Douglas Atkin, Ex-Airbnb Exec who wrote "Belong Anywhere," on Why Every Great Brand Is Really a Cult, Standing Up to the New York Attorney General, and How Airbnb Lost a Million Customers

0:00You were Airbnb between 2012 and 2017. The go-go years. Hypergrowth. And then you left. Yeah, hypergrowth. Why'd you leave? You mentioned the logo. If my memory serves me correctly, that logo was somewhat controversial. Oh, we loved it. Yeah, I called it the Equal Opportunity Genitalia logo because there's something in there for everyone. No one's loyal to Marriott like the way they are to Airbnb. No one loves Hilton, you know, Holiday Inns or anything. They just don't. And then I thought, well, why stop there? Why not study the original? Why not study cults to deconstruct what it took to create that kind of commitment?

0:36If I asked you, the expert, where is humanity? Where are we in 50 years? Does it get better? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse?

0:52Welcome back to another episode of Invested. I'm thrilled to have with me my old friend. We were just reminiscing that we haven't seen each other in way too long. Douglas Atkin. Douglas, welcome. And Douglas and I met the first time around WeWork. And there's a theme there between Airbnb and WeWork, which we'll get into. And Douglas started at Meetup. But Douglas actually wrote the book on cults. And that's where I want to start, was when I first met him, he said, I said, how do you know so much about community? He said, well, I wrote the book on cults. So Douglas, tell us about the book on cults.

1:25So it all started, I had no intention of writing a book, but it became one. And this was before anyone was talking about community in business. I mean, no one was. But how it started for me was I used to work in branding and advertising. And I was in my ad agency in New York in Soho. and I had some clients come in, quite a famous sports fashion brand, and they were depressed saying loyalty is dead, branding is over, we and our competitors copy each other within days, there's no point of difference anymore. And then by coincidence that same night I happened to go to a focus group of teenagers that I'd already organized who were talking about their favorite brand of sneaker.

2:11and um you know sneakers uh they're just they're also you know they're a commodity product they basically um function exactly the same they're bits of rubber and plastic but you couldn't tell these kids that they were incredibly committed to this particular brand happened to be converse um and they were talking in almost uh religious terms about these sneakers so there was two things occurred to me first was the marketers the professionals I had met that morning were wrong you can create commitment even in a commodity market where everything is functionally the same and secondly the thing that occurred to me was that their commitment was so strong and almost cult-like I thought why don't I study best-in-class cult brands brands at the time that have to be like, you know, an apple and Harley.

3:10And then I thought, well, why stop there? Why not study the original? Why not study cults? Maybe if I could still have the most extreme form of belonging and belief, I would be more easily able to deconstruct what it took to create that kind of commitment. Cults that had become religions, such as the Mormons, the Marines, Trekkies, sports team fans, everything. um and uh it worked out because um everyone joined and stayed for the same reasons well the first thing to say is the first one of the first things i learned and saw were um the people who join cults are completely normal this was a really important finding because if they had been marginal, if they had been, you know, kind of not normal, if they've been, as most people think they are, socially inept or psychologically flawed, then they wouldn't have been good objects for study because then I couldn't apply the knowledge I had learned from them to the general.

4:19But they were perfectly normal. And not just normal, but the opposite of what you expect. They tend to be well educated, come from stable homes, are not socially inept at all. If they had been socially inept, cults would never grow because they wouldn't be able to recruit. So, and a little bit more idealistic than the general population. And the second thing I learned is that the reason why people join and stay and believe and belong, world's the same. It didn't matter if I was talking to members of the Krishna cult and other full-on cults, religious cults, or members of the Harley fraternity at the time, the motivations were exactly the same.

5:07It was just a matter of degree. Not always, actually. I mean, there were members of the Appalachian and the Harley cults and other cults, the Bran cults I spoke to at the time, who seemed to be equally committed to full-on religious cults. So anyway, that became a good thing. And so I was able to deconstruct about I think I came up with 12 key insights into why and how people join and stay and also what makes them leave which is also an important finding and that oh and I never intended to become a book but I used that information when I was at this ad agency to pitch for a new bank launched by Citigroup which we won using the information and the co-founder got me to meet a really good book agent in the US and then it became a book and that's what got me out of branding and into tech because as I say no one was talking about community and business at the time and I launched the book and was out you know doing a tour saying community is the next big thing in business and people were kind of buying the argument but there was no you know it was new um uh but lucky for me some of the found there were also because this is in 2004 there were no social media there was no facebook no twitter nothing um but the founders of some of those social networks um lucky for me read the book and that's what got me out of um advertising and tech and branding which i'm getting a little bit tired of and into tech and i ended up joining meetup because the founders of flickr katerina fink and stewart butterfield read the book and they showed it to me one day they were on the board of meetup that's how i ended up there um and they showed it me one day and they showed me all the uh post-it notes and the markings said look we used this book to build flickr and that made it the whole damn thing worthwhile because It was really hard work, writing, research and writing a book while, as you know, while working hard.

7:17You know, by the way, only I hope our audience knows who Flickr was. I know, I know, I know. I suppose I know what Flickr was, but it was like, Flickr was like the place to go put your photographs back in the day and find photographs back in the day. I think it was bought by Yahoo at some point, if I remember correctly. Yeah, it was for too little. and they... 30 million if I remember correctly. Yeah, it was the first social network, actually, really. I mean, Myspace and others were around a bit. But it was really worked well. And then they went on, Stuart Butterfield went on to start some... Slack.

