#474: Josh Clemente on Improving Metabolic Health

Josh Clemente is the Co-Founder of Levels. Josh is a rocket scientist and worked at SpaceX for 6 years, managing the team that designed the life support systems in their space shuttles. In this conversation, we discuss biowearables, metabolic health, physical output vs food consumption, real time biological information, and working at SpaceX and Hyperloop One. ======================= The Stacks 2.0 mainnet launched on January 14, 2021. Stacks, which you may recognize as Blockstack, is a layer-1 blockchain that uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a secure base-layer and enables developers to harness its power in new ways. Stacks makes Bitcoin more than digital gold, enabling apps and smart contracts on Bitcoin--unlocking innovation, new value, and a new way to earn BTC. Visit http://www.stacks.co for more information. ======================= Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains. ======================= Get fresh, pre-measured ingredients and mouthwatering seasonal recipes delivered right to your door with HelloFresh, America’s #1 meal kit. HelloFresh lets you skip those trips to the grocery store, and makes home cooking easy, fun, AND affordable! Go to http://www. HelloFresh.com/pomp10 and use code pomp10 to get 10 free meals including free shipping! =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Josh Clemente is the co-founder of Levels. Josh is a rocket scientist and worked at SpaceX for six years. We manage the team that designed the life support systems in the space shuttles. In this conversation, we discuss bio-wearables, metabolic health, physical output versus food consumption, real-time biological information, and working at SpaceX and HyperL1. I really enjoyed this conversation with Josh, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Blockstack. Apps and smart contracts are coming to Bitcoin, along with a brand-new way to earn Bitcoin.

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  You can literally put pomp.crypto in Coinbase Wallet and it will send the Bitcoin to me. It will make sure it gets to me. Basically, my own personal wallet address that is human readable, pomp.crypto. So if you want, you need to go to unstoppabledomains.com in the DApp browser and you can register and manage your domains there. Just like regular domains, if somebody else buys the name you want before you do, you can't have it. So if you have your personal name, your company name, or a phrase, or maybe something that you think will be valuable in the future, you should go to unstoppabledomains.com today and buy the domain you want. Again, you can't have pomp.crypto because I got that one. But if there's something else you want, go to unstoppabledomains.com today and make sure that you get the name before somebody else gets it.

• 2:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Lastly is HelloFresh. Yes, HelloFresh, HelloFresh, HelloFresh. You get fresh, pre-measured ingredients and mouth-watering seasonal recipes delivered right to your door. HelloFresh lets you skip those trips to the grocery store and makes home cooking easy, fun, and affordable. And that is why it is America's number one meal kit. I don't like cooking, but I've used HelloFresh multiple times. Palina loves it. I love it. It's great food, easy to make, and if it's good enough for me, it's good enough for you. So why is this so awesome? HelloFresh cuts out stressful meal planning and grocery store trips, facts. So you can enjoy cooking and getting dinner on the table in about 30 minutes or less, facts. And it's also healthier. I usually don't eat that healthy, but I'm trying to get better and HelloFresh is helping me.

• 3:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So eat, you can eat healthier and it has never been easier with low calorie, carb smart, vegetarian, and pescatarian options every week. And no matter what you choose, every single recipe is packed with fresh produce sourced directly from farmers. So cut down on your grocery bills and on your food waste. Go and try out HelloFresh. Again, I've used it. I love it. You will too. Go try out HelloFresh. You can go to hellofresh.com/pomp10.

• 4:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, hellofresh.com/pomp10. Now pay attention, you will get 10 free meals, 10 free meals. I'm out here feeding the people. Go to hellofresh.com/pomp10 and use code POMP10 for 10 free meals and you will also get free shipping. Literally, I'm giving you free food. Go to hellofresh.com/pomp10 and use code POMP10 for 10 free meals, including free shipping. If you don't, you literally are not taking the free food that I'm giving you and that makes you not so smart. So go to hellofresh.com/pomp10 and get 10 free meals on me and HelloFresh. Use code POMP10 and you will get 10 free meals, including free shipping. Go to hellofresh.com/pomp10. I'm out here feeding the people. That's what I'm here for. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Josh

• 4:52Anthony Pompliano?

  and let's get into it now.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 5:19Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Got an awesome episode today with Josh. Thank you so much for joining us, sir.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me on.

• 5:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. You've got an amazing background in terms of you've worked at some of the most innovative companies in the world. And now you've started a company that's really pioneering kind of this bio wearable space. Before we get into what you're doing today, I want to go back. Tell us a little bit about your background, what you did at SpaceX and at Hyperloop, and then we'll talk a little bit about those companies.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Definitely. I grew up in Northern Virginia, a little bit south of DC, had a big property. I was always into machines, most particularly cars, motorcycles, dirt bikes, always building stuff. And I decided to go to school for mechanical engineering and kind of spent some time on thermodynamics and heat transfer and not really knowing what I wanted to do other than work on machines and vehicles. And so ultimately after school,

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Spent a brief stint selling used cars and then got the call I was waiting for and went and worked at SpaceX for about six years. And that that was for sure one of the highlights of my life. And, you know, during during my time there, I think I completely changed as a human being. Like end to end, just completely transformed the way I think about the world, where I see myself on the hierarchy of intelligence. Way closer to the bottom than I had previously thought.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  But it was it was an unbelievable experience and I met some of the best people in my life, you know, who are who will be close to me to the forever, I hope. And and generally learned.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  You know, I learned essentially how to solve problems from first principles and, you know, using. Using that foundational, like, what is the simplest solution that gets us to an iterative step forward? Right? That that sort of mindset is is just rampant in in SpaceX and I think in Elon companies generally. Sort of an Occam's razor type approach where you just like go for the simplest solution typically and and also attract really. Exceptional people with a big, a big mission. So that was an unbelievable experience. I eventually worked on. The astronaut life support program. So SpaceX was previously, you know, they were a satellite launch provider initially and then.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  The big transition came when it became clear that that part of the business was working and now it was time to try and take humans into space. And that's like a fundamental rewrite of the organization, you know, now you have human lives at stake and it's no longer an empty shell. It's like. Got to keep keep them alive in there. So I was one of the earliest employees on the life support program at SpaceX and was able to. Work on that in partnership with NASA all the way through to the critical design review phase. Got that across the finish line and then moved over to Hyperloop and spent about a year kind of specking out the earliest full scale system for Hyperloop demonstration. And for people who aren't familiar with that, that system is essentially a maglev train, so a magnetically levitating.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  High speed train inside of a tube and you evacuate all the air out of the tube so that there's no aerodynamic resistance. And so now with very limited power draw, you can maintain really high speeds. So much higher than a maglev train in open air can do. So we built a full scale concept out in. Las Vegas and I was I was able to work on that, design some life support stuff and then ultimately got obsessed with human performance and metabolism and started levels. So that's where we are now.

