Airbnb’s Next Phase — with Brian Chesky

21:47You do now have people returning to cities, but I don't think cities are ever going to be quite as singularly dominant as they were for the pandemic, everyone is less tethered. Population redistributing, because not everyone has to go back to an office, they have more flexibility. We're also seeing a lot more seasonal rentals. Even people in New York are saying you have to come back to an office. You're going to see a lot of people still go away for summers because you can. You can do your job remotely. So these are some of the big things that are changing. So every travel market is either an inbound market, an outbound market, or a mix.

22:22So Germany is mostly an outbound market. Germans spend a ton of travel in Germany, just not in Germany. And a lot of people don't like going to Germany, like broadly compared to France. France is a mixed market. A lot of people love going to France. A lot of people love traveling and leaving France. Italy and Spain are inbound markets. So Germany outbound, Italy, Spain, inbound, France, both, right? UK is both, US is both. Asia is a very unique market. It's a cross-border market. Very few people in Asia travel within their own country. So if they want to travel, they go somewhere else. And the problem has been borders have been basically kind of closed or constrained.

22:56And so there hasn't actually been a lot of Asia travel. But there's so much pent-up demand. Half the world's population or more than majority of the world's population is in Asia. They're really, really young. GDP is growing. As you know, one of the first things a middle class does when they become middle class is they want to travel. And plus, when you grow up in the internet, like the internet is a global idea, right? So if you were a kid and you grew up on social media, you grew up being exposed to the entire world. Now you want to see the world. You have some money. So we think Asia over the next three to five years is going to be a massive boom.

23:27And you're going to have these corridors, China to Japan, China to Korea, Korea to Japan, you know, China to Southeast Asia. So a lot of inter-Asia travel will be really big. Those are, I mean, I can keep going, but those are just some of the trends. And where do you, when you look at the rest of 23 and 24, what are your sort of growth initiatives? Does it just stay the course or is it expand by region, by product type? I mean, your stock trades at a really healthy multiple and applied in that multiple is a certain level of growth expectation. Where does that growth come from? Yeah. So I'll give you like kind of short term, long term.

24:03So kind of short, short term, it's just about like continuing to improve the product we have. I mean, we're a pretty big platform. I think last year we did nearly$65 billion in bookings. So that meant that approximately one in every$1 ,200 or$1 ,300 spent in the world,$1 spent on Airbnb. So it's already a sizable market. The great thing, as you know about marketplace, the bigger you get, the more optimizations and improvements in quality can lead to huge, huge incremental gains in revenue, like in the billions of dollars. So phase one is just keep improving the core product that we have. We're going to have 300 million guest arrivals this year on Airbnb.

24:44Just keep improving that. So that basically means improving the application. We have a ton of app upgrades coming, making sure we have enough supply, making sure that supply is at a good price point, making sure we have great customer service. So that's what I just call making sure people love the service. That's part one. Part two is geographic expansion. Geographic expansion is kind of like an extremely low risk way for us to like, you know, double the size of the company eventually. And geographic expansion is basically going to be Asia. And then there's really half of Europe. Like we're really big in Europe.

25:16But like if you take like Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Eastern Europe, like Poland, like we've really mostly been focused on UK, France, Germany, the three of the biggest economies in Europe. But there's the rest of Europe. So the rest of Europe, you have APAC and then you have Latin America. Latin America is growing quickly. Brazil's blowing up. And then going a little further up north, Mexico is actually blowing up. So that's second horizon, and that's really geography. And the third horizon, and this is by far the biggest, is, and this is stuff you and I have talked about, it's just expanding what Airbnb is.

25:50Imagine if Amazon only sold books. Imagine if Apple only sold the iMac. Imagine if Nike only sold running shoes. They'd be a fraction of what they could become. And so we're now thinking about lots of new offerings for Airbnb because I'm like 41 and I don't want to be spending my 40s doing only the shit I invented in my 20s. You know, I want to do new stuff. And I feel like we have incredible team. And so we're ready to do new stuff. And twice a year, we're going to launch brand new products. And this is maybe the last thing I'll say is before we do new stuff, like I'll use this analogy, Scott, you remember in the like the 2000s, let's say like 2004, 2005, iPods were like the hottest thing.

