LP "Expert Call" with Josh Clemente from Levels
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Hello LPs! We got awesome feedback on the recent special episode we did in the main feed with Levels founder Josh Clemente. So we asked if he could join us for a special quote-unquote LP expert call.

for us for the April LP call. It was so great. Josh is awesome. Big thank you to him and to the whole Levels team for making it happen. Ordinarily, we release these recordings just on the LP Google Drive, but because it was so good, we wanted to release the audio of this one in the feed itself so more people will find and listen to it.

Because it was a live LP call, there's no formal intro or outro. We just get right into it in the recording, which is why I'm here now telling you what's going on. So with that, we will hit play on the recording and we hope you all enjoy. How's it going, everybody? Hey, Josh. Thanks for doing this again. Yeah, I'm excited. Great to have you back. Yeah, hopefully with fewer Internet issues this time around.

As someone said on our last LP call, which had no topic and no special guest, great to see everyone here for the levels all hands. More and more true every week. We've got a quorum here. Well, I have some warm-up questions for you if you want to dive in while people trickle in.

Totally. All right. So the first one is what are some foods that have shocked you in being like very reactive for you that people may not assume would be?

Well, the classic, which people may have already heard of by now, but I was blown away by is, well, there are two that fall in this category, but oatmeal is a big one. So a lot of people assume that that's like such a boring, kind of painful to eat breakfast for many of us. And you do it because it's heart healthy.

it's, it's like crazy, crazy glucose, uh, fuel. So I think last time we did a, we did an analysis data set, which is a very long time ago, 75% of people like blasted into the borderline diabetic zone after eating oatmeal, even just plain. Uh, and then you add the maple syrup and you have the brown sugar and, uh, it gets worse. And then the other one, which was like

The staple of my diet before CGM was brown rice because it's the low glycemic rice. And so I would, I would just like build a layer of brown rice on my plate and then add everything else on top of that. And that was every meal I would eat.

And, uh, ultimately that was probably, that was, I think why things were so bad for me meal wise was just, it was always based on brown rice. And so, uh, I then switched to sweet potatoes. You could have gotten another few years at SpaceX in if you hadn't had all of that. Exactly. It's like, you know, a half pound of rice and then something on the side. That was my...

lunch and dinner and then sweet potatoes are another one that, you know, you just like constantly hear about how good they are and they taste too delicious in my opinion to be good. So that was like less confusing to me. But yeah, those three, it was just like one after the other, it kind of puts the bro science. You go into any gym and like people are going to say eat chicken, broccoli and sweet potatoes or brown rice like all day, every day. And I just, yeah, I saw the negative effects of overdoing that. Okay.

Okay. So wait, what a follow-up question. What about the flip side? Are there foods that are absolutely delicious that people think are terrible for you that are actually. Yeah. Cheesecake. Really? So I can't say that because cheesecake is such a varied product, you can pick one of these up in a, in a box or you can like make a quality cheesecake. Um, I can't say this universally, but cheesecake for me is a total success. Like I, I have had, um,

a number of homemade and even a couple like restaurant versions. And because it's just, it's kind of like a dense high protein and fat dairy product basically with, with added sugar and depending on what the crust is. But that's like my go-to dessert if I'm out. Cause it's,

far better than a standard cake. And yeah, Miz is noting the corollary to cheesecake, which is the frozen version ice cream is another that people tend to be surprised by. That is pretty balanced. I think it was in my first weekly email from Levels. It was like, all right, this week, try eating some ice cream and you won't be surprised. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's always the other, the other one that like, this is a can of worms. It's not so much like a food item that surprises people, but it's counterintuitive is alcohol generally. So a lot of people think like drinking wine is going to be blood sugar, like, you know,

to the moon. But the reality is that it totally changes the way your, your liver is re is metabolizing and releasing, uh, molecules. And so it, because it's kind of a toxin, um, ethanol can only be processed into fat. And so your body starts to just crank out triglycerides, turning the ethanol into it and anything else that you're consuming at the same time. And so a lot of people will actually see a crash in their blood sugar when drinking alcohol, even, you know, and specifically wine. Um,

which makes a lot of sense because then with that crash come a number of hormones that trigger hunger and trigger a lack of satiety. And then you get those munchies and then, you know, you get poor sleep because your heart rate's up all night from the alcohol. And then the next day you've got insulin resistance. And so it's like a, even though it looks counterintuitively positive in the moment, the long-term effects are pretty brutal, I think for the late night drinking cycle. Yeah.

I found myself, uh, like, like I realized that about three weeks in and I found myself like adding wine to dinner when I, when I otherwise wouldn't drink. So I was like, well, I'll probably be less reactive to the food I'm eating. If the invisibility cloak, we call it, um, it's, um,

probably we're mulling over ways to make that more obvious that there are some like some hidden side effects we don't want to would there be like a micro dose level that like would actually get you the behavior that you'd want out of it without like i mean i know maybe that would be less enjoyable but that's a great question i mean i i can't speak to the micro dosing wine but i think there there are there are enough studies out there especially like mediterranean diet studies particularly that include red wine as like a benchmark that

It's got to have some benefits. It's just, where is the moderation? I don't really know. And people definitely, they catch on quick with the CGM and I think start upregulating the amount of alcohol, which we need to confront at some point. Okay. Well, I'll ask a couple more here, but for other folks, start thinking on questions. And when you do decide to ask, just introduce yourself. It's a nice small group here. And actually it'd be awesome for David and I to get to know more people too. So yeah.

All right. Another, another one that I had is a conversation that we were sort of having after recording the episode. And we were just talking for like the 10 minutes afterwards that I thought was, um, like something I just didn't realize about hardware that, uh,

there is a landscape besides the Apple watch question we asked on the episode, there is a landscape of like future developing hardware that can provide like multi-point data rather than just the little quarter inch needle in my arm. Like what is the future of, of, of CGM and is it broader than CGM and how are all those things going to hook into our bodies and where? Yeah, this is my favorite topic because we're like,

so early in the potential biosensor space. And there are so many technologies that have been demonstrated on the bench, you know, in the lab environment, but don't have a market. And so they haven't been commercialized and they actually have a massive market. And we're just like trying to demonstrate that that exists already and that this is not 10 years out. This is two years out. So we, we, we really, you know, part of the mission of levels is to solve this, this big problem, the metabolic health crisis and,

by generating innovation in the space, even if it's outside of the levels, like sort of vertical. So we're hoping to draw attention to, hey, you know, there's like half a billion people on this planet today that have a deterioration condition that can be solved with better information. And we will not be able to solve all the problems, you know, ourselves.