• 8:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk a little bit about this idea of like first principles thinking and almost the simplistic solution. Obviously Elon's fingerprints are kind of all over both of the companies that you just described. But walk through like, are there specific examples where you saw this in practice? Or was it something that maybe there was an experience or some kind of training that really got you from what I'll call a civilian to now kind of be fully indoctrinated into this type of thinking and really kind of problem solving?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it so it's a pervasive culture of simplicity. And the the easiest way to describe this is like, as a really green engineer going into one of my first meetings at the company, my expectation was that I was gonna have to take notes and research a lot of what I heard in that meeting afterwards to understand what was happening. Because I did not anticipate that I would be able to pick up on the the language of advanced engineering. And the result was actually that it was a essentially a first 101 level conversation about designing a product that could be very complicated if

• 10:09Speaker 02

  you wanted it to be. But because SpaceX eliminates acronyms and jargon, it's not allowed. No one is allowed to use industry speak. I as a, you know, fresh out of school engineer understood everything that was being talked about. And it was being spoken about in sort of like an explain like I'm five approach. And it's very, it's like, it sounds a little weird initially when you hear conversations at SpaceX, because they're sort of like, well, what if we make it bigger? What if we make it like, what if we make it out of titanium instead of aluminum? That'll be lighter. And then we can add more, you know, the the volume will be, you know, improved. And so there's sort of like all these conversations that are just maintaining very low level terminology.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  So that if anyone catches on and the goal here is that whoever is in the meeting privy to the conversation, no matter what their background or what their responsibility set is, they can understand and potentially contribute to problem solving. And if you create artificial barriers of complexity, just your language creates barriers. You know, if I had had to take notes in that meeting and go look things up, that means I couldn't contribute in the meeting and I may never get back to those that same group of people in that same context at that point in the project to offer my insight. And just because I didn't have insight at that moment, doesn't mean that I didn't in the future. And many, many times midstream in conversation, people would just hear an idea and say, well, why don't you try this? And the company, you know, SpaceX is a very build, test, iterate company.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  So it's, it's if you are waiting to build a complex version of a potential solution before you test it where it might fail and you have to start over again, you're, you're going to inevitably spend more money and more time doing so. So if there's a version of a concept and one example is the, so the spacecraft, the Crew Dragon spacecraft, when it, when it mates to the International Space Station, it uses this, this really complicated system called a docking adapter. And it's sort of like floats and adapts to the ISS. Both vehicles are moving at different rates and at different angles and they connect and like grab on to each other.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  And originally we were supposed to have to buy this system off an existing aerospace provider. And it was going to be on the order of, you know, close to $50 million, something like that. And instead, a team of engineers said, there's a simpler way to do this. And they built using McMaster car parts, which is like, it's an e-commerce hardware store online. And snowmobile springs, they built what we called the McDocker, which was, I think it was on the order of like $20,000 worth of parts that did everything that the $50 million component would have done. And they demonstrated it live. And that was the build, test, iterate approach that allowed like that we were constantly using it at SpaceX. It was like, I think I can do this with parts that are laying in my garage. So I'm going to, and then I'm going to record a video of it and share it with the team.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  And in, in traditional aerospace, that doesn't really happen. You know, you don't, you don't have that license to. Kind of hack things together if necessary. And you know, the, and it goes all the way to the top. So like, I remember when the Falcon 9 version 1.1 rocket first flew, it, it tried to relight its engine. So, so rockets traditionally burn up and in, on reentry. So they put their satellite in space and then fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. Well, SpaceX was trying to land them and recover them and re-fly them. And when that first Falcon 9 flew, that was able to relight its engine and it wasn't able to land because it didn't have any way to do so, but it relight its engine and slowed down.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Elon basically went on stage afterwards and said, so we're now gonna, now that that rocket did what it was supposed to do, like, we're just gonna put legs on it and land it because that way it'll be able to land. And if you, if you want to land, like, you need to have legs to land on. And it was like the most, it was like a child explaining something. But that is the, that's the example I want to drive home is just that the simplicity of the language pervades the end solution. It ended up that we just put legs on Falcon 9 and it landed. You know what I mean? And oftentimes you can get caught up in thinking about crazy complexity when, at the end of the day, if you just describe it in its simplest form, that might be what you can do.

• 14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of the language ends up determining the simplicity of the design versus the simplicity of the design determines the language? Like, is there a causation there or they both go hand in hand?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  I really think it goes hand in hand. I mean, you, by, by creating, I think by creating a space where you can speak in very simple terms and describe very simple concepts without embarrassing yourself, you, you actually create sort of a competition where, I mean, some of the conversations, as I mentioned, are, are kind of bizarre, where engineers are literally talking in absurdly simplistic terms about very ultimately complex, complex, complex concepts. And I, so I think it's bidirectional. I think by having a mental model that is like driven by simple language, you, you are. Keeping yourself at the root of the problem.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  You're not getting caught up in, you know, as you learn more about a space and you get deeper into an industry, you pick up on jargon and descriptors that are much more abstract. And, and by default, like if they are abstract descriptors that you need to be deep in the industry to understand, they aren't the core of the, of the concept. Like if you look at the Wikipedia description of a system, that's the, that's like the first principles associated with it. You know, it, it moves people from point A to point B. You know, that's kind of like what you're solving and anything beyond that is, is no longer your first principle solution. Like if you're not solving moving someone from point A to point B, you're on some sort of extraneous part of the problem.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  So by, by keeping the language focus there and, and then simultaneously, I think rewarding simple, scrappy solutions in terms of like what you're actually building, you, you can create a culture that is like competing for simplicity. And, and I think that actually ultimately means elegance because I, I feel allergic to complexity generally. You know, the deeper we have to go, the more parts that you have to bolt on to put things together, there's just more failure modes, there's more people that have to be in the loop. It, it generally creates bloat and, and so fewer, simpler, more elegant in my mind.

