#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

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5:10 Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I answered your personal question. Now it is. a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoscellary. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview and attempt to deconstruct.

5:44 world class performers from all different domains, whether it's military, Chess. Art, music. And in this case, entrepreneurship and technology. My guest today is Dustin Moskowitz. You can find him on Twitter at Moskow. So M-O-S-K-O-V. Dustin is co-founder and CEO at Asana, a leading work management platform for teams.

6:07 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. And there is a lot more to his bio We do Explore a lot in this conversation, but before I get to that, you can find Asana at Asana.com, A S A N A.com.

6:40 And as mentioned before, you can find Dustin on Twitter at Moscov, M-O-S-K-O-V. And I should Just mention a few of the things we touch upon. We dive into energy management. We talk about coaching and really performing for endurance. We talk about no meeting Wednesdays as part of energy management, understanding the real risks of AI, the real perhaps existential risks of AI and uh its counterpart, which is embracing the benefits, the frictionless work that might be possible.

7:14 with AI current integrations, what that looks like. the value of holding stories loosely. How to communicate and resolve conflict more effectively. The fifteen commitments of conscious leadership. We get into A lot in this conversation. We also talk about self care.

7:31 physical and otherwise. We touch upon Pretty much every facet of work life balance and work life performance. In addition to all of that, we've added a number of resources to the show notes, which you can find at Tim.blog slash podcast. including Dustin's book recommendations. and time budget template. This is a spreadsheet.

7:51 that you can use yourself. And I don't believe he has shared these things publicly before. So There's a lot to dig into. And uh without further ado. Please enjoy a wide ranging conversation with None other than Dustin.

8:05 Moscovits. Dustin. Nice to see you and nice to reconnect. Thanks for making the time. Absolutely. Great to be here, Tom.

8:16 I would Like to begin. with a device in common and it's a manipulation tool. It's actually sitting right next to me. I have this Anywhere I might happen to be And for those who can't see it.

8:31 It looks almost like I would say an S. Made of Hard plastic. It's about let's just call it

8:40 Two and a half, three feet long, with all sorts of knobs and Yeah. And odd shaped things sticking out of it. What is it that I'm holding up? And I have you to thank for introducing me to it. So let's Let's explain to folks what we're talking about.

8:56 Yeah, of course. So this is the the back buddy. It's a massage tool. I have my own right here as well. And similarly Wherever I go, I have them in, you know, home, in the gym. I travel with a sort of collapsible version. Uh, so this is something that I first found maybe 10 years ago. I think literally just by trying to look at the highest rated Amazon products. And I was like, Oh, wow, this thing has like, I think at the time like 45,000 ratings and it was near a five star rating. I thought this must be great. And so I I got one and it's been almost a love affair ever since. And I I You know, really gotten to just kinda know it better and better over time. And, you know, even I think last night I I found like a new kind of angle that really got into, you know, under my shoulder blade and just the right way. And really appreciated it. And there there's other products like this, like the Theracane. I've tried them. I'm I'm sure some of them are are almost as good, but this is the one I really love. They're also they're really cheap. I think they're about thirty dollars and they're completely indestructible. I still have the first one I bought ten years ago in addition to probably nine others. So it's my favorite among many of these kind of tools.

10:05 I've been very impressed just uh last little bit on the On the back buddy. using these two very close together knobs for the back of the neck, sort of the neck extensors, I've been shocked how effective it is for not just relaxing my neck for extension, but even rotation. Spending 30 seconds on it is surprising and For thirty percent off, use Backbuddy.com slash Tim. No, there's no affiliation or anything with the company, but it is a good tool. Now before we start recording, I was mentioning some lower back pain that I'm contending with. And uh you had responded that I think you've written an article on

10:44 addressing back pain and you mentioned specifically lidocaine patches. And this happens to be the second time lidocaine patches have come up in the last twenty four hours for the first time in my life. So would you mind expanding on that just a little bit? Yeah, so I spent a lot of my twenties doing the classic throw out your back thing, you know, in innocuous ways. Like one time I did it while sneezing and I had been like tying my shoes, so I had like my legs crossed. And it just very frustrating. You throw out your back and you're you're sort of laid up for three or four days. So it definitely went deep on just trying to get advice on on what to do and that can lead you in a lot of directions, including to psychological mechanisms like the the Dr. Sarno stuff.

11:25 And also I just became very acutely aware of it. So I I could sort of feel My back feels like a little tweaked right now. That's usually what it feels like, you know, a couple days before this injury happens, this acute thing. And so I learned that when that happens, I I need to address it. I either need to relax or I need to do yoga or something like that. And eventually I found these lidocaine patches. First I bought The biofreeze ones, which are are menthol based. They work great too. They're they're basically equivalent, but they have a smell. And my wife really just likes it. The lidocaine ones have the same impact, but they don't have a smell. So I I really like those. And it basically if you feel this tweak.

12:03 Or just now I use them all the time, like after a workout, just slap it on my lower back. wear it for six or seven hours and usually that just helps things really release, even if I'm still, you know, sitting up during that six or seven hours, not doing anything special. And usually I'll have like a pretty good back crack at the end of that or something like that. I also love to put'em kind of between my shoulder blades again for the for the neck tension. And it just feels like this incredible hack. It's totally topical, so it doesn't mess with your head or make you, you know, drowsy or anything like that. And yeah, I've just really love them. I I buy them probably You know, 20 a month or something like that at this point. So I want to explain also for folks who may be listening why most likely we are not sharing video. Maybe we'll share video of me in some animal avatar that is of your choosing. But the the reason I bring this up is

12:55 In prep. Your team sent me a fascinating document that I almost certainly am going to try to emulate because I have been in the process of hiring recently. And this is a guide. This is a guide to you. It's like a user's guide. For Dustin. And I just want to read A few of the I suppose.

13:17 line items on the table of contents. Briefly, if you don't mind. How I view success. How I communicate. uh as an example as a subcategory. Under that writing is thinking.

13:28 Meetings, one on ones, group meetings, scheduling, et cetera. Personality. And we might come back to this enneagram type five, introversion motivation, management style, hands off, candor underneath that. Miscellaneous. What gains and loses my trust, revisiting past decisions, holding stories lightly, and then things dust and hate. Now on the it almost looks like a mood board, which I really appreciate on the uh on the page of Things Dustin Hate. is included being videotaped. So Could you please give some context on when you first created?

14:03 this document and for what purpose you created this document. I think there was a a sort of phase where a lot of people were doing this and publishing them online. And it sort of coincided with the real catalyst for me was a book. I can't remember the title. I think it's The Making of a Manager, but it's by Julie Zoo, who's an old colleague from Facebook at the time.

14:24 And she was one of the design leads there. A great just sort of tactical book on how to be a manager. And it includes Julie's, you know, sort of guide to Julie. And In the book, it's sort of framed as this is for your immediate reports. And I originally wrote this doc. Or thumb just for my team. They said, hey, this is great. We'd really love for the whole company to actually be exposed to this. And so now it's included in onboarding. I don't really know how many asanas actually go through the whole thing in onboarding, but I I tried to make it kind of fun and interesting to read. So hopefully some of them would. And part of the reason we did that is because yeah, I I have some quirks. I'm an introvert in a CEO role.

14:58 And I care a lot about managing my energy and kind of what I think of as this this extraversion budget. It's almost like a you know video game energy bar for me that that drains down. And so especially on a Bender, who's the the head of people here at Asana, just really encouraged me, hey, it just a lot easier for everyone to manage your budget if they understand how it works. And so the more people know about you, the better. And so I I put it out there. And then the the things I hate list. I originally also sort of created that. That's a screenshot of a sauna board and originally created that just for fun with my team. A few of them also have one and You know, they are also just like this is great insight into your personality, so you should include it. And in the actual sauna board, you can click in and I've got like some snarky comments about each of the things. Yeah, just for fun at the bottom there. But it does include some things that happen to be energy trains as well and you know, video tapings in there. Let me if you don't mind drill into just a few of these, but then I'm very fascinated by that I am going to highlight for myself

15:57 Just in terms of revisiting systems in my own company, under management style, you have coach for endurance. Would you mind explaining what that means? What that item describes or covers. You know, generally I think a lot of what I've learned as a leader over time is just how much of a marathon the work really is. And I think that

16:17 A lot of Culture and tech industry encourages you to sprint just as much as possible and really focuses on short term productivity measures. And the consequence of that is people burn out. And so, you know, definitely something we experienced with Facebook and I seen a Asana as well from time to time is when people leave the company, they're not necessarily going somewhere else. They're kind of retiring. Or they're taking a long sabbatical. They've sort of decided in order to have a good break, I actually have to quit entirely. I can't just do a two or three week break and come back and it'll be too stressful to even have the mental overhead of what's waiting for me. And so You know, when we were setting out to do Asana, we knew it was a big project. You know, it's enterprise collaboration software takes a really long time to build a business around not only a new product, but in our case a new category.

17:08 And so we knew it wouldn't be a three or four year thing and then I put the company or something like that, and be in it for a long time. Now it's been thirteen or fourteen years and I still have, you know, really long runway in front of me. And so a lot of my mentality is just I I've got to be able to to keep going for as long as possible and not burn out. And I want that for as much as my team as possible because I really heavily value institutional knowledge and the strength you get from having high trust relationships. And so I really try and coach my team around that and I encourage them to to do that with their leads and and so on throughout the organization. One of my favorite phrases is like Don't let the long breaks get in the way of the small breaks. So sometimes people are like, Oh, like a year from now I'm gonna take a sabbatical and kind of get in this mentality of I'm just gonna work really hard for the next year. It's like, no, you should still take like a three day weekend, maybe a you know, week vacation or so before that, and just like breaks during your day as well and take your your nights and your weekends.

18:03 And all of that is important. So it's almost like a a fractal of the balance between rest and work. And I think you have to actually coach people to do that. They don't necessarily do it naturally. Yeah, that's actually been one of the biggest challenges for me personally is that I tend to hire very hungry go getters and sometimes Even despite my encouraging to embrace self care of various types. They burn the candle at both ends.

