Mike's notes.
Reframing metrics is catnip. In book form this is Moneyball, but there are many posts about framing and metrics.
How might we frame a meaningful life? And what metrics?
“Ultimately, the number of things you did can’t be definition of a. meaningful life. It’s got to be what you did and whether you did it in the spirit of showing up for it.”
That’s Oliver Burkeman’s advice to Rich Roll (November 2025). Burkeman’s book, 4000 Weeks, was one of my favorites last year. Happy New Year.
Orthogonal thinking and alchemy means solving problems with nonintuitive variables.
A lot of great finance book use orthogonal thinking. Rather than ask: how to shop for Christmas on a budget, orthogonal thinking moves past money and asks something closer to: how to create meaningful Christmas moments.
That reframing changes the variable from dollars/gifts to moments/meaning. To get in that spirit, Blake Scholl told Tyler Cowen how to make air travel better (no indentation).
The other thing that we need to do, and this is part of why it’s not a solved problem, is we need to fix checked baggage. Because baggage check is unreliable and slow, we have people carrying onto airplanes things they absolutely do not want to carry.
If we fix airports such that baggage check is fast and reliable, then we can stop having carry-ons, and we can get on and off airplanes much, much faster than we can today. That would actually be the biggest win. Imagine an experience where you take your Uber to the airport. The bag that today you would carry on is in your trunk. You step out of the car, someone, maybe even a robot, grabs your bag from the trunk. You don’t see it again.
After you land, you get a push notification on your phone that says your Uber’s in slot seven A, and by the time you get to your Uber, your bag is back in the trunk. The customer experience is your bag teleports from the trunk of your Uber at your origin to the trunk of your Uber at your destination. That’s how they should work. Then you don’t carry on all this stuff and it’s much faster to get on and off airplanes.
“No one,” Zach Lowe told Bill Simmons, “is arguing for a longer season. No one wants more than 82 games.”
“I’ve never seen a study,” Dr. Longo told Rich Roll, “showing that if you do 12 hours of fasting a day you’re going to have a problem.”
Both of these November episodes fit within maxims for thinking analytically. Not all of life will include common ground, but when it does, we can start there and decide how much to move away from there.
In November 2025, Rich Roll release a podcast about fasting. This compilation episode included an overview of why fasting works, how to fast, an additional details. But, what stood out was the importance of design.
Dr. Valter Longo spoke about the effectiveness of a 12/12 fast. That includes a twelve hour eating window and a twelve hour non-eating window.
Roll pushed back, asking is that enough non-eating time?
Yes, Longo explained, there are positive health effects but more importantly it’s easier to do.
Dr. Michael Greger said the same thing – only in reverse. Greger’s early advice was about a daily dozen set of foods people should eat. A dozen foods a day?
Inconceivable! Vizzini shouts.
That led to a lot of explaining by Greger. It’s aspirational. It’s a suggestion. It’s something to work towards.
Actions are based on frictions. How easy is something: to understand, to follow, to fit with my current worldview?
Better fits may not be perfect fits, but they’ll happen more.
Greg Olsen is a former NFL player and current NFL broadcaster. He also coaches a middle school football team. What’s nice about Olsen’s perspective is that he’s played at the highest levels (“The U”, The NFL) and still says it’s the little things that matter. (Apple Podcast) ““The shit that Luke and I are yelling at the kids when we’re trying to coach seventh and eighth grade defense is the exact same coaching points the good coaches are trying to give pro bowlers. It’s all the same.”
What are those things? It’s not the highlights, flash, plays, or scheme. It’s “little technique, fundamental habits. How do we do pat and go in football? Like no one spends any time on that. And I think if people realized how much that would move the needle, they’d be shocked.”
Okay. So it’s the little things that matter. How do you coach them? Specific solutions
“But what I’ve learned is like you can be loud and you can be boisterous, but you have to give them solutions. You have to give them, it can’t just be, we got to tackle better.
“You missed that tackle, tackle them. Like, you know, go get them, go get them. Yeah, what?
“I don’t know, coach, I’m trying, but like, I don’t know what that means. So to your point, what I’ve learned is like, when you are yelling instruction, it’s got to be very specific. Alex, Alex, you’re tackling the wrong hip.”
The wrong hip. That’s specific. That’s fundamental. That’s helpful. It’s the little things.
“I don’t know why we made health a noun. Think about it. When it’s a noun, it’s an object to be obtained.
It’s something tangible. It’s a destination. Health should be a verb.
How many of us have been in the best shape of our life? If we stopped doing what got us there, we would fall backwards. So we, it’s an action.
Health needs to be an action you do every single day of your life. If you are, if we keep setting it up, like I’m going on a diet, I’m gonna lose 30 pounds. What happens once you lose the 30 pounds?