7:55Slack. Yeah. Yeah. Which started as kind of a social network for games, if I remember correctly, and they became Slack, which was the messaging platform. But I want to go back to your comment about religious language. So you said these very normal people, because if they weren't normal, they couldn't influence other people to join cults or brands, as the case may be. But the cults use almost religious language. Can you double-click on that for a second? What is religious language? Why is that important? Why does that matter? or how does that affect these normal people to join the cult? Yeah, I mean, they were kind of using it unconsciously, really.

8:36It was simply an indicator of their degree of commitment. I mean, for example, the ones I can remember wrote about were some of the people I spoke to who used Apple at the time, Macs. They would say things like, sometimes I talk to people who use PCs and they're almost damaged by PCs. It's like their brains have been damaged. I kind of get what they mean because you do have to, like, go through a mental – it used to be you'd have to go through mental gymnastics. You simply use the damn thing. And then this other guy, he was a student. He could barely afford his lunch, and he said, sometimes I just upgrade my Mac – this is before the phone is even – just so that the mothership of Apple can get my money.

9:25I want to have my money. You know, it was like paying it into, it was like a tithe almost into the religion. And they definitely used the religious language in terms of, you know, being missionaries and recruiting people. I mean, definitely when I was interviewing Saturn at the time was, I love Saturn because it was a mass cult brand. It was not a, you know, a niche cult brand. It was mass and with a very generic product. and but people would buy six of these things for all of their families and they would go to go I've forgotten what it's called but there was this thing called the gathering something like the gathering that Saturn would run once a year and instead of going to Disney Disney World or whatever they would go to a car factory in Tennessee to meet the makers of the cars and other purchases of Saturn's you know Saturn but so they were like religious gatherings.

10:26And if you were a cult, what is the language you would use to recruit these members? A full-on cult or a cult brand? It's basically the same. A full-on cult. Exactly. Very similar. Like, for example, when I talked to members of Krishna, I remember this one woman saying that, like the Apple person, that the people who weren't members of recruit, members, crews were damaged. They had to be, you know, saved basically. They had to be fixed. They had to be recruited in and become part of a family. I seem to recall you once telling me that people often on the inside of brands, but also specifically even more so on the inside of cults, they talk about other people's not being able to understand, right?

11:15This is like a language almost that you can't understand until you're swept up in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I talk about the four Ds of difference. The thing about a cult, as opposed to, say, a sect, a sect is an extreme version of an existing belief system, an existing religion. A cult is a new idea around which adherents gather and become passionate, and such. So, for example, Christianity was one of several new ideas, one of several mystery cults in the Eastern Mediterranean, where you are right now, that existed 2 ,000 years ago. And normally they're persecuted out of existence by the incumbents because they're a threat.

11:59This is true both in the religious world and in the brand world. For example, British Airways tried to persecute Virgin Atlantic out of existence in its early days. They did what they came to be known as the dirty tricks. They even, and then Virgin, I love Virgin. So my point about this overall is that there's, you need to be a successful cult or cult brand. You need to focus on your difference. And the way it works generally is to say to recruits, you're different from everyone else. We're different in exactly the same way. Come in and join us and feel at home and at one. with your true family.

12:45And so one of the ways of creating, the fourth way of creating an extreme sense of difference is demonization. And creating a sense of the other. This has become very topical in politics over the past few years. But it's always been topical. I mean, religious leaders and political leaders for thousands of years have used demonization. The word demonization comes from the Christian church that would take local gods like the gods of nature or whatever and literally demonize and put horns on them if they didn't have them and turn them into devils and say, they're bad, we're good. Demonization has two really, really powerful belonging effects.

13:29One is by demonizing the other, you define yourself. So you are the white version of the black you're describing. And demonization also creates a sense of threat, an outside threat, which creates a strong solidarity within. And so the sense of otherness is used by most strong cult-like organizations, whether it's commercial and branded or whether it's a religion or a political party. um for example i'm with this is something this by the way i wanted to tell you about this maybe sometime in this interview this podcast um i'm working on two new communities right now global ones um and one and they're both in response to the demonization by the far right of queer people particularly trans um demonization of course if you're in tel aviv you're jewish very familiar in the Second World War when the Germans demonized the Jews.

14:33It's a classic, classic technique. So going back to your question, there was always the sense of the other. And the other either was a threat or you save people from the other in order to bring them in and make them part of yours. You touched on the movement of culting to politics, and particularly in the moment that we're in right now. I actually wanted to get to this later, but if we're here, we're going to pursue it one second. Do you think that there's something different about politics today that has caught on to more of this, you know, us versus the other, the demonization part of it, the cancel culture elements of it, the political party as a sense of belonging in a way that maybe we didn't have in the past other than in communism?

15:24Is there something about this moment that's kind of brought this to the fore, accelerated it, or has it always been this way? I think it's always from what I mean, I'm not a historian, but from what I can tell, it's always been this way. It tends to come out more when people feel a general sense of insecurity or threat, normally economically. I mean, better historians have written about the rise of Nazi Germany happened after the Second World War, and Germany had to pay a really harsh economic price for the damage it did. After the First World War. First World War, so yes. In the pleasure. Exactly, all of that.