• 16:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The whole idea of like simplicity equals beauty, I think is very, very true and it's cool to see it kind of implemented in a business and especially in a highly technical and what many people think is a highly complex type of, you know, hardware type business. Let's talk a little bit about levels. It's an amazing product, but before we talk about the product, what exactly is the problem that you're going after? You're talking a lot about kind of this metabolic fitness or kind of metabolic awareness in pursuit of metabolic fitness. Talk about like where is the impetus for this idea? What was the problem? How did you come across it and why did it kind of catch your eye and you're so passionate about it?

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so essentially Levels solves the question of what should I eat and why? And we have wearables that tell us a lot about what's happening with our step count and with our heart rate and such, a lot of exercise and sleep tracking. But we don't have anything to answer a fundamental question, which is where is my energy coming from and how well is my body functioning at producing that energy? And so this is the concept of metabolism. Essentially, every tissue, every cell in the body requires energy to function. And where it gets that energy is from our food and environment. So the calories we consume, the sunlight that we absorb. And this concept of metabolism is very abstract for society.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  But in fact, it is metabolic fitness, which is the efficiency with which we're producing energy for our brains and our muscles and the rest of the tissues in our bodies, fundamentally underlies physical fitness and mental fitness. So we spend a lot of time trying to perform better in the gym and perform better at work. But at the end of the day, we never think about the foundation for both of those, which is how well are we producing the energy for our brains and bodies? And so that's what Levels is seeking to do, is to optimize metabolic fitness by using real-time data in as essentially as closed-loop a feedback style as possible. Meaning, when you take an action, you receive feedback on how well that performed for you

• 18:47Speaker 02

  or how well you did, the reaction you experienced, how positive or negative that was, within as near zero time as possible. So closing that gap to the maximum degree that we can. So the concepts that you threw out there, metabolic awareness, metabolic fitness, metabolic fitness is the goal. We all want to incrementally improve day after day. And as with anything, focus, effort, and repetition are necessary to improve physical fitness, mental fitness, and metabolic fitness. So the decisions we're making, they compound over time into a positive or negative result. And if we don't have feedback on whether we're heading in a positive or negative direction, we have no way of achieving metabolic fitness because we don't know which direction we're

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Heading. And so metabolic awareness is that feedback. It's the moment where your body has a closed loop of a data stream essentially to your brain, telling you positively or negatively how well you're doing. And so the level system, essentially, we take in feedback. Well, we take in data from what we call bio wearables. So these are devices which are measuring a molecule in the body. This is fundamentally different from a traditional wearable, which is measuring sort of a superficial marker. So pulse, which you can measure with your finger or step count, which you can kind of just count. In this case, it's a molecule that would otherwise not be measurable without this device. And we take that data in context with your lifestyle choices.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  So the nutrition decisions you're making, your stress level, your sleep quality and your exercise. And we pull out insights to help you understand specifically how well your body is functioning and where your areas for opportunity for improvement are.

• 20:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so as you're doing this, maybe let's talk about kind of the traditional wearable market. So you talked about pulse, you talked about step count. There's a whole bunch of them, you know, everything from a Whoop band to an Apple Watch all the way on down. And really what those seem to be focused on is what I'll call output, right? In terms of it's the physical body doing an activity. And what is the impact of doing that activity? So you can get everything from very simple, just how many steps did you walk today? To, hey, you walked a lot of steps, which meant you burnt a lot of calories and then you slept well tonight. And that is all connected and will tell you that. And so that's very, very valuable for people. But what you're really focused on is the input of what's going in the body.

• 21:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So how do you actually measure what's going in the body? Like, what does the product look like today? And what is it doing when somebody puts it on?

• 21:24Speaker 02

  So it's a complicated problem. Ultimately, metabolism is, it's describing the chemical reactions going on in your body. You know, the human body is essentially a large chemistry set with a lot of chemicals being released in response to other chemicals. And so it's not like, you know, a very clean machine where gears are connected and you turn the crank and energy comes out. It's, it's actually, you're, you're pouring chemicals into your body all the time. And, and then hormones have to be released to, essentially to allocate where those chemicals, those resources end up. And that might be weight gain, that might be to the brain for, for cognitive functioning, that might be to the muscles for exercise.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  All of that is dictated by hormones and complex processes and signaling by, by other markers, chemical markers. So in, in this country, we have an extremely concerning, yet largely unspoken about epidemic of metabolic dysfunction, where, you know, the University of North Carolina released a study in 2018 showing that 88% of adults in the United States are metabolically unhealthy. And the CDC is constantly releasing scarier and scarier updates where younger and younger people are getting, you know, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, all of these concerning side effects of very poor diet and chronic lifestyle decisions.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  And so at a point where 90 million Americans have prediabetes, 70% of whom will, will become type 2 diabetic if they don't do something about it, and yet we have no feedback system to tell us whether what we're doing is working in our favor, we ultimately are, are heading in the wrong direction and flying blind when doing so. So the question of how to measure input versus output is a tricky one. You know, ultimately, we need behavior change, we need to make better choices, but, you know, it's, it's much easier to focus on the outputs than it is on the inputs. It's very tricky to get like really good data on what's going into the body. So the way that Levels attacks this is by highlighting for the, for the user, you know,

• 23:29Speaker 02

  for that member who's using the Levels product, we highlight for them the, the way their body reacted to a specific input, right? So you, you eat a meal, let's say you have a pizza. Well, you tap that into the Levels interface, take a picture, and then let's say you sit on the couch. Levels monitors using the continuous glucose information coming from the bio wearable. We monitor the way your body responded to that pizza, and we then surface that to you as a score. So just a simple score out of 10, and that's the output. But you are, you see the input. It was a pizza, and I sat on the couch, and the output was a negative response. My body experienced a prolonged blood sugar elevation, followed by a hypoglycemic reactive crash when

• 24:12Speaker 02

  I was flooded with insulin. Insulin stores glucose as fat, so I gained body fat as a function of this. And then we encourage you to try something different to compare that input to, to a different set of inputs. And so this time, we maybe recommend have that same pizza, but this time, take a walk around the block. So take 20, 25 minutes, and immediately after finishing that pizza, instead of sitting down, go walk around. And now you see a completely different output, which is that, for many of us, are the muscles in our posterior chain that are powering that walk can absorb glucose without insulin, that fat gain hormone, as long as they're being contracted, as long as you're exercising them. And so now, you know, you eat that same pizza,

• 24:54Speaker 02

  you go for a walk, and your body experiences a totally different blood sugar response, and correspondingly, a totally different hormone response. And then we surface those two sets of inputs and outputs for you to compare. So we can show you, like, just a simple stroll after every meal can completely transform the way your body is processing those meals, and the load you're putting on your hormonal system, and how your body is forced to respond and allocate those resources. So that's where we focus is, at the end of the day, we want to make sure that the person who needs to make better choices is being presented with all the information. And we only want to pull in as much input as necessary to highlight and insight, essentially. So, we

• 25:34Speaker 02

  don't make you tap in calories, or macronutrient count, or kind of anything that most nutrition apps make you, make you focus on. We instead just focus on closing that loop between the input and the ultimate output.