18:30 And burnout. They burn themselves out and I've experienced that personally. But it's easy to, I suppose, take for granted that people will automatically do that, which is, in my experience, not always the case if you get someone who's really a hard driver. On the topic of energy, Budgeting. or thinking about energy management. You've listed a lot of lessons over the years, and there's a lot on wavelength.asana.com that I'd encourage people to check out. One I wanted to ask you about is

18:59 not letting decisions linger for too long. Which can be energy training. So let me just read something so that you don't have to Feel like you're on the spot at a congressional hearing or something. And here's a an excerpt from one of those posts, and here's what it says. I've learned a lot over the years, but here are a few key learnings that I employ regularly in no specific order. And I may come back to a few of these, so I'll just read the five. Number one, not delegating enough is bad for me and bad for people who could be getting more autonomy and learning more skills. Number two, acknowledging that everyone else is a partner in what you're trying to do and not an enemy. Three, recognizing that you agree with people more than you think you do, where you disagree is probably a difference of input assumptions and not a real conflict. I'll certainly, I think, come back to that one.

19:44 But the one I want to ask about is four, avoiding paradox of choice and making decisions, even if you're unsure of what strictly is the best one at at that very moment. Letting a decision linger for too long is energy draining. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. And then the last one is making sure there are regular checkpoints for reflection and there's time to think at a high level and not just be tactical all the time. That's extremely important. So Would you mind expanding if you can on what that ends up looking like? In terms of

20:16 Avoiding the paradox of choice. and making decisions perhaps more quickly because that is something I think I'm pretty good at. Yeah, better than the average bear, maybe, but I still have a lot of room for improvement. And My team is so small. That

20:31 The more open loops we have, the more exhausting it is for everyone. Especially me. So I'd love to hear you say more about that. Yeah, and you know, some of this is aspirational, like I think we get in these long decision loops as well, especially at work.

20:45 First, maybe I should explain the paradox of choice too. Do you think your listeners should be. Part of the paradox of choice is just this idea that if you have the choice between two things, the longer you consider them both, or even being exposed to the second choice. Kind of makes you devalue either outcome. If you choose Path A

21:04 You're always thinking about what could have been with path B and vice versa. And there's some really interesting psychological research people have done sort of proving this in in controlled settings. And so you kind of don't want to indulge that. Mindset if you can avoid it. And I think the easiest way to do that is is to just pick your battles. So at my level

21:22 that it involves often You know, maybe just saying, I don't care. I don't have a preference. Certainly in my personal life, I try and do that as often as possible. You know, my wife is always showing me art for the house or something and it's just like If I don't have a strong opinion, I don't express any opinion at all, which it's worse for her, as often she'd want me to, but you know, I prefer not to kind of like bind My preference if I don't have to.

21:45 And the sort of other flip side of this is often the choices that are hardest. matter the least in exactly this way, where the outcomes are gonna be really similar. It turns out you didn't have a strong opinion. And so you shouldn't spend too much energy on that. So pick your battles is sort of the the first way of going about it. And then the second is delegate where possible. And so, you know, it doesn't have to be my choice in the first place. And it's good to empower people. You have to be a little careful though, because if it's one of these, the outcomes are similar.

22:12 You have to coach that person too because they might end up locked in the same sort of trap of thinking about it too long and getting drained and things like that. And then the third is, you know, being really clear about your goals. We try and start every meeting with not only what are the goals of the project we're talking about, but what are the goals of this meeting? What decisions are we trying to make? And being as clear as possible about what those decisions are and when they need to be made and putting deadlines on them. I have to praise I saw the the best slide I've ever seen in a meeting the other day that was just a list of key questions and it was like These questions need to be answered by August fifteenth, these by September first, these by September fifteenth, and they had recommendations on the first set. And I was like, great, let's just answer the first six right now in this meeting. We did. We got through some of the September first ones as well. And if every meeting could have that slide, I I think we'd be in really good shape.

23:02 I guess that strikes me as sort of a A really helpful proxy for what are the goals of this meeting. If people some How have difficulty translating that because it seems too abstract than just asking what are the key questions we have to answer in this meeting? Sort of seems to perhaps get to a lot of the same ground. If we come back to delegating for a moment, and uh this is gonna be looking in the rear view mirror, probably. It could be current day, but I'm wondering.

23:27 Since this is also a growth area for me. Before taking something that could be viewed as a problem and trying to paint it as more of an opportunity. This is an area where I feel like I can still improve a lot. Were there any particular examples, any th any any concrete examples you could give of things that you found hard to delegate at any point that ultimately were very valuable.

23:50 To delegate. Could be any type of example. Could be a category, could be something specific. Just to maybe illustrate. overcoming that type of friction.

24:00 It's a tough question. I think that In some sense it's it's just an evolution of at the beginning of a sauna, I just owned everything and I had to consciously The side. to delegate and often did it too late and needed to sort of hit a breaking point.

24:16 And need to just kinda declare bankruptcy on something, but looking back, a lot of those just ended up being effective and and good to delegate. But I I used to do Everything from guiding and presenting at almost every all hands. Sort of like all that presentation content was me and and now I'm you know most often in the audience or I've got like a short bit or I'm showing up for the Q and A.

24:39 I used to do kind of like the the year in review and try and read about what happened with kind of like every goal outcome and every project. And just as the organization scaled, it just was too much and kind of have to do that more at different levels of abstraction where I'm kind of doing the the very highest level one. And you know, I hear these stories about a lot of startups with like a thousand people and they say, Well, the the founders in every interview to make sure this person's a fit and you know, things like that I I gave up on, you know, long ago. You know, part of it just takes I love to make these little spreadsheet models and I have one that's just sort of showing me how I use my time based on what the recurring meetings are and some things I know are gonna happen week to week or month to month. And I try and go back to it on maybe an annual basis, and that can sort of help me see Here is a big time suck and it's just sort of out of proportion. Can I somehow reduce this to be a more appropriate use of my time or give it to somebody else? And that kind of helps me each step of the way. I don't know if there's anything in particular. That felt like a

25:38 You know, sort of ripping it ripping it out of my heart or something like that. How do you create or populate the spreadsheet? It's one of those things that in theory To me, for instance, sounds so Appealing yet.

25:50 I would worry that because of task switching or just the number of things floating around in my life, that the simple act of inputting Into a spreadsheet. would consume a vast amount of time. How do you fill in that spreadsheet? What does it look like? In terms of just formatting. I actually made it into a template we can share in part of the uh episode. That'd be great.

26:12 Yeah. It sort of starts with Here are the hours for work. Here are the hours for home. So I got that sort of

26:20 biggest pie chart. And then for work, I have a tab that's like here are my recurring meetings. This is how frequently they happen. This is how long they are. In some cases I have prep time. For example, we have a a board meeting quarterly. It is a three and a half hour meeting. I need two hours of prep. There's also some committee meetings. And so this sort of amortizes out to something like two hours a month or something like that, or like 30 minutes a week. So it becomes a part of the chunk. And

26:48 Those things don't change very often. And are are really kind of the bulk of it and where the most leverage is in in changing something. So you know, I think that those end up adding up to like something like thirty percent of the work time. And then I have another tab that is more

27:05 you know, more abstract. It's like responding to things in Slack, and I just sort of like swag an estimate for how long I spend on that per week or you know interacting with customers and those come up. on the customers cadence. I I don't have like a sort of set block in my calendar for that. But I look back maybe over the past month or two and just sort of like estimate looking backwards how much time I spent. And then what's left, I just sort of count as this is desk time, this is focus time, and try and sort of gut check, does this feel right or am I kidding myself about something and look for other sources of time and that led me to add in my my lunch hour and like coffee breaks and stuff like that. And you know, it's hard the first time, but then every year I'm kinda just like tweaking it and that part, you know, only takes twenty minutes or so. Now are you setting

27:50 I'm gonna get fancy here, just so I can sound smart. Are you using OKRs or are you after re reviewing the spreadsheets saying, you know what, for the next month or next quarter, I wanna hit these percentages? I guess I'm wondering what the assessment looks like if you have questions you're trying to answer when you review the spreadsheet. Just what that process looks like for you. I don't think I'm quite that quantitative about it. We do have OKRs at Asana and one thing I do with the help of my my assistant Orin is I look at my coming month and I try and organize it. under the company objectives.

28:25 And so some of the objectives are about financial management. And that includes all my time engaging with investors and with the finance team here, some of it's about the product, some of it's about engaging with customers. And so if I do have customer meetings, that's kind of slotting in there. And I think that's a good monthly checkpoint for Am I personally contributing to the goals where I think I'm leveraged? Sometimes the sections look too long, sometimes they look too short. And can kind of course correct from there. But I try not to have too many

28:55 Fixed rules. Other than my sort of energy gauge. Am I am I trending towards burnouts or not? Do I have the energy to do the things I need to do? And a lot of that more is sort of day to day and week to week management. And and again my assistant does a big part of that in making sure I don't get overloaded too much. God bless your assistant. Yeah. People think of me as an extrovert, but I am very, very introverted.

29:19 In terms of energy management. I also have to budget for that, but I am such a dancing bear on stage. Playing extrovert that I Sometimes com commit to things that are sort of antithetical to my actual programming. But I want to come back to a few things. So the first is just a definition of terms for folks. So okay, our stands for objectives and key results. If you want to take a look at that, John Dorr has a book about it.

29:44 Google also uses OKRs extensively and you can find a lot written. On that. On the paradox of choice, if people want to look more into that, Barry Schwartz wrote a book called The Paradox of Choice. And there's the aspect that you described. There's also the consideration of too many options, right? Considering too many options and the decision fatigue that that can produce or just creating An excess of decision making and

30:09 It seems to me that Number five. on the list that I read earlier, making sure there are regular checkpoints for reflection. There's time to think at a high level. requires some type of strategic or tactical move to actually implement, right? Or the small things will just crowd out the big things. So I have a few questions around that. The first is do you still or do people at Asana still follow no meeting Wednesday? Or is that sort of case by case? And even if it's just

30:36 Past tense now, if you could perhaps just explain why that existed. I think that would be helpful for folks. For me, I I still follow it quite religiously. It is a bit case by case throughout the company, and that often results from people trying to schedule meetings with me on Wednesdays. And I'm like, What are you doing? Why aren't you doing No Meeting Wednesday? And yeah, it comes from two places. One Maybe I think it was two thousand eleven Paul Graham had this really famous blog post, The Maker Manager Schedule.

31:05 And It was just kind of pointing out that meetings end up on your calendar kind of at the behest of management and team leads and project managers, and that is their entire day. So they're just kind of like stacking their their calendar end to end. But I see he's really especially in software, really need these long focus blocks to get into their work. They need to kind of like load up the context and their their short term memory, get into flow and have a good, you know, 90 or 120 minute session to get useful work out. And so if you don't interfere, the natural thing that happens is kind of your calendar gets chopped up and you don't have any of these two hour blocks. You just have these half hour, an hour blocks and you get a little bit of work done and it's just overall suboptimal for individual productivity. So New Meeting Wednesday is sort of a hack of just we're going to synchronize everyone's calendar so that they don't have meeting blocks on Wednesdays.