16:05So it was easy. And the demons they picked on, so-called demons, were the Jews and the queers and Romanists and so on. It's always used by populists, and Hitler was a fantastic populist, as a way of distracting from the fact that, yes, there were real problems and people do feel insecure, but these populist leaders don't have the answer to them. And so they distract and create a sense of powerful unity. That's the main reason I do it, is the unity by demonizing the other. No, I think the same thing is happening, particularly in America right now, but in other economies around the world and the far right.

16:52There is a playbook. This sounds like a conspiracy theory. It's not. It is a conspiracy. There is a playbook for this that was initially publicly written in Florida, Governor DeSantis. It's been picked up by the Republican Party, namely Trump and that lot, and then also around the world. And there's a lot of swap between it and the Alban administration and Putin and others. They're copying many of the same techniques. and that's why they're often demonizing the same targets which at this moment happen to be queers and immigrants and particularly trans trans it's always good to demonize something that can be an abstract threat so one of the reasons that trans were picked is because that it was a deliberate and i know this because um i know a close friend of mine is the leader of the Equality Florida, which is the queer organization that's toe-to-toe with DeSantis for the past 10 years.

17:56And they know the enemy quite well there. And it was a real strategy by the Republican Party in Florida to pick trans because they realized as a demonization target, they'd lost the gay marriage as a target. We just lost it. So they thought, what is a population that most suburban mothers will never meet and that is obviously very different looking and other? And they picked on drag and trans thinking, tiny population, no one will ever meet them. They seem very other perfect. Let's pick on that. And so they did. And that's been picked up all over the world with dire consequences. I have really close friends who live in sub-Saharan Africa and in Senegal, in Uganda, whose lives are under threat every day as a result.

18:50Do you think the rise of, let's call it, cultic politics also coincides with the decline of religion? Yes. I mean, you know, I saw a similar thing. So when I was doing a lot of research on cults and religions, for that matter, I was interviewing all these people, but I was also reading a lot of books by sociologists of religion and so on. and sociologists like Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone, and others.

19:24The general consensus amongst those academics and experts is that there is a, and this is not just academics of religion, but also sociologists, psychologists, is there is a need to belong in the human species. We needed to survive, literally. I mean, the moment a man in a bear suit, you know, faced a saber-toothed tiger with nothing but a pointy stick and realized he needed his tribe to defend himself, we became a community-led animal that needed a community to survive. And it's still true now. People live longer and have survived heart attacks at a much higher rate if you're part of a tight social network.

20:11Not meaning social networks, I'm meaning like family and friends. Like real live people that you can be together with. Yes, real live people you can be together with. But we need it to survive. I mean, literally, we need it to survive. We still do, even though there's no saber-toothed tigers. So religion has always, for artists, to provide it a really good means for belonging and belief. A lot of people also need to believe in something, have a purpose. Most people do, in fact. And so there's been a useful vehicle for that, whatever religion it is, whenever it was thousands of years ago or now.

20:51And when I was doing the research of the book, that's when the start in, I was doing it in America a lot of it, And the decline in religion was already being tracked by Pew and other research companies. And I could see that people were finding there is this, you know, kind of desperate desire to belong and believe. If it's not being satisfied by one thing, it'll be satisfied by another, which I think is your point. And I think that's true. So brands were taking over that role at the time, which is why I launched the book. And that now I think is politics. I actually want to move on to Airbnb and meet up, et cetera, and a bunch of other things.

21:29But before we get there, you mentioned kind of the populist right as kind of feeding on this and Hitler. Do you think the same thing exists, for example, on the left or the Muslim Brotherhood or other places like that? Or is it a unique feature of the right? I think the right are doing it extremely well. No, I think the trouble with the left, I mean, the good and the bad thing is that it's definitely happening on the left too. the left tends to indulge in infighting much more than the right um like in going back to pre-war Germany Spain and Italy there were equally strong movements on the left they all defeated themselves by defeating each other instead of focusing on the real enemy and so the yeah definitely in the left but we the left can't get shit together to organize into a into really powerful, I have no idea, maybe because they're ideological purists even more so than the far right.

22:25And they fight each other on ideological purism. I don't know. I don't know enough about it. It's not my forte. If you're interested in finding out ahead of time what's going on in Israeli tech, what the latest trends are, who's breaking not only news, but breaking the trend lines, then you want to subscribe to Aleph's newsletter. And you can sign up right in the show notes in the description of the show. Please subscribe to the newsletter. All right, so let's move on more in a second, because you wrote this book on the cults and you translated that at this moment in history of 2004 to like the first era of social networks, which was Flickr and Meetup.

23:00How did you join Meetup? Oh, because Katrina Fague was on the board of, on the advisory board of Meetup, and she sent my book to Scott Heiferman, who founded Meetup, and said, this book is all about Meetup without being about Meetup. because, you know, Meetup had, I wasn't aware of it when I was researching the book. And so I went, so Scott Heifelman reached out. I left branding and advertising and started being a consultant. And then he just invited me to be his partner. So I was one of four partners running Meetup in its early days, which was great. I loved it because it meant that I learned, you know, I learned a lot about community in general, cults in specifically, but working a meetup enabled me to learn a lot about everyday community.

23:53Communities of people who like to form groups of pug lovers or vampires. There was one group I met, they thought that they didn't like pretending to be vampires, they thought they were vampires. Or, you know, belly dancers or whatever. The diversity was amazing, I loved it. but I learned a lot and again what you haven't asked me is what are the key ingredients of a strong belonging community That's why I was headed with Meetup because these are micro communities of belonging. Micro communities of belonging, yeah, very successful ones generally because there's a lot of intimacy. So let me explain the first, the most important principle for us to create a strong community I'm going to say it in a way that is memorable, slightly rude.

