Transcript
Josh Clemente (00:00):
All right. Looks like we’re recording, so let’s go ahead and fire this thing up. Welcome, everybody. It’s been two weeks since our last Friday forum, which seems crazy. I don’t think we’ve missed one. I don’t know. I don’t think we’ve ever missed one, maybe once. So, welcome and we’ll jump right into it. So recent achievements for the last few weeks. Big one here, IRB was submitted for our first study with USF. Dr. Allison Hull was on the Friday forum a few weeks ago, so you all remember her. And this is going to be a metabolic study in collaboration with Dom D’Agostino. Very excited, obviously to be taking our first bite on the research program.
Haney, formerly known as Mike Haney, is our content director and he has launched a new editorial calendar in Notion. And this is live and driving our content platform, so check that out. And definitely looking forward to seeing this thing get real efficient. And I think Haney’s first blog post went live today. So congratulations on that. Good to see you jumping right in. Biograph, which is a company we’ve been communicating quite a bit about, they’re looking to be the future of clinical practice are interested in moving forward with the Levels pilot for their patients. And this is a really super premium company, and they’re doing some very cool things. And so this is quite exciting. This conversation has been ongoing for some time. Looking forward to that.
Absolutely mind blowing stats from the Broken Brain episode that Casey absolutely crushed. $116,000 in revenue in two weeks. And for context, I think it took 13 weeks for Kevin Rose, which was the next biggest show we did or potentially even larger, I’m not quite sure, took 13 weeks to get to the same level. And so this is crazy trajectory that goes to show that A, Casey crushed it, and B, there are certain audiences I think that are just super receptive to the message. So this is super cool.
Another big one, we passed 10,000 followers on Instagram. This is supposedly a big deal. I didn’t quite understand how big a deal it was, but now you can like swipe up and go to a direct link. So we don’t have to do some link out like a link tree thing. This is the professional, this is the pro leagues of social media I think, and we’ve made it. So thank you Stacy and Mercy and Megan and everyone else who has been responsible for just taking our social presence live.
Let’s see. App developments. This is the stuff David’s going to cover, but we’re working on in-app sleep, in-app content, so replacing just like the blog rendering, and then referring a friend. All exciting things, so I’ll let him take that next. But obviously, there’s been a ton in work the last few weeks. And then a big one is focusing on community. So I’m going to zoom in here for a second. We’ve had some amazing members come through the Levels’ beta thus far. And one in particular, Dorothy Kilroy is, she’s the Global Head of Community for Airbnb, and she’s very interested in coming aboard and helping advise us on building our own community out.
And so over the course of a few conversations, she just had some amazing ideas, which we’re going to be fleshing out further in the next few months. But first and foremost, and starting with this meeting, I’d like to just have everyone start with this small thing that I think has really big implications, which is referring to our customers as members. And so that’s the first step to having them feel a part of something much bigger and something much longer than just the 28 day experience. So I’m going to start retraining my brain for that vocabulary, and definitely encourage everyone else to do the same.
Wearable Challenge Cohort 4. So you’ll see a graph here on the right side of the screen, which shows the results from Wearable Challenge Cohort 4. This is very initial. I think we had 30 responses out of the 58 people that went through. But you can see a pretty nice relationship between body mass index and weight loss, average weight loss over the cohort. And that’s exciting. It’s the people who have the most to lose who lost the most. And so all this without any rigid dietary requirements, this is just keeping your blood sugar in zone. So exciting stuff. We kicked off Cohort 5 as well, and moving straight into the next one.
Couple other big things, Mike Barwis had, I think it was Tony who did our video in New York, and Tony went down to Barwis’ facility and recorded the promotional video and several other athletes. And so this is going to be exciting, a lot of great content that we got there. Casey made her first live TV appearance for Cheddar, and that was just a smash hit. Amazing job. It was so cool to see you up there live with the New York Stock Exchange in the background.
A couple other big ones, we spoke with Kevin Love, who’s an NBA All-Star and plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Awesome guy, very supportive of our mission. We’ve had a couple other big conversations in the past few weeks. You’ll see Tony Robbins on the screen. You’ll see Toby from Shopify. All these people are supporters of us, they want to get involved, they want to help us either by trying the product and talking about it or potentially getting even more invested in the company and our mission. So exciting couple of weeks. Dave Asprey posted the first video of Levels on his social media.
And another just exciting thing, this is real member data. This is two different people I’ve posted charts from their monthly reports that they posted on social. And it’s just staggering like the degree of improvement across different folks over just four weeks is something that you would have to honestly see to believe. And I love that people are taking this monthly report, and they’re using it as a proof of work or a proof of improvement posting it all over social. And other people are noticing. Somebody else retweeted it and said, “I’ve never seen a Levels user do worse.” So people are noticing this.