26:30Everyone loved their iPod. And they wanted Apple to make a phone. Remember, like everyone's like pleading for Apple to make a phone. They're imagining. I don't remember anyone talking about the Gateway computer phone, right? I don't remember because no one gave a shit about Gateway. They didn't like the computer. And so what I really want is I want to spend this year making sure people love the core service of homes. There's still a lot of people complaining, especially on social media. They're complaining about prices. They're complaining about cleaning fees. They're complaining about chores.

26:58They're complaining about customer service. And if they were complaining about the iPod, I don't think they would have wanted the iPhone. And so to use that analogy, I want to make sure this is the year that people fall back, like really fall in love with the service. And then next year, we start reinventing what Airbnb is. So I'll just throw some product ideas at you, and I'd just love to give to your initial reactions. I look at Airbnb and I think there's a generation of people who identify with Airbnb and it's got elegant design. So Airbnb plus, which includes meetups, access to better properties, better events in the bigger cities, you pay a premium, very high margin, almost like this is, I don't want to call it velvet rope, but Airbnb plus thoughts.

27:46I think it's a great idea. I mean, You know, we've talked about this a little bit, but I think what you're talking about is Airbnb becoming a little more of an exclusive community with like-minded people. I think we've had this little bit of this challenge where every internet company wants to reduce friction, right? You want to make it easier to sign up. You want to reduce friction. And the problem is that at the same time, people also want to belong to something. And they want to feel like they're a part of something that's actually cool. And ultimately, I think that that will prevail. I think that Airbnb becoming more like a membership where when you meet another Airbnb person, maybe you go to an event with another person that means something and they're like you and you feel like they're trusted.

28:27And you know, first of all, that they're a real person with a verified identity and they have a reputation on the platform. They've met some basic threshold and they believe some things that you believe. And these things are probably values around creativity, design, open mindedness. They're a curious kind of person. They're aware of local authentic culture. They want to meet other people. I think that is kind of an enemy person. I think that's a great idea. I mean, it's certainly something we talked about. And before the pandemic, we were actually working on a program like that. And then, of course, we had to make a bunch of hard decisions to basically shut down like 80 % of everything we were doing.

29:01But I think this is a great opportunity. And also, we've talked this. I want to move me beyond a transaction. See, we're like a marketplace. And a problem with a marketplace, I mean, it's good. It's a good business model. But a marketplace is inherently transactional. And when a community is too transactional, every connection to community can't be a transaction, right? Then it really doesn't work. So pivoting Airbnb from a marketplace to a little more of like a community or membership type thing would be very, very interesting. It's just about what's the right model. Would you ever go vertical?

29:33Would you ever actually own assets? I think of Lyft. My sense is Lyft is going away. It's a subscale number two. It gets cheap enough. Would you ever have rode B &B and acquire the company? You already have people, you already have tens of millions of credit cards, accounts, trusted relationship, and just say, hey, you're on your way to Airbnb in Phoenix. We'll pick you up. Or the interface that just pops up is ride hailing. Yeah, I totally think so. I mean, whether or not we want to start with more commodity services or more differentiated services would be a really big question. In fact, before the pandemic, the big strategic initiative was to try to sell the end-to-end trip.

30:12to verticalize the trip, where you stay, how you get there, and what you do all in one place. And then we obviously had to shut all that down. But I think going back to being a little more vertically integrated would be great. And of course, I like the Apple model a little more than the Amazon model, like personally for our skill set. They're both great models. Now, the challenge we've had in our business is to truly control a lot of experience, you have to control the assets. And we have, you know, about 8 million units or listings on Airbnb. be. If you imagine each unit is a value of about half a million dollars per unit, which is a decent proxy, that's$4 trillion of representative real estate.

30:49So it's just hard with any amount of money to really make a dent in that. We can have assets as brand statements. We could have a space that's a brand statement. It could be for experiences or events, you could get thousands of people in it, you know, like, and it could justify, but like, you know, if you verticalize, then you're kind of either a real estate developer or a hotel. And the challenge we've had historically is the amount of capital and the scale. And it's just kind of like a different investment thesis. Talk about the product you're launching. So the first thing, Scott, is I kind of just came to the conclusion that we have tons of new ideas.

31:26And, you know, between the stuff we've talked about, making it be more of a community, and then of course, AI, I think it's like this huge platform shift. And we have these incredible people. I think one of the problems, and I think this happened to other tech companies, you can imagine who I'm talking about. How many times do you have a founder that fell out of love with their core business before their core business was really perfect? We can think of maybe two iconic examples where they move on to big, new, shiny objects, but their core business, they just kind of forgot about it. And I think that happened to me before the pandemic.

