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That's code Tim20 at roca.com. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. 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?
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I must have a network organism living to show a metal, endless, lead to Paris show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it's my job to interview and attempt to deconstruct 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 Moskovitz. You can find him on Twitter at Moscow V, so M-O-S-K-O-V.
Dustin is co-founder and CEO at Asana, a leading work management platform for teams. Asana's mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly. Prior to Asana, he co-founded Facebook and was a key leader within the technical staff, first in the position of CTO, and then later as VP of engineering. Dustin attended Harvard University as an economics major for two years before moving to Palo Alto, California, to work full-time at Facebook.
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, ASANA.com. And as mentioned before, you can find Dustin on Twitter at Moscow V, 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 it's counterpart, which is embracing the benefits, the frictionless work that might be possible with AI, current integrations, what that looks like, the value of holding stories loosely, how to communicate and resolve conflict more effectively. The 15 commitments of conscious leadership, we get into a lot in this conversation.
We also talk about self-care, 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 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 without further ado, please enjoy a wide-ranging conversation with none other than Dustin Moskowitz. Dustin, nice to see you and nice to reconnect. Thanks for making the time. Absolutely. Great to be here, Tim. I would like to begin with a device in common. And it's a manipulation tool to actually sitting right next to me. I have this anywhere I might happen to be. And for those who can't see it, it looks almost like I would say an S,
made of hard plastic. It's about, let's just call it, two and a half, three feet long, with all sorts of knobs and 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. 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.
And you know, home in the gym, I travel with a sort of collapsible version. 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 got one and it's been almost a love affair ever since.
You know, really gotten to just kind of know it better and better over time. And you know, even I think last night, I found like a new kind of angle that really got into, you know, under my shoulder blade in just the right way. And I've really appreciated it. There's other products like this, like the Therakane. I've tried them. I'm sure some of them are almost as good. But this is the one I really love. They're also the really cheap.
I think they're about $30 and they're completely indestructible. I still have the first one I bought 10 years ago. An addition to probably nine others. So it's my favorite among many of these kind of tools. I've been very impressed just last a 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 30% off use back buddy.com slash Tim. No, there's no affiliation or anything with the company. But it is a good tool. Now before we started recording, I was mentioning some lower back pain that I'm contending with. And you had responded that I think you've written an article on addressing back pain. And you mentioned specifically Lydakane patches.
And this happens to be the second time Lydakane patches have come up in the last 24 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 20s doing the classic throughout your back thing. You know, innocuous ways. Like one time I did it whilst these and I'd been like tying my shoes. I had like my legs across. And this is very frustrating. You throw out your back and you're sort of laid up for three or four days.
So it definitely went deep on just trying to get advice on what to do. And that can lead you in a lot of directions, including to psychological mechanisms, like the Dr. Sarno stuff. And also I just became very acutely aware of it. So I could sort of feel my back feels like a little tweaked right now. That's usually what it feels like a couple days before this injury happens, this acute thing. And so I learned that when that happens, 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 Lydakane patches. First I bought the Bio-Freeze ones, which are menthol based. They work great too. They're basically equivalent, but they have a smell. And my wife really dislikes it. The Lydakane ones have the same impact, but they don't have a smell. So I really like those.
And basically if you feel this tweak, 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 sitting up during that six or seven hours, not doing anything special, and usually I'll have a pretty good back crack at the end of that, or something like that. I also love to put them kind of between my shoulder blades, again, 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 loved them. I buy them probably 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 reason I bring this up is 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, line items on the table of contents, briefly, if you don't mind.
How I view success, how I communicate, as an example, as a subcategory, under that writing is thinking, meetings, one-on-one, group meetings, scheduling, etc., personality. And we might come back to this. Any of you have 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 Dustin hates.
Now, on the, it almost looks like a mood board, which I really appreciate, on the, on the page of things Dustin hates, is included being videotaped. So could you please give some context on when you first created this document and for what purpose you created this document? I think there was 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 Zhu, who's an old colleague from Facebook at the time, and she was one of the design leads there. A great, just sort of, tactical book on how to be a manager and 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 for them, 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 and onboarding, but 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 have some quirks. I'm an introvert and a CEO role, 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 video game energy bar for me that trains down. And so especially Anna Bender, who's the head of people here at Asana, just really encouraged me, hey, 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 put it out there. And then the things I hate list, I originally also sort of created that. That's a screenshot of Asana board. And originally created that just for fun with my team. A few of them also have one. And they are also just like, this is a great insight into your personality. So you should include it. And in the actual Asana board, you can click in. And I've got 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 video tickets in there. Let me, if you don't mind drilling to just a few of these, that I'm very fascinated by that I am going to highlight for myself, just in terms of revisiting systems in my own company. Under management's 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 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 at Facebook.
