Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI,

“Imagine [AI as] the world’s greatest project manager that’s integrated into every team, and it knows all the best practices from everything, and it knows the context of the specific project you’re working on. And that means you can let go of a lot of things that cause continual partial attention disorder.”

— Dustin Moskovitz

Dustin Moskovitz (@moskov) is co-founder and CEO at Asana, a leading work-management platform for teams. Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly. Prior to Asana, he co-founded Facebook and was a key leader within the technical staff, first in the position of CTO and then later as VP of Engineering. Dustin attended Harvard University as an economics major for two years before moving to Palo Alto, California, to work full time at Facebook.

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Do you want to hear the episode Dustin said he was “very delighted” to hear? Have a listen to my most recent conversation with Jack Kornfield, in which we discussed yogic swoons, the point of consciousness, how the Buddha would deal with anxiety, the dimensions of meditation, reliably eliciting the non-self, cultivating a more joyful mind, and much more.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Dustin Moskovitz:

Twitter

• Dustin’s Book Recommendations | Google Docs
• Template: Time Budget | Google Sheets
• Manage Your Team’s Work, Projects, & Tasks Online | Asana
• A Publication for Teams Who Aspire to Do Great Things Together | Wavelength by Asana
• Back Buddy Classic | Amazon
• Aspercreme Max Strength Lidocaine Pain Relief Patches | Amazon
• The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You by Julie Zhuo | Amazon
• Dustin Moskovitz Shares His Lessons on Leadership | Wavelength
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz | Amazon
• Objectives and Key Results (OKR) | Wikipedia
• How to Take Back Your Productivity with No Meeting Wednesday | Wavelength
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule | Paul Graham
• The Brady Bunch Opening and Closing Theme 1969-1974 | TeeVees Greatest
• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch | Amazon
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Warner Klemp | Amazon
• Alex Gendler: The Myth of Sisyphus | TED-Ed
• The Work | Byron Katie
• What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? | American Psychological Association
• Nonviolent Communication: Create Your Life, Your Relationships, and Your World in Harmony with Your Values by Marshall B. Rosenberg | Amazon
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter | Amazon
• What Is Status Quo Bias and How Does It Affect the Workplace? | Wharton Online
• History and Future of Rare Earth Elements | Science History Institute
• Peak Oil: Predictions and Possible Consequences | Investopedia
• Effective Altruism Is About Doing Good Better | Effective Altruism
• Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz: Young Silicon Valley Billionaires Pioneer New Approach to Philanthropy | The Washington Post
• You Have $8 Billion. You Want to Do as Much Good as Possible. What Do You Do? | Vox
• Helping Humanity Thrive | Open Philanthropy
• Earning to Give | Wikipedia
• Malaria in Africa | UNICEF
• Chicken Is the Most Popular Meat in the World. And We’re Expected to Eat Much More of It. | Vox
• Meat Substitutes: The Startups Ditching Animals from Meat | Wired UK
• Where to Buy Impossible Products Near You | Impossible Foods
• One of Philanthropy’s Biosecurity Leaders Steps Up Emergency Pandemic Giving | Inside Philanthropy
• A Facebook Founder’s Pandemic Battle | Puck
• New Type of Ultraviolet Light Makes Indoor Air as Safe as Outdoors | Columbia University Irving Medical Center
• COVID-19 Serosurveys for Public Health Decision Making | The Lancet Global Health
• The COVID-19 Pandemic Almost Didn’t Happen, a New Genetic Dating Study Shows | CNN
• WastewaterSCAN Dashboard
• Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky | Time
• Doomer-as-a-Service | Doombase
• Yuddite | Urban Dictionary
• What the Luddites Really Fought Against | Smithsonian Magazine
• Anthropic’s Claude Is Competing With ChatGPT. Even Its Builders Fear AI. | The New York Times
• Anthropic’s Dario Amodei Discusses Building Safer AI and More at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 | TechCrunch
• Guarding the Future: The Essential Role of Guardrails in AI | Unite.AI
• Meta, Google, and AI Firms Agree to Safety Measures in Biden Meeting | The New York Times
• Why Would AI Want to Do Bad Things? Instrumental Convergence | Robert Miles AI Safety
• David Deutsch: Preserving the Means of Error Correction Is “Morality” | *Faircompanies
• David Deutsch and Naval Ravikant — The Fabric of Reality, The Importance of Disobedience, The Inevitability of Artificial General Intelligence, Finding Good Problems, Redefining Wealth, Foundations of True Knowledge, Harnessing Optimism, Quantum Computing, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #662
• Eric Schmidt — The Promises and Perils of AI, the Future of Warfare, Profound Revolutions on the Horizon, and Exploring the Meaning of Life | The Tim Ferriss Show #541
• Asana CEO: ‘The Way We Work Right Now Will Soon Look Vestigial. Here’s How AI Will Make Work More Human’ | Fortune
• The Jetsons | Prime Video
• Continuous Partial Attention — Not the Same as Multi-Tasking | BusinessWeek
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen | Amazon
• Mount Tamalpais | Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy
• A Lamp in the Darkness: Illuminating the Path Through Difficult Times by Jack Kornfield | Amazon
• Other Books by Jack Kornfield | Amazon
• Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts | Amazon
• Books by Ron Chernow | Amazon
• Books by Robert A. Caro | Amazon
• If You Want to Work Hard, Live Well by Dustin Moskovitz | Medium
• The Japanese Call This Practice Tsundoku, and It May Provide Lasting Benefits | Big Think
• The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile | Amazon
• Enneagram of Personality | Wikipedia
• The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef | Amazon
• Self-Preservation Six | Enneagram Central
• Jack Kornfield — How to Reduce Anxiety and Polish the Lens of Consciousness | The Tim Ferriss Show #684