31:57 A lot of people at Asana go further. They'll add additional blocks, maybe Tuesday and Thursday morning, you know, try and find a couple other maybe half day or third of a day segments where they can try and keep their calendar clear. And Yeah, everyone else tries to respect this as much as they can. Of course, things happen, customer meetings happen, you're not always in control of that. But we try and do our best. So partly it's just about having those focus blocks.

32:22 And partly it's about having, you know, long enough blocks to get into some deep thinking work and, you know, be able to have these longer periods of reflection. And you know, I just find even as a manager, if I have just a half hour, an hour, I'm gonna do something small, something tactical, just so I can feel productive. It's it's hard to get into that deep thinking state. So that's really what it's all about. Yeah, totally. And I wanna just mention for people who may want to look it up, again, the maker schedule, manager schedule by Paul Graham, who's I guess. Fair to co-founder of Y Combinator, people may be familiar with that. That article, as well as or I should say essay, I guess, as well as the top idea in your mind are two that I have bookmarked.

33:06 to revisit constantly. I really appreciate how concise and clear his thinking. And as I also want to confirm, you did get the book title right for Julie Jo. I'm not sure how she pronounces her last name, The Making of a Manager. I think it's Zoom. Well you you actually uh I think you speak Mandarin or something, so maybe I should Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It could be it could be so. Could be any number of things. So so Julie, apologies if I'm getting your name wrong. But the title is

33:32 The making of a manager. And the No meeting Wednesday. brings up a question for me of weekly architecture. I find that I do very well if I have some semblance of a weekly architecture. So for instance, we're recording on a Friday. I tend to record Podcasts if I record podcasts. Monday and Friday at

33:52 10 A. wherever I happen to be, or roughly 3 PM wherever I happen to be. And I've found that Just reduces so much complexity, it meets. communication much more smooth. It makes planning in the long term much easier in terms of blocking out time over a month, a quarter, et cetera. And then there are say, for instance, for me team calls and everything happen on a Tuesday, and that's all format it in a certain way. Do you have a particular weekly architecture that you aim for or that during periods of high productivity that you've followed?

34:25 Well I think that The weekly cadence, like including no meeting Wednesday, really defines a lot. A lot falls out from that. So Asana has an office centric hybrid policy. So we're Wednesdays, since they have no meetings, you can work from home, totally fluid. Fridays are also pretty fluid. And you know, I'm here on a Friday, but relatively low attendance. And so Monday, Tuesday, Thursday is when a lot of our meetings are gonna happen, including my team meets Tuesday afternoon and you know, I'd love to say I designed that for a particular reason, but really that's when our calendars aligned in the right kind of way. And then, you know, I mentioned I have the kind of Tuesday, Thursday morning work box. for getting more stuff done and between those and Wednesday, that's sort of the me time, the IC time, and then most of the rest of Monday, Tuesday, Thursday will be meetings.

35:14 I see as individual contributor. Yes. You know, I think of it as you can be an I C in your manager role as well. It's like when you're not in meetings, you're producing things and coaching people. And then Friday partially because I really prefer in person meetings ends up being pretty light as well, even though I'm here just like a couple of meetings and and a lot of work block time as well. Why do you prefer in person meetings? Well, it's partially for the same reason I don't like being video recorded. I find that Part of my attention is lost in a video call.

35:45 And it depends a lot on the quality of the connection and the audio and the video. I don't know what your experience is like, but you're you're quite pixelated for me right now. And so it's like a little harder to pick up on your your body language, your emotional your cues. And I just find after a video call I'm I'm so drained. And if it's a team meeting, I find the control flow very difficult. Very difficult for people to interrupt or interject. They literally raise their hand to sort of put themselves in the queue. I just find it a lot less efficient than being in a room and and having the more sort of natural cadence of dialogue. And again, the A V issues pop up in the team meetings too, and it's it's a disaster every time. And I don't I don't know. We're three years into the pandemic and all the same problems from twenty twenty are still here. Uh but but they are and and I just like I I can't look past it to to feeling like it's good enough. Yeah, you know, I didn't really consider

36:39 The energetic cost of what you're describing, but it's true. There is something as much as we try or hope that it will be natural, that is unnatural about looking at the Brady bunch on a screen and trying to coordinate Body language and cues. There's a c energetic cost to that.

36:55 I wanna Come back to number three in the list that I mentioned, and it's gonna be a jumping off point. So recognize that you agree with people more than you think you do, where you disagree is probably a difference of input assumptions and not a real conflict. I think this may tie into A question about conscious Leadership. Which I would love to

37:14 Discuss. And In your book recommendation. list that you sent me. I do want to talk about the top recommendation at some point, but at the there are two books that begin the list. We'll leave the first as a cliffhanger for now. So Top Recommendation is the beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, who I had on the podcast with Naval Ravakant. And I do want to ask you about that because that is not an easy book to read necessarily. Very interesting. And then right below that is leadership and strategy. And the first book is the 15 commitments to conscious leadership.

37:47 How did you get introduced to conscious leadership? Or this book. So I think it was You know, almost twelve or fourteen years ago. I went to an event

37:58 Southern California, I I can't even remember where And it had some great people there, including Diana Chapman and actually Jack Cornfield, who you had on the the show last week. And it was kind of my my first exposure to some of those people. It was pretty small group. I think there were 15 people in the group. And so I really got to kind of know them and ended up deciding to work with Diana as a personal coach. And that led to more and more I think this was even before the book was published. And then, you know, as we were starting Asana, it became just kind of the framework that we wanted everyone to learn. I think 15 commitments is is really great. I also think it's very similar to other frameworks, but it's nice to have a similar set of language. And this idea of holding stories lightly and

38:39 understanding the other the other perspective more It also relates to something Jack brought up with with Byron Katie, so she loves to preface any thought with I have a story that these are all kind of related ideas. But having the 15 commitments is something very concrete and language like being above the line, below the line. It's really helpful for everyone in the company to know what those terms mean so that you can shorthand them. And so now you'll go into a meeting and somebody will be in a bad mood and and frustrated about a decision we're making. And they'll just voice out loud, I'm a little blind about this. I'm expressing some frustration, but that doesn't mean stop what you're doing, or I'm like throwing my my body on the tracks. It just means that that's where I'm at right now. I'd love to shift. Maybe you can help me shift, but just be aware. And so that's very useful.

39:24 And it comes up all the time in my one on ones with how I coach people. In fact, I start all my one on ones just with how are you feeling? Cause often it will emerge, well, they're feeling below the line or there's something going on in their life. And that's going to affect our conversation. And I'd rather know about it than not. Yeah. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now. A lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell the future. Nobody can, but I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your savings.

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40:50 This was a paid endorsement by Wealthfront. Yeah. How have you worked with Diana, who's great, spent a decent amount, not as much as you have, but a decent amount of time with her. She is one of a kind and very, very good at what she does. How have you worked with her if you're open to discussing it to whatever extent one on one. What does the

41:12 format look like or what Were you hoping to accomplish in working with her? Were you working with her mostly because you were basically test driving language and shared concepts that you hope to put into Asana? Was it mostly individual in the beginning and out of personal interest. Yeah, it's interesting. It's changed over time. I don't have a one on one coaching relationship with her at the moment. But

41:36 A lot of it. You know, when I first started, I was a total novice on the commitments and I had a lot of stories I was I was holding tightly and they were impacting my energy because I believe them. And she really helped me a lot with that. Part of the reason I don't work with her anymore is like I I kinda know what she's going to say every time. And so I'll I'll do the back and forth on my own. Are you open to and if not, that's okay, and it could be a hypothetical, but sharing a story that you held Tightly.

42:03 And uh Think that'd be be useful. Yeah, I mean I think the one That has been most difficult for me and I think is

42:12 maybe universal for entrepreneurs in general. sense of huge responsibility to keep going and and endure and persevere and do well by your employees and this sort of thing. And it's very easy to feel Like you're trapped. And that there's no other possibility. You're kind of just, you know, susfist as a leader. And I don't want to scare my place. Like I'm I'm not like thinking about leaving right now, but I think going through the coaching of this really helped because

42:42 She would just constantly deny me on anything that I really believed, like It would be terrible if Asana had a different CEO. And it's like, well, how's the opposite of that story true? Maybe a new CEO would, you know, bring in fresh perspective and like they'd have more energy and like, you know, things like this. Or it'd be terrible if Asana shut down and all of our employees all this time and part of their career doing it. And she'd say, Well, how's the opposite of that story true? What about the experiences they got building Asana? What about the value your customers got while Asana was alive? And Obviously I'm I'm still there. So it's not like this coaching led me to think I should leave a sana or shut it down, but it helped me understand that I was choosing to be there and every day is in some sense a new decision. I can't just walk away tomorrow, like that has other kinds of consequences that I choose not to accept.

43:36 But in the longer arc of time, I have agency here, the Asana employees have agency, our customers have agency. And it's much more productive for me to engage with the problems from above the line rather than from this place of fear and scarcity and anxiety. And you know, there's time and place for that. You also need to to feel all feelings in the in the commitments framework. But it's bad if it's just like always a a pall on every hour of every day and every decision, and you want to not grip around those things. And so it's useful sometimes to indulge in how is the story not true? And you know, with Diana, she'll go all the way to fear of death and like

44:14 You know, imagine your own funeral and like whatever your deepest anxiety is, and just try and loosen your grip on that. And for people who want maybe a name for the technique, there's more to it. And Diana has her own flavor and approach, but the turnarounds. that are often associated with Byron Katie. People can find the work online and worksheets. that are really helpful for this if you aren't able to work with someone like Diana. The Fifteen Commitments is also an excellent book. And

44:45 An excellent book not just for companies. It's a great book if you want to improve your communication with your significant other, which is actually how I used a whole Large. Portion of that book. With significant others.

45:00 I just want to add to the the other thing it's a lot like is cognitive behavioral therapy. So e you know, if you want to take a more Western approach, I think it gets at the same ends with very similar methods. Yeah, totally. One particular aspect of what Diana Chapman and Jim Detmer, who've both been on the podcast, embrace that I Have always well, this is a story. It's a part of this whole training is like helps you to identify the stories, but my story is that I have long struggled with

45:30 having incredibly uncomfortable Clearing conversations. when there is a conflict or you feel some resentment or whatever it might be. And I think historically There's been a lot of fear for me around the consequences of trying to have an open conversation about these things. So My question is, how do you handle that if you implement it?