• 25:48Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so let's go back to the way that you're measuring this is it's a patch that essentially goes on the back of an arm. And what exactly is happening with that patch?

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this technology is called a continuous glucose monitor, and it was developed over the past few decades in the lab, and then ultimately was moved into the therapeutic space for people with diabetes. And essentially, what it's doing is when you have diabetes, the insulin glucose feedback loop is broken down. So basically, when you eat carbohydrates, glucose gets into the blood. It's a form of sugar. It's in your bloodstream. The hormone insulin has to be released by your pancreas to get that glucose out of your blood. And if it doesn't, it can start to cause serious tissue damage. So for people with diabetes, they really have to have a full time, high resolution awareness of their blood sugar levels. Historically, they've had to prick their finger every single time they need

• 26:45Speaker 02

  a blood sugar measurement. And that just gives you one point in time. It says you're at 106. And you have no idea if you're going up, or you're going down, or where you were two hours ago. So this amazing technology, which is a CGM, which is essentially a tiny little patch. It's about the size of two quarters. And there's this little flexible filament on the underside of it. And that filament, it's very hair like essentially, it sits in the skin, and it actually interacts directly with glucose molecules. And so this breakthrough, over the past roughly 10 years, has allowed people to go from pricking their finger dozens of times a day, to having a continuous, full time data stream right to their phone. And that is telling you glucose in, say, five minute increments, without

• 27:29Speaker 02

  having to prick your finger without any mess or inconvenience. And so that's the development process for the tech. It's typically a wireless data transfer from this little patch that you wear full time for about two weeks, directly to the phone. And we're now getting to a point where, again, the convenience factor, the price point, and the usability, the usefulness of this information, has made it such that we can start to expand it to areas outside of therapy. Right? So it's no longer just necessary that You have diabetes that you're managing, but in fact, we can start to focus on optimization. So whether or not you have diabetes, no matter where you are in the metabolic health spectrum, we can be making better choices. You know, if we have better insight, I'm sitting down to eat lunch.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  What am I going to eat and why? Well, we can now ground that in objective data. And so that's currently the application we're using CGM for, and that platform I expect will will include many more analytes in the coming years.

• 28:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And what's so interesting to me about this is the obvious thing would be, hey, you had this, you know, kind of persistent, flat glucose level. You ate a bunch of candy and now all of a sudden it spiked. You shouldn't do that anymore. Right? So kind of a very binary, eat this, don't eat that. But you highlighted an example of it's not just a single perspective of eat this, eat, don't eat that. It's also kind of holistically looking at you ate the pizza and then you sat on the couch versus if you eat the pizza and go for a walk. And so would it be fair to say that the only way to get truly holistic kind of measurement of this stuff is to actually understand what's going on inside the body,

• 29:09Anthony Pompliano?

  combined with what's going on outside? Like, it almost feels like if you're just measuring the external output, or you were just measuring the internal kind of consumption, both of those things don't tell the whole story. So you kind of need to understand both in order to really give people kind of a true recommendation of here's the best thing you can do to be as healthy as possible.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I definitely think that it's both. So the, the situation is that people have, for a very long time, been scarcity constrained, right? For, for most of human evolution, we've had

• 29:47Speaker 02

  essentially to be on the constant lookout for food, we'd never knew where our next meal was coming from. We were in a constantly fasted state between meals. And we now have a situation where we, we have an abundance and not only an abundance, but we almost have this ability with our, our processed food supply to short circuit the human metabolism. We can, in a single meal, we can get more. More fast-acting carbohydrates in than a prehistoric human would have had, would have come across an entire lifetime. And that's not a joke. So we now have this situation where because we didn't, I don't think we evolved sensory feedback for the quality of what we're eating, because every calorie was positive, it was going to keep you from dying.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  We don't have the system to give us the feedback that we need. So when we eat those potato chips or we eat that candy, you know, we are relying on very, very abstract feedback mechanisms. And sometimes, and for most of us, I think it's, we wait for potentially months or years until the bathroom scale starts to change or until we get a scary diagnosis at the doctor before we start to think about, what am I putting into my body? And so it's necessary, in this day and age specifically, when we're increasingly moving to internet-based productivity, we're becoming, as a result, more sedentary and our processed food supply is continuing to get more energy-dense. It is truly possible to poison ourselves with abundance.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  And so we have to build new feedback mechanisms to give us that,

• 31:19Speaker 02

  give us that sensory response that we otherwise wouldn't have. So there's that problem, which is that we genuinely do need this as a function of where we are in our evolution. And then secondarily, there's no sort of one-size-fits-all. And this is where it really gets complex. There are some high-level things I'm comfortable saying, like candy is not a good idea. You know, it's just sugar. And that is such an energy-dense system or a situation that our systems can't handle it. And this is coming from someone who is a confessed recovering candyaholic. And I'll go into those theories in a minute. But beyond that, it gets more nuanced. So to the question of like a cookie versus a banana, which is healthier?