Some of the technologies I'm stoked about one paper was just released by the Abbott team actually on Friday, I believe of last week, which was a demonstration of an on-body continuous ketone monitor, basically the freestyle LibreCGM, but with a different enzyme on the filament, which is able to basically break down ketone substrate instead of glucose. And

That's a beautiful demonstration of exactly this. Like CGM has demonstrated the, the, the potential for filament based enzymatic sensors for decades. Nobody really. So that would what, like tell you when you're in ketosis and when you're not to a more exacting level than any other ways. Exactly. And, and the thing is, is that,

you know, ketosis is not required for, for fat loss, but if you are in ketosis, you are certainly burning fat, right? So it's like not all fat loss is in ketosis, but all, all ketogenic oxidation is fat loss. So for people who are really serious about either, uh,

you know, weight loss or living a ketogenic lifestyle for therapeutic or longevity reasons. This is like this combined with the CGM is a killer combo because it it gives you the glucose ketone index. So you understand exactly what foods upregulate ketones and downregulate glucose. And, you know, it's a guessing game without both of those. And anytime you have to prick your finger to get a single data point, like people just turn out, they're not going to do that. And that's currently the only good way to measure ketones.

So we will, you know, obviously based on Abbott's commercialization efforts for glucose being wildly successful and the fact they just released this paper, like we're going to have a continuous ketone monitor on the market, I'd say inside 24 months, hopefully sooner. And, you know, that's going to be a race. So then you're going to have, I think the combination of those two. So you'll have a single device with both, both molecules and,

And then the real future is a platform where you can pick which molecules are measured in real time. And that probably won't happen with enzymatic technology because there's just a lot of limitations. Enzymes are kind of they're easy and hard. It's the easy one to select for, but then there's only a limited number of applications for them. So once you really get married to enzymes,

you have kind of a ceiling on what you can do. But there are some very cool technologies, which a few papers have been published over the past year or so, that I think are going to be the future of biosensors. And one in particular is an aptamer technology, which just to try and do this real quick, it's basically a single strand of DNA or RNA. And you have many of these in a Petri dish

or in a slurry and you add the molecule that you want to measure. And then you basically select for those, those DNA that bind to the molecule. And you do this process repetitively, you know, you basically do this, um, selection process up to like, you know, hundreds or thousands of times. And eventually you, you select for very specific, um, proteins that bind with extremely high specificity to your molecule. And then you can, um,

you can synthesize that DNA at scale and you can now measure like the strands bind to your molecule very effectively. And they can measure with aptamer tech, basically any molecule on the planet, ketones, glucose for sure, obviously, but also insulin, caffeine, cortisol. I mean, you name it. So that's the future. I think of platform real-time biosensing is like an aptamer tech in a very similar package to the enzyme tech we've got today.

It's almost like what an FPGA is to a CPU. This is to kind of the simple enzyme. You don't have to premeditate the molecule you want to measure. Exactly. That's exactly right. It's a brute force process in a sense, but you synthesize...

10 to the 10 to the eight or 10 to the 10, like varieties of DNA and RNA. You don't even care what it is. And you just produce it, dump it in a slurry. And then you add your molecule and you repeat that process over and over again. You just select for it. You don't know what the, with, with enzymes, like, you know,

enzymes that attack certain substrates. With aptamers, you don't need to know that. And it does not rely on the reactivity of the target molecule. It's a really brilliant and I think beautiful technology and has so many potential solutions, not just for like real time biosensing, but also for

just understanding the protein circulating in your body or identifying specific cancers. And there's just a ton of potential for the medical space. One really cool application of it is drug detection. So you can create an aptamer. Let's say that you're in the hospital and you require a very specific dose of vancomycin, which is a, it's an antibiotic, which has a very tight therapeutic range. So if it's too high or too low, it has negative effects.

Um, so with this, you could create a closed loop where you put a biosensor on them with an Optum or selected for vancomycin and you can just like nail that window all day long. And this person has much better outcomes than somebody like manually guessing how much of the IV bag is in the person's body, you know, which is the current approach. So there's just a huge potential for this, this tech. It's awesome.

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It was a wonderful podcast, the last one, Josh. And I was realizing how important founders are. I saw your other founder on a different podcast. Really, really inspiring. So thank you for that. Technically, on this issue of variation in foods,

you know, not just the foods themselves, but between or among people, the variation that you see, do you think that's maybe genetic or is that like the biome or microbiome or something? And if it is microbiome based, do you think what things like day two or biome are doing are important and you're trying to work that in? Thanks.

Yeah, it's a great question because I don't think it's the, well, I don't think it's any one thing. So there, there have been a few studies which have the trials that are most interesting here are the Weizmann Institute trial for 2015, which first showed the degree of variance. And this showed like 50%.

Two people without diabetes can eat a banana and a cookie each and have equal and opposite blood sugar responses. And so looking at the way hormones respond to the fuel substrate in your blood, they probably have equal and opposite insulin responses and all of the downstream effects of that. So that was a real kind of a landmark study. And then the ZO trials or the PREDICT trials by ZO and the King's College team followed up on that.

and they replicated those results even in identical twins. So that kind of eliminated the genetic component. Now they do find that patterns seem to be similar in a way that the original trial were not. So they, I think they came up with something like 30% of the, they could predict with 30% accuracy, the glycemic response of one twin based on the other twins data. So it was like there was correlation, but it was not strong.

So that shows, I think the complexity here, I actually think it's contextual. So your body fat percentage, your, your body composition, I guess, like, you know, basically lean muscle mass to fat composition is going to dictate this come

combined with a whole host of environmental factors like quality of sleep, how well rested you are consistently, and then how adapted you are to the fuel substrate of choice. So certain people are more fat adapted than others and their bodies seem to adjust. You know, those who have been in ketosis for years will have actually more insulin resistance than someone who hasn't been in ketosis, but it is a

a reversible state, whereas someone who is like borderline diabetic or fully diabetic will have insulin resistance that is non-reversible easily. So there's all of this complexity. And what it comes down to is just, I think a number of levers that will, um,

you know, be very specific to that, to that person. Some people are willing to put the exercise in, in order to maintain muscle insulin sensitivity. Some people aren't. And so they have to pull on the sleep levers harder and like avoid certain foods and portion sizes. So unfortunately I don't have a succinct answer, but I just can tell you that it's not any one of those. And I think microbiome is unlikely to be

the silver bullet. I think it will be an interesting correlation and definitely for people who have gut issues and digestive issues, like that's brutal. And that's where I think microbiome is going to be key is like understanding IBS and understanding Crohn's disease and those other really brutal lifestyle. I think lifestyle intervention or induced issues. Sweet. Thanks.