24:45You need to rub your members together until they get sticky. All right? Rub your members together until they get sticky. What do I mean by that? You need frequent and deep interaction between your members. Why? Well, what I saw at Meetup was that we did this research to find out what made successful meetups and the meetups that had the highest ratings um were lps scores were the ones where people had shown up four times or more it's meaning that um the p and we asked why why are you do you feel particularly uh committed to this meetup and um what was interesting was that the reasons why they were there they became so committed was because it took four showing out four times or more to form relationships with other people in the group to form friendships and bonds and so people were going to see julie and mustafa not just to practice spanish for or whatever that the purpose of the meetup was or to do yoga or to go watch foreign films whatever the subject they were doing that too but the other reason this other reason became more important and those bonds are extremely difficult to pull apart that was the source of the strength of those communities and so you need this frequency and and depth and the thing about meetup groups is they're face to face you have to leave your warm home on a cold night show up and meet complete strangers and then become friends so they're very intimate close uh communities um so that's the The first golden rule is rub your members together until we get sticky.

26:34This was also reinforced by the research I'd done on cults. There was a great social study done on the Divine Light Mission, which was a famous cult in the 70s, quasi-religious cult, sort of hippie Christian cult, and also the Mormons. And there was a direct correlation between frequency and depth of interaction and commitment to the belief system and following the rules of the organization. So that's the first one. The second one is, it seems it's the most important, but it's actually secondary to the first. And that is you need to have a very clear, strong ideology, a belief system, a purpose.

27:16And because people need to say, need to glom onto that and say, I believe in that. And I also feel a deep sense of belonging with people who believe in the same values. So super, super important. This is why the far right is very, very clear values. I don't subscribe to them at all, but they're very clear. And so it's attracting people to them. But actually what becomes more important is the interactions between the other members who also bind to the same thing. That's actually what creates this stickiness. So you started by saying that there's like a kernel of content, vampire, yoga, whatever, that brings people together.

27:58And then they get rubbed together over this small kernel of content until they become sticky. And then you add that there's like a belief system that they buy into. Is that a precursor or does that develop through the stickiness? Is that created over time? And if you're not a cult but a brand or a community or set of communities like Meetup, how do you endow the somewhat sticky members who have been rubbed together at least four times with that set of values that they need to have. It encourage them to be carriers. So the answer is the purpose, the purpose is I'm now going to switch to Airbnb or a news address and a song because I ended up working, it's the first thing I worked on at Airbnb was the purpose.

28:47I was so upset when you went to Airbnb, by the way, because I was so desperate for you to come to WeWork and help us. I know, I remember that. You know, I don't I don't know if I've told you this, but, you know, I was about to say I went to Airbnb in a kind of weird way. One of the founders read my book and some blog posts and he invited me to do a fireside chat. So I met him. Well, I met him for breakfast. Joe Gabby. I met him for breakfast in New York in 2012. We got on like a house on fire. He said, I like the way you think. And he invited me to do this fireside chat. so I did the fireside chat in San Francisco to all 140 employees that's all there were at the time now I think it's like 8 ,000 um about community and then I realized hang on a second they seem to be interviewing me a bit but anyway I didn't think much about it and I left and then they asked me back to do a gig and I flew that that night from New York back to San Francisco and met up with Brian again, Brian Chesky, who's still a CEO and co-founder.

29:50And he said, you know a lot about brands. Can you help us figure out what ours is? And that took me by surprise because, you know, I thought I was there to do something about community. And so I said to him, let me think about that. And can I talk to you in the morning? So I came back in the morning and said, look, yes, we can talk about the brand. But I think what's more important is we talk about the purpose of Airbnb, because clearly people, guests, hosts, employees, also guests and hosts are extremely committed to Airbnb. Why? What role does it play in their lives? If we can figure out the role that it plays in their lives, we might get an idea of what your purpose is.

30:31And if we can figure out what the purpose is of the organization, then that governs everything. that governs um what products you launch and what you don't what you choose not to launch it governs the kinds of people you hire and the ones you avoid and fire it governs um how you decorate the office it governs what companies you might choose to buy or not buy it and it also can govern the brand so i think we should do that first and then he he kind of looked at he he's very good at when he's thinking he's he's a great listener brian one of the reasons i love brian is he's a great listener uh and he's and he thought about it and then gave me through one of his dead-eyed stares and said okay do that and internally i'll go oh shit what have i talked myself into that's a big job fucking hell can i do this um so um anyway so i did that's what i did during that gig in three and a half weeks we ended up talking to over 500 guests and hosts and used particular research techniques that surfaced the role that Airbnb played in the lives and why they were so committed.

31:36And that's what actually led to Airbnb's purpose, which is the longer version, which is still short, is we want to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. And we shorten it to belong anywhere. And it still is that purpose. And one of the reasons I loved working at Airbnb and love my founders and my colleagues is we lived that purpose every day. We used it every day to make highly costly decisions. Really, you know, decisions that a purpose is unused good in any organization, whether it's a commercial organization or a religion or a political party. If it costs something, if you use it every day and there's a real short-term cost.