What’s your next move? This is the ozempic. What’s your next move”
From The Rich Roll Podcast: Dr. Mindy Pelz On Women’s Hormonal Health, Cyclical Fasting, Health As A Verb, Reclaiming Your Body’s Intelligence & Transforming Menopause Into Empowerment, Jul 31, 2025
Don’t hire a noun to do a verb’s job.
Will Ahmed is the founder of Whoop, the fitness tracker. In July 2025, he told Rich Roll:
“So maybe there’s a focus group on a band and the focus group sort of leans one way versus another on which direction the band should go. And I feel an incredibly strong pull towards the other direction.
I might just do the other direction. That, though, is a very sort of trivial example, I think. What’s been more interesting for me in my life is these moments where I’ve felt a deep sense of knowing something, and a lot of people have disagreed with it.”
Ahmed was obsessed with the progress (this is Moesta’s JTBD language) a subgroup (elite athlete) wanted to make. It’s such a clear example of Jobs Theory – though Ahmed never explicitly says that.
Focus groups don’t work for many reasons: people don’t actually know what they want, people are obsessed with status, people only think in the existing solution space. JTBD (jobs to be done) theory gets around that by focusing on the progress individuals want.
Ahmed discover that HRV matters a lot for rest and recovery. That led him to discover HRV needs constant monitoring. That led to this breakthrough:
“You needed to be able to measure it (HRV) continuously. And that was another breakthrough in hindsight of the whole idea for WOOP, was this idea of continuous data. Continuous data is the reason that this doesn’t have a screen.
It’s the reason we invented a modular battery pack. It’s the reason that the bands have all sorts of different looks and feels and colors. It’s the reason we’re not a watch, because we don’t want to compete with other watches.”
Alan Waxman told Patrick O’Shaughnessy they want to hire a certain kind of person:
“So people that are over themselves, no politics, no egos, no BS, just so we can all talk to each other. So those are the values. We always said we wanted to be the largest startup in the industry.
That’s literally day one. We want people that can play tennis so they can debate, not that my baby is the prettiest type people.”
Throughout the episode Waxman references “playing tennis”.
It’s so common, it’s probably an internal figure of speech too.
And it’s a great example of how to argue well. Not to hard, not too soft. Engage in an enriching way. Aim for improvement, not defeat.
It’s a good organization if someone can play some tennis.
Anna Lembke told Andrew Huberman:
“So we’re all forced to make stuff up, whether it’s being a scientist or being a doctor or being an Olympic athlete or climbing Mount Everest. And people really vary in their need for friction. And some people need a lot more than others.
And if they don’t have it, they’re really, really unhappy. And I do think that a lot of the people that I see with addiction and other forms of mental illness are people who need more friction.”
I (finally) bought Thinking in Systems: A Primer in June 2025. It was an early summer read and focused a lot of summer thinking (before back to school gears up) on systems thinking.
Friction is an accessible dial.
Find a verb/noun combo and make it easier/harder. Don’t put your phone on the desk (like really, don’t).
But maybe it plays a more central role in the system.
Maybe friction is akin to vanilla in baked goods: Gotta have it, but just the right amount.
A fellow teacher told me she’s ready for her students. Summer break (we get seven weeks) is too long. We had a similar feeling. One night everyone at cereal the kitchen was a mess. This is what degenerates look like, I explained. The current patterns of summer don’t have enough frictions. It’s what people crave with schedules. It’s why people run races. Competition is friction. Constraints are frictions.
We’ll end in the spirit of Tyler Cowen: Friction is underrated.
One of the (few) calculations for my Business and Entrepreneurship class is customer acquisition cost. I’m a fan.
Rewriting the text for the upcoming year forced me to reemphasize and reiterate the value of a low CAC. Especially in the world of social media marketing and influencer marketing where CAC is sometimes zero. It’s an incredibly powerful idea.
But anything zero or low coast can be. Especially when part of an equation that divides (zero by many) or one that multiples many by a low cost (such as almost zero).
Talking with Chicago Fed Chair, Tyler Cowen asked about this very thing.
COWEN: What would be an example of something with a marginal cost of zero?
GOOLSBEE: [laughs] Well, I don’t want to reveal anything about our operations and get myself in trouble about the Federal Reserve operations. If you look at marginal cost of zero things, opening meetings to include others and having folks work together, sharing of information can often have very low cost — if not literally zero — and strong benefits.
Maybe this is the engine of alchemy. Find something that costs nothing (or very very very little) and do more of that. If it’s valuable (or very very very valuable) do a lot more of that.
Related: Free Things.
The Waiter's Pad 