If you don't mind, a kind of related question, I was kind of contemplating this would be, was there any tension between going after your early adopters and then having kind of some homogeneous data? I mean, cause they're guessing a lot of the early adopters kind of, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the, the interesting thing is how much variability there are, there is even outside of like anthropometric or demographic categories. So, you know, for example, my co-founder, Sam, he,

I don't know, he must weigh 150 pounds maybe and he's about six feet tall, really lean guy. But his blood sugar control, and I think he'd be comfortable with me saying this, is not good. So his, we did a glucose tolerance test

So these are bottles of 75 grams of glucose and some of us on the team chugged those for science. Is that the A1C test? Well, the clinical version is an oral glucose tolerance test. So A1C is a slightly different metric. It's measuring like how much glucose is bound to your red blood cells. Oral glucose tolerance test is you drink a standardized amount of glucose and then see how your blood sugar responds and how quickly you can get back in range.

Um, anyway, a bunch of us did this and we have two people on the team, you know, Sam, and then John is a similar build and they had extremely different blood sugar responses to these two things. And so these are people who on paper are, you know, they're lean. They don't have the traditional indicators of type two or prediabetes or anything like that. And yet Sam's was great.

certainly worse than the other guy. And that speaks to the amount of, I think it tells you how much variation you can get in a dataset, even if you're looking at similar adopters. So we do have, despite having certainly like a tech forward biohacker interested or a Jason crowd, who's like very excited about us now. We have tons of variants in the dataset despite that. And that's the beauty is like, we're getting a lot of rich data. And then also

you know, honestly, our audience is now quite a bit more diverse, certainly than it was like a year ago. So we are getting attention of people who are, they would never, I think, evaluate a biohacker tech. They just want an alternative to a diet. You know what I mean? People who are shopping us against Weight Watchers, most likely, which is, you know, way earlier than I expected us to be able to tap that crowd. Out of curiosity for, you may not know offhand, but for Weight Watchers or a diet program like that, what's the

Are you guys cost competitive with that? Even at the current prices? Uh, I actually do not know weight loss price point. Um,

I don't know. You know, we certainly don't make claims that using levels will help you, will cause you to lose weight, or it could help you understand, you know, the factors that are driving weight gain. But, you know, the program is not designed to achieve any sort of goal other than education. So we call it metabolic awareness, but you should be able to, and we surveyed a few of our members. We have surveyed them a number of times. We just got another round of results that

really help demonstrate this fact. So people go from confused to confident in what is causing

blood sugar dysregulation in their, in their lives, like the effects of their diet input to output. Uh, right now it's like super cloudy for people. They don't really understand. And there's a ton of ways to find, you know, a guru who will sell you any, any end of the spectrum. And so levels gives them kind of a compass. And that's what we're trying to do today is just help you on, you know, connect those dots, develop a sense for how you're, how you metabolize the foods you're eating. And then the other factors like sleep and exercise. Um,

Of course, longer term, I think we can make very strong claims and start to point people in a prescriptive direction. So if you want to lose weight, here's how to do so using the CGM. We have a pilot program called the wearable challenge, which is a kind of a partnership between ourselves and a couple investors in the company. And they took an interesting approach where they just took levels and then built a layer on top of it where you put up a, yeah,

You put up a wager of actually quite a sizable amount, and then you can earn back $25 a day if you stay in this specific blood sugar range. And we have these different cohorts we've gone through. And some people go through it just because they want to use a CGM, and it's like an easy way to jump ahead of the levels wait list.

But others have gone through because they really want to make a difference. And we've seen consistently that people with the higher BMI who need to lose more weight do lose more weight. And they lose on order on the order of 10 to 20 pounds over 28 days with no dietary restriction. It's just, you know, eat whatever you want, but do it in such a way that your blood sugar stays within range. And there's that financial incentive and then the accountability effect of the data, which is a really cool sign and something that we may eventually build right into the program.

That's awesome. We have a thermodynamic perspective. That's an enormous number of calorie. That's a big calorie deficit in a short period of time. Like canonical wisdom is you can really only lose like a pound a week. Otherwise you're like not, not eating.

Yeah, certainly. So the tools at their disposal are, are many. So some people may just be fasting straight through, you know, and there certainly are people that are fasting, but a lot of, of this, I think is just an awareness of how portion control plays in. So, you know, you can, you don't have to fast the full time, but maybe you, you do a one meal a day type approach. And then you, you're also curbing the number of portions. Maybe you're not having like

You know, two huge slices of garlic bread with dinner, you're having one. And like they've learned that that's what will keep them in range. And so you're, I think, combining a lot of these factors with feedback and the effects, I believe, will ultimately be more sustainable than something like

I don't want to say anything negative about Weight Watchers. I think they've done a great job helping a lot of people, but because it provides that educational factor and that confidence and awareness, people now understand the specific food factors that were causing big blood sugar elevations and then that elevation

induces an insulin release, which then stores all of that glucose as fat. And when you, when you understand and internalize that, that's like a huge edge for people who have struggled with weight gain their entire lives, right? It's like finally a tool that they, they understand about themselves. And so that's, I think our advantage there. Yeah. I was going to say the, um,

financial aspects of this make me uh remind me of uh ben i i wanted to so ben and i recorded our um most our episode that's going to come out next week two nights ago which is part one of our work

berkshire hathaway series which i was super pumped about uh it was so much fun uh but there was a little tidbit i wanted to work in that uh warren warren is so obsessed with money so he uh you know he eats like famously he eats like terribly candy and coke uh there's this amazing um

in the HBO documentary about him, uh, it starts off with, uh, they were in the car with him driving to the office and every day he just goes through the drive through a McDonald's and gets like a different McDonald's breakfast every morning. Uh, so the way, at least when he was, uh, like middle age that he kept his weight was he wrote $10,000 checks to his children. Uh, and, um, so,

I think he signed them. There was some mechanism, I forget exactly what it was, that it was a challenge that he had to stay at his current weight at 173 pounds. And if he went over 173 pounds, they got to cash the checks. And they never cashed the checks. Even to his own children, the thought of parting with $10,000 was so painful. Too much. Yeah.