45:53 At Asana. those types of clearing conversations. Or broadly speaking, if this is easier, just disagreements, tension between or among Employees and so on. Yeah.

46:06 It's a big company, so I don't think it happens the same way everywhere. But what I try and coach people to do and what I experience with my immediate team. Is that we we do try and get into this mode. You know, it's a little bit Conscious leadership, it's a little bit nonviolent communication, but very speaking unarguably, reflecting back what the other person said. To make sure that they feel understood.

46:29 I've definitely over the years My biggest takeaway with conflict. is people want to feel heard more than they want the decision change. A lot of it is just you gotta you gotta make the space for that. And if you're gonna do some difficult change management. You just gotta accept that there's gotta be some of that. And it's important to do

46:46 Do it at the right times. Can't have everyone get involved before the decision is made, but the people who who especially need to be bought in and need to help you to change management after they kinda need to be heard before it's finalized. And then even after it's communicated, you know, you're gonna have to really listen to people on why they're disappointed or unhappy. And reflect that back to them. Not just Yeah.

47:07 be a literal sounding board, but you know, actually be engaged in empathetic conversation. I think that goes the longest way. And sometimes people use, you know, conscious leadership as a literal Clearing script. The facts are when this happened. I generated the story or I had these feelings. And this is meant to explicitly get away from language like You did this and that made me feel angry. You know, the whole idea with conscious leadership is you're responsible for your own feelings and you know, you're gonna have a reaction. That doesn't necessarily mean the person was trying to hurt you or that that's really what happened. Often it has to do with

47:41 You know, stuff from your past or your childhood or situations like that that you don't want to experience again and your body is bringing them up again. And so just trying to bring some awareness to that, bring it into the room. There's two people in the conflict and they're in different positions of of power or different positions with respect to the decision being made, but they each need to play their role in a mindful way and be as above the line as as they can and be present. And and that's really what we're going for. The conscious leadership scripts. are outstanding. You do need some shared vocabulary to play that game with someone. So they kind of need to be signed up for the same set of rules, but can be super effective. And I wanted to

48:23 Underscore nonviolent communication. by Marshall Rosenberg. I listened to the audio book, which I think has a peace sign, a hand making a peace sign on it. So don't necessarily be put off the the cover's a little bizarre, but The format itself That plus conscious leadership in some of the scripts. I'd say over the last three years.

48:44 Have Three to four years. really changed how I approach communication in general. And what I've experienced personally, I'll try to keep this short, but is having some type of structured way of thinking about how you're going to open a conversation also gives you A chance and maybe a catalyst.

49:02 to de escalate. Whatever emotion happens to be. running really hot or really hard and The simple act of saying Something inarguable.

49:12 Starting with what I hear you saying is A B C. Did I get that right? Is there more? And then having when X happened as a video. camera would record it, right? When you wrote this sentence in this email, I felt this. The story I have around that is this.

49:29 Would you be willing to agree to this, having a request at the end? It's remarkable what you can get accomplished, especially if you have a history of being a bit of a bull in a china shop like I do. The transformation is quite something. Sometimes when you're talking about this, you you get the sense of like Everyone kinda has to be a Zen monk and like tot totally in control of their emotions. I also just want to really emphasize, you know, one of the commitments is is feel your feelings. And sometimes that means like purposely going below the line like as far as you can. Yeah. Getting on the drama triangle, making it playful and just like hamming it up, really making that person like the biggest, scariest villain monster you can. I really think that's an important part of it. And everyone's gonna have like a different way of doing it. But you know, I think if you try and you've talked about struggling with anger management in the past. I I think I do that too. If you try and solve that by

50:19 withholding and containing all that anger, you end up lower back pain. And it still comes out anyway. And it comes out in the wrong you know, for a totally different situation that's unrelated to the thing you're really angry about. And so it's really important to like go through that. And part of the way I do that is maybe I'll just write it all out, you know, I'll have like a Google Doc or a Sana task and just kinda go crazy, just, you know, stream of consciousness, you know, sometimes move your body, hit things. You know, I I really want to put that in there too is an important part of doing this well. And then once you've processed your feelings and like move them through your body, then then you can have that above the line conversation. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. It's a good reminder for me. Also that's

51:00 you know, swinging from one extreme to the other and neglecting to express that stuff. might very well contribute to my mysterious lower back pain. So I promise listeners that I wouldn't leave them hanging with the cliffhanger on David Deutsch, so would you mind Explaining why that book features so prominently. Yeah,

51:23 Your book. recommendations and for people who want the title, it's the beginning of infinity subtitle Explanations that transform the world. It's been a while since I've gone through it myself, but I've read it probably three times. First of all, I find it just really fascinating and enjoyable. Before reading that book.

51:39 For a long time I said that Girdle of Scherbach was my favorite book, but I had never finished it. It's tough. Yeah. But it's really entertaining. And some of the ways that it's entertaining, I think also feature in Beginning of Infinity. Like he has these, you know, sections in between the chapters that are more narrative and fun, without nearly as much math. There's a little bit, but it's not like T B we have, you know. You have to have advanced math degree to get through it. But the big lesson from it is this idea. the problems are soluble. We build on knowledge and No matter how immense a problem.

52:15 seems as long as it is possible to solve within the laws of natural physics, it generally can be solved. And Over time, you know, we've had all these crisis moments in humanity where it's felt like that's not true. There was a resource running out, there was an irreconcilable conflict. And people just couldn't see the way to the future. And what happens is the pressure builds up and you you get more and more attention on solving this problem, and lo and behold, it gets solved.

52:42 And sometimes the reason so scary is is a form of, you know, status quo bias. So people think Everything will be exactly like it is now, except we won't have this important resource. I think there's a a story about Uh particular element that's needed that was needed for T Vs in the fifties, do you know what I'm talking about? I don't know I don't know that example. The price of oil and oil supply would be another example. Yeah, totally. So like you know, for a long time with energy, people thought, well, we we'd run out of oil at some point and that would that would be the end of energy. And then of course we we have all all these alternative sources now that can supplant it. And you know, these are also solutions to to CO2 problems. The T V one is nice just because there was a while people didn't think you would be able to have the sort of

53:24 cathode ray tube TVs anymore because this element was going to go away. And then now we have liquid crystal displays that that don't involve the element at all. And so that this is an example of Sasco bias because people couldn't imagine a different way to accomplish the goal of getting a crisp video image, you know, two people in a broadcast format. And so he just goes through a bunch of examples like that. And gives you this sense of like, you know, how powerful humanity really is and what the power of compounding knowledge really is. Alright, let's uh leave people to explore that book and certainly if they want an overview, they can listen to the the podcast with uh David Deutsch and myself and Naval Ravakant. I let Naval do the heavy lifting on that one for a million and one reasons. Yeah. But I do I do feel like the

54:09 Premise that problems are soluble or many problems are soluble is a good Jumping off point to effective altruism. You're one of the largest funders of effective altruism. And I'd like to explore this and discuss it a bit. Could you begin maybe with just explaining for folks who don't know the term what effective altruism Yes. And then you can take it wherever you like. And I can also

54:35 Certainly help hop in. I feel the need to preface this with there there's some disagreement about what it is. So I'll tell you I'll tell you my perspective, which I think it's really It's an idea and some people call it a movement, but it's really it brings together people who are interested in asking the question, how do we do the most good? And that can take the form of philanthropic donations, it can take the form of how you spend your career, like maybe which nonprofit you would work for, or in a lot of cases, they're part of what's called earning to give. And so they

55:08 Just choose a sort of normal career with a high paying job. with a plan to then donate some of their earnings as as effectively as they can. And so that Leads you to you know, a certain set of ideas. So as a philanthropist, I think of effective altruists as defined by cause agnosticism.

55:26 So that means Rather than coming to philanthropy with what I care about is education or what I care about is climate, you're coming with Just the point of view, I'd like to do the most good. And That leads you to different places that sometimes look very strange.

55:43 Because it turns out that When you're the next philanthropist on the margin. The thing that does the most good is often something in it that's important that other people aren't doing for whatever reason. You know, it doesn't have enough attention or it's not as sexy, or it requires really kind of going deep on The logic of why this is important. And so you end up

56:04 not doing the things that most other people are doing. And so the overarching framework that we use for for choosing cause areas is it it has to be important. hard to do too good without working on important things. It has to be tractable. So it has to be possible to make progress. And then it should be neglected so that you're doing good because This is the good that other people aren't doing. So it's it's a form of sort of comparative advantage. What would some examples be? Cause I can imagine if I'm acting as a stand-in for the audience, they're like, Well, how do you figure out

56:36 What is Most good or the greatest good for the greatest number of fill in the blank? Is it biased towards and measured in human Lives? Is it some other metric? How do you determine what is good? Would you mind Giving a few examples of cause areas or specific projects.

56:54 that you've ended up landing on based on the type of vetting you're describing. And this is where I think some of the subjectivity comes in, because I don't think there is a one answer to to what that metric is. So the one that is sort of easiest to understand is global health and well being. So we do a lot of work, particularly in the developing world.

57:15 Particularly around Valaria is probably the the single largest destination for our grant money. And there it is often just measured in the number of lives saved or the equivalent. So it's this idea of a a quality adjusted Life year that kind of lets you convert the value of Helping somebody

57:33 Avoided militating disease or you know, maybe takes years off their life or even increases their earning power. How might you make that equivalent to helping a child make it past their their fifth year because malaria bed nets are are helping them avoid a a fatal infection. And so with in global health and well being That's where you kinda have the most

57:54 similarity in the goals and can kind of trade off the different opportunities against each other in in a fairly clean way, though it can still get You know, it can still involve a lot of judgments, so there's a lot of debate. about whether the goal should be about mortality or perhaps subjective happiness. Or perhaps earning power, which is a kind of like proxy for economic empowerment, giving people as much choice in the world as possible.

58:19 But often you're you're debating things that are that are very similar. You're going to help avoid a child death through malaria bed nets or perhaps through iodine a supplementation and and they have pretty similar Well, maybe that's not a great example for avoiding a death. Avoiding intestinal worms like something that would really mess you up. So that's an easy compare. Second big category is Animal welfare. And there we work especially on factory farm animal welfare because that's where

58:45 A very large amount of The animals with either full consciousness or a great deal of consciousness live and die in the world. I think I was reading a stat that is something like Nine chickens are slaughtered every year for every human on earth. So it's something close to a hundred million chickens. And so if you can improve the welfare of those animals a little bit, you can reduce quite a lot of suffering. And that gets you to a very clear subjective point about the good, because a lot of people will say this doesn't matter at all.