31:56And then of course, we lose 80 % of our business in eight weeks. People said we're going to like go out of business. Is this the end of Airbnb? And I think, you know, it's like you ever like almost lose something, you tend to value it more. I think that happened to me. I almost lost the core business. I tend to value it. And I said, you know what, before we do new things, we're going to fix the core thing. And so I started traveling and living on Airbnb last year. When I saw you in Miami, I was living on Airbnb. Then I started hosting in my own home. I started having people in my home. And what we did is we, we, we analyzed 20 million customer service tickets.

32:28We look through tens of thousands of social media posts. We talked to hundreds of thousands of guests and hosts. And we asked them the same question, what annoys you about Airbnb? What frustrates you? And then we created this giant experience blueprint. We basically storyboarded the end-to-end experience of staying in Airbnb and hosting. We created a map of all 150 product screens and app screens, every user policy, and every customer service touchpoint. And we decided to just try to redesign the entire core business with, try to fix the top 50 issues. So you took the top 50 issues, like prices aren't transparent, people feel like.

33:05There's a whole bunch of chores when I check out. Listings are too expensive. It's hard to find long-term stays. I can go down the list. It takes too long when I call customer service to get a response. They hand off to people who have no context. A lot of like, I mean, I'd say stuff that people get bored by, like CEOs don't usually do. And I said, we're going to focus on that. So we have over 50 upgrades and features based on the top feedback from our community. It's not sexy, but it's really what I think we need to do. And then the second thing is the original idea of Airbnb was staying in a home with somebody while they're there.

33:37It's still going. We sell tens of millions of room nights a year, but it's not been invested in. And we put people back at the center and we launched this thing called a host passport. It's really cheap and you get this really local experience. And if you want to go to Mexico City, I say the best way to go to Mexico City is stay in a home with somebody because they're going to like show you around the city. You're going to save a bunch of money. You're going to feel like you're a local. The problem is a lot of people are weirded out about staying with another stranger. They're like, who is this person?

34:03So we created this really cool little passports where you can basically get to know the people before you book. And so we call this product Airbnb Rooms because they're rooms. And then hopefully if we're successful, we've gotten back to our core. We've listened to customers. We fixed their issues. And hopefully, if all goes well, we have permission to now go on to even bigger new ideas. We'll be right back.

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35:55And then I hear other city officials saying that the key to our growth is tourism and we like short-term rentals. After spending two or three years, I imagine talking to a lot of municipal officials and negotiating and putting out fires. What have you learned about the intersection between kind of growth economies, sort of disruptors, and getting along with local governments? What do you wish you'd done differently? Where does it all stand now? Because it feels like you're in a relationship, a different relationship with every city. 100%. That's true. That's the best way of saying it. So the best way, Scott, to say it is most companies are regulated at a federal level, right?

36:33You imagine like Facebook. Or not regulated. Yeah. And if they want to be regulated, it's a national conversation. Nobody wants to regulate housing at the federal level, certainly not in the United States. Most big countries do not want to attempt federal housing regulation. That would be onerous and too hard. So it ends up being at the city level. And we're in 100 ,000 cities. And I remember 10 years ago, we had this concept called the model city, that we were going to try to do a deal with New York or San Francisco and create a model and then replicate the model. And I remember we did a deal with like, I can't remember what city it was, Boston or Portland or some city.

37:07And we thought, this is a great model. And we go to the next city. You know what they said? They said, like, we're not Boston. And so the thing that turned out is that every city believes they're unique, they're personal, they're one of a kind. They are. But having now done business in 100 ,000 cities, they're not as different as they think they are. But they do not want to be treated the same. And then the other problem is, let's say, what would you say our relationship with the city of New York is? Well, it depends. You're talking about the city council or the mayor's office? Are you talking about the average voters?

37:37Are you talking about people in which boroughs? Are you talking about when they're traveling? So even a city is many constituents. You can't really say we have one relationship with a city. We actually have many relationships. 10 years ago, the question was, will Airbnb exist? And it wasn't clear. At one point, there was a greater than$100 million opposition campaign against Airbnb by like, And this was not a secret by hotels, and that was quite difficult to deal with. And that was in the mid-2010s. We found some peace. The peace we found was through two things, collecting hotel tax and agreeing to have Airbnbs registered.

