YouSaid · the spoken record

Dustin Moskovitz

lines on the record: 95
first: 2023-08-10
most recent: 2023-08-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, you know, I'll just say I was very delighted that the last episode I heard was Jack Cornfield. And I thought that was one of the best that I've heard over the years. And I know he's been on more than once. But yeah, I feel like you could go a long time on sort of the mindfulness and the self-care. And you do. So it's not something you're not doing already. But I think that's usually my favorite kind of content.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One hasn't come up in a while, but it was talked about a lot when it was first published. But Scout Mindset, it's a book by Julia Galliff. And she's a rationalist and she's near the effective altruism community. And I think it's just like 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 how you think about ideas and learn about the world and something I've come back to a lot.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It depends on the team. I've done it for my directs, we've actually done it for the board as well because it's often useful to kind of understand the interactions between two types. But I don't know how far in the company it pervades. Quite a lot of people do know their type though.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm an audible guy, so I 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. And I'll just say up front, it's like written by a former preacher and he's got some religious tones. And that doesn't really appeal to me, but I just found the descriptions of the Enneagram types to be just really spot on, especially the one of my type type five and just really felt like reading my diary. And I've recommended it to a few other people who had similar experiences. And I had read a bunch of about Enneagram before and was like, oh, this sort of fits. It sort of doesn't. And then this one really spoke to me.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm going to 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.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if I have a pithy phrase for this, but oh no, I do actually. The title of one of my medium posts is live well to work hard. I think people create this false dichotomy of work-life balance where they think of it only in terms of like the number of hours you have for work and what's left for life and don't really think about the quality of those hours. And I just like over time just come up a lot in this conversation, but just more and more an appreciation for I have to rest really well to be able 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 family and friends. It's still all part of me and, you know, part of being a whole person. And I think particularly in the tech industry, particularly in your 20s, people think of it more as like.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think if I was going to reread a biography, it would be Churchill. There's a few different ones, but walking with Destiny happens to be the one I read, and his life is just extraordinary. It feels like fiction to go through it. And in terms of biographers, I think Chernow and Kara are a cut above. And so anybody they're writing about, I will become interested in.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one I have in here is a lamp in the darkness. It's particularly useful when going through grief. He has just a lot of great books on day-to-day living. And so I think I'm more likely to sort of look for which one haven't I read yet that a lot of it will overlap and he'll tell some of the same stories anyway, but it'll just be like a different angle on it. And so 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.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a little bit of a type A person with this where I'm usually going for a new book. But 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 every six months or something like that. And there are authors like Jack Cornfield's extremely prolific. He has many books. I have one in here that touched me in a personal way, but there are many that are quite good.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's incredible. But, you know, like, you know, I'll do like a 10 mile hike or something in a day, you know, love the Mount Tam area, for example. And just I find that very restorative. And I'll tell people about it after and they'll say, oh, you should have invited me. I live in that area. I love going on hikes. And I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. That's not how it works. This is for me. And I've just tried to be reflective on what those things are and at what cadence I need them and what works for me and what doesn't and what's taxing and what's restorative and just try and ever iterate towards better balance over time.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Arc versions of this, like I try and go for a solo hike once every three months. My wife and I have certain vacations we try and do. Some of them are traditions with friends. Some of them are just us”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, I just say I'm a work in progress on that. So it's something I. I'm always trying to get better at. And over time, I've just learned there are some things that are sacrosanct for me and they get fixed in my calendar and things happen. They won't necessarily happen every week. But if maybe two weeks ago in a row, then I'll find a new block for it and make sure it happens. This includes, you know, of course, sleep, exercise, spending time with my wife. We do 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 night of the week for that. And just try and be mindful and intentional about it rather than just, I think, maybe 10 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 you never get to it. And so I've become a lot more regular and scheduled. And I think that serves me well and they're longer.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Expert kind of on everything in the world can really help give you the confidence that you're using all the building blocks in the right way. And then you kind of take it from there.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or even whole projects. So, you know, right now we live in this world where you either get the building blocks of Asana and you fill it in all yourself, or you use a very abstract template. Like, you know, I want to run a marketing campaign. But as you said, you can be very specific. Like not only am I going to do a fishing trip in Montana, but like this exact city and have it fill in all the tasks and like tell you what the local stores are and like how you're going to get there and it can really bridge this gap between nothing and template to giving you customized bespoke projects in as much detail as you give it at the outset 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 don't know if i'm like using everything i should be organizing this in the right way and having that that sort of assistant that is an expert on asana and”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a way to have it feel really, really positive 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 do something really great.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we'd love to take that responsibility off the user's hands so that they can relax into 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 guest was unavailable to translate it to podcasts. But in sort of like just be always watching for you as well as helping you celebrate accomplishments and recognize people for doing great work. You have to not do that in a creepy way, but I think that they're...”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like to frame this as sort of like push versus pull AI. So, what we've got now is pull, like the user is always deciding this is when I'm going to use the writing assistants. This is when I'm going to use the summarization tool. Versus push would be more like what you already see with news feeds today where it's like the intelligence is 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 helping to identify the open loops in the first place So something that happens in meetings and comment 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 follow it through to completion. Or you said these three things needed to be done, but you didn't actually assign them to anybody. And so like that would be.