32:21You bear the short-term cost because long-term, it will have a better, longer, more profitable in the company's life term. So for example, in Airbnb, let me give you a very specific example. After six months of being there, so in 2013, middle of 2013, the Attorney General of New York issued a subpoena against us for all of our host information, which at the time was 15 ,000 hosts. And bear in mind, New York was our largest market. It was about 50 % of our business at the time. This was very early days. And we knew that if we adhered to that subpoena,

33:03our hosts would feel betrayed because they had just prosecuted a host who then also was not unprosecuted, but it was dismissed in court. thinking he was a a landlord bad landlord but he wasn't and he'd been fined 35 000 dollars just a few months previously so our hosts were petrified and i knew this because i was talking to them a lot and um so what i am this was a big deal um and so what are we going to do because no one as it's in fact at one point we decided in the end not to uh to squash the spinet and take the attorney general to court and they were aghast i mean no one had ever said no to the attorney general of new york's subpoenas he just got billions out of the international banks the previous week for causing the 2008 uh recession so um and here we were literally no one had heard of us we were a cocky little startup from california and no one had heard of us and we were saying no to the attorney general and their lawyers literally said to us do you have any lawyers because no one says no to the Attorney General.

34:15But my argument to Brian at the time was, we have to say no, because we have to be in lockstep with our hosts. Without our hosts, we have no business. And we can't betray them. We have to feel their pain as much as they feel it. And I said, but we have one huge advantage, which is our hosts and our guests. So we had known that the hotel lobby had been to see the Attorney General the previous week. Coincidentally, he issues a subpoena. against us. And this was just at the time when the hotels were beginning to stop laughing at us and dismissing us and beginning to take us seriously as a threat.

34:56So what I said to Brian was, look, we can't compete with them on money power and lobbying power. We have one lobbyist for the whole world. They have, you know, like phalanxes of them just for New York. There's no way we compete them on that but so they have lobbying power and people power i mean and money power but we have people power we have a lot no one's loyal to marriott like the way they are to airbnb no one's loyal to hilton no one loves hilton or any of these you know holiday inns or anything they just don't so we have that power and i just learned because what i did before i joined Airbnb was do the startup, which is, as you still exist, this consultancy, which helps mobilize millions into social movements for social change.

35:45So I said, I know how to do this. So let's organize them. So like a crazy five months, I got some of Barack Obama's grassroots organizing team from the White House, because he had written the playbook on that, hired them to train our host to become political activists basically they went up to albany lobbied the politicians we had this pop this petition we kicked it off with this petition which i thought we'd get 10 000 which we found this amazing host who was a veteran of the war iraq war and was now being an airbnb host to pay for her new career to go to college um and i we expected 10 000 signees we got 350 000 from around the world.

36:30That got the notice of the press. The press wrote us up. We totally won the cultural narrative around it. And a whole of population of New York and the world, actually, because it became a kind of worldwide story, was on our side. And we won in court. We squashed his subpoena because it was simply a fishing expedition. Now, where did all that come from? To answer your question, it came from the fact that we believe in belonging and one of our core the core prime core value was be a host so to within the company be a host to your colleagues help them be successful nurture them and everything else which is incredibly strong well one of the reasons why it's an amazing culture but of course we had to be hosts to our hosts we had to nurture them and make them successful and we had to make sure they felt they belonged and were safe in a hostile world.

37:27And so that's what we did. And during that period, I was every week flying to New York from San Francisco, often with Brian and Joe and Nate and our one lobbyist, and having town hall meetings that the press began showing up, TV cameras and things, and telling the hosts everything as it happened, as we knew it. You know, the water law, bad news, good news. They just became in. They were part of the family. And we won that particular fight. But I want to double click on this for a second, because it sounds, I want to go back to the woman who was renting out her apartment so that she could go to college.

38:09So this woman just, it was transactional, right? She started to make a bus. Yes. And she didn't belong to anything, really. She was making a buck. But you transformed it into belonging. And so the question is, you know, like if I come to a meetup where I want to be a vampire or I want to do yoga, I have an interest in that already. And meetup has got this receptacle for that. And, you know, if people are Christians, they go to a church. Right. But this woman was just making a buck and you activated her into an activist and someone who wanted to belong. I don't think she was missing a sense of belonging before, was she?

38:52No. Or she didn't know it. No. Most people are. I can't ever watch the belong. Right. You're right. Right. So the truth is that, and I dug into this a lot, especially when I was doing that, researching those 500 people to figure out what the purpose was, is that the initial reasons people participated in Airbnb was transactional. For a guest at the time, Airbnb was cheaper than hotels. So you went for a cheap stay. If you're a host, remember this is like 2012, the effects of the 2008 recession was still really badly felt. And many hosts were doing it because they couldn't afford to pay their mortgage or rent.

39:34And so it was transactional. But they became committed because once they started participating, they realized the powerful, non-transactional, more emotional benefits that were involved. And that was a lot of it was a sense of belonging. belonging to a group of travelers who valued authentic travel you know where you're interacting with locals and living a locals life rather than getting on a double deck a bus and taking photographs um for example or as a guest as a host where you your motivation thousands of them told me this you know i i try and make my my guests feel like they're members of the family they'll take them to the football matches with them they'll host dinner parties and have the have the guests attend with their friends they would give them their favorite uh you know their advice on where to go where not to go all those kinds of things but is that really a belonging i mean this is like uh how do i make my service better by the way i know people who are obsessed yeah right they want those points more than anything they don't really belong they don't necessarily with the brands they want those points so that's kind of a proxy that's all transactional.