38:14We now are one of the largest collectors and remitters of hotel tax in the world. We've collected billions of dollars of hotel tax. I think the second thing that's happened is most cities want Airbnb in their city. They just want to regulate it. And so they don't, you know, if they have a housing crisis, they don't want a whole bunch of fully dedicated rentals. But this is not every city. So they say register and then we'll decide how frequently you can rent. So some cities will say like you can rent 180 days a year. Some cities will say 60 days a year. Some cities will say you just need to have like proof of residency.

38:45So every city has slightly different versions. But if you register and you collect taxes, this is what's happened. And the vast majority of the top 200 jurisdictions, we have some kind of regulation in place. I think it's more than 90 % now. So I'd say generally things are in a much better place and also travel is redistributed. And the smaller the city, the less likely they have hotels, the less likely they have a strong union, the less likely they even have an alternative. So if you're going to pick the small town, there often aren't even hotels. So there's Airbnb or you're not going there. Do you have lobbyists in Washington?

39:19Do you have representation? Do you have a strategy to try and get elected representatives on your side? I mean, my sense is big tech learned from the sins of Microsoft. Microsoft initially said we're not going to play that game. It really hurt them. And now most tech companies play the game and then some. Like, what is your approach? Well, I can give you a hint. Jay Carney is, we hired Jay Carney. He runs policy and communications. So he ran it for Amazon. So you can imagine he builds a very robust operation. But this predated Jay Carney. And we had a person named Chris Lehane. And before him, a really good team before him.

39:54So Airbnb is kind of unique, Scott. Like Amazon didn't really get like regulated or anything until they were big, right? Facebook didn't really have a lot of scrutiny until they were big. We had scrutiny where there were 10 employees working on a three-bedroom apartment. And the reason why is because Airbnb represented the internet moving into your neighborhood. But the most important thing is we have a playbook. and the playbook is basically we share with cities a lot of data. The second thing is you need to build relationships with them. And so I actually spent time meeting many of the cities.

40:24And my approach, by the way, Scott, was different than a peer of mine named Travis Kalanick. We both came up in the 2000s, 10s. I used to joke that he was secretary of war and I was secretary of state. So we both chose different approaches. My instinct, by the way, was to fight just like him, because we were an upstart, people trying to regulate us. And I thought, when people don't like you, you got to fight back. But I hired a woman named Belinda Johnson. She ran legal and policy and eventually became my COO. And she told me something that changed my mind. She said, when people don't like you, you should meet with them.

40:57And I'm like, really? Why would I meet with them? They don't like me. I should avoid them or I should fight them. And she goes, no, because when you meet with them, you'll listen to them. You might change your view and you'll educate them. And actually, it's hard to hate somebody up close. And most people don't like you, it's because they don't know you. And I tried that and I started meeting people and I decided to go from the secretary of war, which is what Uber did at the time to secretary of state. And ultimately that diplomacy worked out much better. We didn't get everything we wanted. Occasionally we did find ourselves into some litigation with cities that we initiated, but very rarely.

41:29And the last thing we do is we connect them to our host. Because I think a lot of people think a lot of Airbnb people are these like landlords and real estate bros, you know, And I have to tell people, first of all, 55 % of hosts are women. The top three professions are healthcare workers, students, and school teachers. And there are also a lot of people in the creative class, right? Because really creative people tend to have unsteady income. They tend to host a lot. And so you just got to put a face to this business. And I think that's been a winning strategy for us. And at this point, like most cities, they couldn't do large events without us.

42:02I mean, the Paris Olympics could happen, but the business model wouldn't work without Airbnb because we're going to house as many as half a million people. You can't build hotels for a once in a 25 year event. And so the business model would change if you didn't have Airbnb. And you mentioned AI before. What are your thoughts on how AI might change Airbnb? And what have you done to try and incorporate that new technology? Well, let me preface this by saying one of my close friends is Sam Altman. He was one of the first people I met in Silicon Valley because he was in Y Combinator before me. And I reached out to him.

42:34He became a mentor to me. So I've been following this journey and I've had a bit of a front row seat. I have another close friend named James Mnika, who runs Google Research, which is kind of one of the two research labs other than DeepMind at Google. So I've had a pretty nice, like maybe front row seat to this movement. Based on everything I talked to when I talked to them and others, I would just start by saying, it feels like this is going to create a revolution. It's somewhere between the internet and the industrial revolution. Pretty soon, everyone's going to be able to interface with software and manipulate it the way anyone can just point at a camera.