One was the OG wearables challenge. I was just going to say, it's like he set the standard there too. Well, one thing I was going to add David to what you were saying around being price competitive. So qualitatively when we've had discussions with members, like we talk with members every week not surprisingly, the willingness to pay for anybody who has more of a weight loss lens towards the value prop of the product is

it's almost like their willingness to pay is inelastic, right? Because they, we, we call them as a segment, the chronic dieters, like they've tried everything and they're like, I can't figure out anything that will work. If this will work, price becomes somewhat irrelevant. So it's pretty interesting. And not that that becomes a reason to say, cool, you can have a premium product because we've got a ton of work to do to get the product down to a price that is actually helping the

a greater population of people that need help with the product. But it's really interesting to see how people view the product and what they're willing to pay for. Like, what does this tool do for me? Sure, I'll pay for it. Yeah, and I think there's also an opportunity. There's a corporate angle there as well. There are so many companies spending so much money for wellness, et cetera, as well. So it fits in really well because, you know, corporates tend to reduce their costs by having healthier, quote-unquote, healthier employees.

And so this cost aspect of it to your point, then also be offset, uh, even if it's, let's say inelastic to your point, because people will do whatever needs to be done with, if it's helping them. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, self-insured employers are just given the rate of change. It's, it's like the only, it's the only condition that is preventable and increasing at an increasing rate globally, um, is, is, uh,

metabolic dysfunction, type two diabetes. So it's something that like every self-insured employer is, is thinking about because it's their, their number one line item in terms of their, their liabilities. There's also like, this is maybe a little bit out there, but maybe not kind of to your own story, Josh, like employers should care a lot about this because your employees cognitive function is like your number one resource and,

And if they're having blood sugar spikes and crashes, it's definitely going to impact their cognitive function during the workday. Yeah. It's like very well replicated too. And in academia is the, um, so after a hyperglycemic episode, memory is affected. Cognitive function is affected. Word recall, um, pattern matching all of these tests, uh, the, the people with the worst postprandial response to, uh, and input, uh,

have, and I can't remember the numbers. We have this on the blog. I should have brought this, but it's a significant effect. And so

like, we just saw this the other day, we had kind of two employees on the team were were down for the count, because they did this glucose challenge. And they like chugged 75 grams and went to like, you know, 300 milligrams per deciliter came crashing back down. And that that postprandial crash, the hypoglycemia is really where all the negative stuff happens. It's where you feel shaky, and you have a headache, and you just like want to go lie down. And we spoke with

a woman who had gestational or no, she was being tested for gestational diabetes when she was pregnant. And they give that test as part of that process. And she was sick for two days after that. Um, it threw her like hormones into such a crazy, like spiral that, uh, she was just like, it was the worst part of my pregnancy. And

That type of thing, it's not happening to that extreme because you're not taking pure sugar to the face unless you were like I was in college. But for the most part, people are just doing a 60 percenter at every lunch and every dinner. And this effect is happening at scale. And so, yeah, I totally agree. Just making the general wellness possible.

uh, you know, approach mainstream is, is our, obviously our current focus. And we will get into the sort of preventative and, and medical and clinical implications further down the line, but there's enough on the table right now, like you're saying for us to, to stay busy for a long time. Are you guys, um, other people should jump in too, but, um, what's the, what's the current state of play for you guys? If you can talk about it on, um, you're, you know, being rate limited on, on hardware and being able to just

get these out there? Like, has supply chain improved at all? Or when are we going to see GA? I guess is the question. That's a... So the goal is summer. I will say...

the plan is June to be able to have this thing at least be unblocked. We may not, you know, go live in any sense. Like the rollout is going to be staggered for sure. But the goal is to be unblocked in the, in the supply sense by, by the June, July timeframe. And, you know, we're,

we're in conversation with the two main CGM manufacturers. We're likely going to roll out with Dexcom first. They've got a Bluetooth sensor. They have a really good offering. And so

I'm currently trialing that. I think Miz and Ben are potentially both wearing Dexcom as well. And so we're starting to shift in that direction. And that's likely what we'll go live with and then probably roll out the new LibreSense sensor when it gets here to the US later this year or early next. And Dexcom conversations are going well, but things ground to a complete halt on the FDA side. And there is a regulatory component here for us to get real-time data access. So that's been a, you know, COVID is number one and

From the FDA side, things are just slow. So it's very hard to predict this. And ultimately, we're kind of at the mercy of the process. So we will continue to increase volumes and start rolling out the Dexcom product. And then I'm just optimistic that we'll get a little acceleration here as vaccinations improve and COVID. So wait, how are you able to do even the beta program? Is it just like a stockpile?

No, we, so we currently work with the, so if you've used levels, you have two apps. So you have the LibreLink app and the levels app. So the go live product is a direct integration with the hardware. So you, you only use the levels app and yeah, so that's the,

We will be able to do so with the LibreSense when that gets here to the US, but that's the product that they're going to open, you know, sort of open source their API for. Dexcom has a product that they are working on that, you know, we will be able to tap that data stream. Do you know if that's a common problem right now among other digital health companies is that the FDA is just not paying it? Like they're focused on COVID and everybody's sort of up a creek right now?

I have a buddy who started a company that was in, um, an adjacent space and he pivoted the whole company because of the attention that FDA was paying to COVID and started developing COVID tests and his company, his business is booming, but it was like, they wouldn't approve this, you know, this, they basically shelved his other product for the foreseeable future. And so they, they completely pivoted the whole, the whole organization overnight because they saw the direction of the resources and just weren't going to be able to survive it. And, um,

I think that, yeah, for sure across the board, with the exception of maybe a few experimental sort of in-flight products, the whole thing is stopped with the exception of COVID. Wow. Yeah. Yep. It's Black Swan for sure. Josh, can I ask about the geofencing issue? Let's say I'm in Chicago and I travel a lot of state. That's obviously fine. But let's say I've got an international trip I have to make. How does that actually work?

So if you have the US version of the app store and the app on your phone, it will have no effect. If you try to use sensors that you acquire overseas or you have an app store version, UK version, it will not talk to the US sensors and vice versa. So the sensors are region specific as are the software.

I'm not wearing a Levels. I've got a Levels. This is our kit that comes, but I can't wear the sensors that come in here because they're US sensors.

So I have to buy Canadian sensors for Abbott and Dexcom. And the Dexcom ones are actually- You can just do that at your local store, right? You just walk in and buy OTC. Yeah. Yeah. Walmart, we've got Rexall, Shoppers, Drug Mart, or Superstore is like Walgreens, right? You just walk in, you're like, hey, can I get a couple of those? Don't even ask about it. Yep. That's a felony here. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm actually in Japan and I'm hoping to get back home soon to Chicago and then thinking about taking it back with me, but see if that works. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, the, we have, we have people who travel and, you know, bring the sensors with them. And the biggest thing is they just have to either, they have to log out of their app store and like reset their phone, I think. And, and, um, you know, set their location to the U S or something. It's fairly complex. And so we, we are, uh,

Once we get this launch here in the US, we will be turning our attention to what should be an easier rollout internationally because of the availability of sensors. So it's kind of a backwards process for us. We have such an opportunity here to provide the accessibility in the US where there is none. And so that's a key unlock for us today. Dang, it's like video game regions back in the day.