And I've seen 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 along sabbatical. They've sort of decided in order to have a good break, I actually have to quit entirely. You know, 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. It takes a really long time to build a business around not only a new product, but in our case a new category. And so, we knew it wouldn't be a three or four-year thing, and then put the company or something like that. You know, it would be in a different long time. Now it's been 13 or 14 years, and I still have, you know, really long runaway in front of me.
And so, a lot of my mentality is just, I've got to be able to keep going for as long as possible. I'm not burned 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 encouraged them to do that with their leads, 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 going to take a sabbatical and kind of get in this mentality of, I'm just going to work really hard for the next year. And it's like, no, you should still take like a three-day weekend, maybe a vacation or so before that, and just like breaks during your day as well, and take your nights and your weekends, and all of that is important.
So it's almost like a fractal of 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 various types, they burn the candle at both ends and burn out, 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 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 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 in non-anime 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. All certainly, I think, come back to that one.
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 that very moment, letting a decision linger for too long as energy training, 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 avoiding the paradox of choice and making decisions perhaps more quickly? Because that is something I think I'm pretty good at, do you know, better than the average bear maybe, but I still have a lot of room for improvement. And my team is so small that 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. First, maybe I should explain the paradox of choice too. Do you think your, let's say, should be pleased? Part of the paradox of choice is just this idea that if you have a choice between two things, no 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, 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 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 to just pick your battles. So at my level that it involves often, 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 has always shown 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 is worse for her, often she won't need to, but I prefer not to kind of like bind my preference if I don't have to.
And the sort of other flip side of this is often the choices that are hardest, mounted 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 first way of going about it. And then the second is delegate where possible. And so 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, 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 trained 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 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 15th, these by September 1st, these by September 15th. And they had recommendations on the first set.
And I was like, great, that's just to answer the first six right now in this meeting. We did, we got through some of the September 1st ones as well. And if every meeting could have that slide, I think we'd be in really good shape. I guess that strikes me as sort of a really helpful proxy for what are the goals of this meeting. If people somehow have difficulty translating that because it seems to abstract, then 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 this is going to be looking in the rear view mirror probably, it could be current day. But I'm wondering 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 concrete examples you'd give of things that you found hard to delegate at any point that ultimately were very valuable 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. It's a tough question.
I think that in some sense, it's just an evolution of at the beginning of a sauna, I just owned everything and I had to consciously decide to delegate and often did it too late and needed to sort of hit a breaking point and need to just kind of declare bankrupting on something. But looking back, a lot of those just ended up being effective and good to delegate. But I used to do everything from guiding and presenting it almost every all hands. All that presentation content was me.
And now I'm most often in the audience or I've got a short bit where I'm showing up for the Q&A. I used to do the year in review and try and read about what happened with every goal outcome and every project. And just as the organization scaled, it just was too much. And you kind of have to do that more at different levels of abstraction where I'm doing the very highest level one.
And I hear these stories about a lot of startups like 1,000 people and they say, well, the founders and every interview to make sure this person's a fit and things like that I gave up on long ago. Part of it just takes, I love to make these little spreadsheet models. And I have one that's just showing me how I use my time based on what the recurring meetings are and some things I know are going to 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 out of proportion. Can I somehow reduce this to be 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 sort of 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 I would worry that because of tasks 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 and part of the algorithm. Oh, amazing. That'd be great.
Yeah. It sort of starts with, here are the hours for work, here are the hours for home, here are the hours for sleep. So I got that sort of biggest pie chart. And then for work, I have a tab that's like here in 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 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 those things don't change very often and are really kind of the bulk of it and where the most leverages in changing something. So I think that those end up adding up to something like 30% of the work time. And then I have another tab that is more abstract. It's like responding to things in Slack.
And I just sort of swag an estimate for how long I spend on that per week or interacting with customers. And those come up on the customers cadence. I don't have a sort of set block to my calendar for that. But I look back maybe over the past month or two, which is 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 to remind getting myself about something and look for other sources of time and that led me to add in my lunch hour and my coffee breaks and stuff like that. And it's hard the first time, but then every year I'm kind of just like tweaking it. And that part only takes 20 minutes or so. Now are you setting? I'm gonna get fancy here. Just so I can sound smart.
Are you using OKRs or are you after reviewing the spreadsheet, 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 of the sauna.
And one thing I do with the help of my assistant, Lauren, is I look at my coming month and I try and organize it under the company objectives. 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 MI 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 fixed rules other than my sort of energy gauge and my trending towards burnout 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 again, my assistant does a big part of that and making sure I don't get overloaded too much. God bless your assistant. Yeah, the people think of me as an extrovert, but I am very, very introverted 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 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 OKR stands for objectives and key results. If you want to take a look at that, John Doer has a book about it. Google also uses OKRs extensively and you can find a lot written 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, considering too many options and the decision fatigue that that can produce or just creating an excess of decision-making. And 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 let us on us still follow no meeting Wednesday? Or is that sort of case by case? And even if it's just past tense now, if you could perhaps just explain why that existed, I think that would be helpful for folks. For me, I still follow it quite religiously. It is a bit case by case throughout the company.
And that often results in 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, I come from two places. One, maybe I think it was 2011, Paul Graham had this really famous blog post, the Maker Manager schedule. 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 calendar into end. But I see these 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 in there. 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 of blocks.
You just have these half hour hour blocks. And you get a little bit of work done. And it's just overall suboptimal for individual productivity. So a new evening 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. A lot of people to sauna go further.
They'll add additional blocks, maybe Tuesday and Thursday morning, you know, try and find a couple other, maybe a half day or a third of a day, segments where they can try and keep their calendar clear. And to everyone else, try 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 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 going to do something small, something tactical just so I can feel productive. It's hard to get into that deep-thinking state. So that's really what it's all about. Yeah, totally.
And I want to just mention for people who may want to look it up, again, the Maker's Schedule Manager Schedule, my polygram who's, I guess, fair, just co-founder of Y Combinator, people maybe 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 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 zoo. Well, you actually, I think you speak Mandarin or something. So maybe I should, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It could be sounds. It could be any number of things. So, Julie apologies from getting your name wrong, but the title is 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 10 a.m. wherever I happen to be, or roughly 3 p.m. wherever I happen to be. And I've found that just reduces so much complexity. It makes 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 formatted in a certain way. Do you have a particular weekly architecture that you aim for or that during periods of high productivity that you followed? Well, I think that the weekly cadence, like including the One 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 I'm here on a Friday, but relatively low attendance. And so Monday, Tuesday, Thursdays, when a lot of our meetings are going to happen, including my team meets Tuesday afternoon. And I'd love to say I designed that for a particular reason, but really that's when our calendar is aligned in the right kind of way. And then I mentioned I have the 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. IC is individual contributor. Yes. I think of it as you can be an IC in your manager role as well. It's like when you're not in meetings or 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 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. 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 quite pixelated from me right now. And so it's like a little harder to pick up on your body language, emotional cues. Don't like that. And I just find after a video call, 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 having the more sort of natural cadence of dialogue. And again, the AV issues pop up in the team meetings too. And it's a disaster every time. I don't know. I don't know.
Three years into the pandemic and all the same problems from 2020 are still here. But they are. And I just like, I can't look past it to feeling like it's good enough. Yeah, I didn't really consider 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 an energetic cost to that.
I want to come back to number three in the list that I mentioned. And it's going to be jumping off points. Or 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 discuss. And in your book recommendation list that you sent me, I do want to talk about the top recommendation at some point.
But 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 RavaKont. 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.
How did you get introduced to conscious leadership or this book? So I think it was almost 12 or 14 years ago. I went to an event Southern California. 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 show last week. And it was kind of my first exposure to some of those people. It was a pretty small group. I think there were 15 people in the group. And so I really got to kind of know them.
I 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 as we were starting to sauna, it became just kind of the framework that we wanted everyone to learn. I think 15 commitments 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 understanding the other perspective more, it also relates to something Jack brought up with Byron Katie. So she loves to crefice 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 frustrated about a decision we're making. And they'll just voice out loud. I'm a little worried about this. I'm expressing some frustration, but that doesn't mean stop what you're doing or I'm throwing 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.
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? Because often it will emerge, well, they're feeling below the line or just something going on in their life. And that's going to affect our conversation. And I'd rather know about it than not. 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.
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How have you worked with her, if you're open to discussing it to whatever extent, one-on-one, what does the format look like? Or what are 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 hoped to put into Asana? Was it mostly individual in the beginning to add a 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 a lot of it, you know, when I first started, I was a total novice on the commitments, and a lot of stories 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 kind of know what she's going to say every time, and so 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? And I think that would be useful. Yeah, I mean, I think the one that has been most difficult for me, and I think is maybe universal for entrepreneurs in general, is just this sense of huge responsibility to keep going and endure and persevere and do well by your employees in 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, pacifist as a leader, and I don't want to scare my eyes, but he's like, I'm not like thinking about leaving right now, but I think going through the coaching of this really helped because 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 bring in fresh perspective, and like they'd have more energy, like, you know, things like this. Or be terrible if Asana shut down, and all of our employees wasted 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 still there, so it's not like this coaching led me to think I should leave Asana 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, 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 feel all feelings in the commitments framework, but it's bad if it's just like always a poll 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, you know, imagine your own funeral, 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 15 commitments is also an excellent book, and 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. I just wanna add to the other thing it's a lot like his cognitive behavioral therapy. So, you know, if you wanna 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 Deppmer who've booked it 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 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 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, 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 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 with the other person said to make sure that they feel understood.
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 make the space for that, and if you're gonna do some difficult change management, you just gotta accept that there's gonna be some of that, and it's important to do it at the right times, can't have everyone get involved before the decision is made,
but the people who especially need to be bought in and need to help you change management after they kinda need to be heard before it's finalized, and then even after it's communicated, you're gonna have to really listen to people on why they're disappointed or unhappy,
and reflect that back to them, not just be a literal sounding board, but actually being engaged in empathetic conversation, I think that goes the longest way, and sometimes people use conscious leadership as a literal clearing script. The facts are, when this happened, I generated this 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.
The whole idea with conscious leadership is you're responsible for your own feelings, and 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 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 power, there are 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 they can, and be present, 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 kinda need to be signed up for the same set of rules, but can be super effective, and I wanted to 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.
Don't necessarily be put off, 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, 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 are going to open a conversation also gives you a chance, and maybe a catalyst to de-escalate, whatever emotion happens to be running really hot, or really hard, and the simple act of saying something inarguable, starting with what I hear you saying is ABC. 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, 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 get the sense of like, everyone kind of has to be a Zen monk, and like totally in control of their emotions.
I also just want to really emphasize, one of the commitments is feel your feelings, and sometimes that means like, purposely going through those lines, as far as you can, 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 I think if you try and you've talked about struggling with anger management in the past, I think I do that too. If you try and solve that by withholding and containing all that anger, you end up going back pain. And it still comes out anyway, and it comes out in the wrong, 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, have like a Google doc or a sonotask, and just kind of go crazy, just stream of consciousness, sometimes move your body, hit things. I really want to put that in there too, it's an important part of doing this well. And then once you've processed your feelings and like move them through your body, then you can have that about the line conversation.
Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. It's a good reminder for me also that, 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 promised 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 in 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. For a long time, I said that Gertluss Rebach was my favorite book, but I had never finished it.
It's tough, it's tough, 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 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 G.B., where you have to have advanced math to agree to get through it. But the big lesson from it is this idea that problems are soluble.
We build a knowledge and no matter how immense a problem seems, as long as it is possible to solve within the laws of natural physics, it generally can be solved. And over time, 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 irreconciled little conflict, and people just couldn't see the way to the future.
And what happens is the pressure builds up and you get more and more attention on solving this problem and going to hold it get solved. And sometimes the reason it's so scary is a form of 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 story about a particular element that was needed for TVs in the 50s, 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, for a long time with energy, people thought, well, we'd run out of oil at some point, and that would be the end of energy. And of course, we have all these alternative sources now that can supplant it. And these are also solutions to CO2 problems.
The TV one is nice just because there was a while people didn't think you would be able to have the sort of cathode ray tube TVs anymore because the silent was going to go away. And then now we have liquid crystal displays that don't involve the element at all. And so this is an example of status quo bias because people couldn't imagine a different way to accomplish the goal of getting a crisp video image to people in a broadcast format.
And so you just go through a bunch of examples like that and gives you the sense of how powerful humanity really is and what the power of compounding knowledge really is. All right, let's leave people to explore that book. And certainly if they want to overview, they can listen to the podcast with David Deutsch and myself in Neval, Robacon. I'll let Neval do the heavy lifting on that one for a million and one reasons.
But I do feel like the 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 is? And then you can take it wherever you like. And I can also certainly help hop in.
I feel the need to preface this with, there's some disagreement about what it is. So I'll tell you my perspective, which I think it's really, it's an idea in some people called 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 just choose a sort of normal career with a high-paying job, with a plan to then donate some of their earnings, as effectively as they can. And so that leads you to a certain set of ideas.
So as a philanthropist, I think of effective altruists as defined by cause agnosticism. 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 because it turns out that when you're the next philanthropist on the margin, the thing that does the most good is often something 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 not doing the things that most other people are doing.
And so the overarching framework that we use for choosing cause areas is it has to be important, hard to do to 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 a form of sort of comparative advantage. What would some examples be?
Because I can imagine if I'm acting as a stand-in for the audience, they're like, well, how do you figure out what is most good or the greatest good for the greatest number of film, 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 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 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, particularly around the areas, probably 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 that's this idea of a quality adjusted life year that kind of lets you convert the value of helping somebody avoid a debilitating disease or maybe takes years off their life or even increases their earning power. How might you make that equivalent to helping a child make it pass their fifth year because malaria, vet nets are helping them avoid a fatal infection?
And so in global health and well-being, that's where you kind of have the most similarity in the goals and can kind of trade off the different opportunities against each other in a fairly clean way. Though 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 proxy for economic empowerment, giving people as much choice in the world as possible.
But often you're debating things that are very similar. You're going to help avoid a child death through malaria, vet nets, or perhaps through iodine, supplementation, 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 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, put it something like nine chickens are slaughtered every year for every human on earth. So it's something close to 100 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. You should spend infinite money on helping one human before you think at all about these chickens or these cows. And I think that's a judgment call.
I think it's fair that people have different points of view on that, but from perspective as a single 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 think the clearest definition is, these are things that actually cause extinction or cause modern civilization to be set back 2000 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 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 affect the people that are alive today. But there is a set of EA's 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 a couple of follows related to these. And the first is related to animal welfare and suffering, which I think a lot about. And 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 somebody 10 or 15 years ago that would have some kind of beef meal every single day or chicken meal and, you know, that 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 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, you know, satiation that real meat does. And mostly I feel limited by availability. I just, Hannah, I've like pushed for the culinary team to just like serve it more often and we had impossible burgers earlier this week. It was like, great. Definitely going to 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 a fair amount of restaurants but it's still pretty rare.
But I definitely seek those restaurants out and 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. It's kind of how I think about it. So if we hop from some of those cause areas to perhaps forward looking perspectives, is there anything that you've been watching and particularly interested in funding or considering funding that is outside of the cause areas that you mentioned?
Well, those are pretty sweeping buckets. They are. They are. 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 effective altruism community was focused on pandemics on some level, even before 2020 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 going to be a whole different kettle of fish.
On the pandemic side, what levers do you try to pull? What are most important in terms of high leverage or important perhaps neglected or under exploited, under funded, and so on with respect to pandemics? How do you think about trying to, I suppose, help with preparedness or other aspects? So 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.
There really hadn't been anything since, I guess, the first, you don't call it the Spanish flu anymore, but the 1919 pandemic. And so we've sort of followed 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 is 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 skill funding. And so we still feel somewhat defenseless. I think people are a lot 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.
What do you mean by that? Well, during COVID, and especially if you lived through the California wildfires, people got into the hape of filters and things that are sort of processing here. There's a research right now with with far UBC. This is kind of like an ultraviolet light that can kill bacteria and viruses in the air. And the only reason we're not deploying it everywhere is there's their 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, you know, 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, you know, I'm sure you remember all these debates about how much COVID actually is there? Is there a bias in whose testing? And are the tests accurate and all this? Sure. But there's a shortcut. Well, there's two shortcuts. One is what's called a sero survey. And so you just kind of, you try and get a random sample of people in a local population.
You do a blood test and you just like 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 throughout totally small samples, you would catch pandemics like COVID-19 well before if 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. No, I have not. There's a great one in the Bay Area. And they're literally just looking at a sewage runoff and sampling for the concentration of COVID.
And now they've extended it to monkey pox 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 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 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 you just be trusted? Is something real? 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-in to 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? Where would it make sense to start? Lately, 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, right? They're entirely pro AI or sometimes you'd call them dooms or yadais, if you've seen his term. Have any of it? A yadai.
Yeah, well, it's a yadai. Well, it's a reference to Elias or your account. A lot of it. Yeah. I'm not going to put a pun on, but what is the y? Well, for Elias or your good Kowski, who's sort of, oh, okay, I see him get it. Yeah, I get it. I get it. Took me a second. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I feel bad even bringing up the term and making him more popular, but also I love puns so much. And I'm like, wow, people really nailed that one.
But he kind of represents 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, you know, destroy civilization. But even with Elias or even more so with me, it's much more nuanced than that. He's not an actual let-ite. He's a technologist and, you know, 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, you know, 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 humanities 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.
You know, I wake up every day and I'm like, 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 a whole bestie. Yes, don't kill us. Yeah. Exactly. And so I try and, you 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 efforts.
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 with the NFS even when we got there. 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 marine biologist and I'm thinking, how much of the people in AI are like 12 year old boys of a pet, great white shark. That knows a bunch of cool tricks. But man, you got to 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 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 risks and how do you assign sort of probability to those risks if they haven't yet come to pass? And maybe some of them are already current.
Well, start with the one where there's a lot more agreement. So we're 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 AI's, can change this and create more of an offense, defense, and balance. So there's been some research recently. And Dara Amadeh, 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 a 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 along the way, work around problems, and just figure out step-by-step. And 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 biode, 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, 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 the situation safer, or at least buy us more time to set up better defense. Could you say more about this particular example? Because I think about these sort of cost asymmetry and offense for defense.
And maybe there isn't not understanding the specifics personally, maybe misthinking 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 100 drones released with explosives or a pack of drones. It's relatively inexpensive to launch that offense, but it could be very, very expensive.
Or even if it's like 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 large language models for making something they shouldn't make, or breaking into a 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 this conversation. Yeah, but there's some clever ways to circumvent. What are some of the most promising avenues for establishing some defensive capabilities with these types of things? There's constraints and there's defense. So if you go and ask open AI 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 are ways to jailbreak this.
So the first thing you can do is 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 think we'll get iteratively better at this over time. So you get sort of an anti-fragility effect of people are trying to hack these things, and we're 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 chat GPT or in Thropics Cloud, you can also just like know your customer, monitor what they're doing, have terms of service, cut them off, law enforcement can get involved. And I think those are just important conventional measures, but notably they don't imply to the open source models.
So whatever you do to try and prevent jail breaks or try and prevent certain times of questions from being answered, once you have an open source model, those may as well not exist. It's extremely easy to kind of remove that safety protection. 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 opening AI or in Thropic, 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, you know, how will you improve the safety of these or how will you solve alignment, which we'll get to 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 and 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 doing the safety work, cost 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. How do you incentivize 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 discords creating things that you would not believe. How do you create those incentives? 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 DiAngelo, who's a board member of the Sonnas, also an opening iPod. 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 served as 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 resource. 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 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 bio weapons, which at least we have a lot of data.
Which at least as I listened 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 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 bio weapons?
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. We 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. But we're also trying to instruct this kind of alien like human system to care about and incorporate. In some cases, we're 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.
So this idea of instrumental convergence, 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.
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, if people get in a rabbit hole and 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. And it's not going 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 threatened to kill the end user in a chat script. Or like not give the recipe for napom 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 to 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 several 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 the I development is you could have very fast take off.
This is what part of why all the others are so concerned, literally like maybe next year, all of a sudden, there is 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 an obviously enough attention going to the defense side to align things before we get there. And we also don't know which actor will produce it.
It will be antagonistic state, or maybe it'll just be somebody who doesn't care about the safety issues or is trying to maximize commercialization or something is like stripped out the things that are slowing down the system that cost safety. And all of that just feels very chaotic. And like a lot of things could go wrong and unperqued ways.
So I would love to ask you just so people don't curl up in the fetal position under their desk after this as 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 and paint a picture of what things might look like in, I know this is very hard to do and possible to do accurately unless you're
a bit of a, you know, some type of of sooth, dare and can peer into your crystal ball. But what might the future look like in three, five, 10 years if we're able to manifest some of the promise of AI on the positive side. This is so fun. This is part I like to talk about because there's so many like good things I recently published a piece in, unfortunately 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 schedules get chopped up and part of this is just we have these very course ways of trying to, 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. Well, 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 spots between them and sometimes you'll move one meeting to make an extra space and 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 and give you, you know, ideally sort of do like a defragrantation on everyone's calendar is just keep iterating until it's as
possible, honoring as many people's preferences as possible. It also eliminate the need for meetings in many cases, you know, one of the things we're excited about in a sauna is sort of identifying more proactively when you even need to call a meeting when you have a decision 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
and share status updates and kind of recent can see what decisions are coming up now. And I think that, you know, having AI serve more 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 you know, that's sort of just the tip of the iceberg 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 wrote to repetitive or in 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 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 this thing that's a little less explored of having just like a really great, 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. 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? You just said partial attention disorder, right? Yeah, yeah. That is amazing. That is such a great great phrase. Okay. I'm going to I'm going to write that down.
But yeah, it's a David Allen thing from getting things done. David Allen. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I didn't I didn't realize I was an acronym from that. Okay. Got it. Yeah, a partial attention deficit. Yeah. Well, and this is part of the reason we built us on is like people carry around their task lists and their heads or that's in their email and box and they're rescuing their email and box all the time.
And if you can get it into a system that you trust to show you those things at the right time or sending reminders at the right time, you can let go of it in the active memory and get more space for presence. And I think I 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 deadline slips. 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 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 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 conversation.
And you know, I think that can just like go so much further and get rid of a lot of this work about work that that we do a lot of manual processes to try and like work around these problems and, you know, 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, you know, drives the business forward towards its goals.
Yeah, my team and I use a sauna we have for years. We also use more recently chat GPT and I'm sure will experiment with more language models, but it is remarkable. I'll tell you what's in the hopper for my follow up questions so it can just date with you for a minute. But the AI integrations into a sauna that you are most excited about and part of the reason I ask is right now.
We use a number of different tools, but to really focus on a sauna were 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 kind of green yellow red and add a glance.
Keep track of all of these things, 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.
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 we chat. Point where you can say I want to make roast pork 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 say right turn on my oven free whatever I mean where it's it's going to happen quickly and I mean there's the downside to that with the napalm example to but the integrations are really interesting to me and I'm wondering what you're most excited about with respect to AI integrations into a son of.
You know I think I've been talking about some of the longer term versions of like we we almost sort of conceptualize it is AI is an extension of your team and I think a lot of what we've seen in products today is you know 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.
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 sub tasks we've written the sort of summarization tools 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 or about.
I like to frame this is sort of like push first 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 summerization tool first push would be more like what you already see with like 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 decided.
And I think it would be really powerful if you just did the language analysis of like hey actually this is still on the side and maybe even like a sign 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 so that would be so helpful i'm going to admit it's embarrassing but you know some of these things are very aspirational for me still it's not a perfectly oiled machine yeah exactly this would be incredibly helpful just to identify.
What got lost in the shuffle during the off site you guys captured a million different things and you prioritize them are made an attempt to. But for whatever reason you forgot for out of the you know 12 top items and dropping that into a system with some visibility with would be super super helpful yeah we'd love to take that responsibility off the user's hands.
So they can relax into to doing the work but feel like a sauna itself is this super diligent project and goal manager and even do sort of longer things like often you'll be in a kickoff meeting and you 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 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 you.
Here's that thing happening that you talked about at the beginning there's a production delay or the guest was on available and not a chance that it's a to podcast but in 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 and a creepy way but 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 do something really great.
There are so many examples I can think of of where push AI would be helpful assuming that it doesn't create an information day loose or 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 is just not going to happen.
And I'm considering a fishing trip like a river trip with friends and all of my full time employees are in our 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 a son and it's a bit of a clumsy large tasks it's not quite the what is the next the next physical action you know I'll David Allen but if you had you know to draft an itinerary for a fishing trip in a mountainous region blah blah blah blah parameter parameter and then it could very easily as chat GP did draft a premium.
And then you can have a pretty compelling rough draft it's not going to be the final version but it provides you with enough to save a lot of time on miscellaneous searches and calling through sponsored versus organic versus this versus that content
versus individual author blog that has some higher page rank or whatever it's just safe so much time on the front and it could very easily see that auto populating somehow in the son of task 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 feel it on 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 not only I'm going to 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 like how you're going to get there and it can really bridge this gap between you know nothing
and template to giving you customized you know bespoke projects and as much detail as you give it at the outset it will engage with all that detail into a great job that'll really help people a lot in particular with you know one of the complaints we get about a sauna a lot is just like I don't
know if I'm using it well I'm not 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 a sauna and an expert kind of on everything in the world can really help give you the confidence that you know
that you're using all the building blocks in the right way and then you kind of take it from there I want to 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 nourish you 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 going to reach a level of such efficiency and effectiveness that the real question will be how the modern worker takes advantage of this vast amount of leisure time but somehow humans being humans we've managed
to decide that generally to I don't want to say squatter but you find ways to fritter away time 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
about that type of time blocking making sure the big things or the items it really nourish you find time in your schedule maybe that's a lazy question but I know it's one that comes up directly indirectly a lot for people in my periphery so I'd be curious to hear anything that you might have to say about that first of all I just say I'm a work in progress
so it's something I'm always trying to get better at and you know over time I've just learned there are some things that are sacrosanct for me and they get fixed in my calendar and you know things happen they won't necessarily happen every week but if maybe two weeks go in a row 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 do a date night every Saturday
but sometimes we want a trip or we do something with friends on Saturday and so we'll find a different different nine of the week for that and just trying to 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 way your time and you 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 arc versions of this like I try and go for so hike once every three months you know my wife and I have certain vacations we try and do some of them are traditions with friends some of them are just us when you say solo hike is that like an afternoon stroll are we talking about long vacation you said every three months what is what is a solo trip like that look like 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 a you know I'll do like a 10 mile hike or something in in a day you know love the mountain area for example and just I find that very restorative and I'll tell people about it after you're and I'll say 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 it's not how it works
it's just for me and I just try to be reflective on what those things are and at what cadence I need them and you know what works for me and what doesn't and what's taxing and what's restorative and just try and ever iterate towards towards better balance over time
if I may pull us back to your book list which 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 all sorts of different ways you have psychology mindfulness you have leadership and strategy
and philosophy are there any books that you've returned to when you're like you know what I just need I feel like I need a refresher or reminder in maybe high stress or high stakes periods of your life if that's if that question makes any sense at all I'm a little bit of a type A person with this one that's 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 you know every six months or something like that and there are authors like Jack Cornfield's extremely prolific is many books I have one in here that you know touch me in a personal way but like there are many that are quite good which one of his books
the one I haven't here is a lamp in the darkness you know it's particularly useful when going through grief you know he is just a lot of great books on 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 you know a lot of it will overlap and he'll tell some of the same stories anyway but it will just be like 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 around with each other as well and then sort of more intellectual stuff like beginning of infinity if you had to reread a biography that you have read let's just say you know in the next few months you just sit down with something you've already read or a person for whom you've already read one biography you could read a new biography of them all I'll read it
I'll allow that who by you choose or what book might you choose I think if I was going to reread a biography it would be Churchill and there's there's a few different ones but a walking with that city happens to be the one 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 turn out in and carrow or a cut above and so anybody they're writing about I will become interested in
yeah their dedication to the craft is just unbelievable if it took it with you just an old Sasca a few more questions and then we can we can land the we can land the we can land the plan I end if if these are dead ends I will take the blame but I'll ask just a few of my common questions because I like
Dastlin that's whether common so one is the billboard question 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 many many people what might you put on that billboard I don't know if I have a pithy phrase for this but oh no I do actually the title of my medium post is you know 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 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 appreciation for I have to rest really well to be able to do my
job well and perform well during the hours and I'm working but also all these other parts of life you know exercise yoga using the back putty spinning you know spinning time with my wife and family and friends it's still all part of of me and you know part of
the whole person and I think particularly in the tech industry particularly in your twenties people think of it more is like 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 live well to work hard I'll link to the medium piece in the show notes as well and one more question because I love books as you can pick up if I were to scan this camera on the room you'd be horrified by the number of stacks of books that I have here but I tend to accumulate there's this term soon doke which is like a Japanese term for accumulating stacks of books that you have not read
that's very much highlighted in the room that I'm in right now but what book or books have you gifted often to other people if you've gifted any books could be recommended yeah 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 enigram and I'll just say up front it's like written by a former preacher and he's got some like religious tones and that that doesn't really appeal to me but I just found the descriptions of the enigram 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 had similar experiences and I read a bunch of about
any gram before and was like out of sort of fits it sort of doesn't and then this one really spoke to me I'll check it out yeah the conscious leadership folks use an a lot I don't speak for all of them but at least in gym and in Diana do and I know that I believe when Toby of shop fine I last spoke on the podcast he also mentioned I think they may
type everyone in the company who works with the company do you guys do that at a sauna or is that more opt in for you and a handful of folks who may be interested or is that systematized throughout the company anyway I think it depends on the team I've done it for my direct we've actually done it for the board as well because often useful to kind of understand yeah the interactions between two types
but I don't know how far in the company it prevents 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 any agrarium oh yeah absolutely yeah great okay 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 talked about a lot was first
published but scout mindset is booked by by Julia Gallif and she's a rationalist and she's near the effect of altruism community and I think it's just like a good way of thinking into that way of thinking and I think it's very related to consciously your ship a lot of it is about kind of challenging your stories and just like being open and curious and how you think about ideas and learn about the world and something I've come back to
to perfect well Dustin we have covered a lot of ground and 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 you wide to a close that you'd like to mention closing comments for questions of the audience anything at all that you'd like to add I think we got it all probably as soon as I hang up I'm sure I'll come up with something like I could do a voice
at Dendom yes a PS from Dustin if need be but it's nice to see you and thanks for making the time today I really appreciate I have lots of things I'm going to follow up on I am going to get the road back to you because I've been meaning to reboot the anyagram for myself I've had everyone in my company type I do find it helpful even if not
necessarily an interaction but even so that 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 type is you've been typed yeah I can I am a self preservation six
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 any of them one of my very close friends is one of them so it's not for everybody but it's one of the tools one of the many of the tools that I can be helpful and I really appreciate you being so open and willing to dig into a lot of the specifics and cover so much ground I feel like we got got a lot into one conversation so thank you does thank you highly recommend the experience and yeah and for people actually
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 you know I'll just say 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 the years and I know he's been on more than once
but yeah I feel like you could go a long time on that sort of the mindfulness in the self care and you know you do so it's not something you're not doing already but I think that's usually my favorite kind of content great yeah thanks it's I think of that personally is I think it was
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 do a lot in the world so I will it's good reminder for me and I will I'll be sure to have Jack back on his
apprenial favorite and to everybody listening we talked about a lot we made many references we talked about books people different principles and so on including the template for time tracking that you mentioned which we will put into the show notes as per usual for everyone to
prove that Timed up log slash podcast and in closing I'll just say to everybody out there back buddy don't miss it and I should have been my cohort exactly back buddy and be just a little bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself and until next time thanks for tuning in
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