59:16 you should spend infinite money on helping one human before you think at all about these chickens or these cows. And I don't think that's a judgment call. I think it's fair that people have different points of view on that, but from the perspective as a single A funder in the space, it's something that we feel sympathetic to. And then the last category is global catastrophic risks. So these are It's been a debate about the name recently, but I I think the clearest definition is is these are things that actually cause extinction or cause modern civilization to be set back two thousand years, something really catastrophic. And

59:50 This gets debated for a lot of reasons, but the philosophical point Is sort of whether you care about The seizing of life, or if you just care about suffering? You know, you could take the point of view that It's great that the people are here and and we don't want the ones that are alive now to suffer, but if kind of the lights went out for everyone else tomorrow, maybe you're fine with that. Or maybe you don't care at all about the people who haven't been born yet, or things like this.

1:00:11 I don't like to go too far into the future generations because I think in practice it it doesn't matter that much. I think the threats are are quite soon and affect the people that are alive today, but there is a a set of EAs that you know are putting a lot of the weight on the sort of I think it's like 45 trillion theoretical future human lives and making sure that they get to actually experience the world and that something doesn't stop it before we get there. And so that's where we work on things like pandemics and biosecurity risks, as well as potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. All right, we're gonna dive into

1:00:46 Couple of follows related to these. And uh Uh the the first is related to Animal welfare and suffering, which I think a lot about. And

1:00:57 I read that you are directionally vegetarian, and I would love for you to explain what directionally vegetarian means. I always feel a little sheepish about this because from a pure ethics perspective I sort of feel like vegans are right. But I also, you know, I know a lot of vegans and vegetarians and I see how they struggle with some of their eating decisions and I know what the experience is like for me. And so I just feel better when there is a little bit of meat in my life. But I've cut way back, I probably was

1:01:28 somebody ten or fifteen years ago that would have some kind of beef meal every single day or or chicken meal. And you know, now there are many days where there's no meat in my diet and I'm very interested in the alternative meat products, especially The ones from Impossible Foods where the foundation is actually taking an investment. And basically I'm in a place where if the alternative is even like half as good or three quarters as good. I'd much rather have that. And it gives me the same sort of, you know, satiation that real meat does. And mostly I feel limited. By availability, I've like pushed for the culinary team to to just like serve it more often. And and we had Impossible Burgers earlier this week. I was like, great, definitely gonna eat that one. And you know, we have some home cooked meals and try and incorporate it there. And in San Francisco, it's in in a fair amount of restaurants, but It's still pretty rare, but I definitely seek those restaurants out. I found a few like great takeout places and I'm just like really eager for this future where that's in our diet and I feel ready for it, but for the availability.

1:02:31 That's kind of how I think about it. So if we hop from Some of those cause areas. Two Perhaps

1:02:39 Forward looking. perspectives. Is there anything that you've been watching and particularly interested And Funding or considering funding that is outside of the cause areas that you mentioned? Well, those are pretty sweeping buckets. They are broad.

1:02:56 Yeah. On the global catastrophic threats. I don't know if I'm getting that phrasing. Correct. But on the pandemic side, it seems like the the effective altruism community was focused on pandemics. on some level, even before twenty twenty came around and COVID. How do you think about Let's just focus on that before we get to AI, because I know that AI is gonna be a whole different kettle of fish. On the pandemic side.

1:03:24 What levers do you try to pull? What are most important? In terms of High leverage. Or important. perhaps neglected or

1:03:33 Under exploited under funded. And so on. With respect to pandemics. How do you think about Trying to uh I suppose.

1:03:44 help with preparedness or or other aspects. So we've been in the space since twenty sixteen. And so in those early years, it was partially Just trying to make people understand that this was a real possibility. There you know really hadn't been anything Sense. Yeah, I guess the the first

1:04:02 Don't call it the Spanish fool anymore, but the nineteen nineteen pandemic. And so we've f sort of fall into this complacency, but we could see that. There were a lot of things like globalization that were increasing vulnerability for a global scale pandemic and that it just felt like a matter of time. So partially raising awareness. Now of course COVID 19 has has dramatically increased that. But it hasn't increased the preparation. So it's been really disappointing to see not only has there not really been budget for sort of cleaning up this pandemic, but there's very little money going into preparation for the next one in terms of of government scale funding. And so we still feel somewhat defenseless.

1:04:41 Uh, I think people are a lot more aware. They kind of know what some of the playbook will be. Uh, if there's another pandemic and I'm I'm really encouraged by things like a focus on indoor air quality, I think is is a huge deal. What do you mean by that? Well like During Covid and especially if you live through the California wildfires, people got into like the HEPA filters and and things that are sort of processing the air. There's some research right now with with Far UVC.

1:05:06 This is kind of like a ultraviolet light that can kill bacteria and and viruses in the air and Only reason we're not deploying it everywhere is there's there are unknown uh long-term health side effects. Um, and so I think we have some grants in this area. I know some people are funding. research into exploring that. One of the biggest wins I think we could have is is just if a technology like that was as commonplace as air conditioning or water filtration, you know, uh water quality is something we we already have sort of caught on to. This is really important and we have

1:05:38 municipal scale and also personal scale devices that help us with this. I think doing the same with air quality would go a long way. But I think the biggest thing that we push for is just more surveillance of what's circulating in the wild. And there was a point In time, you know, there's I'm sure you remember all these debates about how much COVID actually is there. Is there a bias in who's testing and are the tests accurate and all this. But there's a shortcut. Uh well there's two shortcuts. One is what's called a a sero survey. And so you just kind of

1:06:07 You try and get a random sample of of people in a local population, you do a blood test and you just like sequence everything in their blood and and see what's there. Um, and if we were doing this in every major metro all over the world, even with relatively small samples, you would catch pandemics like COVID nineteen well before they become these these global scale outbreaks. In this case, maybe it was being done in China and hidden or or who knows? But by the time we actually became aware of it, it was just the cat was out of the bag. It was probably like three months after the first infection and it was it was too far gone. But if you're doing this systematically, just looking for an emerging pandemic, you'd be much more likely to catch it.

1:06:44 The easier way to do it that I think is really interesting is is with sewage samples. I don't know if you've seen any of these sites. No, I have not. There's a great one in the Bay Area and they're they're literally just looking at sewage runoff and sampling for the concentration of COVID. And now they've extended it to, you know, monkeypox and various types of flu. And you can literally just look at the Bay Area cities and look at you know a two year trend graph of how prevalent these things are. And so I was actually just this morning I was reading a news article like COVID spiking in the Bay Area and like, you know, these sort of scare stories that that come up from time to time. I said, Hey, this is my trusted source. So I'm just gonna go see if if it's really spiking and you know, there's a little a little increase and maybe it'll become something more, but this feels like something that it removes all these biases from how people test and everything and can just be trusted as as something real.

1:07:33 All right, so Dustin AI, let's uncork this monster and talk about AI. Not saying monster in the pejorative sense, but this might be also a tie into effective altruism because there's been a lot of attention And purported attention given to AI. Where would you like to begin? Because this is, of course, a topic that could go in many different directions. Where would it make sense to start? Lately The the place I've been starting is kind of

1:08:02 Getting more into the nuance of the positions, there's been this part of the discourse that's emerged that that really paints everyone into two extremes. You're either Entirely pro AI or you're sometimes you can call them Doomers or Yuddite, if you've seen this term. Where I haven't even I haven't even seen a Yuddite. Yeah, well it is a Yuddite. Well, it's a reference to Eliezer Kalsky. Luddite. Yeah. Uh but upon on but what is the why? Well for for Eliezer Godkowski, who's sort of uh okay, I see. I get it. I get it. Yeah, yeah. Uh You know, I I feel bad even bringing up the term and making it more popular, but also I love pun so much, and I'm like, wow, people really nail that one. But he kind of represents

1:08:45 the other end of the poll of like he's the most worried about AI and you know is is just really worried about it as a global catastrophic risk, like we were talking about earlier, something that could uh actually cause human extinction or, you know, destroy civilization. But even with Eliezer, and even more so with me, It's much more nuanced than that. He's not an actual Luddite. He's a technologist and you know really believes in the technological future. He believes in the power of AI. He started out enormously pro AI. And then as he got into it, sort of came to understand some serious risks. that you know felt like you needed to be addressed. And I think the risks are very serious. I don't think they're quite as likely to occur as he does. And I I have more Optimism around

1:09:29 humanity's resiliency and ability to to address the problem for the conversation about beginning of infinity. And I'm also just really enthusiastic about AI at the same time. I you know, I wake up every day and I'm like that this is amazing. There are so many cool things I can do. Oh, and also I hope it doesn't kill us. Um and I'm like I'm like always kind of like having to hold the steel. Yeah. Exactly. And so I try and you know, give this analogy of like when you when you get into a car, you expect to go to your destination, but you put on a seatbelt. You follow the rules of the road. And there's a regulatory system and licensing system for drivers that that helps ensure sort of mutual safety for everyone, including the pedestrians. And so I really think about AI safety like that. Like we are heading towards something really awesome. But there are some serious risks we need to address, and that requires some concerted effort. And the reason it relates to effective altruism is especially until the last year, a lot of things have been changing. Pretty much nobody was working on this, partially because they thought AI was very far off, partially because they they didn't agree that the the risk would manifest even when we got there.

1:10:35 What are Some of the risks. And I couldn't help but imagine in my mind, I was thinking, you know, when I was 12, for a very long time, I wanted to be a marine biologist, and I'm thinking. How much of the people in AI are like twelve year old boys who have a pet great white shark that knows a bunch of cool tricks? But man, you gotta be careful with the great white shark. But what are the risks? I am particularly excited to hear you describe them because you are technical. I am not technical, to be clear. I'm not an engineer. I don't play one on the internet, but

1:11:05 I appreciate Perspectives on AI from those people who are able to immerse themselves. in some of the more technical aspects. So what are the risks for a lay audience? You could get into the weeds a bit. We do have technical folks listening as well, but what are the what are the risks and how How do you assign sort of probability?

1:11:26 to those risks if they haven't yet come to pass and maybe some of them are already Correct. Well I'll start with the one where there's a lot more agreement. So we're talking about part of Our G CR work is on biosecurity and we talked a lot about pandemics. But we also worry about bioweapons. So somebody purposefully engineering a pathogen.

1:11:47 And you know, if there are people in the world who are trying to do this now. And they have various resources available to them. Some of them are successful. Governments try and stop them in various ways And there's been no no major bioweapons. But Language models, especially, or even more purpose built AIs can change this and create more of an offense defense imbalance.