You can't play the PAL discs on your US PlayStation. That's right, not backwards compatible. I've got another question that escaped me on the episode, and so I wanted to ask it here.

Most of the companies that we start at PSL or that I invest in are some kind of marketplace or SaaS. It's unlikely to be hardware, but basically you have designers, you have engineers, you have product people, you have people that get it to market, you have some maybe lightweight operations. But pretty much zero of the companies I work with have a research department. And how do you think about what you should be

What is incumbent on you, the company, to do research on versus what should be done by outside institutions? And when you were talking to people to invest in the company, how do you think about how many of shareholder dollars should go to direct research versus bringing in outside research? Yeah, we kind of pitched the company as having three...

primary objectives in the near term. One was developing the product. Another was the educational component because metabolism and certainly metabolic fitness is not in the public, you know, in the mainstream jargon, which we intend to get it there. And the third was the, the lack of research in this space. So there were at the time, there were three decent sized trials that had ever been done in non-diabetic people with continuous glucose monitors. And the

no others that we were aware of in work. By the way, we were able to blow past, those are the largest non-diabetic with lifestyle data sets on record. And we blew past the largest of them like in month two or something like that of our, well, not month two, I would say month four. And so since then we have orders of magnitude more data than has ever been collected on the non-diabetic with continuous resolution.

So that tells you how much is on the table here. And, and, um, you know, it's, it's currently the fringe approach to medicine to measure someone's insulin levels who is not diabetic.

Um, the rationale there escapes me, but insulin is the defining hormone for metabolic health and function. And it's just not measured in sort of as the standard of care today. Uh, there's all these examples across, I think the spectrum up to the type two diabetes threshold that can be optimized. And the reason they are not currently is that the research just hasn't been done. We're only studying the disease state. So we just kind of like.

we made clinical research a core component of the go-to-market and that we have to, like today, we're going to be able to get a ton of information on people. We'll be able to build this big, beautiful data set. But then how do we tell people what to do next? You know, if the science hasn't been settled,

or even started, we're going to be in the lurch until somebody decides to go ahead and take this on themselves. And so we just decided we're going to fund this through a number of different vectors. And we'll of course take a big data approach ourselves and try and pull out longitudinal outcomes from the dataset. But we really need to do this rigorously and we need to do it in a trial form and we need advisors who are metabolic researchers who can help us tackle that. So we told our investors that we will... We had earmarked

up to 10% of our initial raise for, uh, for direct primary research. Uh, we haven't yet deployed that much, but we do have a number of trials underway, um, across university of South Florida, BYU, Jefferson, um, and now Yale with Dr. Schulman joining. Um, and so, you know, these are, these are researchers who have, they've been wanting to study this for their entire careers and have been told, no, it's not interesting. And so now we're, we're kind of like

donating to the cause. And I think we're going to reap benefits several years down the line. That's certainly a long payout. But if you consider the fact that first you make a really appealing product, you get people using it on its own accord, and then you have the primary research eventually finding outcomes that can direct the optimal direction. You combine those two,

Hopefully you also get some efficacy data from, you know, along the way from both the general user and academia. And that's what you take to, I think we touched on this on the podcast, but that's what you take. That's the evidence basis that you take to the self-insured employers and the big insurers. And you just show them like, here's the science, here's the data set. This, this shows us, you know, efficacy and combination that people should care about it before they have diabetes. And I think that's how we get it covered for, for everyone. Yeah.

I'm curious on a related question that feel free to absolutely plead the fifth and refuse to answer here. It's totally, totally fine. We didn't prep you that I might ask about this, but I'm curious about your fundraising experience.

when and when and how did you raise i mean you've raised a very large seed round by even even 2021 standards um was it all at once like how far did you have to get along the way before raising the money um you had a very different you know pitch that i imagine most seed stage companies yeah well we we actually started that that raise we kind of

rolled all into one, but it was, we kind of had a rolling safe note and Sam gets into the nitty gritty on this approach on the

I think the funded podcast series with Jason Yeag. And so yeah, we had a multi-part safe note that we brought in Strategics and Angels early on just to get the ball rolling. And then we ran a regular process in 2020. We started that process in February timeframe, had a couple partner meetings. And then I was in San Francisco the first week of March getting ready for some more partner meetings and those were suddenly canceling. People weren't answering emails.

And I hadn't, I hadn't really paid attention to the news, you know, at all. So I had no idea why felt, felt pretty negative. And then, um, yeah, then this is the one case where it really wasn't you. It was them. Well, it certainly felt like me. Um, but, but yeah, so we, we had intended to raise an early 2020 and then we just kind of decided to buckle down and focus on, on product and, uh, try and ride this thing out. And by let's see, by late summer, um,

emails were starting to be answered. And from that point forward, we were just like drowning in interest from like June, July timeframe through to when we closed terms with A16, which was October. And then we announced the round in November. So we brought in three quarters of the funds in that seed round. And then the rest came in on the safe note earlier in, well, late 2019, early 2020. So it was like kind of a two-parter. Do you think, is there...

Do you know what, if anything, changed that brought in all the interest? Was it something with you guys or was it the investors just decided this was hot all of a sudden? Well, I personally feel there are a bunch of factors. The first is

The delta in our progress between when we first approached these investors and when we reconvened was massive. So they were seeing like, we went from 10,000 people on a wait list to like 70,000. And, you know, we went from 50 or 100 customers to like,

I think we had 1200 or something like that and all paying and we were getting really great NPS scores and things were looking really good at the same time that in other areas of industry, things were looking really bad. So I think all things being relative, we appeared, I think, to stand out. The second thing

you know, a number of investors were just not interested in a fully distributed team. And we were distributed before COVID, right? We were leaning in hard. And a number of them just said, like, this is a non-starter for us. We don't do it. Those same investors in general changed their tune a few months into COVID when they realized that there was opportunity here. So I think we benefited there. And the last thing is,

it was immediately obvious that metabolic health was a core comorbidity to COVID outcomes. From month two, here in the US, we had the first Chinese results coming out where something like 50% of deaths were among people with type 2 diabetes. And so those were being replicated all over the world.