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Most people, I think, would answer pretty easily that the banana is healthier. Well, in 2015, there was the largest study on non-diabetics with continuous glucose monitors was done. And this was at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. They put 800 subjects through a week of continuous glucose monitoring and made them eat these standardized foods. At the end of the trial, they were able to show that two people could eat the exact same two foods. In this case, it was that banana and a cookie made with wheat, and they could have equal and opposite blood sugar responses to those two foods. And so, one person, flat on the banana, big spike for the cookie, another person, the exact opposite. What that indicates is that they're also experiencing opposite hormonal responses. So, that insulin

• 32:43Speaker 02

  release that drives fat gain, or ultimately is associated with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, could be opposite for these two people. So, it is truly the case, I think, that not only do we have the concern about what we're presented with every day in terms of options, but we have to go another layer deeper if we really want to be optimal, in the sense that we should also understand specifically how we, our own individual genotype or phenotype, responds to that specific food, you know, our own chemical makeup. And I think much of this is context. So, I actually believe that only a small fraction is genetics driving those individual responses, and the rest is something like stress, body composition.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  So, basically, how much fat you have on your body, how much muscle you have on your body, how well-slept you are, how much cortisol and insulin are circulating in your bloodstream at any time. That's all what dictates how your body's going to respond to a specific meal. And so, that's why the levels, the levels system is focusing on bringing in much more than just nutrition. It's nutrition in combination with your activity level, with your sleep quality, ultimately with your, with your stress through additional analyte tracking. And this way, we can help you identify which of the levers you should pull on hardest. You know, if it's, if it's a situation where you're experiencing severe metabolic dysfunction as a, as a result of non-caloric decisions. So, you're, you're in very stressful meetings

• 34:12Speaker 02

  all day, and you're sleeping very poorly, and your blood sugar is chronically elevated because you're in a state of essentially enhanced fight-or-flight mode, we can highlight that, as opposed to someone who's eating candy all day. You know, that's a, that's a little bit of an easier connection to make.

• 34:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating to me that you're able to get such a great understanding of the holistic picture. You mentioned earlier metabolic health, and I want to make sure that people really understand this. I think this is kind of the crux of everything you're talking about here. What exactly is metabolic health? And then what are the things that people who have great metabolic health or really bad metabolic health kind of experience?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this goes back to the metabolic fitness conversation. And so metabolic health, the best way to describe it is when the body is able to produce energy effectively without harmful byproducts, such that you can perform to the maximum extent that you need to and can age gracefully. I think that's a good way to describe metabolic health. It's a complex subject. There's a lot that you could dig into there. But you know, what's important is that many people assume that metabolic health is something binary. So I'm either very metabolically healthy, or oftentimes people say I have a fast metabolism, or I have a slow metabolism, and I'm metabolically unhealthy. The reality is that, and this has

• 35:38Speaker 02

  been studied, and international, essentially, conventions of diabetes experts have come out and said, there is no such thing as thresholds, right? Everyone exists on this spectrum of metabolic health. And we've drawn these lines in the sand and said, this is diabetes. This is very metabolically unhealthy. And this is slightly less metabolically unhealthy, but still bad. And that's pre-diabetes. And the rest of us are all in this other end of, you know, bucket of the spectrum. So what we're reframing it as is metabolic fitness. It's your fitness level. How well is your body producing energy? How well is it responding to the specific lifestyle choices you're making every day? The nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress levers you're pulling every single day combine into a metabolic

• 36:21Speaker 02

  profile. And so, you know, we really want to reframe the conversation and get people to stop thinking about this as something that's out of their hands, or like a switch is flipped, and start getting us to think in terms of focus, effort, and repetition. If I know what is causing A positive and or negative response in my body, I can modify those behaviors, not just by removing it. You know, if I, if I love cheesecake, I don't necessarily have to remove that if I just add a stroll afterwards. Or, or if I just make sure that I sleep well that night, you know, get, get a full eight hours. And that can help me maintain insulin sensitivity, which helps me process those indulgences. And so connecting all of these dots for people into a holistic picture of like, okay, all of that abstract advice of eat healthy,

• 37:05Speaker 02

  work out more, I can now understand contextually what that means, you know? Working out more allows me to use the glucose I'm putting into my body immediately. And, and eating better means avoiding these massive hormonal kicks to my system, which ultimately can break it down.

• 37:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. The other part of this that to me is, is really fascinating is there's some, I don't know, taboo, things you can put in your body that everyone seems to be really, really religious about. So I'm going to throw a couple of them out there and you kind of just throw me back whatever comes to mind when I say them. The first one is alcohol. What's kind of the thought process there and what have you guys seen from a trend perspective?

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, I think there's a ton more studying that should be done in terms of alcohol and its effect on metabolism. But what we know is that it's counterintuitive. So for most people, the assumption is, oh, alcohol is all carbohydrates. So if I eat this while I'm wearing a glucose sensor, my blood sugar is going to skyrocket. The reality is that alcohol actually hijacks your liver. It basically tells your liver, well, your liver treats it as an emergency situation and wants to convert the ethanol in, in the drink into fat. And that's essentially how you can metabolize ethanol. So it turns it into triglycerides, which are then stored on, in body fat. In order to do that, it, it seems to shut down the production of new blood sugar.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  So what you end up with is a situation where.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  On a glucose monitor, you have a drink or two, and this varies person to person, but there will typically be either no response or an actual decrease in blood sugar. And what's happening behind the scenes is both the alcohol and anything you're eating at that time are being biased towards fat production and fat storage, which is probably not a great alternative to glucose production, but it is a really interesting effect. And, you know, I think generally for me, the biggest concern with alcohol is just it destroys my sleep. It almost seems like it doesn't matter when I have it during the day. My heart rate's elevated, my body temperature's elevated, and my sleep is worse. So I tend to think of it as a stressor that I use sparingly and typically earlier in the day.

• 39:17Anthony Pompliano?

  What about what I'll label as like the keto diet? So basically, I'm gonna eat no carbs, I'm only gonna eat meat, and I'm basically going to be as strict as possible with a fanatical focus on just meat consumption.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I think that there are many ways to put together a diet that avoids the sort of energy toxicity that we touched on, you know, where you have a ton of sugar and really a ton of fat. Either of those can cause essentially toxicity in the metabolic system. So what I think is important is that you don't do what I just mentioned. Don't eat a very, the standard American diet, which is high carbohydrate and very high fat, including poor sources of fat. I think the ketogenic diet, it's very hard to maintain. In my experience, I personally am not keto, and I instead strive for kind of a high protein, moderate fat, low carb diet. And ultimately, that's just, that's just my decision.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  You know, my co-founder, Casey, is, she's a plant-based vegan. So she only eats plants, she doesn't eat any meat, and she has, you know, between the two of us, we have totally different macronutrient profiles. She eats a lot more carbohydrates than I do, but she actually has better blood sugar control than me. And so that's another counterintuitive piece where she's using a lot of this really nuanced knowledge about how her body metabolizes specific foods and in what order. So like fiber, fat content, along with those carbohydrates, can modify the way her blood sugar Response. So she's been able to build a really high quality, plant based diet. I think I've been able to build a really high quality, more animal based diet.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  And at the end of the day, there are also people who are maintaining exceptional glucose and probably improving their risks of of certain chronic lifestyle concerns with a ketogenic diet. And so what I think it all comes comes together as is wherever you are, whatever you're able to pull off, whatever your dietary philosophies are, they should be grounded in some objective data so that you can confirm that this is actually doing what you think it it does. And there have been plenty of people who have come in having kind of predetermined assumptions about a specific, either a specific food or a philosophy or dietary approach that have, you know, been blown up in the face of better data.