1:12:08 So there's been some research recently, and um Daria Amade, who's the CEO of Enthropic, recently testified to Congress. about you know how this works, where you're you're basically Trying to solve. any problem and and use language model to help, but in this case a a sort of malicious goal if you're trying to engineer a bioweapon and a language model can help you not get stuck along the way, work around problems. And just figure out step by step.

1:12:32 And You know, right now what's possible the language models don't don't help you that much. They help you a little bit, but they're not at a power level or this is a serious threat. But the worry is in another generation or two or three, they will get to a place where it becomes really enabling for people to have this goal to to kind of work around these problems and figure it out, especially if they already have you know, a background in biology, but even if they don't. And so, you know, maybe you're just enabling a lot a lot more people to come up with this. And usually when I have this conversation, people try and relate it to nuclear weapons and they're like, What's the equivalent of uranium? You gotta regulate that. And it just turns out with bio, that there there is nothing like that. You know, we may just be in a place where it's more like 3D printed guns, where you can get commodity hardware and this thing's helping you and you can do something really dangerous with it. And then you have to think about

1:13:25 Are there other ways to stop this? Again, the surveillance can help, even with a a bioweapon that we talked about, but also Are there ways to create safeguards around how the language models themselves work. that could make this situation safer or at least buy us more time to set up better defense. Could you say uh more about this particular example? Because I think about the sort of cost asymmetry in offense versus defense. And maybe there isn't

1:13:52 Not understanding the specifics. Personally, maybe um Miss thinking this, but I think of let's just say micro drone, like swarm drone. attacks and if you have a target, let's just say There's a tank that's the target. And then you have a hundred drones released with explosives or a pack of drones.

1:14:11 It's relatively inexpensive to launch that offense, but it could be very, very expensive. Or even if it's like a a very targeted attack using bioweapons. against an individual, but with some type of distributed attack. The defense seems really tough. What are some of the most promising avenues of defense? Because I'm sure you have and I have seen examples of circumventing The restrictions placed on some of these

1:14:36 Large language models. For making something they shouldn't make or breaking into a uh neighbor's house where there are ways that you can circumvent it. I don't necessarily want to give people a how-to guide in these conversations, but there's some clever ways to circumvent. What are some of the most promising avenues for Establishing some

1:14:57 Defensive capabilities. But these types of things. There's constraints and there there's defense. So if you go and ask Open AI uh Chat GPT, how do I create a bioweapon and it will tell you it's not going to help you. And as you said, there's there are ways to jailbreak this. So the first thing you can do is

1:15:15 Try and improve those, right? Cut off these sort of backdoors. And there's a lot of research going into that right now from the big labs, from academics, and I do you think we'll get iteratively better at this over time. So you get sort of an anti-fragility effect of of people are trying to hack these things and figuring out all the hacks and getting better at it. But the other thing I would point out is when you have a hosted service like ChatGPT or Entropic Cloud, you can also just like know your customer, monitor what they're doing, you know, have terms of service. Cut you know, cut them off. Law enforcement can get involved.

1:15:50 And you know, I I think those are just important conventional measures. But notably they don't apply to the open source models. Um, so whatever you do to try and prevent jailbreaks or try and prevent certain types of questions from being answered, once you have an open source model. Those may as well not exist. So it's extremely easy to kind of remove that that safety protection. So when I think about the overall AI risk landscape.

1:16:13 Part of what I'm worried about is just how many different actors there are in varying degrees Of concern about this and varying degrees of control. You know, when I think about an individual lab like OpenAI or Enthropic, I feel pretty good. I think they're doing responsible things. I think they're doing great safety research. But they're not the only ones out there. And so a lot of times when people talk about

1:16:35 You know, how will you improve The safety of these or how you solve alignments, which which we'll get to all as well, I'm sure. They think about this kind of idealized lab that's like doing all the right things and they're keeping the untested AI in a in a safe box and it's, you know, not connected to the internet or not embedded in critical infrastructure. And like that'll be how we iterate into a safe place. And I'm like, yeah, I I believe you. And there are 10 other actors at least that are that are also doing things. And there's a a penalty for doing the safety work. Costs money and time and means you're not going to have the latest, greatest, most powerful model on the market. And that sort of like game theoretic dynamic is is more the thing I'm I'm concerned about and that I think creates a lot of risk.

1:17:19 How do you incentivise the This might not be the right way to think about it, but sort of the closed system players, the proprietary shops, again, might not be the right terminology, but how do you incentivize them to allocate a lot of resources to safety? when you have other players who may not play by those rules or Open source options. Which I've seen in some

1:17:42 Discords. Creating. Things that you would not believe. How do you create those incentives? I think it's a a really hard problem. And even if you solve it in the short run, you may just get to a place where

1:17:54 the sort of race dynamics kind of take over. I think we're really fortunate in who runs the current big labs. You know, I I know Sam Altman very well. Adam D'Angelo, who's a board member of Sana's also on the opening I board. I know the Anthropic team really well. I'm closely involved with them. And those leaders are just true believers in the safety issue and they care, right? It's like their own lives at stake and their family's lives at stake. I think that's a a really powerful force. And I I think it's served us well so far. And I think this is also true of many of the leaders inside the other labs that I know I know less well. And I think that's the thing that we we most have going for us right now. And part of what we've been trying to do is just convince more of the rest to care as well and just have as many people as you can care and then try and make sure those organizations are a little better resourced. And I I don't know how long

1:18:45 That will go on for, but It's a good place right now, but there have been some some new labs that have been founded very recently where I'm more concerned about this. And You know, in some cases They claim to care about safety. They've got a certain approach that sounds good on paper, but I I don't know where it will really go. But just trying to get the the labs to communicate with each other and to engage with the research and to just care about the issue in the first place, I think is the best thing we have going for us. So in addition to

1:19:15 bio weapons, which at least as I listen to you describe it. seems to highlight smaller groups or Probably individual players, but maybe not state actors. I would imagine as a lay person that disinformation campaigns and really sophisticated campaigns run by state actors will become more and more

1:19:35 of something to contend with. But in your mind, what are some of the additional Threats. That are potentially catalyzed or enabled by AI outside of the bioweapons. The other big one we worry about is is just the alignment issue.

1:19:50 So As you have more and more powerful systems You Discover that

1:19:57 It's harder than you would think to get them to adhere to human values, to care about the things that we care about. And sometimes that's because we've sort of poorly specified what we care about. If you just step back and forget AI. And talk to humans about philosophy and fairness and equity. There's no sort of consensus answer right now. These are like still philosophical problems. So we can't even like really well define them for each other.

1:20:20 But we're also trying to instruct this kind of alien like human system to care about and incorporate in some cases what are like paradoxical goals, but also are very, very nuanced and have to do with with trade offs. Whereas what they naturally want to do is maximize, like achieve a goal as well as possible. And so This idea of instrumental convergence, which is No matter what goal you give a system, if it's trying to maximize it.

1:20:47 It eventually gets to a place where it wants a lot more resources, it wants Control. And it wants to not be shut off. Um, and that's when you get into concerns about 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,

1:21:06 uh it might decide to contain that threat just as part of achieving some other goal, which maybe we gave it in the first place, or maybe it came up with on its own. And I don't think any of this story requires consciousness, by the way, people get in a rabbit hole when they engage in that part. But it's just, you know, you gotta keep in mind this thing sounds human because it's a language model and it's it's meant to sound as human as possible. We've 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 like not give the recipe for napalm if you coax it out in the right way. And later more powerful systems are going to need to incorporate more important, uh more nuanced constraints than that. And so there's a bit of a, you know, again, this sort of offense, defense, arms race of like how good will we get

1:22:02 at constraining and aligning the system compared to how fast will it progress. And by the way, this is a place where I disagree with with David Deutsch. He's very much an accelerationist, you know, the Once there'd be no constraints on the AI. And I think the crux of the argument is speed. Um I basically agree with him that our normal sort of iterative processes

1:22:25 Can solve all these problems. They are solvable problems. But I don't know that we'll have enough time. Usually we have many decades to solve very hard problems. And the nature of AI development is you could have very fast takeoff. This is what part of why LES are so concerned. Literally like maybe next year all of a sudden there's extremely powerful AI. Or even if it's more moderate than that, maybe ten years from now, we have this extremely powerful AI That isn't obviously enough time. There isn't an obviously enough attention going to the defense side to align things before we get there. And we also don't know.

1:23:00 which actor will produce it. Maybe it will be an antagonistic state, or maybe it'll just be somebody who who doesn't care about the safety issues or is trying to maximize commercialization or something and is like stripped out the things that are slowing down the system that that cause safety. And all that just feels very chaotic and like A lot of things could go wrong in in unpredictable ways. Okay. So I would love to ask you Just so people don't curl up. In the fetal position under their desk after this as um

1:23:32 A very close friend of mine said he almost did after listening to a separate episode that I did with Eric Schmidt, my second conversation with him where we talked a lot about AI. Could you make the optimistic Case or Give us some of the upside.

1:23:46 And paint a picture of what things might look like. in I know this is very hard to do and impossible to do accurately unless you're Uh you know, some type of of soothsayer and can peer into your crystal ball, but what might the future look like in three, five? Ten years.

1:24:07 If we're able to Manifest some of the promise. Of AI. On the positive side. Oh man. This is so fun.

1:24:16 This is the part I like to talk about because I there there's so many like good things. I I recently published a a piece in in Fortune actually that's kinda looking at this through the the work lens. Because I think that even a lot of the things we've talked about so far in the episode, I think can be really amplified with AI. So for example, we're talking about how people's schedules get chopped up. And Part of this is just we have these very coarse ways of trying to

1:24:40 you know, solve the multifaceted problem of like, there are five people with you know, different work streams and schedules and you want to get them together while disrupting the focus blocks as little as possible. And really we we do this just by kind of like looking at everyone's calendar and like looking for the open slots between them and sometimes you'll move one meeting to make an extra space and oh look often no meeting Wednesday is often clear on everybody's calendars. Let's use that. And you you end up chopping up everyone's calendar, but an AI can do that really well. And give you, you know, ideally sort of do like a defragmentation on everyone's calendar and just keep iterating until it's as perfect as possible, honoring as many people's preferences as possible. Can also eliminate the need for meetings in many cases.