Okay. So let’s see. A couple other things that are on the screen that I haven’t touched on, but overall, just big two weeks. Thanks to everybody for crushing it. Over to David.
David Flinner (05:41):
We’ll start with Andrew, today.
Andrew (05:44):
Yeah. So covering a few of the engineering infrastructurery things that don’t have good UI. I tried to get a picture of how we’re working on this, and this is as close as I can get. So experiments are, I think you’ve probably heard us talk about them before. It’s a ability to turn on and off features for groups of people as quickly as possible. Right now it’s very clunky how we’re doing it, and so Hao is exploring the next phase of this that’ll make it really easy to add users in and out of groups. And so for example, if you’re testing a new beta app, you can take your user out of any special groups and see what a normal customer’s experience is like. So that’ll be really exciting.
Next. Xinlu has been working on the next version of Day Score, and has a really interesting proposal for how we can collect ranking-related information between. And so there will be actually an exercise where everyone can participate soon. And there’s a little retool, we’ll call it a game, that you can play. But so stay tuned for that. The outcome of this will be scores that make a lot more sense, like the directionally where we don’t have circumstances where someone gets a lower score that we would actually think that are doing better than a higher score.
And as also a side effect of this, we’ll have a little bit better explainability to be able to say, what are the reasons that you don’t have this or you have. And so stay tuned for all of this. It’ll be kind of a longer term project. But the outcome of this will be a lot more resilient scoring in our app.
David Flinner (07:27):
All right. Cool. One of the other things we’ve been working on is in-app content. And the last time we met, I previewed this screen where customers, if you get a bad score or a good score, oftentimes you want to know, “Well, what should I do next to improve?” And so we don’t have a great contextual content experience there, where we could say, “Hey, here’s a short video, here’s some short tips that you can do for that.” And then also in the Learn Module, which is packed full of our great blog content, it’s sort of overwhelming. And stylistically, it’s just iframing in the blog. So you’re in the Levels app, it feels like Levels, and then you hit an article and it feels like, “Whoa, what’s this? Oh, it’s the Levels website just kind of injected into the app.”
So Jhon’s been working on a proof of concept for in-app native experience for content consumption. And you can go to the next slide. And I’ve recorded a video, I created one of these for you so take a look. This is the in progress implementation. But this is all rendered in the new in-app content experience. The style is not there yet. But essentially, we now have these rich formats where you can tap it once it loads a video, tap it once it loads an article, tap it once it loads a video plus an article. You see here that the content is, it’s not styled right yet but this is in progress. But pretty soon, we’ll just add a layer of styling on there. And it’ll look very seamless and like it was built for the app. You can opt into that 22nd video with words, things like that if that’s your MO, or you can read the text if that’s your MO or you can ignore it. So great stuff there.
Next slide. Cool. And Gabriel has been working on pulling in sleep from Apple Health and Google Fit into the Levels app. So pretty soon, maybe today. But very soon, you’ll be able to demo this integrating… You can pull in your sleep data from Apple Health and Google Fit. The very first thing that we’re doing is just simply putting it on the graph, and just letting you know it’s sleeping. This is not fully styled yet either. But then thereafter, you can see a mark on the right, we’ll have like a sleep details page where you can see what was your waking glucose, what was your average glucose overnight? Not really sure exactly what else would be useful here. So if you have ideas of what would be useful for your sleep and that kind of data, let us know. But this will be rolling out pretty soon.
The primary thing this is going to help with is just, like Levels does, it’s gaining that metabolic awareness. So once you can see your wake up point, then you can see, “Oh, wow, it looks like I started rising like an hour before waking up, and that Wake Up icon is right at the peak of my glucose rise. That’s interesting. What does that mean?” So stuff like that can just provide context. Next slide. So Murillo implemented this integration with a new tool called Instabug, which makes it really easy for customers to either submit a feature request or report a bug.
And what’s nice about this is that it’ll type in automatically to our internal system, Clubhouse, for managing those. And then we can close the loop with customers very simply by responding to them when the fix has been rolled out. That’ll be great. And I suggest everyone start using this, do your testing, just shake your phone to launch this modal interface and do your bug reports that way. Next slide. And then another cool thing, a new idea that we have is oftentimes people ask us to like, “Hey, can I get my friends into Levels?” Jhon’s been working on a feature and Sam’s been specking this out, a feature to have an in-app referral link. So every customer gets their own referral code, and they can share that as much as they want with their friends.
There’s also some backend features that we can configure these codes, so that you can make limited time use, like maybe you can only refer three people and then your code expires, something like that. This is in progress and excited to see it go live in the near future. Next slide. And then beyond that, there’s been several other really important things that have been going on that are a little smaller or not visual, but I’ve kind of bucketed them here into iterate on the products, improve the product quality and then scaling Levels.
You can imagine, we don’t want to just launch new features. But we want to make sure that we launch them, listen to feedback, iterate on them, make sure that they’re actually hitting the intended problem we’re solving for customers. And so to that end, there’s a bunch of work that went out to improve the experience, getting your monthly report, the auto flag for strenuous exercise. We originally had that at plus 30 spike, but now it’s a plus 20 because it wasn’t sensitive enough and a variety of other things. And then in terms of improving the product quality. Gabriel fixed a rendering issue with the catalog, super important that things look the way they should, and Jhon pushed out a fix to deep link crashing. There’s some back end stuff. Andrew, did you want to touch on any of the back end scale operations?
Andrew (12:10):
Yeah, just calling out a few of the other products that are ongoing. I’m sure several people have seen, had some scaling challenges recently. And so coming up with elegant solutions for that. Xin Lu has also been thinking about long term data storage, specifically to make it really easy to protect the privacy of all of our customer data. And so having like clean access policies and stuff like that. Yeah, and I think… I don’t remember if you mentioned how it made it really easy for us to generate other people’s reports, which is really cool.
David Flinner (12:52):
Any questions?
Josh Clemente (12:56):
Awesome. Great update, Mike.
Mike DiDonato (12:59):
Awesome updates. So we had 25 calls. And really quickly, I should just give a quick update there. Going forward, we’re going to reduce the volume of our calls with our… I almost said customers. I should say members, in an attempt to go deeper on these conversations so that we can better understand their needs and what they want. Just quickly, two key themes I want to highlight around education and content. We continue to hear that our members love our content, but want an easier way to engage and almost have like more of a curated experience. I heard from a couple of people, use the questions we ask when they’re signing up to target and make the content experience a little bit more curated. I think I talked with David and [inaudible 00:13:57] about that a couple of times.
And then the second part is community. People want to continue to be a part of Levels, even if they’re not actively using the product. And what I’ve heard is not everybody necessarily uses Facebook, and I did a debrief call with Nick Robinson from Zero and he said it’s still a perfect time for us to focus on community. We’re still small enough, and if we wait too long, it could get away from us. So I’m excited to hear David’s update around education and content, and then the conversations we’re having with Dorothy Tory who’s an OG Levels member. That’s all I have.
Michael Mizrahi (14:47):
All right. On the upside, a few quick updates, we have a lot of order states that are stuck. Customers are stuck at different points of the order flow. So they might have signed up for Levels, but not yet filled out their console form or get lost at any of the other steps. So we’re taking these one by one and kind of chipping away at them. So with order validation now, this is the state where we check on consoles before we send them through to the physician network. We’re proactively messaging customers who are stuck in console flow, who haven’t yet filled it out. This is a big improvement. We’re reducing the number of abandoned orders.
When we first started checking this out, we had orders dating back two or three months. And so we brought this all into like the 30 day range. We reach out three times. If someone doesn’t answer after that point, we refund their order and invite them to sign up when they’re able to complete. Next update, Truepill. We’ve moved our fulfillment as foreshadowed from Hayward to New York for a majority of orders. We’re still going to fill some orders out of Hayward for the West Coast. but majority is from New York. So there’s much better capacity there. We should have much improved scaling capabilities there, and kind of nipple out of the packaging issues that we were seeing in Hayward with the retraining of a brand new team in New York.
So that is live this week. The first few orders went out on Tuesday, and ramping up over the next week or so until it’s all moved over. This does have some operational challenges. We now have to manage packaging inventory in two different places. And we can run short in one location, need to overnight to the other location, trying to minimize as much of that as possible with the Truepill team. Josh mentioned Wearable Challenge 5 kicked off right after Thanksgiving. So we’re about a week in, and so far looks great, active involvement in the WhatsApp. And we’ll share out the core forelearnings and results pretty soon.
And then finally, wanted to announce a new program, Everyone on Support. So a bunch of different companies do this in different ways. It’s just a good way for everyone across the team to interact with our customers, to learn what their issues are, to work with our internal tools and kind of solve the problems that we do on a daily basis. There’s a levels.link/eos signup form in notion. We’re going to have two to three slots every other week, ideally targeted for our high volume days, you can give us a hand. We’ll find a time that works for everyone and together we can do tickets in a paired way.
We’ll help you out. Don’t worry, you’re not on the hook. We’ll walk you through punch the documentation, let you click the buttons, and then work for an hour or so and see how many can solve. Should be a fun way to connect with customers. You can do email or live chat, and Mercy will share more details around that. But for now, you can go and sign up. I think the first slots open up next Tuesday, and we’ll keep this going on a rolling basis, open to everyone. So if you have an hour to spare on any one of those days, we’d love your help and might be insightful for you as well in whatever you’re working on.