40:45But, you know, part of belonging in a cult is I can get someone to do something that they probably don't want to do necessarily. Yes. In the Airbnb case, you know, one, it's self-interested in some way. Of course. But two, I'm like, if these people met each other, I'm making this up, you bought 500 Airbnb hosts together, you know, in Times Square, it doesn't feel like they would glom onto each other. They wouldn't say, hey, I belong to this group called Airbnb-os, would they? You'd be surprised because generally... You're right. Well, I mean, I created these groups just to see if there was a community to begin with.

41:24Right at the beginning of Airbnb, I created this platform where hosts could basically create meetups for other hosts. And they did. And especially in the early days when being an Airbnb host was extremely unusual when your family was telling you please don't invite strange men into your bed at night which is literally what they were doing um uh you'll you'll be murdered you know or or guests show you know telling their friends oh we stayed in this person's home you what did you know them no never met them before so um there was a there was a you know people were they and then in the end the hosts were a forming community group for also transactional reading reasons they wanted to give each other tips and learn from each other about how to do it right and so on but in the end so there was this there was this guy called robert roberto actually in new york i remember him saying you know i live in new york i'm a real estate agent i have a you know a tough tough day but when i know that i'm going home to welcome my guests i ramp up my hostiness And he gave it a word, which I loved.

42:33I said, well, what is hostess? So basically, he was ramping up his empathy. He was so that he could switch from being, you know, a ballsy real estate agency, even not known for their empathy, real estate agents, and to welcome these people who've flown from Europe or Israel or wherever and be empathetic to say, OK, what can I do for you? What do you most of what? Shall I disappear? Come back in half an hour. Do you want to know how the air conditioning works? You know, do you want to go go out and buy a grab? I can take you to my favorite cafe. You know, so he ramped up his host dinner. So Airbnb hosts develop over time.

43:11They've become extreme empaths. And there is this huge community of empaths in a way. They've become he described himself as a better human being for being an Airbnb host. What do you think is the biggest price Airbnb paid for the purpose of belonging anywhere? Oh, God, we paid loads. So actually, let me tell you, we had these core values, which I managed to shorten from six, which is too many, to three, basically, slash four. We really lived by them. We made decisions about them every single day. So I'm going to give you a very personal example. one of the ways we made sure that the core values and the culture was so strong is that whenever we interviewed someone to work at airbnb you'd have eight interviews say if you're a software or say you're a i don't know a marketing person you'd have eight interviews with marketing department to see if you're a good marketer your skill set is there then you'd have two interviews with people at airbnb who have nothing to do with marketing they may write software there may be a partnerships person and they were not interviewing you to see if you're a good marketing person they were to see if your personal core values the values you use as a person to make the biggest decisions of your life were aligned with the core values of airbnb and if they weren't they had veto power and they would use it and so you could be the best marketer but if you didn't pass the core values interviews you were not hired there was one particular that really really important so So there was a cost, right?

44:45So there was a cost to me one time. I wanted to parachute this woman into Seattle. She was a grassroots activist to deal with a particular political problem we have with the city council there. It was urgent. I needed to go in in like a day or day two. And she passed all of her skill interviews but failed the core values. That meant she couldn't be hired. And, of course, I just went apeshit and went, what the hell am I going to do? and then you know then i said well i have to adhere by this because i think she's a perfect match but and i respect these uh two core values interviewers who don't and so i will have to run around at cost uh political cost as well in seattle and deal with that because if she joined and was a really bad fit she would be poison in the system and would ultimately uh destroy airbnb from within as with everyone else.

45:43There's a story, Douglas, that you rejected a million customers because they wouldn't sign the Airbnb. Yeah, I don't know. I wrote about this. I wrote about all this stuff, by the way, in some articles on Medium a while ago. Is that true? Yeah, yeah. I asked Airbnb. So there is, when you join as a host or a guest, you're asked to respect Belong Anywhere and their core values. because their core values not just for employees they're the core values for for members to be a host uh and so on so and and i saw i i this had been going for about a year after we had launched the new logo and belong anywhere as an as the purpose well it should be going in like two or three years so i asked um i asked someone who i knew there and said how many people didn't sign and therefore didn't join.

46:35They said, it's well over a million right now. I'm rising. So yes, I mean, it's only real. It's only a real... Most purpose in most companies and organizations are on mugs and a slogan on a wall and a PowerPoint presentation, or if they still exist. For them to have a real impact on the organization, they have to be lived and adhered to. By the way, you mentioned the logo. If my memory serves me correctly, that logo was somewhat controversial. Oh, we loved it. Yeah, I called it the Equal Opportunity Genitalia logo because there's something in there for everyone. You know, you can see tips, boobs and everything else, depending on who you are.

47:21And when it was launched, that's what people were writing about. And our social media team encouraged it, actually. Is that right? Because the whole idea of the logo was to represent the purpose, which I think we launched it in 2015, the purpose. How does Janet tell you I hope you belong everywhere? I missed that. I'll tell you. Well, actually, there's a great little video that brings it alive that shows you the graphic examples of how it comes from a person, a locator, and a place, and so on. But the whole idea was we wanted our community to draw their own logo, to own it. It had to be something they could draw themselves.