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I've been talking about some of the longer term versions of we almost sort of conceptualize it as AI is an extension of your team. I think a lot of what we've seen in products today is the sort of co-pilot mentality of like there's one person trying to accomplish a specific thing, you know, make a dinner tonight and it's helping fill in some of the steps or explode small details into a complete plan. We will definitely do that kind of stuff we've already launched in beta like a writing assistant to help you draft tasks. We can take a task and break it into subtasks. We've written the sort of summarization tools that I think are very powerful. Like you come back to a thread and 50 people have kind of gone back and forth in comments and be really great if something just sort of said what were the key points, who was doing most of the speaking kind of 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”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scope down. You need to do something to change this. And it can even be doing softer stuff like, hey, marketing and sales are fighting. We can tell just by like looking at the text analysis of the conversations they're having. And I think that can just like go so much further and get rid of a lot of this workabout work that we do, a lot of manual processes to try and like work around these problems and have the systems in place that we can catch things some of the time. I think all that can go away so that people can focus much more on the creative, productive work that really drives the business forward towards its goals.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, in general, I mean, this is part of the reason we built Asana, is like people carry around their task lists in their heads or that'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 can let go of it in the active memory and get more space for presence. And I think AI can be doing this at a much higher level of abstraction for entire teams and entire companies 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 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 need to fix. You need to resource better. You need to”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This thing that's a little less explored of having just like a really great 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. 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?”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And just that also coincides with the work that humans don't want to do. 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. And I think every time that's happened, we just get a little closer to the Jetson style world where 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.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and give you, you know, ideally sort of do like a defragmentation on everyone's calendars 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. 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 going to get together every week and share status updates and kind of 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 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 that's sort of just the tip of the iceberg on work.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh man, this is so fun. This is the part I like to talk about because there's so many good things. I recently published a piece in Fortune, actually, that's kind of looking at this through 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 solve the multifaceted problem of like there are five people with different work streams and schedules and you want to get them together while disrupting the focus blocks as little as possible. And really 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 end up chopping up everyone's calendar. But an AI can do that really well.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Problems and the nature of AI development is you could have very fast takeoff. This is what part of why all the years 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 10 years from now we have this extremely powerful AI that isn't obviously enough time. There isn't obviously enough attention going to the defense side to align things before we get there and we also don't know”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To do some simple constraints, like not threaten to kill the end user in a cat 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 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 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 David Deutsch. He's very much an accelerationist, you know, once there'd be no constraints on the AI. And I think the crux of the argument is speed. I basically agree with him that our normal sort of iterative processes 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.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is No matter what goal you give a system, if it's trying to maximize it, it eventually gets to a place where it wants a lot more resources, it wants control, and it wants to not be shut off. 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, 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 got to keep in mind this thing sounds human because it's a language model and it's meant to sound as human as possible. We've asked it to maximize that goal in itself, but it is not human. It is very alien-like under the surface. We don't know how it works and we can't even get it.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other big one we worry about is just the alignment issue. So as you have more and more powerful systems, you discover that it's harder than you would think to get them to adhere to human values, to care about the things 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, 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 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.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Resourced. And I don't know how long that will go on for, but it's a good place right now. But there have been 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 don't know where it will really go. But just trying to get 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.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a really hard problem. And even if you solve it in the short run, you may just get to a place where the sort of race dynamics kind of take over. I think we're really fortunate in who runs the current big labs. I know Sam Altman very well, Adam D'Angelo, who's a board member of Asana, is also an open AI board. I know the Anthropic team really well, 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 really powerful force. And 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 less well. And I think that's the thing that 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.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 more the thing I'm concerned about and that I think creates a lot of risk.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when I think about the overall AI risk landscape, part of what I'm worried about is just how many different actors there are and varying degrees of concern about this and varying degrees of control. You know, when I think about an individual lab like OpenAI or Anthropic, 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 how will you improve the safety of these or how will you solve alignments, which we'll get to as well, I'm sure you think about this kind of idealized lab that's like doing all the right things and they're keeping the untested AI in a safe box and it's 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 believe you and there are 10 other actors at least that are also doing things. And there's a penalty for.