SHOW NOTES

• [08:17] The Back Buddy.
• [12:38] A user’s guide to Dustin.
• [15:49] Coaching for endurance.
• [18:43] Making quicker decisions.
• [20:45] Avoiding paradox of choice.
• [23:20] Difficult but desirable delegation.
• [25:08] The time-saving spreadsheet.
• [29:12] No Meeting Wednesdays.
• [33:34] Weekly architecture.
• [35:33] Why Dustin prefers in-person meetings.
• [36:55] The 15 Commitments to Conscious Leadership.
• [40:55] Working with Diana Chapman.
• [45:10] Clearing conversations.
• [48:09] Nonviolent Communication.
• [49:43] Feel your feelings.
• [51:10] The Beginning of Infinity.
• [53:50] Effective altruism.
• [1:00:43] On being directionally vegetarian.
• [1:02:32] Funding future pandemic preparation.
• [1:07:33] AI risks and Yuddites.
• [1:13:43] Most promising avenues of AI defense.
• [1:17:19] Incentivizing AI safety compliance.
• [1:19:12] Further AI threats.
• [1:23:21] What the AI-amplified decade ahead might look like.
• [1:28:59] Asana’s forthcoming AI integrations.
• [1:37:04] Blocking personal time.
• [1:40:41] Recommended reading.
• [1:43:14] Dustin’s billboard.
• [1:47:46] Parting thoughts.

MORE DUSTIN MOSKOVITZ QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“The thing that is most likely to shut off the computers is the humans. And so if you have a sufficiently powerful system that has gathered enough resources, it might decide to contain that threat just as part of achieving some other goal, which maybe we gave it in the first place.”

— Dustin Moskovitz

“This thing sounds human because it’s a language model and it’s meant to sound as human as possible. We’ve asked it to maximize that goal in itself, but it is not human. It is very alien-like under the surface. We don’t know how it works and we can’t even get it to do some simple constraints like not threaten to kill the end user in a chat script or not give the recipe for napalm if you coax it out in the right way.”

— Dustin Moskovitz

“Imagine [AI as] the world’s greatest project manager that’s integrated into every team, and it knows all the best practices from everything, and it knows the context of the specific project you’re working on. And that means you can let go of a lot of things that cause continual partial attention disorder.”

— Dustin Moskovitz

“Part of the reason we built Asana is people carry around their task list in their heads, or it’s in their email inbox, and they’re rescanning their email inbox all the time. And if you can get it into a system that you trust to show you those things at the right time or sending you reminders at the right time, you can let go of it in the active memory and get more space for presence. And I think AI can be doing this at a much higher level of abstraction for entire teams and entire companies.”

— Dustin Moskovitz

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