And that, that was the third piece was that we were able to really say like, this is the collision of two pandemics. You know, the, the alarm has been raised now for a very long time by certain people that, um, you know, metabolic dysfunction dismantles the immune system. And this virus happens to attack the same receptors on the cell that insulin binds to the ACE2 receptors. And, um, and so that fact means that it, it, uh, unfortunately targets people who have

uh, existing conditions with their hemoglobin and their, their insulin resistance. And unfortunately the inability to fight off infections because they're in a hyperglycemic state and all of the things that we were kind of talking about were showing up in the literature. And so we were able to have this conversation and just say like,

yeah, it's a problem in the sense that it, it removes society's resilience. You know, metabolic dysfunction is this quiet thing until it's not. And so that was the third piece that I think really cemented in, in some of these, uh, the, the more scientific, you know, kind of funds where we're thinking about how do we prevent round two of this? And we were, you know, well-positioned to, to talk about that. Nice. I didn't realize, um,

I didn't realize that was your story. I think it's a good one and instructive because you guys obviously raised a very large seed round. And I think a lot of companies and founders can feel these days like if you don't get around like that done right out of the gate...

then it's going to be impossible to do so. That investors are just like, oh, you could be passed over or whatnot and then not be able to raise something like that. And they have to go to plan B. But yeah, that's not always the case. Sometimes things change. I also think it's a lesson. A number of companies that we invest in

announce all their notes concurrently with our investment, or maybe they don't announce our investment and then they announce it together with the next investment. And I think if all you're doing is reading TechCrunch, it's very misleading. You're like, God, these companies are doing huge rounds, but it's like multiple rounds. Or the other thing that's happening is...

People are like, oh, Series A's now are 15 to 20 million. Well, a lot of those companies are raising 8 to 10 and then get bid up or pushed up by a single investor to say, hey, we got a big fund. What would you do with 15 million? And so I think it's also a little bit of a disservice to founders who then are like, I guess I should put the ask at 15 where that may not be the right thing to do. Yeah.

And like, Josh, if it's not oversharing, I'm curious to know, like, did your raise amount sort of change while you were on the trail? Yeah, for sure. I mean, in early 2020, we were looking to raise about five. And, you know, terms got significantly better as sort of the circumstances improved, you know. And frankly, we raised at the same net outcome, a much larger amount, obviously, in that way.

In retrospect, we second-guessed our ability to get as far as we did before raising. Sam and I were having some conversations about pivots. What are we going to have to do to keep this thing alive if we need to? And we published a memo internally about fairly grim, just like saying, hey, we're going to pause the raise because it's not happening anymore. And here's what to expect type of thing. And

And then just a few months later, things had gotten so good for the basic cues for early traction that conversations changed. So it was just totally unpredictable. We certainly felt we were going to have to take worse terms. And then thankfully and luckily, that was not the case. And also, it must be crazy, your psychology changing at that point, going from someone who feels like not a beggar, but like we're in a...

not in a great position. We're not in great footing here to like now like puffing your chest up and being like, we can do whatever we want, you know? Yeah. I mean, to Sam's credit, like he, he does a great job of just maintaining that optimistic perspective and that swagger like all the time. So I certainly was like, Hey, are we in trouble here? And he was like, no, not at all. This is going to be fine. Um, so he does a good job balancing that. Cool.

So I have a question about engineering versus research. I've been in VR for the last nine years. When we started, there was a tremendous amount of research, almost none of which had actually been publicized. So there was really crappy code written by graduate students that didn't really work in most situations. But nobody had gone through the process of turning that into something you could ship and sell to a customer.

So on the one hand, there was plenty of work left to do, but on the other hand, the basic science was all pretty much settled. Are you in a similar state where there's a lot of basic science done, but the engineering, the productization hasn't been done? I don't think so, unfortunately. There's a lot of...

great research that defines how bad the problem is and defines how much worse it can get if people don't kind of intervene and change their, their metabolic outcomes through better lifestyle choices. So you can, you know, all of the negative side effects and comorbidities of, um, of type two diabetes, for example. Uh, and that's been studied ad infinitum, like looking at a whole number of ways to manage the diabetes state. And, and, um, you know, that, that has been well studied, but

The problem that we're facing is that no one's tried to define the target, the goal, and certainly not understand what optimal looks like. So we have a situation where we're trying to steer people towards an unknown target. I certainly today do not...

have any real good understanding of what my blood sugar should be for optimal outcomes long-term. I know where it should not be, but that's a, that's kind of a different thing. And if you talk to anyone with type one diabetes, you know, this is the autoimmune condition where your pancreas stops producing insulin. Those folks have to inject insulin in order to control their blood sugars. And so they are by default trying to target

normal blood glucose levels that have not been studied. You know, they, they are every single person it's, you know, type two type one diet diabetics in particular have a really strong perspective here. They say like, we've been asking for this research forever because we want to, you know, inject the appropriate amount so that we're not overdoing it or underdoing it. And we have no idea what to push for. And no one cares. Endocrinologists just do not care about the optimal state because it's for one reason or another, it's just not interesting academically.

So I think what we have to do is across a number of metabolites and analytes, not just glucose, but insulin, uric acid, HSC reactive protein, triglycerides, most likely a number of these have to be studied within their association with outcomes in the non-disease state. And only then will we understand how to push like what the product has to look like.

that gets you there. We can build a lot. You know, we can, we can certainly, there are huge leaps and bounds that can be taken today with our product to just get people making better choices on, you know, sleep optimization and meal timing, meal composition, just like general know-how exists. But, but then to like finish the last mile, you know,

And this may be too complex to ever get there, but I'm confident that the research is going to help us significantly with some key features that have yet to exist. Sorry for the ramble there, but I just generally just do not think that this has been studied at all, certainly not to the degree that it needs to be. Totally.

Josh, actually, I was wondering if I could ask you a little bit more about like the early fundraising that you did, maybe pre-seed or something. Maybe your co-founder was more active in that. Maybe you were. Any sort of stories about how you transitioned from the SpaceX to actually getting people to fund you early on, if you can share. Yeah. The early approach, by the way, that funded podcast, the two-parter that Miz linked in the chat is really good. It goes into the details, but

We kind of took a market-driven safe note strategy. So obviously on day one, week one, we needed to just get some money in the door and turn on operations. And so that was just conversations with people in our network. Sam is well-networked having come from... He's founded a few companies and been in the startup world. I was...

at hardware companies and had not been in the fundraise seat. So he was able to kickstart that with his network. And we brought in about a million initially from just angels.