Cool. One more slide. Just our November numbers to date on NPS. This is, the full month of November we’re at 64 on NPS, which is basically, “How likely are you to recommend Levels to a friend?” We put this up right before we delivered the monthly report, so pretty great score there. And you can see notes or any comments in the user feedback firehose channel, or the user feedback channel rather. And then on CSAT for the full month of November, happiness score of 97%, great, and a small handful of okays or not goods which are usually people who get stucked in order validation or were not able to solve their problem for some reason. But for the most part, great job on the support side and we’re keeping our members happy. So we’ll update all of our language there. That’s it for me.
Josh Clemente (18:23):
Awesome. Coming to us live from what looks like a road trip. Weekly beta trends, so just showing the number of shipment starts, users starting the program over the past few weeks. I want to highlight obviously the partner code stuff here. We had over the holiday a bit of a slowdown in our regular codes with the exception of course of Broken Brain, which absolutely just orders a magnitude ahead of any other codes. So amazing to see that velocity through the holiday. We’ve got a good cue here coming into December of orders, so nothing has really slowed down other than that October spike. So we’re still maintaining velocity here. Sam.
Sam Corcos (19:05):
Yeah, so still have 10.4 in cash. We crushed our revenue goal for November and we’re on track to do the same for December. So keeping it up mostly from these podcasts. Broken Brain really… You’ll see on the next slide how the bar… There it is. You can see Broken Brain makes all of our other numbers. If you recall, the week of November 8th was a new record for us, and the week of November 15th kind of blew all the other ones out of the water. So that’s pretty cool.
Josh Clemente (19:41):
Huge. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente (19:45):
Instagram we reach 10,000 followers so now we can swipe up. That’s a big exciting thing. We can now link to blog posts, IGTVs, all the exciting things that we’re mentioned in. A lot of interesting things this week, people sharing different variations between cookies and bananas, and the difference each person has. We also posted a photo, asked people how they did on Thanksgiving, and a lot of people were just sharing how the difference between walking one day and then the next day when they ate their leftovers, they had a massive spike because they just sat on the couch. That was interesting to see.
Next slide. Twitter, also the same thing. A lot of people were just commenting on just how they did, comparing leftovers to actual Thanksgiving day where they enjoyed hanging out and walking around, versus the next day. You can see right there on the center, a photo of a guy who said Thanksgiving leftovers he had a four versus the day before in eight. So it’s pretty interesting. The following on Twitter is also increasing. We’re almost at 9,000 followers. I think we’ll be there probably by the end of the weekend is my guess. So things are happening fast. That’s it for me.
Josh Clemente (20:53):
Awesome, and podcast update.
Thomas Griffin (20:57):
All right, so the podcast train keeps moving quickly. I think we’re at close to 125 secured, recorded or released, continue to get feedback from a few people over the last couple of weeks [inaudible 00:21:10]. I’ve never seen results like this from what we’re doing, which is really cool and a testament to our team and our network. Most notably over the last couple of weeks, we locked in Casey on Ben Greenfield Fitness in January, which is absolutely huge. This is definitely like a top five overall get in the health and fitness space. And as inevitable as we thought this was, it really wasn’t.
So this is a big exhale for me personally. I’m really happy that this is locked in. We also got verbal confirmation that we’ll be on the Whoop Podcast in likely January. So that’s really exciting given the overlap and audiences. Next slide. So just an update, the top shows to look out for. As everyone has mentioned, Broken Brain has killed it. And I just noted that over the course of the first two weeks, we’re at double the pace of Kevin Rose. I think Kevin Rose was around 150 unit sales in those first two weeks, which is pretty incredible given where Kevin Rose is today.
And then, yeah, we’re recording Greenfield and Bulletproof Radio both on January 13. Going to talk to those teams to make sure that the release dates are a bit spread out from one another. But those are really two of the other top shows that I think are going to generate potentially similar sales volume to Broken Brain. So we’ll keep an eye out for those. And then I guess one other thing to say about these is, beyond the immediate aftermath of these shows being released, the content will remain extraordinarily valuable to us in our marketing efforts in the years to come really, when we eventually turn on our growth engine and start doing paid advertising.
Almost no doubt, I put a lot of money on the fact that the content from like these three shows will likely be our best performing Facebook and Instagram ads. So these are enormously valuable for us as a company, even beyond kind of like the first month or two that we’re tracking sales from them. Next slide. Yeah, so we kind of sneakily did our first partner video shoot earlier this week down in Florida. Typically, I would be on site for a shoot like this. Josh had also intended to go down to Florida for this. But given COVID and Thanksgiving, we weren’t able to make it happen. So shout out to Barwis, their staff and then Tony, our videographer, who went down for really just managing like an incredibly logistically complex day.
Typically, you do one to two featured interviews in a day. We did six with four NHL players, one physical therapist, and Mike Barr was himself. Also did a ton of b-roll of them working out in a variety of capacities, and having protein shakes and eating. So I think this video is going to be pretty amazing. I’ve started watching some of the interview footage and yeah, it’s pretty cool. In the near term an asset like this is going to be more used for sort of business development purposes, for example maybe with press and kind of telling the story of the Levels application, and peak performance and professional sports. Long term we’d be cutting up an asset like this to use potentially for paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram, email marketing and our website.
Next slide. And then just some miscellaneous quick updates. The conversation is progressing, frankly, uncharacteristically fast. With Equinox, their executive leadership is testing Levels including their former CEO, current Executive Chairman, their COO, their Head of Equinox Ventures, their Head of National Programming, Head of Innovation. And they’re very interested and are doing a lot of back channeling within our network for people like Mike Barwis, who has been talking to them on a daily basis. So exciting stuff there. MLB, we were selected to be featured in what’s referred to as their Winter Meetings. This is an annual Sports Science and Technology Summit that they put on specifically for the 30 MLB teams in the commissioner’s office.
So this year, given COVID, they’re doing a presentation featuring a select number of companies that they think are the most interesting. So we applied for and got picked to be featured in that deck. And then we’ll likely have a number of follow ups with specific MLB teams after that. And then a lot of conversations with just the other top performance and health technology companies and nutrition companies in our space, like Oura, Hyperice, Athletic Greens, Organanifi. These are incredibly helpful conversations beyond marketing collaborations. We’re doing a lot of horse trading with contacts, and frankly, just learning from people who have traveled down the road that we’re walking currently. A couple of other things there, but I’ll wrap up. That’s it for me.
Josh Clemente (26:05):
Awesome. Solid. Thank you. All right, content. [inaudible 00:26:11] first update.
Mike (26:13):
Yeah, exciting. Yeah, we’ve since last time we were all together, we’ve posted three new articles. There’s a great Ben Bikman piece. This is the first of three parts that he’s going to do. It’s really kind of an ultimate guide to insulin. I definitely recommend this. It’s a great example of a little bit tighter, a little bit more direct piece than some of the longer thought leadership pieces we’ve been doing. The other piece we put up is about artificial sweeteners. It’s actually one I wrote as part of the kind of interview process for coming on board here. Some interesting information in there. Again, a good example of how we’re formatting some new content, breaking it into sections.
And then we just last night put up Metabolic Health and Menopause. This is another one of these thought leader pieces hitting on one of these sort of core foundational subjects by a writer we hadn’t worked with before named Jennifer Welsh, and that’s a really nice piece as well. Next slide. So as Josh mentioned earlier, we have a new editorial calendar. This takes the place of some of the disparate documents that were around before to plan out the content that we’re doing, but also to capture ideas and to capture things that have been published. So you can find this out under the Content Wiki. It’s really useful to look at our content from a number of different directions.
So if you want to see the kind of stuff that we’re planning and what’s coming up, which I’ll talk about a little bit in a minute, you can sort that way. If you want to look at, what have we done around a particular topic? Maybe you want to send something to somebody and who’s interested in the exercise aspect, you can sort on the topic of exercise here and see all the articles we’ve done around that, both interviews and foundational pieces. And then when you or anybody sends us ideas, this is where they’re going to start to get captured.
So we’ll grab the conversation that might have come along with an email or a Slack chat, we’ll put it in the notes here and we’ll create a line in here. And then those ideas will slowly turn into things that are in progress and editing. Definitely go out and take a look, play around with this. It’s a nice comprehensive view of what we’re up to. Next slide. And then, of course, as it is an editorial calendar, you can also change the view from the default view of the table and to a calendar view. And where this is going to come into play is to kind of see what’s upcoming.
So with pieces that we are working on, we’ll start to schedule them out. This is our tentative plan for December. So you could see some of the content that’s coming up here. There’s some interviews. The Jack Johnson interview hopefully will go up next week. Josh had a really nice conversation with him, NHL player. We’re going to start doing some shorter posts, things that have been good ideas, that have been kicking around a while like 10 people to follow, and metabolic health, and 10 books to read about metabolic health. So Casey and I are putting together this initial list, and then we’re going to put those out on Slack to kind of socialize a little bit and get everybody else’s input.
We’re going to do some shorter versions of some of the longer stuff we have like a weight loss primer. This is an idea that came from David of, “Hey, can we do something that’s just a much quicker kind of read, that will be really useful in-app and that learn tab?” But also we’re going to put up on the blog and see how it does there. We’ll keep obviously those longer posts up, we’ll link back to them. But really, one of the main goals of the content over the next couple of months, is to give people more ways to get into these subjects, to get into these topics, to get into metabolic health. Sometimes that’s going to be a longer piece. Sometimes it’s going to be a shorter piece, and then try to increase the amount that people are reading more on our site, that they’re coming in and then hanging out. So any questions on content. Thanks.
Casey Means (30:04):
Exciting stuff. Thanks, Mike.
Josh Clemente (30:06):
Thank you. Cool. We are on to the share of the week or a personal share, rather. Tom, go ahead and kick us off.
Thomas Griffin (30:15):
Oh, boy, I’m not ready. I’ve been leaning into Christmas which has been nice. It’s a unique year in our household in terms of tradition and not being able to execute on the normal traditions. But we got a tree and we decorated everything this past weekend. I’ve been playing Christmas music a lot, so I’ve been enjoying that quite a bit. And then on the Levels side, I’ve been really excited about… I’ve got like five to 10 calls in the next couple of weeks, with people who lead marketing and partnerships at a lot of other top health technology and nutrition companies. And I’m just super excited to learn and triangulate best practices as we look ahead to the next 12 months.
Josh Clemente (30:57):
Nice. Hao.
Hao Li (31:00):
Yeah, I’m just so excited to see we had some scaling issues on our engineering side, because we’re growing so fast.
Josh Clemente (31:11):
Yeah, that’s awesome. I don’t think Laurie’s joined us. Laurie, jump in if you are on the call, if not, Sam.
Sam Corcos (31:20):
Yeah. I’m excited just for the pace of product iteration. That’s been really exciting to just see how quickly we’re iterating on things, and how when customers request something, we make a note and very quickly thereafter, we ship it. And it’s exciting to see. I think our customers feel that pace as well. It almost seems like David’s feature announcements are a feature in and of themselves, because it gets people really excited about it.
Josh Clemente (31:49):
For sure, yeah. I love seeing the chatter on social of people reminding each other of what we’re working on. It’s people are paying attention to the pace. Jhon.
Jhon (32:02):
Yeah, on the Levels side, I’m excited about the in-app content features that we have been exploring this week. We have found a very powerful and extensible solution that will allow us to provide a better experience for our members and for content editors. And personally, I’m excited the rainy season is over here, and we expect to have dry and sunny days until the end of January here at Columbia.
Josh Clemente (32:36):
Nice. Yeah, opposite going on up here. But that’s how it goes, I guess. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (32:43):
On the work side, excited for a lot of the trooper progress. That New York move is a big one. And then we also have the physician network coming online as soon as two weeks from now in December. So those are some big rocks that are going to be in place, which is great. On the personal side, seeing some family this weekend and then have a few days off early next. But simultaneously, it sounds like California is getting a little worse. So hoping things look okay and we all stay healthy and well. Yeah, that’s about it.
Josh Clemente (33:13):
Nice. All right, Dom.
Dom D’Agostino (33:17):
Yeah, the fall weather and the research, of course, the IRB process and associated red tape, getting through that and getting a lot of good feedback. And actually had a number of calls lined up including Mark Lambert, the strength and conditioning coach for the Tampa Lightning, and they are very interested in metabolic optimization. So I’ll be scheduling that call maybe over the weekend or on Monday.
Josh Clemente (33:45):
Thanks, Dom. Haney.
Haney (33:47):
Yeah, professionally I’m excited to have the machine start to kind of get up and running, having the other calendar in place, I sort of think in spreadsheets of being able to just stare at that and sort it nine different ways, gives me a lot of happiness. Personally, I’m a week now into wearing Levels. It would be hard to say I’m excited about what it’s telling me. But I’ll say I’m excited about the opportunity to make improvement. There’s basically nothing but blue sky for my diet.
Josh Clemente (34:17):
That’s what we’re here for. All right. Yeah. I mean, for me, professionally, it’s been a really fun couple of weeks, having a lot of great conversations, both on the hiring front and also doing some exploring of the hardware landscape for additional analytes. And it’s just, one of the most interesting things was a conversation I had actually yesterday with a company that is still kind of in stealth, but they’re developing a really exciting potential biosensor technology. And they basically are shifting in a significant way their plans because of what Levels is accomplishing.
They are looking at what just happened with the seed round and with A-16 signing on, and basically the who’s who of consumer getting behind this real time buyer wearable trend. And they’re saying, “That’s the evidence we did not anticipate it was possible, which is why we were looking at clinical, but now we’re very meaningfully looking at wellness and the general space.” And that’s crazy. We’re affecting business plans around the world. This is a company that is not here in the US, so awesome and exciting. And then on the personal side, of course, had a great holiday and looking forward to another one sometime here in the next week or so as we start to ramp into Christmas, which is my favorite holiday season. Evan.
Evan (35:34):
So I’ve been shifting my Sleep Schedule and Daylight Savings time to wake up at dawn and go to bed closer at dark, and then in the afternoons go bicycling more. And I found this really great new hill, really steep. And then on the top of the ridge, you can see the Richmond Refinery, beautiful industrial facility. And on the other side, Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. And it’s just amazing, real favorite bike spot, and it’s very easy to get to. So that’s something cool personally I’ve been doing.
Josh Clemente (36:02):
Nice. Yeah, bikes are one of my favorite things in the world. DiDonato.
Mike DiDonato (36:08):
Yeah, I think Sam had mentioned just the pace at which we continue to iterate. We, I mean like product and engineering team, it’s pretty amazing. Every week I feel like I’m getting pushed an update on the alpha side, and it’s just awesome to see all that work come together. And then still just like everybody who’s interested in Levels, whether it’s Tobi from Shopify which is an amazing company, or Tony Robbins, that one’s a huge one. So it’s just super awesome. That’s all.
Josh Clemente (36:49):
Agreed. Casey.
Casey Means (36:52):
Yeah. So professionally, I just want to give a major shout out and thank you to Dom D’Agostino, who’s been doing just a huge amount of work to get the study off the ground for January and submitted the IRB, and has just done tons of follow up and legwork on that. So that’s very exciting progress and huge thank you to him for all that work. I think also professionally, just couldn’t be more excited to be working with Haney on expanding and refining the editorial operations. There’s huge momentum already happening, and big picture, I think through our content, we can have just such an impact on shaping the narrative around the future of metabolic health and what good health means. And I can already see Mike’s experience and execution moving that ball forward, at a even more rapid pace than we have been. So super excited about that.
Josh Clemente (37:40):
Yeah, for sure. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente (37:44):
I’m excited about all the product improvements that are happening. Those seem super cool and that’s going to be really helpful for the members. Personally, I’m going to try to decorate for Christmas this weekend, so excited of that.
Josh Clemente (37:58):
Nice. Gabriel, [inaudible 00:38:01].
Gabriel (38:02):
Yeah, I continue to be really excited about the quality and velocity of all the content with podcasts content and the blog posts. I was really enjoying the artificial sweetener article that Haney just posted. And then on the personal side, I’ve recently stepped away from coffee and I’m getting back into the world of herbal tea, which I used to be really into and haven’t touched in a long time. So that’s exciting for me.
Josh Clemente (38:27):
Nice. All right. Let’s see. We are going to step into a quick story of the day by Mike DiDonato, going to walk us through his health stack.
Mike DiDonato (38:39):
It’s not a story. It’s a share. And I think I actually tried to duck out of this as I was running out of ideas, and I had no idea how I arrived at this, but we’re going to go with it. I guess like health spec. This probably helps to talk about things that matter the most to me when it comes to health and well-being, and I’d say probably the first is just like feeling and being at my best every day. And for me personally, it has a lot to do with, I guess, preparedness and performance, whether we’re talking about physical and both mental performance. Whether it’s working out regularly or eating well, it enables me to just feel and perform better personally and professionally.
And then I guess like the other big part is, I want to live both long and well. I guess you could call that like, I want to almost increase my life and my health span. So we could start with fitness. The Apple Watch and Whoop for me, I’d say more importantly is the Apple Watch. I’ve used it for a really long time, and I guess this isn’t just relating to the fitness portion. But I think like Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” So the Apple Watch and Whoop, I wouldn’t say it’s an accountability thing, but it just given me awareness of things that just weren’t always clearly visible. Whether that’s like pace on a run, or like a predictive VO2-max or any other biometrics.
And then obviously, we have to have Levels in here. I think online, I think I’ve seen most people say that they use Levels just for nutrition. But for me, and I think I talked with David and Josh a few times with this, it’s actually like a benchmark for how intense my performance was for the given activity. I do most of my exercise and workouts in a completely fasted state. And then the other thing is, it’s given me an understanding or clarity of what I can actually do. Again, the fitness and performance industry, I think there’s this conception that you need to fuel up with carbs or you’re going to bonk. And personally for me, I’ve seen that that doesn’t happen. So it’s been pretty cool. We could bounce the next one.
Nutrition. There is only one. There is only one, it is Levels. I don’t think I have to talk about it much. But for those of you that don’t know, I had a really big aha moment when I first started using Levels. I was eating something on like on a daily basis that I thought was super healthy for me and a really good choice. It’s advertised as low on the glycemic index. There’s 20 superfoods and there’s no preservative. So this particular item had to be refrigerated. But when I first started using CGM in Levels, I found out that this particular item was sending me to the pre-diabetic zone. And I was basically doing this to myself on a daily basis and had no insight or context previously. So that’s just one of many examples.
So we can go to the next slide, Josh. And then I think it’s actually like I did this a little bit out of order. I think I should have probably put recovering sleep first. This one’s been huge for me personally. I like to live an active lifestyle. And especially over the last couple years, I’ve been more curious about understanding how I can continue to push that limit. So just like a few things here. Apple Watch, I use like a third-party sleep tracking app and then Whoop obviously has a recovery metric. The data between the two can be… I’d said when I first started using Whoop was pretty different. But now they’ve become directionally aligned.
I’d like to learn more about both of the things that are being measured. But I’m even more curious about some of the research that we’re going to do here at Levels when it comes to recovery. And then the two in the bottom, I actually just got hooked with a Theragun. So anybody who doesn’t know what a Theragun is, it’s pretty amazing. It’s like a percussion massage device. And I don’t know. I won’t do it justice, but it’s been kind of like life changing. I put my body through a little bit of a pounding and just having that, I have a bunch of myofascial tools like foam rollers and lacrosse balls. But this really is just like another level.
And then the final one, Calm. Over the last few weeks I started using Calm. I just realized that sleep for me is huge. And I think we all know that, but being more intentional and seeing like all the different areas that I can optimize to improve my sleep quality. And one of the big ones with Calm is just like the nighttime routine. And I think I was even telling David this week that recently I experimented with their… They do bedtime stories. I had Matthew McConaughey read me a bedtime story. That was pretty interesting. And then Joshua, you go to the next slide.
Oh, there. I had to throw Brooks on here. I run a lot and I have like Fred Flintstone feet, meaning I have super flat feet with no arch. And I put a lot of miles in and Brooks has definitely been like the best shoe that I personally I’ve ever worn. And then [inaudible 00:44:55] on the bottom, Equip. So I don’t really take many supplements at all. But I live an active lifestyle and I don’t want to lose weight, so I need to find supplementation with protein in order to eliminate losing lean muscle mass. Shout-out to Anthony and Alex for putting out really quality products. If you guys haven’t tried it, we do have a code. Their protein is amazing and I’ve tested some of their other products.
Nike Training Club… Let me see, time check. Nike Training Club. I don’t really use apps for working out. I like to program my own things. However, when COVID first happened, I was living with my sister and her family, and she had us kind of like on lockdown, lockdown. So my only option to work out was in like the 200 square foot basement and it was really cool. Nike Training Club, they made it free for everybody. If anyone’s looking to check a workout, I highly recommend it. I still use it for mobility and like some yoga workouts. And then the other one here, YouTube.
YouTube’s awesome. You can literally learn anything. But just for this slide, the two big things for me, I’ll start with, I’ve had a lot of injuries and I don’t think we always have time to go to a doctor or physical therapist. And I think we’d be pretty surprised that for a lot of things, we can actually fix or start the healing process. And over the last five years, I’ve been really interested in body mechanics. And there’s some really, really cool channels, like some really well respected people showing you how to fix things. Two things in particular for me that I learned was, basically I used to get runner’s knee all the time. I thought it was a knee problem, but it has actually nothing to do with your knee and it’s just been super fascinating. You can literally go on YouTube and learn anything that you want about the human body.
And then next, Josh. Things to add. So I think we probably all know about these products. Oura is probably the one that I want to add next and probably should, considering I get asked about it all the time. Eight Sleep, definitely. Elysium, so I think probably everyone knows about this product. But if you don’t, they have an interesting test that maps your biological age, super curious about that. And then Hyperice who I actually feel like Tom is like talking to everybody on the slide. They have some really interesting products of recovery that I’d love to try out. That’s it.
Josh Clemente (47:51):
Cool. Yeah, this is pretty interesting. I think we should… Haney, just going to throw this out there. But I think the health stack at the individual level might be an interesting kind of content vector, like everybody going through what they use day-to-day to stay sharp, especially in a company like ours. Anyway, yeah. Thanks Mike for throwing that together. And everybody generally, you’re all encouraged to explore, and experiment, and share.
We have the Slack channels. We have a health and wellness organization. So let’s keep each other sharp and share these tips and tricks. We do have a discount code notion page. So like Mike was mentioning, Equip is on there. I think Perfect Keto is on there. I believe we have more codes floating through email. So let’s try and consolidate all those in the notion page, so we can all take advantage. That said, we’re here at the end. Appreciate everybody’s contributions during the week on the meeting. Yeah, next week we will do this again. So have a great weekend.
Casey Means (48:47):
Bye everyone.