48:03So most companies, the moment someone fiddles with their logo, they've got phalanxes of lawyers persecuting you. We wanted to encourage people to fiddle with our logo, to fiddle with the genitalia, as it were. And so this was very important design criteria from Joe and Andrew, one of the designers, and Brian was drawing it yourself. And so that led to that. And it was a kind of an A for Airbnb, but it was also an upside down heart for love and belonging and all those things. I feel like I need to ask you, you mentioned Joe Gebbia very fondly many times in this interview. He's, of course, in the Trump administration, which I think he was a little less fondly, about 30 minutes to go.

48:50I don't know what happened. Ouch. Before I move on to our last topic, you were Airbnb between 2012 and 2017. The go-go years, hypergrowth. And then you left. Yeah, hypergrowth, yeah. Why'd you leave? Because I burnt out. Burnt out? Well, I mean, I'm susceptible. I get migraine, and I was getting, ultimately, I had a permanent migraine, and I had to leave. I didn't want to leave at all, but I had to. And a lot of people, literally half, and I mean literally half my age, who joined at the same time, also left for the same reasons, burnout. But the one thing I want to say, it wasn't bad burnout. It was kind of good burnout.

49:30It was performance burnout, not stress from fear at all. I mean if there was any fear it was a fear of you know not performing to the mission to the uh to the expectations of everyone else in the company who you genuinely there was only one person in the whole company I just did not like which you know by the time I left I think there was like 2 ,000 people in the company I joined me there's about 160 I think um only one person everyone They're amazing because, you know, they're recruited by the same values. And they left because they often, you know, were kicked out, not just because they didn't perform well, but because they were not performing.

50:16They could perform really well, but whilst abusing the values. And then they were kicked out for that reason. So you talked a lot before about belonging. We talked before about social networks, the early ones, Flickr, MySpace, which both of us are old enough to remember at this point. People have forgotten Friendster. But like there's been more persistent ones, Facebook, Meetup, Twitter, et cetera. Yet with all of this, loneliness is like an epidemic. The Surgeon General called it an epidemic. We all see it's getting worse. And people are driven also to, I would call, all sorts of loneliness-induced strange behavior and even radical behavior going on.

50:56What's going wrong? Help us. You're like the expert at this. Help us understand the moment we're in. And why, with all this kind of likes and see me on social media, people aren't getting together. The kind of meet-up economy, so to speak, has not brought people closer together. People are more alone. And then transform that into the AI world also, while you're at it. So I think it's mixed, right? So there's good and bad with social media. The good thing is that people are engaging with other people. They're not just sitting in front of the TV alone watching TV. It is an engagement media. They have to be more careful about whether they're engaging with bots or not.

51:38And also many forms of social media are creating many forms of genuine community, like the meetup and Airbnb. But I think there are other engines, social engines, that are driving loneliness, especially in the US. I mean, it's one of the highest forms of death for men over 50 is suicide. And then there is this ghettoization and demonization thing that's happening that's being totally accelerated by social media, of course. It's a complete disaster. I think it's fundamental that our political leaders and corporate leaders, the whole idea of working from home to me, for example, was a disastrous idea.

52:22Really bad idea. One of the whole reasons you're going to work is creating face-to-face contact and real social engagement. To rub people together to make them sticky. You've got to rub people together to make them sticky. There is this, I talked to you about it before, this thing I kind of devised called the community commitment curve. Yeah. Describe it. Yeah, so this, the upper level is degrees of commitment, and this is time. So over time, you make small asks like look at our community web page, if it's a meetup or something, then join, then interact with other people, then join, then show up, then show up again, then comment and post and whatnot.

53:12All that comes earlier, actually. Then organize the meetup. You know, so there are these you make small, incrementally harder asks that don't feel so hard because of the commitment you've already made. And you end up ramping a greater proportion of people up to the top and up near the top is face to face contact. And down at the bottom is the easy stuff like clicking, liking and whatever else. So the whole goal, I think, for political leaders in the world is to move people from lower commitment, easier asks like clicking up the curve to face-to-face contact. If you were the chief doctor of the loneliness epidemic right now, what would you devise to save the world from the loneliness epidemic?

54:02I think, by the way, Douglas, if there's one guy who can solve this problem on planet Earth, other than with the reemergence of religion, which we can talk about another time, it's you. So you're the biggest doctor. Yes, it is. No, no, no. Well, it's all the kind of mechanisms and whether that's executed by churches or social groups or companies or city councils, organizing street parties, organizing ways to get people out of their homes and face to face contact is the most important thing. To do that, you have to use some of the things that people think are what keep people home. So, for example, let me talk about Meetup, which is a really good example.

54:50Meetup, when I was at Meetup, we had this terrible problem in that only 40 % of the people who joined a Meetup group online, you know, like to do a hiking Meetup, say, only 40 % of the people would actually show up to go hiking or whatever it was. that was a terrible drop off 60 failure rate and this is how we devised the community commitment curve because we realized that getting people to join the group is easy but getting them to leave their warm home on a cold night and be complete strangers was too much social anxiety and it turned a lot of people off and so ultimately what we did is we used a lot of social media techniques to get people to diffuse the strangeness, you know, to diffuse the anxiety.

55:42So people joined a meetup and then we encouraged them to, you know, like and message people in the same hiking group before they even showed up to go hiking, to share things, to share pictures, to form relationships, so that when they did show up, they knew they were going to meet Brian or Ingrid or whoever it was at the group. And so the social anxiety was much lessened. So I think you need to, whatever the platform is, whether you're a religion or whatever it is, Saturn used to do this. Saturn used to do a car dealership. They would get people to meet up in the dealership and have events in the dealership.