• 41:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Intermittent fasting seems like another one of these themes or trends that people are grabbing on to. How have you guys seen that impact some of this?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  So intermittent fasting with a glucose monitor is pretty cool because you can see the effects of your body doing its thing. Essentially, when you cut out carbohydrates, or really when you cut out all calories, most people think that they're going to kind of plummet, their blood sugar is going to drop and they're going to have this fatigue issue and they're going to probably pass out or something. And the first time that you do an extended fast and you see that actually all of this, like these spikes and drops and all of the hormonal fluctuations associated with that completely disappear. And your body goes into this very elegant mode where it is taking what you have on on yourself, your your sort of existing body fat.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  And it's converting it into the appropriate amount of blood sugar to keep your brain functioning. And so you'll typically see like a nice, slow decrease and then a very flat blood sugar line. And most people feel really good. And when you see that data, when you see that feedback loop and realize that you can actually maintain this for days without any calories and you're not going to pass out most people, you know, of course, there are some, some of us who have a condition that prevents that, but the reality is most of us have, you know, the average person has about Eighty thousand calories of body fat stored on them. And they only have about two thousand calories of stored sugar, which is called glycogen. So you can, you can easily burn through that two thousand calories of glycogen in a single ninety minute workout.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  But you can go multiple days on the body fat stores. So training your body to using, you know, I think mechanisms like intermittent fasting to tap into that body fat and become more acclimated to using it, I think is a really great approach. And I do a lot of it myself. It helps to kind of release you from, from the grasp of food scheduling as well. You know, it's nice to be able to do one meal instead of three sometimes.

• 43:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. The other thing that I find fascinating about all of this is multivitamins and just what I'll kind of label as not food, yet trying to get some sort of nutrient impact. How do you guys see that playing out? Are there any trends or takeaways?

• 43:52Speaker 02

  I think there are some supplements that probably make sense. If you, if you, certainly if you know you're going to be

• 44:00Speaker 02

  compromised on them. I think vitamin D is a really good one. Vitamin D is super important, and especially as we, like in winter months or indoors. I think vitamin D supplementation makes a ton of sense. Magnesium is another, I think, really important supplement that I take commonly, especially when fasting. And I tend to, I eat a lot of avocados and I do add bananas in here and there for potassium. Those are the ones that I've noticed the symptoms or side effects associated with too little of that, you know, specific vitamin or supplement. Beyond that, I, I tend to be skeptical. If there, there isn't good research connecting a, you know, a specific effect of, of too little, then I would argue that you're probably just urinating most of it out

• 44:46Speaker 02

  because many of these supplements tend to have like ten thousand times your, your necessary daily value. And, you know, this goes to the, the if some is good is more better type concept. And I think generally, no. There's a sweet spot for almost everything and, and just taking a multivitamin probably isn't doing much that you couldn't get from a better diet.

• 45:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk a little bit about the bio wearables. So we talked a lot about kind of what you're measuring and how that can be impacted. But the actual device itself and kind of this growing class of things I put on my body that measure something going on inside of my body. How do you see that evolving over time? And is that something that levels will say, look, you know, we've got one product, we want to eventually expand into an entire product suite? Or is it just staying, you know, really, really focused on that glucose monitoring?

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're just cracking the shell on bio wearables right now. I consider levels to be kind of like a bow wave into an entirely new market that has previously been undiscovered of, you know, the, the metabolically aware or the nutrition aware or the honestly, the health seeker who wants to continually know that they're making positive compounding returns on their lifestyle investments, right? We're each, we're making decisions all day, every day, whether it's going to the gym, taking time away from family to do that, or eating food that may not taste as good as that delicious donut. But we're doing it because we want to improve our health. And, and so we're, we're opening up an opportunity to get those micro optimization receipts, like you're, what you're doing

• 46:23Speaker 02

  is working or not working, and here's how to do it better. And to continually feel like you are moving in a positive direction. Glucose is one piece of this. It's a really important, you know, I mentioned some, some stats in the beginning. It's a really important problem in society today. Glucose dysfunction and all of the side effects associated with it are ravaging over 120 million people each year are dealing with some sort of metabolic dysfunction that is preventable. So we're going to stay focused there and continue to expand access to that technology and improve the actionability. But, but it's one of many, you know, and so we're going to continue to push innovation and look to work with innovative companies who are developing the next generation of sensors that are going

• 47:07Speaker 02

  to go a little bit deeper in the, in the direction of bio wearables. And I think this will probably be real time sensing of hormones like cortisol and insulin, which are associated with your stress and how your body is Allocating, you know, fat storage and probably deeper into kind of lipids and triglycerides. So ultimately, I think you'll be able to get a really good immediate view on your, your full metabolic health, not just your glucose regulation. And it'll probably be, be, I would imagine in a consolidated form. So you'll wear one thing on your body and it will do everything that your current wearable does. Plus it's measuring molecules below the skin, which I think is the ultimate, it's the

• 47:46Speaker 02

  holy grail of longevity using these, you know, these, you know, closed loop feedbacks sort of fashion.

• 47:54Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. You've mentioned a couple of times, uh, real time, especially focused on like the real time data collection or, or a presentation. Uh, is that something that previously just wasn't available and now there's the technology and kind of the platforms to do it in real time? Is there some other reason why that's kind of the future? Or is it just literally if you have more data and you're able to track it in real time, then you can be more effective in the, in the recommendations and ultimately the behavior change?

