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Main image for podcast "Lance Armstrong - Live in San Francisco"
November 4, 2024

Lance Armstrong - Live in San Francisco

Main image for podcast "Bryan Johnson: Don't Die - Live"
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Bryan Johnson: Don't Die - Live

Main image for podcast "CEO of Veri: Anttoni Aniebonam"
September 25, 2024

CEO of Veri: Anttoni Aniebonam

Main image for podcast "CEO of Prenuvo: Andrew Lacy"
August 27, 2024

CEO of Prenuvo: Andrew Lacy

Main image for podcast "Chief Digital Product Officer of Les Mills: Amber Taylor"
August 1, 2024

Chief Digital Product Officer of Les Mills: Amber Taylor

Main image for podcast "VP of Teamworks: Sean Harrington"
July 22, 2024

VP of Teamworks: Sean Harrington

Main image for podcast "CTO of Function Health: Mike Nemke"
July 11, 2024

CTO of Function Health: Mike Nemke

Main image for podcast "John Anthony: Swim.com, WHOOP, Google Health, and Podium"
May 16, 2024

John Anthony: Swim.com, WHOOP, Google Health, and Podium

Main image for podcast "CEO of Osmind: Lucia Huang"
May 8, 2024

CEO of Osmind: Lucia Huang

Main image for podcast "CMO of Oura - Doug Sweeny"
April 17, 2024

CMO of Oura - Doug Sweeny

Main image for podcast "CTO of Equinox: Eswar Veluri"
April 9, 2024

CTO of Equinox: Eswar Veluri

Main image for podcast "CEO of Numan: Sokratis Papafloratos"
March 26, 2024

CEO of Numan: Sokratis Papafloratos

Main image for podcast "CEO of Instalab and ex Y Combinator Partner: Adora Cheung"
March 14, 2024

CEO of Instalab and ex Y Combinator Partner: Adora Cheung

Main image for podcast "CEO of OK Capsule: Dr Andrew Brandeis"
March 6, 2024

CEO of OK Capsule: Dr Andrew Brandeis

Main image for podcast "Founder of MYZONE: Dave Wright"
February 13, 2024

Founder of MYZONE: Dave Wright

Main image for podcast "Founder of CORE: Wulf Glatz"
February 2, 2024

Founder of CORE: Wulf Glatz

Main image for podcast "Founder of Kaged - Kris Gethin"
December 28, 2023

Founder of Kaged - Kris Gethin

Main image for podcast "Founding Partner at NEXT VENTŪRES - Melanie Strong"
December 12, 2023

Founding Partner at NEXT VENTŪRES - Melanie Strong

Main image for podcast "Founder of the Cycling Power Meter - Uli Schoberer"
December 4, 2023

Founder of the Cycling Power Meter - Uli Schoberer

Main image for podcast "Founder of Inside Tracker: Gil Blander"
November 22, 2023

Founder of Inside Tracker: Gil Blander

Main image for podcast "Co-founder of ZOE - George Hadjigeorgiou"
November 13, 2023

Co-founder of ZOE - George Hadjigeorgiou

Main image for podcast "Co-Founder of O2X Human Performance: Paul McCullough"
October 30, 2023

Co-Founder of O2X Human Performance: Paul McCullough

Main image for podcast "CEO of Supersapiens: Phil Southerland"
October 2, 2023

CEO of Supersapiens: Phil Southerland

Main image for podcast "CEO of Sword Health: Virgílio Bento"
September 13, 2023

CEO of Sword Health: Virgílio Bento

Main image for podcast "Managing Director at General Catalyst: Niko Bonatsos"
August 31, 2023

Managing Director at General Catalyst: Niko Bonatsos

Main image for podcast "Ray Maker: The journey of DC Rainmaker"
August 22, 2023

Ray Maker: The journey of DC Rainmaker

Main image for podcast "Co-founder of Levels: Josh Clemente"
August 3, 2023

Co-founder of Levels: Josh Clemente

Main image for podcast "CEO of Hydrow: Bruce Smith"
July 20, 2023

CEO of Hydrow: Bruce Smith

Main image for podcast "Olympic Medallist in Triathlon: Alistair Brownlee"
July 11, 2023

Olympic Medallist in Triathlon: Alistair Brownlee

Main image for podcast "Managing Director of Rapha - Daniel Blumire"
July 4, 2023

Managing Director of Rapha - Daniel Blumire

Main image for podcast "Soylent and Founders Fund: John Coogan"
June 27, 2023

Soylent and Founders Fund: John Coogan

Main image for podcast "Founder of Bodybuilding.com and Black Box VR: Ryan DeLuca"
June 13, 2023