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's constraints and there's defense. So if you go and ask OpenAI ChatGPT, how do I create a bioweapon? And it will tell you it's not going to help you. And as you said, there are ways to jailbreak this. So the first thing you can do is try and improve those, right? Cut off these sort of back doors. And there's a lot of research going into that right now from the big labs, from academics. And I do think we'll get iteratively better at this over time. So you get sort of an anti-fragility effect of.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you have to think about are there other ways to stop this again, the surveillance can help, even with 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?”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“along the way, work around problems, and just figure out step by step. And, you know, right now, what's possible, the language models 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 kind of work around these problems and figure it out, especially if they already have a background in biology, but even if they don't. And so maybe you're just enabling 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 got to regulate that. And it just turns out with bio, there is nothing like that. 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.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll start with the one where there's a lot more agreement. So we were talking about part of our GCR work is on biosecurity, and we talked a lot about pandemics, but we also worry about bioweapons. So somebody purposefully engineering a pathogen. And 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 major bioweapons. But language models especially or even more purpose-built AIs can change this and create more of an offense defense imbalance. So there's been some research recently and Dara Amade, who's the CEO of Anthropic, recently testified to Congress about how this works where you're basically trying to solve any problem and use language model to help. But in this case, a sort of malicious goal if you're trying to engineer a bioweapon and a language model can help you not get stuck.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And so I try and. Know, give this analogy of like 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 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 didn't agree that the risk would manifest even when we got there.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is amazing. There are so many cool things I can do. Oh, and also, I hope it doesn't kill us. And I'm like, I'm like always kind of like having to pull this TI. Yes, don't kill us.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other end of the poll of like he's the most worried about AI and is just really worried about it as a global catastrophic risk like we were talking about earlier or something that could actually cause human extinction or 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 really believes in 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 felt like he 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 have more optimism around humanity's resiliency and ability 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 wake up every day and I'm like,”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay. Yeah, yeah, you know, I feel bad even bringing up the term and making it more popular, but also I love puns so much. And I'm like, wow, people really nailed that one. But he kind of represents.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The place I've been starting is kind of getting more into the nuance of the positions. There's been this part of the discourse that's emerged that really paints everyone into two extremes. You're either entirely pro-AI or you're sometimes you call them doomers or Yudites if you've seen this term.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a great one in the Bay Area, and they're literally just looking at sewage runoff and sampling for the concentration of COVID. And now they've extended it to monkeypox and various types of flu. And you can literally just look at the Bay Area cities and look at 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 come up from time to time. And I said, hey, this is my trusted source. I'm just going to go see if it's really spiking. And, you know, there's a little increase and maybe it'll become something more. But this feels like something that removes all these biases from how people test and everything and can just be trusted is something real.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a shortcut. Well, there's two shortcuts. One is what's called a CERO survey. And so you just kind of try and get a random sample of people in a local population. You do a blood test and you just sequence everything in their blood and see what's there. 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-19 well before they become these global scale outbreaks. In this case, maybe it was being done in China and hidden 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. It was too far gone. But if you were doing this systematically, just looking for an emerging pandemic, you'd be much more likely to catch it. The easier way to do it that I think is really interesting is with sewage samples. I don't know if you've seen any of these sites.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The only reason we're not deploying it everywhere is there's unknown long-term health side effects. 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 ones I think we could have is just if a technology like that was as commonplace as air conditioning or water filtration. Water quality is something we already have sort of caught on to. This is really important. And we have 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. 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?”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, like during COVID, and especially if you lived through the California wildfires, people got into the HEPA filters and things that are sort of processing the air. There's some research right now with far UVC. This is kind of like an ultraviolet light that can kill bacteria and viruses in the air.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More aware, they kind of know what some of the playbook will be if there's another pandemic. And I'm really encouraged by things like a focus on indoor air quality, I think, is a huge deal.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've been in the space since 2016. And so, in those early years, it was partially just trying to make people understand that this was a real possibility. It really hadn't been anything since, you know, I guess the first, call it the Spanish fool anymore, but the 1919 pandemic. And so we'd 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 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 government scale funding. And so we still feel somewhat defenseless. I think people are a lot.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By availability. A sauna of pushed for the culinary team to just like serve it more often and we had impossible burgers earlier this week. I was like, great, definitely going to eat that one. And we have some home cooked meals and try and incorporate it there. And in San Francisco, it's in a fair amount of restaurants, but it's still pretty rare. But I definitely seek those restaurants out. And I found a few great takeout places. And I'm just really eager for this future where that's in our diet. And I feel ready for it, but for the availability. It's kind of how I think about it.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 somebody 10 or 15 years ago that would have some kind of beef meal every single day 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 has actually taken 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 satiation that real meat does. And mostly I feel limited.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be set back 2,000 years, something really catastrophic. And 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 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. I don't like to go too far into the future generations because I think in practice it doesn't matter that much. I think the threats are quite soon. And in fact, the people that are alive today, but there is 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 act.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT