Dustin Moskovitz, Co Founder of Asana and Facebook | The Tim Ferriss Show

Tim Ferriss interviews Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder and CEO of Asana and co-founder of Facebook. They open with self-care tools and tactics, then move into how Moskovitz manages his energy as an introvert running a company, including his published user guide to himself, no-meeting Wednesdays, time-budgeting spreadsheets, and coaching teams for endurance to avoid burnout. The conversation covers conscious leadership, the 15 Commitments framework, working with coach Diana Chapman, nonviolent communication, and holding stories lightly. Moskovitz then explains effective altruism and his philanthropic focus on global health, animal welfare, and global catastrophic risks like pandemics and AI. The episode closes with a detailed discussion of AI risks (bioweapons, alignment, race dynamics) balanced against the optimistic case for AI in work and life, plus book recommendations.

• Moskovitz introduces Tim to the Body Back Buddy massage tool, which he found roughly 10 years ago by searching Amazon's highest-rated products; he says it has been a love affair ever since and still has the first one he bought.
  00:08:55
• He shares his back-pain hack: lidocaine patches worn for six or seven hours after a workout, which he prefers over menthol-based Biofreeze because they have no smell and are purely topical.
  00:11:32
• Moskovitz describes the published 'user guide to Dustin' document his team uses in onboarding, covering how he communicates, his Enneagram type 5 introversion, his management style, and a 'things Dustin hates' list (including being videotaped).
  00:13:37
• He explains 'no-meeting Wednesday' as a way to protect maker focus blocks, inspired by Paul Graham's maker/manager schedule essay, and says he still follows it religiously.
  00:30:38
• He opens up about working with coach Diana Chapman, who repeatedly challenged tightly-held stories (like 'it would be terrible if Asana had a different CEO') to show him he chooses to be there each day and has agency.
  00:41:33
• Moskovitz lays out his effective-altruism framework: causes must be important, tractable, and neglected, leading to global health and well-being, animal welfare, and global catastrophic risks.
  00:56:11
• He details the AI bioweapon risk, noting language models could create an offense-defense imbalance and that, unlike nuclear weapons, biology has no equivalent of uranium to regulate.
  01:11:18
• He makes the optimistic case for AI in work, envisioning AI as 'air traffic control' that defragments calendars, identifies open loops and undecided decisions, and acts as the world's greatest project manager.
  01:23:49

• The Body Back Buddy costs about thirty dollars, has tens of thousands of near-five-star Amazon reviews, and Moskovitz says he owns roughly ten of them.
  00:09:25
• The 'user guide' idea was sparked by Julie Zhuo's book The Making of a Manager, which includes her own guide to herself.
  00:14:09
• Moskovitz keeps a time-budget spreadsheet template breaking down recurring meetings, prep time, Slack, customer time, and focus time; the annual update now takes him only about 20 minutes.
  00:26:01
• Malaria is probably the single largest destination for his grant money, often measured in quality-adjusted life years.
  00:57:12
• He cites that roughly nine chickens are slaughtered per year for every human on earth, motivating his factory-farm animal-welfare funding.
  00:58:46
• He notes some effective altruists weight roughly 45 trillion theoretical future human lives when prioritizing existential-risk work.
  01:00:21
• Moskovitz describes himself as 'directionally vegetarian' and is enthusiastic about alternative meat products, especially Impossible Foods, in which his foundation has invested.
  01:00:53
• He highlights sewage sampling and sero-surveys as cheap, bias-free ways to detect emerging pandemics, pointing to a Bay Area site tracking COVID, monkeypox, and flu.
  01:05:34
• Moskovitz says he takes a solo 10-mile day hike roughly every three months in the Bay Area, which he finds restorative and deliberately does alone.
  01:34:39
• His billboard / personal motto is 'Live Well to Work Hard,' rejecting the false dichotomy of work-life balance in favor of quality of hours.
  01:43:29

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