Founder of Bodybuilding.com and Black Box VR: Ryan DeLuca

Main image for podcast "Founder of Fitt Insider: Anthony Vennare"
May 26, 2023

Founder of Fitt Insider: Anthony Vennare

Main image for podcast "CEO of Zwift: Eric Min"
May 12, 2023

CEO of Zwift: Eric Min

Main image for podcast "CEO of Outside, MapMyFitness, and Under Armour: Robin Thurston"
April 21, 2023

CEO of Outside, MapMyFitness, and Under Armour: Robin Thurston

Main image for podcast "Co-founder of Strava: Mark Gainey"
March 16, 2023

Co-founder of Strava: Mark Gainey

Main image for podcast "CEO Moxy Monitor: Roger Schmitz"
January 19, 2023

CEO Moxy Monitor: Roger Schmitz

Main image for podcast "Genopets co-founder: How blockchain and gaming intersect, a conversation with Co-Founder Jay"
January 12, 2023

Genopets co-founder: How blockchain and gaming intersect, a conversation with Co-Founder Jay

Main image for podcast "Kalibra.ai CEO: Turning Health data into action"
December 14, 2022

Kalibra.ai CEO: Turning Health data into action

Main image for podcast "Co-founders of Breakaway: From Tour De France, to Y-Combinator, and building the future of Cycling. Jordan Kobert, and Christian Vande Velde"
July 13, 2022

Co-founders of Breakaway: From Tour De France, to Y-Combinator, and building the future of Cycling. Jordan Kobert, and Christian Vande Velde

Main image for podcast "CEO of Health Hero: Building the Play to Earn Future with NFTs, with Anthony Diaz"
July 6, 2022

CEO of Health Hero: Building the Play to Earn Future with NFTs, with Anthony Diaz

Main image for podcast "CEO of Quin  - Supporting people with diabetes with Cyndi Williams"
June 29, 2022

CEO of Quin  - Supporting people with diabetes with Cyndi Williams

Main image for podcast "Founders of Ultrahuman: The journey of one of the world leaders in metabolic health"
April 5, 2022

Founders of Ultrahuman: The journey of one of the world leaders in metabolic health

Main image for podcast "CEO of Territory Foods : Preparing meals with technology, with Ellis McCue "
March 16, 2022

CEO of Territory Foods : Preparing meals with technology, with Ellis McCue

Main image for podcast "Kieran Gibbs: Playing for Arsenal, Inter Miami, health wearables and investing in startups"
March 9, 2022

Kieran Gibbs: Playing for Arsenal, Inter Miami, health wearables and investing in startups

Main image for podcast "Head of Samsung NEXT: Samsung NEXT, SV Angel, Wearables, and Company Culture with David Lee"
February 25, 2022

Head of Samsung NEXT: Samsung NEXT, SV Angel, Wearables, and Company Culture with David Lee

Main image for podcast "CEO of Eight Sleep: The future of Sleep, Training, and wearables with Matteo Franceschetti"
February 15, 2022

CEO of Eight Sleep: The future of Sleep, Training, and wearables with Matteo Franceschetti

Main image for podcast "Lance Armstrong: Training, Wearables and Investing"
February 8, 2022

Lance Armstrong: Training, Wearables and Investing

Co-founder of Levels: Josh Clemente

Authored by Halvard Ramstad

In this podcast, we connected with Josh Clemente, Founder and President of Levels, one of the fastest-growing metabolic health companies in the world.

Listen on Spotify, Apple, and Google


Josh's journey from working in the astronaut life support program at SpaceX to building Levels

Kyriakos: Josh, it's a pleasure to see you again. I've been following levels since the early days, and I'm really excited to have this discussion together. How about we start with the pre-history? I believe you have an awesome pre-history with the likes of SpaceX.

Josh: Well, Kyriakos, I'm excited to come on the show and definitely have enjoyed being in touch and connecting about the space for a long time.

To go back to the beginning, I never had much of an interest in health beyond physical fitness growing up. So I was always into sports after school, where I played a bunch of club sports in university. I started to do Crossfit and became a Crossfit trainer. Generally, if I could run fast, lift heavy weights, and jump high, I figured that's the picture of health.

And it wasn't until I was deep into my professional career I was working at SpaceX on the astronaut life support program, which was a brand new first for SpaceX. We had been basically an empty box. The spacecraft just carried supplies up to the International Space Station, but it didn't have to sustain life. When we started doing that at SpaceX, we had to make NASA very comfortable to keep humans alive. That was my first project at SpaceX, where health came into the picture. I started to be involved with the mission doctors and the long-term crew sustainability concepts. I had these moments of realization.

I was working on an extremely stressful project, the most stressful moment of my life, but also the most exhilarating and exciting. I was physically fit. I was working out as frequently as I could, typically every day or every other day.

I had a few weird moments where I realized that although I looked healthy, I did not feel healthy.

I was literally sleeping under my desk in the middle of the day, having to sneak a nap, just wanting to sit down, feeling low energy, feeling shaky. Simultaneously, we were developing these fantastic systems for the spacecraft on the program itself. But there would be these moments where we would have all this data telling us that the vehicle was operating properly. But I would realize, and I'd have this weird sense, that we wouldn't have any data on the astronaut within the vehicle. So we wouldn't know if they were healthy or what that even means. And so I started combining these two concepts and researching for myself, what would sensor health look like? What would you have to measure in order to know the health state of somebody?

I started to experiment myself and eventually, this led to continuous glucose monitoring. It led to a realization that I have impaired fasting glucose and impaired glucose tolerance myself, despite never having been told that by any doctor. Ultimately that kicked off a realization that CGM is just the first of many future technologies that will give people continuous real-time insight into their health state, and they'll be able to live in the driver's seat instead of having to offshore that to another physician or something.

That's the long story short - levels came out of my own realization from a very stressful period, a very exciting period of my life where I was burning the candle at both ends and was really pushing myself into metabolic dysfunction. I just happened to stumble on it and realized that this is the tool, the beginning of the tool set that will give people control over their health in the future.


Early days at SpaceX, learning from Elon Musk, and building a responsible engineer framework at Levels

Kyriakos: I wanted to ask some questions about the early days of SpaceX in terms of the culture. What did you learn from the approach - what did you learn from Elon?

Josh: So many things. The things I took away from SpaceX, first of all, is that it's not for everyone, but it is for me, having worked in many different environments since it is the pinnacle of fast-moving technological breakthroughs.

SpaceX is the pinnacle of fast-moving technological breakthroughs.

There are not many places in the world where you can be an engineer to work on hardware problems and get the condensed experience that you get at SpaceX. Things happen literally 10 times faster there.

And the reason for that is I think two things - there are no arbitrary barriers. So even something I think a good exploration of this is something as simple as language. There is no acronyms policy at SpaceX. If you look at any other aerospace program in US history, it is rife with acronyms. You can read an entire page and you will have no idea what that page is describing because everything from the project to the intention to the outcome is condensed into acronyms which you have to have a glossary to understand.

At SpaceX, that's not tolerated. Everyone is expected to communicate. Regardless of how advanced you are in your career and how specialized you are, you're expected to communicate in a way that anyone at the table, regardless of their background, can understand and contribute to.

That's key because it avoids the sense that you are too ill-informed or uneducated to contribute to a conversation or you don't have the experience, and it enables everyone literally to stay in the same context. That genuinely means that people who are just interns are walking in the door and within a few weeks they're contributing in a significant way to major initiatives that have been going on for a long time. Something as simple as language, and it'll be funny because you would sit at a conference room table at SpaceX and it will sound like people are explaining things to children.

They'll be using very basic, simple analogies for what they're trying to achieve. Something as simple as we need just to put legs on the rocket, and then the leg should unfold, and then the rocket can land on the pad. That doesn't sound like an advanced aerospace conversation, but that's how it happens in SpaceX. A key part is avoiding limitations on other people being able to contribute. Then the second thing is extreme accountability.

The responsible engineer framework is what it's called at SpaceX, where one single individual is accountable, regardless of what happens, for the outcome of a project.


Bodybuilding and the post-workout glycemic window myth, and why you should not copy elite athletes

Kyriakos: In the body-building space, there's a lot of talk about the post-workout glycemic window, is this a myth - what's your view?

Josh: It's a great question. I would say this is where I will lean heavily on personal variability. We are not all the same. One of the most amazing things I've learned through levels is just how different we each are in terms of how our bodies respond to the same stimulus, the same inputs. I'm somebody who has very volatile blood sugar. I have high fasting glucose. I have a very aggressive response to simple foods, even black coffee.

If I just drink black coffee, I have a blood sugar spike, sometimes a dramatic one, depending on how poorly I've slept.

Kyriakos: Wow, this is surprising.

Josh: Yeah, even among people who have been using levels for a long time, I'm one of the few people with that response. Firstly, there isn't a one size fits all answer to this. Secondly, one of the first things I saw when I tried a CGM for the first time was exactly this effect. I was somebody who, like I said, lived in gyms. I was obsessed with musculature and making sure that I was bulking up at the right times and staying lean simultaneously.

