Tag: podcast

JTBD at Whoop

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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.”

Playing Tennis

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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.

Summer frictions

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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.

Zero Cost, Pure Upside

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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.

Quantitative Parenting

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Parenting two teenagers is difficult. Most of it comes down to remembering two things.

The first, my wife said this too shall pass. From the very beginning that has been good advice.

The second, when I was a boy of 14 my father was so stupid I could barely stand him. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned. That’s from Mark Twain. Maybe.

There might be a third to the list.

“Quantitative stuff can survive doing some horrifically stupid things in isolation. If 53 percent of the time increasing is a good word, then 47 percent of the time you were stupid. Turns out natural language processing or NLP, if we want to sound like the cool kids, that is taking that same data and training a ML model to say what predicts and what doesn’t predict.”

From Money Stuff: The Podcast: Cliff Asness, Jun 20, 2025

And parenting is kind of like that! Everyday Asness makes bets and everyday we get to be with our kids. If we can just be mostly right, things work out just fine. Or at least they have for Cliff.

Michael’s Monday Motivation

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“You exist at home and everything is nice and comfortable, and stress has come in, but they’re in the form of emails and deadlines and things just get predictable. Go out into a place that is totally unfamiliar, do something that’s going to be challenging to you, go with the wind, you will find things that will really enhance your life, that will make you feel, as Joseph Campbell put it, the rapture of being alive”

The rapture of being alive.

From Huberman Lab: How to Grow From Doing Hard Things | Michael Easter, Jun 16, 2025

Teaching in Verbs rather than Nouns

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There are two ways to teach chess, a master explained.

The first, is to teach chess principles that may apply to life. And the second, is to teach life principles that definitely apply to chess. 

“Could you give me an example of one such principle? Because I love in biology teaching not names, not using nouns, but instead teaching verbs. Because ultimately, if you want to understand, for instance, how the nervous system works, or the immune system, you teach the verb actions of molecules.

And the names of the molecules are important if you decide to go into that field professionally. But otherwise, the principles and verbs are what’s most important. So what’s an example of a principle of chess or a mode of action on the board that you think transfers?”

Yet we teach with nouns and employ nouns because nouns have a lower cost, even though they may not be the right tool for the job.

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From Huberman Lab: Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life, Jan 27, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/josh-waitzkin-the-art-of-learning-living-life/id1545953110?i=1000685629066&r=5936
This material may be protected by copyright.

Living…for time

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Metrics tag.

A huge goal of living well is living intentionally. Do the things I do do align with the things I want to do. Intentionality is why design is such large issue.

We can get lost in the abstraction. Such-and-such leads to end-result but we focus on such-and-such to the detriment of end-result. When my daughters were younger we tried to have family dinners as often as possible. I planned, prepped, and cooked the food. Sometimes they wanted something different, sometimes they wanted to help, sometimes life got in the way and dinner was canceled.

Sometimes this bugged the crap out of me. I put all this time, and effort, and blah blah blah. It was pure ego. And I’d lost sight of the end.

Kelly Starrett has a good podcast with Andrew Huberman talking about this (and many other things!). Kelly frames exercise as “earning credits”. The point isn’t the exercise, the point is to go and spend credits – being physically active with the people you love. Don’t do burpees to see how many burpees you can do in twenty minutes. Do them to have a more enjoyable hike with your kids.

From Huberman Lab: Dr. Kelly Starrett: How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility, Dec 9, 2024
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dr-kelly-starrett-how-to-improve-your-mobility-posture/id1545953110?i=1000679727148&r=8703

Love and Trust and USA Basketball

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One theme here is that information is not enough.

In his book, 10 to 25, about communicating with young people, David Yeager writes that the compliment sandwich doesn’t work because its supply side not demand side.

JTBD works so well because it shifts the focus from me to you, a business to the customers.

The supply side version of a compliment sandwich is what Yeager calls “wise feedback”. Before young people can hear criticism they have to feel safe. Feelings matter. Being in-the-group matters.

Shane Battier tells a story about Coach K’s early Olympic experience. Coach has just come from Duke where he sets a standard. People like us do things like this. But there was one guy on the team who was not very good in pick-and-roll defense.

So, coach lit into him. “You let him know in no uncertain terms that this is not going to fly,” said Battier. “And at that moment, like, you could see the look on this player’s face. He had never been talked to like this.”

Battier had. “I lived it, so I understood where it’s coming from. It was coming from a place of love.” This is Yeager’s wise feedback. It comes from a place of wanting the best. The listener feels safe because the listener and speaker are on the same side – they’re in the same group.

Coach K wises up right way. “It clicked and you realize, oh, this is not appropriate for him at this moment.” He didn’t have the right relationship for that kind of communication. It takes trust and love which take time and effort. We evolved as group members.

Note: Another version of this idea is here: https://moontower.substack.com/p/jokers-everywhere

What are your patterns?

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My grandmother used to say call a spade a spade a lot. And she did. By the time I knew her, she was not afraid to speak her mind. She probably always was that way, only getting ornery as she got older.

One of our themes around here is to talk about the thing we want to talk about. Like Wharton professor Cade Massey interjects in his podcast, “let’s be precise“.

Another one of our themes is to think of things conditionally. Is something good or bad? It depends. Weaknesses are strengths and strengths are weaknesses (WAS A SAW).

Those ideas meet in Andrew Huberman’s podcast with Kelly Starrett, who (speaking about the human body) said:

“And I wouldn’t even say that weakness isn’t even the right idea. Just like here is a pattern that I’m not as effective at, as efficient at. So when we go into the gym sort of with this great curiosity, then it’s a really rich place and a really, frankly, the only safe place because there isn’t contact and sport and we’re not fighting and dancing and moving and we can really do this controlled formal movement where we can really see inputs and outputs.”

He’s talking about physical training but what a great idea!

  • It’s not that I lose my temper, but my impatience is a pattern that I’m not as effective at.
  • It’s not that I’m bad at math, but it’s a pattern that I’m not as effective at.
  • It’s not that my relationships at work are bad, but it’s a pattern that I’m not as effective at.

This framing also applies some ownership (another form of being precise). To take things back to Starrett’s conversation: our tight hamstrings are not a genetic pattern but something we can control.

For a science podcast, this episode (implicitly) covers a lot of spiritual ground as well as systems theory.