1:25:22 You know, one of the things we're excited about in Asana is sort of identifying more proactively when you even need to call a meeting, when you have a decision that needs to be made, when there's a conflict. And in lieu of having intelligence around that. You just do course things like we're we're gonna get together every week and share status updates and kind of re resync and see what decisions are coming up now. And I think that you know, having AI serve more as sort of like air traffic control, looking at the the work overall in the organization can just lead to not only better business outcomes, but much better sort of individual subjective experiences of how your work happens. And you know, that that's sort of just the tip of the iceberg on on work. And then, you know, I think the thing that people talk about a lot is sort of you know, automating a lot of work that is rote to repetitive or uh and and just

1:26:12 That also coincides with the work that humans don't want to do. Um, there's a lot of knowledge work that looks like that. There's also a lot of physical work that can be automated with robotics. Uh I think Every time that's happened, we just Get a little closer to the the Jetson style world where you know you're living your best life and spending as little time as possible in the stuff that you don't want to do. And additionally I think there's this uh

1:26:35 this thing that's a little less explored of having just like a really great um, you know, coach and cheerleader, both on an individual basis and for the team. Like imagine you have like 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. Um, and that means you can kind of let go of a lot of things that cause continual partial attention disorder of like Did we really get to a concrete next step here? You just said partial attention disorder, right? Yeah, yeah, partial

1:27:09 Oh, that is amazing. That is such a great Great phrase. Okay. I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna write that down. But yeah, it's a it's a David Allen thing from uh getting things done. It's a David Allen. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I didn't I didn't realize that was an acronym from that. Okay, got it. Yeah continual partial attention deficit. Yeah, well in general, I mean this is part of the reason we built a sauna is like people carry around their task lists 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 send you reminders at the right time, you you can let go of it in the active memory and get more space for presence.

1:27:47 Uh and I I think AI can be doing this um at a much higher level of abstraction for entire teams and entire companies. So you don't have to worry about, you know, is there a dependency that's going to affect the critical path on this project we're working on that's going to eventually mean that a deadline slips. Like right now, that's a lot of what managers are doing is Looking for these problems. But I think an AI can be can be doing it for you, doing it a lot more effectively, helping focus the managers on where they'll be most useful. This is the actual blocking dependency that you you need to fix, you need to resource better, you need to scope down, you need to do something to change this. And it can even be doing softer stuff like, hey, mar marketing and sales are are fighting. We can tell just by like looking at the text analysis of the conversation section. Um and uh you know, I think that can just like go so much further and get rid of a lot of the this workabout work that that we we do a lot of

1:28:43 Manual processes to try and like work around these problems and you know have the systems in place that that we can catch things some of the time. Um, I think all that can go away so that people can focus much more on the creative, productive work that really, you know, drives the business forward towards its goals. Yeah, my team. and I use Asana we have for years. We also use Uh more recently, ChatGPT and I'm sure will experiment with more Language models, but

1:29:11 It is remarkable. I'll tell you what's in the hopper for my follow up questions so it can gestate with you for a minute, but the AI integrations into Asana that you are most excited about. And part of the reason I ask is right now We use A number of different tools, but

1:29:27 T. really uh focus on Asana we're we're using it not just for tracking the work of other people, but tracking our own work. So trying to take these Open loops. and put them into a repository such that we can see what is

1:29:42 kind of green, yellow, red, and at a glance. keep track of all of these things. Uh, especially, I mean, I shouldn't say especially, but on a small team. the problems that are created if you don't do that. It's true for a large team as well. But a lot of people are self directed. Everyone is self directed, largely. And everyone is a direct report of mine, effectively. So it's

1:30:03 It's it's it's proven to be a critical piece of our infrastructure and process. On the chat GPT side, you know, I'm just imagining how these things are going to be integrated in the future. And there are already these integrations with chat GPT, and I'm imagining when it gets to sort of the WeChat I wanna make roast pork.

1:30:24 Tonight. With these parameters, this is what I like this is what I don't like. have all of the ingredients delivered to me within the next three hours and A, B, and C, right, turn on my oven and preheat it to whatever. I mean, where it's I it's gonna happen quickly. And

1:30:42 I mean there's the downside to that with the napalm example too, but The Integrations are really interesting to me, and I'm wondering what you're most excited about with respect to AI integrations into Asana. You know, I think I've been talking about some of the the longer term versions of like we we almost sort of conceptualize it as AI as an extension of your of your team. I think a lot of what we've seen in products today is

1:31:06 you know, the sort of co pilot mentality of like there there's one person trying to accomplish a specific thing. you know, make a dinner tonight and it it's helping fill in some of the steps or you know, explode small details into a complete plan. We will definitely do that kind of stuff. You know, we've already launched in beta like a writing assistant to help you draft tasks. You know, we can take a task and break it into subtles. We've written the the sort of summarization tools that I think are very powerful, like

1:31:35 You come back to a thread and fifty people have kind of gone back and forth in comments. It'd be really great if something just sort of Said, what were the key points? Who was doing most of the speaking? Can I catch you up really quickly? That stuff will be really great. But the things that I think are going to be really powerful are about. I like to frame this as sort of like push versus poll AI. So what we've got now is poll, like the users always deciding this is when when I'm going to use the writing assistance, this is when I'm going to use the summarization tool versus push would be more like what you already see with like newsfeeds today, where it's like, The intelligence has decided this is important for you to see. And it's like putting it in a queue or sending you an email. And then, you know, these ideas like

1:32:12 helping to identify the open loops in the first place. So something that happens in in meetings and common threads is people will identify a decision and they'll sort of like give some thoughts about it, but they won't necessarily like decide it. And I think it would be really powerful if you just did the language analysis of like, hey, actually this is still undecided, and maybe even like assign it to somebody to to follow it through to completion. Or you said these three things needed to be done, but you you didn't actually assign them to anybody. And so like That would be so that would be so helpful. I'm gonna I'm gonna admit It's it's embarrassing, but you know, some of these things are very aspirational for me still. It's it's not a perfectly oiled machine.

1:32:50 Yeah, exactly. Th this would be inc incredibly just to identify What got lost in the shuffle. During the off site, you guys captured a million different things and you prioritized them or made an attempt to But For whatever reason you forgot four out of the

1:33:06 You know, twelve top items and dropping that into a system with some visibility would would be super, super helpful. Yeah. We'd love to take that responsibility off the user's hands um so that they they can relax into to doing the work but feel like asana itself is this super diligent project and goal manager and even do sort of longer arc things. Like often you'll be in a kickoff meeting and you'll identify key risks to a project. And the idea for this is that somebody will remember those key risks and kind of like come back to them and notice when they're manifesting. But in reality, you know, you may or you may not do that. You may forget about them. But the system ideally could remember them and say, oh, hey, here's that thing happening that you talked about at the beginning. There's a production delay, or the the guest was unavailable. I don't know, I don't know how to translate it to podcasts, but um and sort of like just be always watching for you, as well as helping you celebrate accomplishments and recognize people for for doing great work. You have to not do that in a creepy way, but I I think that there is a way to have it feel really really positive and and feel like it's truly helping you see more. You don't have to like go through every single task everyone on your team is doing to see when they they do something really great.

1:34:20 There are so many examples I can think of of where push AI would be helpful, assuming that it doesn't create an information deluge or a paradox of choice issue, right? For people who are maybe confronted with options that they weren't prepared to select from. But I'll give you an example recently. I like to organize trips with my very close friends and get them on the calendar well in advance because everybody's busy. If you don't do it, it's just not gonna happen. And I'm considering a fishing trip, like a river trip with friends.

1:34:53 And all of my full time employees right now are experimenting with chat GPT for basically rough drafting. different tasks. And for something like that. You could very easily imagine a world in which that's in Asana, and it's a bit of a clumsy large task. So it's not quite the what is the next the next physical action, you know, a David Allen, but if you had

1:35:17 You know, to draft an itinerary for A fishing trip In a mountainous region, blah blah blah blah blah parameter parameter. And then it could very easily, as ChatGP did, draft a pretty compelling rough draft. It's not gonna be the final version, but it provides you with enough

1:35:38 to save a lot of time. On miscellaneous searches and calling through sponsored versus organic versus this versus that content varm versus you know individual author blog that has Some Higher page rank or whatever. It just saves so much time on the front end. You could very easily see that auto populating somehow in a Sana task.

1:36:00 Absolutely. Or even whole projects. So you know Right now we live in this world where you either get the building blocks of a sauna and you fill it in all yourself. Or you use a very abstract Template.

1:36:11 Like, you know, I want to run a marketing campaign. Uh, but it but as you said, you can be very specific. Like not only I'm gonna do a fishing trip in Montana, but like this exact city and like, you know, have it fill in all the tasks and like tell you what like the local stores are and like how you're gonna get there. And it could really bridge the this gap between, you know, nothing and template to giving you customize, you know, bespoke projects in as much detail as you give it at the outset, it it will engage with all that detail and do a great job. That'll really help people a lot. In particular with, you know, one of the complaints we get about Asana a lot is just like I I don't know if I'm using it well. I'm not know if I'm like using everything I should be or organizing this in the right way. And And having that that sort of assistant. that is an expert on Asana and an expert kind of on everything in the world can can really help give you the confidence that, you know, you're using all the building blocks in the right way and then you kind of take it from there.

1:37:03 I'm gonna, if you don't mind, zoom out to Maybe some of the philosophical level and ask you a question that ties together the energy management we were talking about earlier with time blocking and ensuring that you do things that nourish You.

1:37:21 Nourish your soul, however you want to think about it. Like this trip that I'm considering taking with friends. And the reason I ask is that For at least A hundred years, maybe longer. Many writers have postulated that with A, B, and C technological advances, we're gonna reach a level of such efficiency and effectiveness that the real question will be how the modern worker takes advantage of this.

1:37:45 vast amount of leisure time. But somehow Humans being humans. We've managed alongside that generally to I don't wanna say squatter, but you find ways to fritter away. Time.

1:37:59 often using many sort of parallel technological advances. I think the net net that I perceive in my audience, at least, is that We have the tools to be more efficient than ever. But a lot of people still feel a sense of time scarcity. And I'm wondering what you do personally.