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we have a theory of behavior change that it is closed loops that make the difference. So most people do not want to be unhealthy. And ultimately it's by prolonging the, the length of time between an action and the negative reaction to that action. By prolonging that, you allow the sort of behavior change piece to dissipate, right? We, our memories just sort of dissolves and we, we lose the immediate reinforcement that happens. Whereas if you do something, you touch a hot stove and immediately feel pain, you don't touch hot stoves anymore. If you were to eat something and immediately feel pain, you wouldn't eat that thing anymore. And as we mentioned, there is no sensory system for that. So by replacing

• 49:05Speaker 02

  in as close to the same amount of time as possible, that sensory feedback with a, a visual or a data-driven feed, piece of feedback, we can help to supplement people's senses of positive and negative when it comes to these things like nutrition. And so I do think that the timeliness of a piece of feedback is crucial to its, to the, to behavior change. So we're all About minimizing feedback loops, we we don't really focus on, you know, blood tests where you do it once and you get, you know, results two weeks later or something like that. They're nonspecific. It's much more temporal. So it's you eat lunch and you see how you respond to that minutes later. And then you eat dinner later, another lesson on dinner. And then you

• 49:48Speaker 02

  can do that over and over again. And you have hundreds of permutations of exploration in a 28 day period. And each of those was an opportunity for immediate lesson learning. That's where I think all of the behavior change value is. And that's what our team, you know, believes and has we've written about in our theory of behavior change is that by taking micro electronic technology, using it, you know, we've unlocked a huge amount of opportunity with with this, you know, essentially the the minimization of, you know, size, scale and cost of electronics, we can now build these these closed feedback loops for a huge number of data vectors and I think completely change the trajectory of of health, not to mention many other things, you know, as we're seeing in finance and elsewhere.

• 50:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it going to be a world where literally we all have a bunch of sensors on and we're walking around, there's like a live dashboard and we almost get to like a predictive state where it says, hey, you're about to eat X, don't eat X, or hey, you're about to lay down on the couch, don't do that, go for a walk, like, you know, how kind of real time slash predictive does this get? And then also, how pervasive do these technologies come into our life? And this has something that we necessarily want, or I don't know, you guys have built this. So you tell me kind of how you guys are thinking about some of the, you know, making it available is one thing, wanting the whole world to use something, it has kind of a whole bunch of other connotations to it.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that in the long run, you know, I would like to see us reverse the trends of metabolic dysfunction, you know, that 88% were unhealthy. I'd like to see that be the healthy set. And, you know, only 12% of us are dealing with preventable chronic lifestyle related illnesses. If we could see that, I mean, I think the productivity we'd see and the benefits to society would be hard to hard to even imagine. The direct costs of diabetes are expected to be over 600 billion in 2030. In the US alone. And so, you know, the secondary effects are, as I mentioned, you know, it's really hard to trace them. So I think it's important that we ramp up our focus on metabolic health in the nearer term. But I don't think it's going to be an invasive thing. You know,

• 51:56Speaker 02

  I think this technology is going to continue to develop and refine. And it's going to be much more, much more similar to a financial data sort of feedback model where you, you get feedback, you see your withdrawals and deposits, you see the compounding rate and direction of return on your, quote unquote, investments. So what you're doing each day, you see the connection to your long-term plan, you know, that retirement trajectory that you're that you're on. You get expert advice if you need it, you know, if you want to do something specific, or if you just generally want someone to coach you along the way, you can have that directly and it's driven by data. It's not abstract and guesswork. And so ultimately,

• 52:37Speaker 02

  I think with metabolic health and really health generally, by having that same data-driven, you know, very large data set per individual type of relationship, you know, to ourselves, we can, we can build a similar model where, you know, you're slowly but surely working towards that, that future where you are not only, you know, financially retired, but also know you're going to be healthy enough to enjoy it type of thing. And, and so it will be kind of a background layer, available confidence, you'll be able to build confidence in what you're doing. And I do think it will be predictive in the sense that, you know, the devices will be able to tell you, hey, look, you didn't sleep at all on that, on that red eye flight, and you should avoid these foods. Those don't work for you when you're under this kind of

• 53:21Speaker 02

  stress from poor sleep, recommend this menu instead. Very simple, low cognitive overhead, it's not invasive, but it just takes away that guesswork and you know, okay, yeah, I'm compromised on sleep. This is going to help me be healthier and you can connect that right with your goals.

• 53:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I love that. And I think that you're probably more right than, than wrong there. Before I wrap up, I always ask everyone the same three questions. The first one is, what's the most important book that you've ever read?

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, this one I've had to ponder a little bit. I'm gonna say the this book was extremely important to me. It's only I've only recently read it. So you know, I'm putting it in on a high pedestal, but it is amazing. And it's Extreme Ownership by Jaco Willink. I think that the way he reframes so many of life's problems into a very simple binary, where it is your responsibility. Like, that's, that's just all it comes down to is like, if you just take away all the the mental argumentation about whose responsibility it is, and, and accept that it is your responsibility to improve every single day, everything that you do, everything you're involved in.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  It's a position of power, actually. It's an empowerment book. And that's what I loved about it was it was taking something that sounds on the outside like a burden and turns it into a real mechanism for empowerment, which I love.

• 54:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think that that book is, even though everyone knows about it, for those that haven't read it, they feel like there's no way it could live up to the hype, but, but definitely does, at least in my opinion, it sounds like you as well. When it comes to sleep, our friends at Eight Sleep, they've sponsored this question. And as I've talked about on the podcast before, they basically have this bed that cools and helps you get deeper sleep and just a much more kind of refreshing sleep. I sleep on one every night and absolutely love it. What's your sleep schedule? Do you do anything before sleep? Do you do anything specific during sleep? Or any kind of things that have changed over the years?

• 55:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I love the Eight Sleep folks. I have my Eight Sleep Pod Pro that I have not yet unboxed, but I am absolutely ecstatic that I finally have it.

• 55:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I feel like you're, you're measuring what goes in people's body. They're measuring what happens when you go to sleep. You guys should be friends.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  We are friends. Yeah, they're great, great friends of ours and supporters. So I'm glad to hear that they've, they sponsored this question. I'm a warm sleeper. Like, I always wake up in the middle of the night, just uncomfortably warm. And so that that thermal regulation that they incorporate, I think is going to be a total game changer for me. I'm really excited to put it. The test and you know, generally I have over the time that I've been using metabolic tracking glucose tracking specifically to understand how well my body is performing. I've totally changed my perspective on sleep. You know, I used to be a sleep when you're dead type person like that's that's weakness and just recognize very quickly how bad my my

• 56:21Speaker 02

  situation was to give some context. I was actually borderline prediabetic or fully prediabetic when I started this company levels despite being a CrossFit trainer and always caring about physical fitness. And so everything that was going wrong was not my degree of body fat or my exercise. It was that I was eating foods that were putting me into a bad place and sleeping poorly and being highly stressed. So my current approach now I track sleep with Whoop. I also have my Garmin 245 that that do sleep tracking and between the two of them, they forced me to recognize that I can't drink alcohol close to bed, really even in the afternoon. I can't eat meals, you know, within about two hours of going to sleep and I have to get at least seven hours. I do pretty well after seven hours, but ideally eight hours every night and

• 57:07Speaker 02

  light is another real big one. I just, I just cannot get the same recovery scores when I have, you know, light streaming in.

