Tim Ferriss

August 10, 2023

Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More (#686)

“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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The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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#686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More

This episode is brought to you by Shopify! Shopify is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. Go to shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/Tim.

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The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. The 3.25% Base APY on cash deposits is as of December 19, 2025, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum. If you are eligible for the overall boosted rate of 3.9% offered in connection with this promo, your boosted rate is also subject to change if the base rate decreases during the three-month promotional period. Tim Ferriss, who is not a client, receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage LLC for advertising and holds a non-controlling equity interest in the corporate parent of Wealthfront Brokerage LLC. This ad may not reflect the experience of other Cash Account clients, and similar outcomes are not guaranteed. See full disclosures here.

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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.

#684: Jack Kornfield — How to Reduce Anxiety and Polish the Lens of Consciousness

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

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

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That's how we're gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you're rude, we'll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration.)

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Jen Zeman

2 years ago

Hi Tim!

Just a shout-out to your 5-Bullet Friday email – HELL YES to Slipknot!! lol… Antennas to Hell is one of my favorite albums, ever. Spit It Out and Surfacing are my #1 go-to cardio songs.

And also, thank you for the discount code for Sundays for Dogs. I have two Golden Retrievers and the other fresh food companies are way too expensive to feed these two food annihilators. Will definitely check this company out.

Hope all is well & have a great weekend!

Jen Zeman

2 years ago

Tim, I enjoy your podcast. I want to encourage you to seek out guests who do not identify as Caucasian. There is a lack of diversity when it come to the practices, tools, etc. that you share with us. The best of what is available has to naturally come from a diverse group. I would appreciate if your team would audit your guest list to share the diversity of your guests against a couple simple metrics just to get a general sense of how diverse your guest pool is–maybe gender and race and provide your listeners with the results. And based on the results it would be great to get your perspective if the results represent your intentions. Thank you for considering this idea.

Jakob Gasser

2 years ago

Reply to DG

Hi Tim,
you mentioned in this episode that you are hiring. For what kind of support/roles are you looking for, and how can someone apply?
Thank you and best,
Jakob

Nick

2 years ago

Hey Tim! Really enjoyed this episode, especially the part where Dustin tells the story about the list of things he hates lol. During this part you mentioned you were hiring if my memory serves me right. I have not been able to find an open opportunities page anywhere. Any chance you can link me to the correct location? Thanks in advance!

Mike Lund

2 years ago

The conversation on AI that starts around 90 minutes in is the some great stuff. Would love to hear more thoughts from you Tim on where you believe AI is heading.

Brian

2 years ago

Overall, I really enjoyed the podcast, but wanted to leave a comment for Dustin to consider. Regarding ‘Impossible Foods.” Is it possible that the industrialized nature of the product could be worse for animals of consciousness. The product needs factories and it needs plant agriculture – large fields – to create the burgers, et al. These historically have taken and poisoned habitats of many, many animals, not just the one’s humans eat. So you may save that life of one cow the day you eat the impossible burger, but how many bunnies, squirrels, insects, etc were killed in the process of making the impossible burger? What if we were to refuse meat from confined feeding operations, and sourced it from places like what is seen in the documentary: “The Biggest Little Farm”?

2 years ago

Tim,
Thoroughly enjoyed this episode. I would love to introduce you to an amazing lodge for your fishing trip in Chile. If you’re keen to stay closer to home then I know I spot in Colorado that would work too.
Hope I can help,
Elizabeth

Stephan Reichl

2 years ago

Hi Tim & Team,
I recently did the PrinciplesYou (https://principlesyou.com/) assessment (co-founded by Ray Dalio) and liked it more than the Enneagram test I have done before, due to more details and actionable insights. Furthermore, I liked that it’s free and you can invite your partner, friends and colleagues to compare results.

Cheers, Stephan

Drew

2 years ago

Did Dustin share his “A Users Guide to Dustin”, or a template for that?

Nick

2 years ago

Reply to Drew

I would love to make one for my team, and use Dustin’s as a guide for me.

Joey

2 years ago

Reply to Nick

Courtesy of J3remy2007 on reddit, I found some similar examples by googling “working with me templates”, but haven’t been able to find a specific Dustin’ example. Hope that helps though.

-1

Nick

2 years ago

I was intrigued with how Dustin demonstrated vulernability by having a guidebook for his staff about himself and Anagrams. Both I want to know more about, but they weren’t in the show notes. This a great interview, already listened to it twice and will do so again.

Vicky

2 years ago

Dear Tim & Dustin,

I absolutely enjoyed this podcast and was particularly interested in your conversation regarding [53:50] Effective altruism. I thought it important to bring to you attention (assuming of course that you haven’t already come across these) two books I am currently reading.

The first is by Peter Singer, called ‘The life you can save’ and the second is ‘Doing good better’ by Wiliam Macaskill. Both of these explore in different ways the cost – benefit analysis of donating and discuss the various ways you can vet charities to ensure every dollar you donate is effectively contributing to where is it meant to go.

There are some websites mentioned in the books which I will put here for your reference as well as some amazing initiatives to help entrepreneurs to be more socially concious.

(As a side note, Tim, I would love to see Peter Singer on your podcast discussing some of the matters raised in the book regarding effective alturism).

Givewell.org is a site that search for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar.

Pledge1percent.org is an organisation that facilitates early stage corporate philanthropy and as the name suggests encourages startups and business to pledge 1% of their profit to charity.

Maverick1000.com is an invitation only group that brings together entrepreneurs who want to make a positive impact in the world.

Of course you can get all this information from Peter’s book and also at Thelifeyoucansave.org/

Kind regards,
Vicky

Vincent Rehms

2 years ago

Lovely episode – the audio seems a bit ofd