And then we proceeded from there to start to kind of ratchet the safe. And actually in that initial million, we also ratcheted, but we did a, just kind of a market test approach where when we filled a note, we would release another one, you know, 25% or some, you know, boost the value a bit and see if we could fill that. And we continue to do that process throughout the, the

the 2020 timeframe. And it was really interesting because we were able to take that and just slap it on the desk when we were doing the formal raise process as demonstrated ability to raise, you know, not only would we fill the round, we would often be oversubscribed on each of these tranches. And that was like, you know, a great way to, in retrospect, show the demand. The Rahul Vora patented superhuman interstitial fundraising approach. Yeah.

There you go. Yeah, it was very successful. It certainly takes more resources to manage that approach, for sure. It was a long and

you know, bandwidth intensive process. So maybe not the best move for a cert, certainly for like a smaller raise that, that would not make much sense, but we kind of were doing this for two reasons. First, we, we didn't know when COVID was going to clear and when we were going to be able to start raising again. So we were just like, all right, we should probably raise a little more while things are hot. And we just kind of fell into it. And there was a little bit of strategy and a little bit of luck involved. And at the end of the day, I think it ended up being a very successful way to demonstrate market demand for us and into the SpaceX thing. Like, yeah, I think I touched on that, but I did, I just was not,

This was a new process for me. This was my first fundraise. I was kind of like a key witness in the fundraise at Hyperloop, for example, where I would just talk about technology. But this was the first time running the process alongside Sam. So that was all educational for me. Josh, I'm curious. I always like to ask people after they raise on notes and then do a priced round, did the dilution from the notes end up being about what you thought or was it different than what your gut sort of estimate of what that dilution would look like?

That's a great question. I think it came like the, the notes solution ended up being slightly higher than I anticipated and the formal round, like slightly lower. So we ended up at the dilution target, but yeah, the, the, the note portion of that was higher for sure. And like, that was something I was not doing my mental math accurately there. I don't think anyone does. I think it's so complex to, to like, especially when you're doing this ratchet approach, you can just things get out of hand quick if you're not paying attention. Stacking them all on top of each other. Yeah.

I remember back in the day when I was at Maggiorno when safes were relatively new. This was years and years ago.

a founding company that, um, we invested. I think we only participated in the, I don't think we'd let it, I can't recall anyway. Uh, but it was a founder that, uh, it was the second time founder, but the first time he'd been a founder was in the.com era. So like totally different era. And he did the safes and then raised the A and it was like a huge A at the time, like 50 posts or something like that's a crazy. And, uh, it, uh, uh,

And I was the G2 associate. I made the cap table model. I sent him the cap table model after. He's like, no, no, no, no. This is wrong. It was like 33% deletion or something like that. And I'm like, no, I'll check it again. But I think this is right. He's like, no, no, no, there's no way. And no, yeah, he had a lot less of the company that he thought he did. Oh, that's a shame.

It wasn't that bad. I'll tell you that much. I was off by a few percent on the, on the total figure, not, not a few tens of percent. Yeah, it was, it was interesting, very interesting, obviously for a number of reasons. And, you know, we had kind of spooled up for this traditional race process where we were going to meet all the partners and shake hands and such. And then, you know, I still haven't met the partners from A16 that we, that we raised from, you know, I,

That's just, we nodded our heads over the phone and that was that. And it's just kind of crazy. Like the whole thing transformed over that, the course of last year. And I'm going to be really curious to compare notes with other founders who raised in that same timeframe to just see like if our situation was unique or consistent. I don't think so. I think it was consistent. Yeah. I mean, it is the weirdest thing deploying millions, like multi-million dollar checks to people you've never met. It's like...

How important is that thing where you meet in person and you're like, cool, yeah, I trust you. It's like dogs sniffing each other. There's some human element where you kind of want to have verified they exist in real life or something. I agree. I said the whole time it was very much like playing a video game. Still is. You log into the computer for 10 hours and then you log out and the surroundings are the same. You haven't met and spoken with anyone. You kind of second guess reality. It's like, is this actually happening type thing? Yeah, very strange.

Yeah, I think the whole thing is also interesting for acquisitions as well. So many acquisitions have happened completely virtually the last one year, like not even a single handshake. And people are deploying significant amount of people. I mean, companies are deploying significant amount of capital. I mean, Microsoft is delivered 20 billion. So,

I mean, it's kind of weird for stuff that's even earlier at the point where you can't do any meaningful due diligence, too. If you're doing pre-seed investments, a lot of these companies, there's not a whole lot you can really diligence even if you wanted to. Not saying that I'm such a good personality judge in person that that's going to be the thing that prevents me from getting paid.

But that's what you hang your hat on a lot of the time as an early stage investor. It's like, yeah, there's certainly no financials. There is likely no traction. There's probably no product. And so therefore, I'm evaluating the founders. And if you can't even do that in person... Yeah, it's also like... It's kind of like this...

Yeah, it's more just about like, what are you trusting in some ways? Like, it hasn't changed all that much to do it over Zoom. You know, I couldn't, somehow I still couldn't imagine doing it like just a phone call and not even like a Zoom. But you know, Josh, is your point that doing it on Zoom versus doing it in person, the issue still remains whether how do you judge the person when you're that early?

I mean, I don't even know the answer. I don't even know the question to a certain extent. But yeah, like it's a bizarre world that we've just like, I think it's just, if anything, I don't think it's more bizarre than it was before, but it kind of removes some of the myths that we were allowed to tell ourselves before. And now we can't even like, it's like nice to have a single fiction that you have to accept as true instead of like everything being a fiction, you know, that you're like accepting as true.

Yeah, I like that way of framing it. I think across society, a number of myths were removed and we can no longer rely on them. And it's really interesting. Yeah, every CFO now knows that the travel budget doesn't actually need to be that big. Sad, shed a tear for them. I'm kind of curious, you know, just because I've

seen companies in like the kind of i don't i don't i don't want to like judge you too much in this like exactly where you fit in this but kind of this like self-testing like biohacker like there's like a whole spectrum of like self-home testing to like biohacker you know like and it cannot be all the way like here's what weird supplements you should take that probably all you know just make your pee a little more yellow to like you know we're actually measuring something about your body and you know obviously the challenge you're running into uniquely just because

you're measuring something in a population that's never had it measured before you know even more so you would naturally run into that i think maybe not specifically what you're doing but like even

a higher probability of that. So like, I guess what are you kind of like, you know, because there's room for you to like expand what you go into, it feels like it's a dangerous white space in some ways of like what is meaningful. Like how do you figure out what to go after and like what other companies out there you think would be doing interesting things in like adjacent spaces. And Josh, before you answer, we're going to make this the last question. And Josh, we told you an hour, so we'll let you go after this. Oh, no worries. Yeah. Um,

Sounds good. So it's a great question. I mean, we do know one thing. We have one guardrail, right? We know what bad looks like.