1:38:17 Or how you think about that type of time blogging, making sure the big things or the items that really nourish you Find time in your schedule. Maybe that's a lazy question, but I know it's one that comes up directly or indirectly a lot for people in my periphery. So I'd be curious to hear anything that you might

1:38:36 Have to say about that. First of all, I just say it's I'm I'm a work in progress on that. So it's something I you know, I'm all I'm always trying to get better at. Uh and you know, over time I've I've just learned there are some things that are Sacrosan for me. And they get Fixed in my calendar. And you know, th things happen, they won't necessarily happen every week, but if maybe two weeks go in a row

1:38:58 Then I'll find a new block for it, make sure it happens. This includes, you know, of course, sleep. exercise, you know, spending time with my wife. You know, we we do a a date night every Saturday, but sometimes we're on a trip or we do something with friends on Saturday. And so we'll find a different different night of the week for that. And Just try and be mindful and in intentional about it. Rather than just I think maybe ten years ago would be more like Well, I've got all these things I'm doing, and if I feel done enough by a certain hour, then I'll go work out. And of course, like then you fritter away your time and like like you never get to it. And so I've become a lot more regular and scheduled. And I think that serves me well.

1:39:36 And there are longer arc versions of this, like I try and go for a solo hike once every three months. You know, my my wife and I have certain vacations we we try and do. Some of them are traditions with friends, some of them are are just us. When you say solo hike, is that like a an afternoon stroll? Or are we talking about uh long vacation? You said every three months. What is what is a Solo trip like that look like.

1:39:58 I mean I live in the Bay Area, which is just phenomenal for hiking. So usually it's a day trip. It is incredible. Yeah, it's incredible. But you know, like uh you know, I'll I'll do like a ten mile hike or something and In a day. Yeah, love the Mount Tam area, for example. And just f I find that very restorative. And I'll tell people about it after and I'll say, Oh, you should have invited me. I l I live in that area. I love going on hikes and I'm like, No, no, you don't have I don't understand. That's not how it works. This is this is for me. And I I've just tried to be reflective on what those things are and at what cadence I I need them and you know, what works for me and what doesn't, and what's taxing and and what's restorative. And just try and ever iterate towards towards better balance over time.

1:40:42 If I may uh Pull us back to your book list, which I I do not believe is publicly available, but maybe we can share some of them to the extent that you're Comfortable. I'm wondering what of these books you've revisited in times of uncertainty or duress or stuckness. You have a lot of great books, and they're categorized in in all sorts of different ways. You have psychology, mindfulness, you have leadership and strategy, epistemology and philosophy. Are there any books

1:41:11 that you've returned to when you're like, you know what, I just need I feel like I need a refresher or a reminder. in maybe high stress or high stakes. periods of your life. If that's if that question makes any sense at all.

1:41:25 I'm a little bit of a type A person with this where I'm usually going for a new book. But uh I guess the way I think of it more is like a lot of the books are very similar to each other. And so I think of it more as I'd like to read a book about mindfulness. you know, every six months or something like that. And there are there are authors like Jack Cornfield's extrem prolific. He has many books. I have I have one in here that

1:41:48 you know, touch me in a personal way, but like there there are many that are quite good. Which one of his books? The one I have in here is a lamp in the darkness. You know, it's particularly useful when going through grief. You know, he has just a lot of great books on on day to day living.

1:42:01 And so I think I'm more likely to sort of look for which one haven't I read yet that you know a lot of it will overlap and it'll tell some some of the same stories anyway, but it'll just be like a a different angle on it. And so, you know, it's usually I'm sort of cycling through like mindfulness and like leadership. Those books, you know, business books all rhyme with each other as well. And then sort of more intellectual stuff like Beginning of Infinity.

1:42:23 If you had to reread a biography that you have read. Let's just say. Yeah, in the next few months. You had to sit down with something you've already read or a person

1:42:35 for whom you've already read one biography. You could read a new biography of them. I'll allow that. Who might you choose or what book? My issues. I think if I was

1:42:46 going to reread a biography, it would be Churchill. And there's there's a few different ones, but uh Walking with Destiny happens to be the one I I read and his life is just extraordinary and It feels like fiction to go through it. And in terms of biographers, I you know, I think Chernow and uh and Caro are a cut above. And so anybody they're writing about. I I will become interested in Yeah, their dedication to the craft is just

1:43:12 Unbelievable. If it's okay with you, Dustin to ask a a few more questions and then we can we can land the we can land the plan. Uh and uh if if these are dead ends I will take the blame, but I'll ask just a few of my Common questions'cause I like to ask them, that's why they're common. So one is the billboard question.

1:43:33 And that is if you could put A quote, a phrase, word, An image, anything. on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get something in front of Many, many, many, many people.

1:43:46 What might you put? On that billboard. I don't know if I have a pithy phrase for this, but Oh no, I I do actually. The title of one of my medium posts is uh you know, live well to work hard. I think people create this false dichotomy of work life balance where they think of it.

1:44:03 Only in terms of like the number of hours you have for work and what's left for for life. And don't really think about the quality of Those hours and I just like over time just It's come up a lot in this conversation, but just More and more an appreciation for

1:44:18 I have to rest really well to Do my job well and perform well during the hours that I'm working, but also all these other parts of life, you know, exercise, yoga, using the back buddy, spending, you know, spending time with my wife and and family and friends. It's still all part of of me and you know, part of being a whole person. Uh, and I think particularly in the tech industry, particularly in your twenties, people think of it more as like

1:44:44 Yeah, I'm gonna work hard right now and like later I'll live my life and Later doesn't come unless you're intentional about it. And I think you'll be more effective than just the sprinting. Live well to work hard. I'll link to the medium piece in the show notes as well. And one more book question because I love books as you can pick up. If I were to scan this camera around the room, you'd be horrified by the number of stacks of books that I have here. But uh I tend to accumulate there's this term Tsundoku, which is like a Japanese term for accumulating stacks of books that you have not read. Now

1:45:23 What book or books have you gifted? Often to other people if you've gifted any books. Could be recommended. Yeah, I'm I'm an Audible guy, so I like never Give a physical book to people. Something that's come up a lot lately is this book, The Road Back to You, which is about the Enneagram.

1:45:43 And I just See up front it's like written by a former preacher and he's he's got some like religious tones and the N that doesn't really appeal to me, but I I just found The

1:45:54 descriptions of the Enneagram types to be just really spot on, especially the one of my type, type five. Um and just really felt like reading my diary and Um I you know, I've I've recommended it to a few other people who had similar experiences and I and I had read a bunch of about Enneagram before and was like ah this sort of fits, it sort of doesn't, and then this one really spoke to me. I'll check it out.

1:46:16 Yeah, the the conscious leadership folks use NARM a lot. I don't want to speak for all of them, but at least Jim and and Diana. You and I know that I believe when Toby of Shopify and I last spoke on the podcast, he also mentioned I think they may type everyone in the company who works at the company. Do you guys do that at Asana or is that more opt in For you and a handful of folks who may be interested, or is that systematized? throughout the company in any way.

1:46:45 I think it depends on the team. I've done it for my directs. We've actually done it for the board as well. 'Cause it's often useful to kind of understand yeah the interactions between two types. But I don't know how far in the company it pervades. A lot quite a lot of people do know their type though. Yeah, for people who want to explore that. Check it out. Does the Road Back to You is that a suitable starting place for people who have no familiarity with the Nneagram? Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, great. Okay.

1:47:11 Perfect. So I will link to that as well. Can I give one more recommendation? Oh please. Absolutely. This one hasn't come up in a while, but it was was talked about a lot when it's first published, but uh Scout Mindset. It's a book by by Julia Galliff. And She's a rationalist and she's near the effective altruism community. And I I think it's just like

1:47:30 a good way of getting into that way of thinking. And I think it's very related to conscious leadership. A lot of it is about Kind of challenging your stories and just like being open and curious in in how you think about ideas and learn about the world and something I've come back to a lot. Perfect. Well, Dustin, we have covered a lot of ground and I I'm sure I could go for hours and hours more with all of the many notes that I still have around me, but is there anything before we wind to a close that you'd like to mention, closing comments, requests of the audience, anything at all that you'd like to add? I think we got it all out.

1:48:05 I'll probably as soon as as soon as I hang up, I'm sure I'll I'll come up with something. We could do a voice addendum, a p a PS from Dustin, if need be. But uh it's nice to see you and thanks for making the time today. I really appreciate it. I have lots of things I'm gonna follow up on. I am gonna get the road back to you because I've been meaning to reboot the Enneagram for myself. I've had everyone in my company typed. I do find it. Helpful even if not In necessarily an interaction, but even so that

1:48:33 each person can be perhaps more aware Myself included, of strengths and weaknesses and how your predispositions can show up as handicaps that you may not recognize off the bat. Find it very helpful. So I'll revisit that. Can you say what your uh type is? You can tell?

1:48:50 Yeah, I can. I am a self preservation six. Yeah. And That'll make a lot of sense to people. If they read the description, they'll be like, Oh yeah, shocker. Not surprised. And it's also fun. It is a fun exercise. And I have found at least practical in more ways than than one might expect. There are some people who develop or have severe allergies to the Enneagram. One of my very close friends is one of them. So it may it's not for everybody, but it's one of the tools, one of the many modalities that can be helpful.

1:49:22 And I really appreciate you being so open and willing to dig into a lot of the specifics and cover so much crowd. I feel like we got got a lot into One conversation. So thank you Dustin. Yeah, thank you. I'd highly recommend the experience. Yeah. And uh for people actually you know what?

1:49:40 One last question. I keep giving these like second goodbyes and third goodbyes, but is there anything that you would like to see me discuss more on the podcast or Whether that's topics to explore, particular people, does anything come to mind that you think could be fruitful? to explore on the podcast. Well, I you know, I'll just say I was I was very delighted that the last episode I heard was was Jack Cornfield. And you know, I thought that was one of the best that I've heard over over the years. I I know he's been on more than once.

1:50:12 But yeah, I feel like You could go long time on on sort of the mindfulness and the self care and you know, y y you do. So it's it's not something you're not doing already, but I I think that's usually my favorite kind of content. Great. Yeah, thanks. It's I think of that personally as Think it was uh I can't remember who first used this phrasing with me, but like put your own oxygen mask on before helping others. Like just that the importance of self care, if you actually want to

1:50:39 Do a lot in the world. Uh so I will It's good reminder for me and I will I'll be sure to have Jack back on. He's a pr he's a perennial favorite. And to everybody listening.

1:50:50 We talked about a lot. We made many references. We talked about books, people, different principles, and so on, uh, including the template for time tracking that you mentioned, which we will put into the show notes as per usual for everyone to peruse at Tim.blog slash podcast. And in closing, I'll just say to everybody out there Backbuddy don't miss it. And should have been my billboard. Exactly. Backbuddy. And be just a little bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. And until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bold Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.

1:51:55 It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts. guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, Just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

1:52:36 This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything anywhere. giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day to day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods, Shopify has thousands of integrations and third party apps, from on-demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, anything you can imagine.

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