• 57:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you you don't drink in the afternoon or at night, does that mean that you're waking up and pounding a couple of shots?

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Well, I gotta tell you, man, some of these, some of these other European cultures, I think, have it figured out. No, but seriously, it is interesting to look at places like Italy, where oftentimes you'll have a glass of wine, like sort of in the afternoon and a big meal in the afternoon and then, you know, get up and walk and relax and then go to sleep relatively early. And I think that gives the the alcohol some time to metabolize out of the system. Might be, there might be something to it.

• 57:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I love it. Makes a lot of sense. Last question that you'll get to ask me when to finish up is aliens. Are you a believer or a non believer?

• 57:56Speaker 02

  I'm a believer and one of my favorite sort of mental problems to wrestle with is the Fermi paradox about, you know, with the vastness of the universe, why are there not aliens absolutely everywhere? One of my favorite books on this, this was gonna be like the other book that I was gonna say in your first question is The Three-Body Problem. This is written by, I always screw his name up, but Sishin Liu, I think, and totally amazing. Kind of it has a really beautiful explanation for why aliens may not be revealing themselves. And so I just think like probability wise, very unlikely that we're alone and I want to figure out why we haven't seen anyone yet.

• 58:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Before you ask me the last question, I gotta ask, and I don't know why I didn't think about this earlier, any idea if Elon believes there's aliens? Or like what's SpaceX's like internal, like general view on this?

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so generally I think people look at the statistical probability and, and think, yeah, we're very likely not alone in the universe, but given the fact that we have, as far as we can tell, a very hard limit on the fast, like how fast we can travel, which is the speed of light, and the size of the universe doesn't actually matter because there's only so far that we could ever make it in, you know, a million lifetimes. And so at a certain point, it's like, well, the universe is actually not as big as it really is because we just could never interact with anything that far away. So I think that kind of cuts into it. It's like, well, maybe, maybe aliens are just on the opposite side of the universe and we'll never come across them. And so Elon's perspective is, we don't know that there are aliens.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  All we know is that we are the only conscious life forms and consciousness has to be preserved. And so that's kind of the underlying philosophy of wanting to get to Mars is to preserve like, as far as we know, until we come across intelligent beings besides ourselves, we kind of have a responsibility not to extinguish our own existence.

• 59:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's a pretty compelling mission there for sure. What question you got for me to to finish up?

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  This is one I've been grappling a lot with. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  I gotta ask, has social media been good or bad for society on balance?

• 1:00:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I think huge, huge net positive overall. You know, look, I'm biased. I worked at Facebook for for two years. And I think that until I worked there, I didn't really understand kind of the net positive aspect of it. I just thought I was like agnostic. I didn't really have an opinion. But when you start to understand the benefits of everything from like a high level, just hey, you connect billions of people together, and now they can communicate, you know, do commerce, coordinate, you know, all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of benefit to that. Two is you start to understand the human element of it, like, you know, hey, you and I, we were in first grade together, I moved to a different country, and then I

• 1:00:52Anthony Pompliano?

  find you 30 years later, and like, we reconnect. There's some of that type of just objectively positive impact on the world that happens. And then the last thing is, there's this argument that like, the platforms and all they actually even throw in like, the messaging applications and social media applications, like, they're one of the last stands against kind of overreaching governments. Like, if the people can't communicate via encrypted, you know, manner, or can't create a Facebook group, or go to an event, or whatever, like, that's probably not a good thing. But with all of that said, like, there's definitely downsides to it, right? And I kind of just think the folks who make the argument, like,

• 1:01:33Anthony Pompliano?

  social media isn't good or bad. The impact can be good or bad, but really, the impact is merely like a mirror of who we are as a society. So like, you know, if we're all getting worked up about something, like, it's worse on social media, right? If we're all really happy about something, it's worse on social media. And so I think that it's more of like, an amplification type thing. And so if you think of it through that perspective, then the question becomes like, are we good people or bad people? Right? Like, and like, you know, frankly, Yeah, like frankly, you know, there's an argument depending on what group, uh, what geographic location at what time, like for good or bad, you know, people, right? And kind of like good

• 1:02:13Anthony Pompliano?

  or bad actions. So I think it's obviously super complex. Um, and there's frankly, no right answer, but the positive impact I saw, I think drastically outweighs the negative impact. But anyone who's making like a perfectly blind argument and just like, oh, everything is great on the internet and like the internet's amazing. And so it's social media and all the stuff and there's no negative impact. Like, I think like you could pretty much now assume that like that argument doesn't, you know, really kind of stand the stand the test of time.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  Hmm. Yeah, I mean, we're figuring it out. So it's the early stages. It's, it's interesting to be to have seen like the whole chronology, you know, it's gonna be amazing to see what happens 20 years from now.

• 1:02:52Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, I, I continue to joke that, uh, you know, the saying, uh, the revolution will be televised. It's like the revolution will be tweeted, right? To some degree, like, absolutely, absolutely history, you know, historians will go back and they'll just look at Facebook posts and then tweets and stuff like that to get a lot of information. So, listen, man, I really, really appreciate you taking the time to do this, Josh. Uh, where can we send people to find you on the internet? Uh, or find more about levels?

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm on Twitter at Joshua's forest with two Rs and I'm on Instagram at Josh dot F dot Clemente. Um, and then levels, I highly recommend everyone check out the website levels health.com and the blog in particular, which breaks down a lot of this sort of abstract, you know, metabolic stuff into understandable, approachable terminology that you can kind of bring home every day. And, uh, we're on Instagram and Twitter at levels.

• 1:03:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, I, I found the blog to be amazingly helpful. So I definitely suggest other people go check it out as well. Um, and hopefully we will, uh, we'll send some people over to, uh, to you guys and, uh, and also find you on Twitter. So thanks so much for doing this, man. I want to do it again in the future.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, pump.