And so we can help guide people away from bad. Now, where, where to is, yeah, remains to be, to be seen. And I think there's a lot of vanity, you know, measurement that happens out there where people are just taking labs with food sensitivity stuff and DNA stuff and the actionability is missing. And what we're committed to is always having close feedback loops with actionable metrics where you are, you are targeting a change of some kind.

And we do not want to get lost in the white space because there is a ton of it. You can measure a million things with at-home finger sticks, but the question is, what are you going to do about it? So I think it's really beautiful to look at

Examples from, I personally look at Whoopinora as very successful. They've taken a single metric heart rate variability and they've been able to give people a really nice insight into what affects their sleep. And it's not just alcohol, but it's also food effects and exercise effects and light. And people are targeting all of these different factors. That's very actionable in my opinion. And they started out in a very niche sort of athletic market and they're now expanding rapidly into a whole host of spaces.

So, you know, I think it's always going to be better to reduce the number of things we're measuring and just really nail the actionability and people will feel that confidence and feel that control. And then, yeah, and then from there we can, so we will expand slowly in terms of what we're measuring and certainly cautiously in terms of what we're, you know, what insights and prescriptive information we're delivering. So yeah, just staying very anchored to you.

to what we know. And that's kind of why research is a core component right now is that we, we don't want to dive into the supplements approach where it's like, you know, take, take 10 million percent of, of everything that's circulating in your body. Like that's, we don't believe in the, if some is good, more is better philosophy and have to, have to really stay grounded there. But yeah, to your point, like again,

Once we, we have a few very key targets, by the way, that, that we know matter. Insulin resistance is like, is easily measurable. And so if I could just measure, if you ask me like, what would I measure beyond glucose? It would be real-time insulin with CGM. And in that case, like we, we can absolutely, I think, fix a vast majority of the preventable prediabetes and type two diabetes out there. It's just that we currently lack

the continuous insulin metric against which glucose has to be compared to really know if you've made it to insulin sensitivity. So that that's one that we, we will look to solve for as quickly as possible.

Real quick, I want to correct the record on a story I told on the podcast, the famous nozzle trimming. I misnamed Marty Anderson Kelly. In my mind, he was Kelly Anderson. It's Marty Anderson. There were two amazing technicians who looked very similar and worked in the same space, and they were Kelly and Marty. And I attributed Marty's work to Kelly, and I apologize to him. Yeah.

on this call. You will not hear it. But those of you who listened to the episode, I just want to make sure that you know the truth. I'm going to update it in the transcript on the website. So if anybody is ever reading that or searching it, then I'll have the right name. Yeah. Josh texted me the next day and he's like, man, I made a mistake. I was like, yeah, don't worry. He's locked in for good. And then the next day acquired is the number one tech podcast.

I know. I was like, well, a buddy of mine listened to it and he was like, dude, I can't believe you did it because we used to do it all the time at the factory. Is there a blur feature on Descript where you can just like, instead of like deleting a word, you just kind of like intentionally mumble it so you can't tell what it means there? Like a redaction feature? I don't know. Well, it's not redacted. It's like you try to like intentionally like obfuscate it, kind of like white noise for like for sound, but just like just in the range where it sounds like a word that no one, and then you can like put it in whatever you want in the transcript, you know?

Oh, yeah. Let's deepfake it. Yeah, you could indescript, actually. You can sample your voice with... Yeah, the... What's it called? Lyrebird or whatever. Lyrebird, yeah. But they call it something else. Overdub is their feature name for it, but it's from... We all know the acquired company. Great Montreal company. Oh, cool. Yeah, Lyrebird. They were acquired two years ago, I think.

so I'm looking at our analytics right now, um, because the show has grown a lot recently, both causing the spike to number one. And then because it was number one, the levels episode is currently our one, two, three, four, fifth most listened to ever out of the 150 episodes. Uh,

as of nine days in. And a lot of that comes from like just the base now that like auto downloads. And then it's going to also, it was a great episode, but it was for sure. But if it were even better, no, you got the name, right. You timed it. Well, not, not doing the episode a year or two ago. Yeah.

Let's just be honest. Maybe it doesn't have the same breadth of appeal you would expect out of some of the most popular episodes, which are really just like Tesla's for everyone. That's like a dumbed down episode, but this is really funny. This is Winnie the Pooh with the monocle. Epic, DoorDash, Twitter, Superhuman, Rec Room. What's the top five? It's SpaceX in order. It's SpaceX, probably Talk WhatsApp.

Wait, Bitcoin, not one? Bitcoin is by far and away number one after a month. It has a lot of room. It'll beat SpaceX here at some point, but since SpaceX is older, it still has the most lifetime.

So Bitcoin, SpaceX, Talk, WhatsApp, and Levels are the top five acquired episodes ever? Ever. Levels is not in there yet. But if I'm looking at accumulative downloads after X days after release chart, it is the fourth highest after nine days. Got it.

Kelly will be pumped. That's killer. Kelly will be pumped because he's getting the praise for like one of the most meaningful moments in SpaceX history. That was such an amazing story. Yeah, we have a picture. I sent the guys on Slack. There's a picture of Marty up in the interstage. It's actually on the internet. I did a quick search and you can find this picture of him up there. And riding the, you can like see him riding the genie boom up. And so you can get a sense for how

crazy that experiment was. I was, I know this is not at all what it was actually like, but as you were telling the story, I was imagining, you said you called it the skirt. I'm imagining like the SpaceX rocket, like wearing a skirt. If you, if you had seen the videos of that AC nozzle blowing on it, it, it literally was shaking like a skirt, like a fabric skirt. It's crazy that we missed it. Like it was happening for several hours before it ripped. Wow.

Is that the thing that you see when there's stage separation and stage one starts falling back toward Earth and you're like, why is the engine wrapped in tinfoil? Is that the skirt? No, so that is called mylar. That's like a... It's a thermal blanket, basically. But the thing that turns bright red or bright orange, the big nozzle in view, when you're looking back at the first stage or back at Earth, there's that big glowing orange nozzle. And it's not actually...

made of the same niobium like metal material it's now composite so it looks a little different it looks like a patchwork type thing wow cool yeah crazy