56:22So anyone can do this. You can get people to familiarize themselves and then show up and meet face to face. Do you think there's more social anxiety today than there was in the past? and if so, why? I don't know, but I'm sure that's being measured by the likes of Robert Putnam and other sociologists. There may well be, because there's more fear that has been stoked by demonization, basically. Our friend David Siegel, who's the CEO of Meetup later on, said to me when I interviewed him, he said he thinks one of the great ways to get over loneliness and social anxiety is some sort of mandatory military or community service.

57:07Do you believe in that? I don't know. I don't know about mandatory. I think what the governments might be able to do and, you know, enlightened leaders of companies or religions is invest in getting strangers to meet each other face to face. Through these means, we've been talking about online and offline. How do you think this AI world we're going to, which will have, you know, much more, AI doing things on our behalf and more robots. How do you think about lowliness in that era and the formation of community in this era that we're going into? And what do we need to do differently? Well, I am definitely an expert and I fear to comment on it.

57:47From a personal point of view, I spend less time in front of the screen because my AI agent does more work for me so that I can spend more time with my friends. I don't work now, which is good. I started this project called 29. 29 is, we call it 29, because there are 29 Yogyakarta principles. Yogyakarta principles are human rights written specifically for queer condition in Yogyakarta, which is a university town in Indonesia, about 20 years ago actually. And my co-producer and co-founder and I are going around to 29 countries in the world where one of those human rights for queers has been achieved legally.

58:33And we're finding local queer artists and influencers and activists and making a music video about that particular human right. So for example, we just did one in Trinidad and London about decriminalization. We've been to Indonesia, the Philippines, and India, also doing ones about the right to representation, the right for accountability, et cetera. And each of these, we don't just show up with a camera and film artistic queers. We go in several months before, find these queer artists and influencers and journalists and writers and so on, and politicians sometimes, and have workshops with them for a day to work on the idea together.

59:20An unintended consequence, happy unintended consequence of this project is the amount of incredible community we're making in each of these countries and between the countries at a time of crisis when queers are being actively persecuted and imprisoned. The whole goal of this, by the way, is to shift the culture, become predisposed towards queer rights through joy, not hate, not we need rights, you're all horrible to us, we hate you. Not that. It's celebrating with joy the acquisition of a human right and thereby demonstrating our shared humanity with everyone else. I've admired your work for many, many, many years.

1:00:02I tried to recruit you, so it's obviously I admire your work. I admire you, Michael. I admire you. You're an amazing human being. We think the same of each other. And every time I come away after talking to you, I'm left in this schizophrenic state or bipolar state in which I say to myself, oh, my God, human nature is just such that we need to be tribal, which is good. We need belonging. Sebastian Junger wrote a great book about that, which I'm sure you've read. And we can create community for good. And at the same time, I walk away and say, oh, my God, human nature is such that we will inevitably be locked in this battle, so to speak.

1:00:51It doesn't matter what the lines are. And part of it's loneliness on kind of one battle, and the other battle is dehumanization on the other side of it. And so if I asked you, the expert, where is humanity? I mean, it's been going on for thousands of years, okay? It's not new. And where are we in 50 years? Does it get better? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? Yeah, partly. I mean, so there's a downside to many things, including community. When communities get an extreme negative manifestation of a strong community, it's the othering of everyone else, it's the demonization of everyone else.

1:01:36What we're trying to do in this, and also in this other global queer community thing that I'm organizing that I haven't talked about, is we're trying to do the opposite of that. We're trying to recruit allies by being open and welcoming as well. There's a danger, right? Because I know that strong communities come from very clear, well-defined ideologies and strong values. And you shouldn't let people in who don't subscribe to that ideology or share those values. But actually, there are lots of communities that do share values. You know, there's many in the, for queers, there's many, many in the, of course, in the straight world who share the same values of inclusion and diversity and love who you want.

1:02:21And also letting people live their lives, you know, not trying to judge them all the time. So I'm always, I'm an optimist. I'm optimistic about it all. Human nature, everyone thinks the world's going to end in their generation. And so far, it hasn't. Yeah, I wouldn't know that. I'm a Matt Ridley rational optimist, big time. No, I know you are. Yeah, we've talked about it in the past. And I think that's true. I mean, there's always more fear when there's a threat, you know, in times of plague in the past. There were conspiracy theories when there were plagues. There are conspiracy theories when there are wars.

1:02:59There are, you know, demonizations. And I sense that you think that there's conspiracy theories and demonizations now that a lot of it goes back to 2008 and the financial crisis. I know I think. Yeah, yes, yes, definitely. I wrote a book about that. I think so, yeah. Yeah, because it really shook the fundamentals of the West's economic system. So everyone felt that. Everyone was really angry, too, especially when they saw Wall Street get off stock-free. And I agree with people. I was angry, too. It was a total error. Douglas Atkin, this was a wonderful conversation. Thank you for joining me. Same.

1:03:32As always, good talking to you. Likewise. And to our audience, if you enjoyed this conversation, please write us five stars on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. And of course, subscribe to the newsletter. We will promote this interview and conversation with my good friend Douglas Hacken. Douglas, thank you so much. Lovely to see you again, Michael. I love who you see us.