.
Marc Champagne (36:08) Yeah.
Josh Clemente (36:09) Rather than walking into the doctor’s office and getting a blood panel done and two weeks later, you get some numbers and all the decisions made are contingent on those recent numbers you can have in your phone, in your pocket, all of your data going back years and projecting into the future modeled on a personalized algorithm that detects how you personally respond to specific lifestyle choices. And you can share that with an expert that you trust, and again, project that years into the future. And for many of us who take our retirement planning seriously or are planning for that financial future, this is the way that I think we will one day be confident that we’re going to be there to enjoy that financial future, so to speak. Right now, we’re really using data in every aspect of our lives, except in our health and wellness and I think this is going away anytime soon. People are going to embrace the personalized, just the freedom of understanding and feeling confident about decisions that you’re making each day.
Marc Champagne (37:11) Yeah, totally. It’s not really a pivot, but just in relation to those decisions you’re making every day, I’d love to know, specifically with you, just some of the mental fitness practices that you have found that have been the most impactful for yourself. And the caveat being, I share this all the time. This isn’t a prescription, especially since we’re talking about personalized health in general. The idea with this is, someone on the other line, and myself included, frankly, “Oh, I never thought of that.” Or, “I could try that and this routine.” And then we can we can test it on ourselves. So I’d love to understand what are some of the non-negotiables these days in in your life when it comes to your mental fitness? Or how do you keep your mind clear when running a team like this? And carving a path in a century of brand new market or space?
Josh Clemente (38:08) Yeah. Yeah, I’m learning and it’s a constant process for me, but this whole experience of understanding that I had metabolic dysfunction, I was heading in a dangerous direction each day without knowing it. It has opened up my mind to a lot of lifestyle techniques that I otherwise may not have considered. And the mindfulness piece and the mental fitness piece is one of the main areas of focus for me. There is a very strong link between dementia and cognitive decline and metabolic dysregulation and it runs in my family. And so this is a specific area of interest for me is to maintain metabolic fitness well into the future. I’m sorry, mental fitness well into the future. And that is closely linked with the metabolic fitness piece. And so, for me, the accountability of maintaining my lifestyle choices daily is the biggest one.
So I understand this link. I know there’s strong research showing that both acute cognitive function, so like memory tests, are directly related to insulin resistance, which is the hormone that responds to glucose and glucose dysregulation. So people who are the slowest to clear blood sugar spikes out of their blood, performed the worst on assessments, like word list recall, or paragraph recall. So very simple tasks that we all deal with every single day. So those memory tests are associated with how well we metabolize our food. And so I commit to holding myself accountable on dietary decisions, nutrition choices every day as a technique to maintain mental sharpness. And another thing is the benefits of physical exercise for me. This one for me is almost entirely personality-driven. I think that I am a better person when I am consistently exercising my body.
Marc Champagne (40:09) Same.
Josh Clemente (40:10) Yeah. I don’t understand it super well. I don’t know what it is. It’s probably some sort of hormonal mechanism, but it transforms me when I am consistent. And even in a single day I can be absolutely unwilling to go and put in a quick workout. But if I can somehow just go through the motions and get it done, my entire day and the following day are better for it. And the people around me appreciate me more because I was able to do it. So that one, I think, in the personality component, it doesn’t matter if it’s a really intense workout or just simple movement for 20 or 30 minutes, I just have to. That’s a non-negotiable for me.
Marc Champagne (40:59) Yeah. The exact same. It’s unbelievable. If a couple days go by where like you said, even light exercise, I immediately feel, I just feel mentally like garbage physically, I don’t feel good and it’s just a quick walk outside or – for me spinning is a big one – a spin class and doing it at home now, but that’s always one that gets me going. And then breathwork I don’t know if you’re exploring with that. But I feel like breath work is like instant.
Josh Clemente (41:29) Breath work is stunning to me because I’ve only literally in the past two or three months, started experimenting with that and it’s profound. There’s a physical component to it, where a few minutes of focused breathing can completely change my heart rate and bring my blood pressure down – all of these mechanisms.
And so I’ve also seen – I think it’s a direct stress management technique and I’ve actually seen this in blood sugar response. So stress, so cortisol can – it basically is a hormone. It’s called a glucocorticoid that elevates blood sugar. It’s like a fight or flight response to make sure you have energy. And so if your cortisol levels are high for feeling stressed out, your blood sugar can be elevated. You don’t want to be in that situation. And breathwork, I think, directly affects cortisol release and can bring glucose down.
And so I think this is something I really want to study deeply beyond just me in the anecdotal sense, but I think breath and the practice of it is a powerful tool that I unfortunately don’t know a ton about, but I’m definitely experimenting with right now. The Wim Hof Method, for example, is what I’m currently trying out.
Marc Champagne (42:40) That’s what I was going to ask you. Yeah. He’s been diving pretty deep on the science of this. I know that was – it’s been what, maybe two, more than that – three, four years since he’s really exploded in the public eye. And I like his – He’s obviously a character for anyone that followed him and seen him go. So that’s fun. But he’s always going back to the science of it. Like his little – the experiments he’s done on himself and that group of guys when they were injected with a flu of some sort and they were able –
Josh Clemente (43:18) Managed their symptoms.
Marc Champagne (43:19) Yeah. They fought off all the symptoms and stuff like that. So I know he’s doing a lot more now. So I’m really curious to see what’s next. You guys should link up with Mr. Wim Hof. That’d be fun.