It was a lot of carb loading and glycogen replenishing. Loading carbs so you have energy for that workout and then replenishing the glycogen that you depleted from the workout immediately after. I ate many carbohydrates, brown rice, sweet potatoes, and whole-grain pasta. And I found that my blood sugar from those carb loads and glycogen replenishments, regardless of how aggressive my workout is or how long, completely just blew through the roof in terms of blood sugar control. I would have a huge spike.

Let's say I was carbo-loading for a workout. I would have a shake with a lot of carbs, banana, maybe some brand lakes, etc, on my way to the gym, while I have this huge blood sugar spike, I would then be walking up to the bar for the first set, and my blood sugar is now crashing down through the floor and my energy is lost. I used to yawn in the gym at 10 AM because I now realized my blood sugar was crashing through the floor and all that energy was being soaked up. Then for the glycogen replenishment, it just turns out that I was massively overdoing it.

For my body, I just did not need that many carbs. And in fact, I was probably causing myself a lot of trouble with inflammation and just the variation and the crash is just lowering my energy because I was overdoing it so much. That said, I know many people who have a similar build to me who were eating similar nutrition profiles and have completely controlled blood sugar.

My point is that I think you have to dial this stuff in and you need some feedback to know whether or not you're overdoing it. In general, my emphasis is on protein. I eat high protein, moderate fat, low carb diet, and that's where I feel best. That's certainly how I perform best in the gym. I don't have those issues anymore. I would say one last thing on this is that a lot of the gym nutrition culture comes from looking at the elite, looking at the best of the best for athletics, and saying that this is what the best performance looks like so everyone should copy that. At the time that I'm describing, I was certainly spending most of my time at work, working really hard, but it's knowledge work.

I was not physically exerting myself. I would go to the gym and I would work out hard for 60 to 90 minutes. But I'm not somebody who's training for 3, 4, or 5 hours a day. I should not be copying what elite athletes, elite Crossfit athletes, or Tour de France athletes are doing for my carbohydrate intake. We make that mistake all the time.

Everybody looks at what the elite are doing, and there's a difference between elite performance and optimal health.

So what they're doing is pursuing goals in the event that they're competing in. What we're doing is trying to perform well as a team, employees, husbands and wives, and so on and so forth. And so there's a very big difference. I just want to conclude that even if it is important to replenish glycogen and carbo load, let's make sure we're doing it for the lifestyles we actually lead, not the lifestyles that lead athletes lead.


Why first principles thinking is foundational to the philosophy and culture at Levels

Kyriakos: What mental models are you using?

Josh: Well, one of the hardest things for founders to work through is prioritizing where to focus and breaking through hard decisions constantly. You feel like you get through one wall of a hard decision and then you're smashed right into the next one. And this can really be difficult. It's hard psychologically.

What I like to do is think in terms of a 5-minute, 5-day, and 5-year framework - does this decision or does this item matter in 5 minutes? Does it matter in 5 months or 5 weeks? Does it matter in 5 years?

The goal is just to understand better how consequential this is. Is this a one-way door? Is this a two-way door? Is this some small nag, insecurity I'm facing that will not matter? And it really helps me to zoom out that way in steps because it's very possible that something will matter in five weeks. And that's a pretty significant thing to pay attention to. Why am I even thinking about it if it doesn't matter in five minutes? And if it will matter in five years, that's where I should focus my attention.

That's one practical way, and I think it has always helped. And then the next thing is, in terms of mental models, this is something that comes from SpaceX and I think is actually quite easy to overdo. But just the first principles of a decision or of a project. I like working with people who question pre-existing assumptions, especially the best practices, and I'll put that in quotes, of an industry or a technology.

I'm happy to say that all of my co-founders and certainly Sam and I embrace this idea that we are not trying to just take at face value what exists out there. We will get straight to the root of a question and answer that first for ourselves. Only then should we assume that something is what it is. It's only once you understand how it interfaces with the laws of physics. I just encourage people, don't let first principles become a buzzword or some throwaway term that we always use. It really has meaning. It means stopping wasting time on the peripheral branches of a problem.

Answer for yourself whether it can be done differently or more effectively. If you don't know, ask somebody else. But I really like to sit down frequently, and when there's a hard problem that really matters, I will start with a first principles model. I will literally write down what are the first principles of this problem. And I won't move forward until I understand them on that piece of paper. So I really encourage people; yeah, let's not overwater or dilute that one. It does matter a lot.


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