Josh Clemente (43:30) Yeah. We’d love to. Yeah. That’s a powerful one. I think the last piece in terms of mental fitness. Much of mental fitness, in my opinion, is maintaining clarity of thought and trying to reduce the clutter and the noise and maintaining perspective, I think, is the is a huge factor here. And one of the most important things for me in terms of perspective is really expanding or creating a frame of reference for myself and when things are feeling overwhelming or if you just find yourself maybe in a hole and you’re feeling like it’s an uphill battle and maybe a little bit hopeless. I think we all go through these moments.
For me, one of the most amazing ways to reestablish that perspective is nature and getting out under a huge open sky and seeing stars and just realizing your place in time and space. And that is so centering for me and it completely – It’s similar to physical exercise in the way that it is transformative for me just a simple quiet 10/15 minute period laying there and looking up at the sky is enough to get me snapped out of those moments where things feel out of my hands and that’s something that I really have leaned even further into in recent years where – I’ve spent a lot of time in cities and I find that I, although I love them for many reasons, I lose perspective quickly because everything is so walled in and it feels very claustrophobic mentally. So that perspective framing is just really important for me.
Marc Champagne (45:23) I think stillness is the underrated practice of the time right now and more and more people are discovering it, myself included, thanks to people like Ryan Holiday that write quite a bit about this, in bringing the stoics and how the – again, this is not new stuff, but we’re finding ways to include it in our routines and our rituals now, but it’s amazing. I’m always amazed at what comes up when in nature and when still. We just moved from Toronto, which is the busiest city in Canada and we’re two hours north of that and in nature now a we just – The ideas that come up when you can quiet your mind and let your mind actually do its thing and make the connections is – It’s unimaginable almost.
Josh Clemente (46:14) Yeah, I totally agree.
Marc Champagne (14:15) Yeah, it’s great. Do you have – a last question for you. I’d love to know if you have any, whether you journal pen to paper or – You definitely reflect. We’ve already established that. But do you have any prompts that circulate in your life to help with that reflection? Either on frequent basis or when making big life decisions?
Josh Clemente (46:39) Yeah. I really like this one. So I don’t – Something I have to improve, I think, in my reflection is reflecting on the positive or I think being more –
Marc Champagne (46:50) Yeah. You’re human.
Josh Clemente (46:52) Yeah, just being more intentional about understanding my frame of mind, going into positive moments. I actually think, I think Matthew McConaughey was just on Tim Ferriss and he was talking about something very similar. But he does it very well. Like he focuses on where was I mentally? And how is I performing when I was at my peak? And he uses that for recall when he’s not at his peak.
And so I think what I do is, I certainly tend to bias towards negative change or uncertainty, but I will share those big questions that I like to use to prop myself during reflections on those bigger, scarier times. And so one of the most important for me is just asking myself, what’s the worst likely outcome, and just being able to quantify that or verbalize it. What is the worst likely outcome of this, whatever this idea or this fear is that I have or this change that’s coming. And then following on that, what is in my control? So there is only so much that I can do. Certain things are just entirely – it is impossible for me to affect them at all. And so it’s important to then zoom in on, there are a series of choices that you can make and which of these are you facing today and then just by, I think, chunking the problem into which pieces of this are in my control. It helps me, again, reestablish my frame of reference and ignore those pieces that are entirely out of my hands, and I can just focus on being effective on the choices I do have to make. And then the last one, especially when things are feeling particularly uncertain, I just asked myself, will this matter in five years?
Marc Champagne (48:44) Wow, that’s good.
Josh Clemente (48:46) That one’s always, that one always, for me, works super well. It’s just, “Yeah. Good point. This is probably, I’ll probably forget about this in two weeks. It’s super uncomfortable in this moment and I am I’m struggling, but five years from now, I won’t remember this moment.” And most of the time, that’s the case.
So, again, most of this for me is about finding that frame of reference and making sure that my perspective is adjusted because we can just, I think, get so sucked into the acute feelings that we’re going through in the moment and we lose track of, again, time and space and most of the things that matter in life are going to be okay and you just oftentimes have to remind yourself of that, I think.
Marc Champagne (49:32) Oh, totally. I love these prompts and I love the sequence of the prompts too. They make sense and like you said, I think you come out of it with a really great grounding on perspective of a situation. So I appreciate you sharing them.
On Matthew McConaughey’s side of things, I heard that interview as well and I’m reading his book now because of it and it’s great. It’s causing me – I think just naturally, autopilot wise, many people aren’t doing any reflection, period. And then people who are, it’s easier to obviously help process some of the negative things going on and whatnot. And then I think, to your point, the next step then is, “Well, wait a second, don’t forget about the good things,” and dissecting those. So I think, wherever people are out on the journey, we’re all just trying. We’re trying to do our best. And I think this is what I love about these conversations and the ones that you just referenced from Tim as well. It just gives, again, it gives a different perspective, a shift, “Oh, yeah. You know what? We can think of these other things as well.
Josh Clemente (50:43) Totally.
Marc Champagne (50:44) Amazing. Well, Josh, I want to respect your time. This was super fun. I could speak to you for hours. I want to thank you for making some time to speak and above all, thank you for dedicating your time day in and day out with your awesome team to push a pretty big mission forward for the health of an entire population essentially. So I’m here definitely in Canada rooting you, rooting along in the sidelines and as much as I can in a direct way. So thank you for all of your effort.
Josh Clemente (51:22) Thank you, Marc, for having me on. I really appreciate the intentionality of this show and I love listening to you and your other episodes. I’m really happy to be able to be a part of it. And yeah, thanks for walking me through this conversation. I’d love to do it again sometime.