43:09And that's going to be amazing, but it's going to come with some really, really big risk. And I think that we have this window of opportunity to, I don't want to say regulate AI, but like kind of figure out how we want to live with this technology. Because this is the least political this is ever going to be as a topic. It's going to get only more political. And anyone who will listen to me, I'll tell them, you have three to six months to figure out how you want to regulate this technology, what kind of principles you want these industries to live by. And if you miss that window, I think it's going to get really, really political and it's going to get very, very difficult.

43:42And we're going to want to do stuff because even the experts say this is probably more powerful than nuclear energy. And how are you leveraging it at Airbnb? What's your vision for it? There's basically three to five large models, right? So you have OpenAI, you have two at Google, you have Microsoft Research, Anthropic. So these are your big models. And OpenAI is GPT-4, the preeminent model. And we're not going to do that. So the base model is like a highway. It's like infrastructure. We're not in the business of building highways. We don't do infrastructure. But I think Airbnb, we can be one of the best companies in the world as a layer on top of those base models.

44:18So I think there's two layers. The first is tuning the model. So they're still tuning the model. And I think there's going to be a real art and science of tuning the models with your customer data. Scott, if you and I ask ChatGPT a question, we get the same answer, right? Like generally, because it doesn't discern between you and me. But let's say you ask, like, Scott, you ask, like, hey, who's a cool person I should meet tonight? Why would you and I get the same answer? We have different preferences. Well, the system needs to know you. It needs to understand your customer data. And you're never going to, like, you're only going to want to give your data to a company you trust.

44:50So we have to be a company that you trust with your private information. We know more about you than anyone, like a member, right? And then we can really tune the model to be deeply personal to you. And then the layer above that is the application interface. And what I think Google and OpenAI will both tell you is that most of these efforts are research and engineering driven efforts. They are not product led efforts. They're not design led efforts. And they're not marketing led efforts. Product design and marketing are probably our three biggest strengths, I would say. I mean, we're good at technology, but we're not better than Google.

45:24But design, product, marketing, we're pretty good at those things. So designing interfaces for AI, I think, will be really critical. So that's at the conceptual level. Specifically, I think three things immediately. One, this can revolutionize customer service. So the first thing is we can use AI to dramatically improve customer service. And if we can do that, that will not only lower the cost, but we could provide, imagine we could provide four seasons level service with any kind of issue anywhere in the world. That's the first thing. The second thing is just improving the core Airbnb experience.

46:00And I think at like a simple example, we matching, right? Google has a search ranking problem. We have a matching problem. So if you type in like hotel in Paris or you type in like whatever, the first page of Google results is the only page that matters. Who goes to the 14th page of Google? It's not a relevant page. On Airbnb, the 14th page might still be relevant, right? Like, who's to say the first home is the right home for you? And the more we get into people and connected people, you know, a dating site, not that we're going to be a dating site, is not a search rank problem. That's a matching problem.

46:33And so AI is really good with matching. AI is also really good at summary information, right? So there's a lot of long tail of information on Airbnb because there's no SKUs, right? So there's like a listing with 400 reviews, being able to summarize the review, being able to match you the right thing. So this is the second thing we're going to do. And the third is just productivity. Obviously, like, you know, a fraction of the engineers could do the same work with AI as our current team. Now, it doesn't mean we're going to only have a fraction of engineers, because the inverse of that is the same amount of engineers could do 10 times the work.

47:04And I think that we can probably increase productivity of every software engineer by 30 % this year. And so those are the immediate things we're going to do. I actually thought of you when I was on ChatGPT4 last night. I thought that Sam should speak to Brian about user interface. I was thinking that you build a thick layer on top of ChatGPT4, AI BNB. I go there. I like the, you already have my credit card information. I give you a data set that's my Amex card that you crawl and feed for the type of hotels, restaurants, travel patterns, economic weight class. all that stuff. And I type in, hey, AI, BNB, I'm going to the Euro finals in Istanbul with my 12 year old son.

47:48Create a three day itinerary for me. Hotels, flights, cars, the tickets, everything. And ask me a series of questions. Do you have tickets yet? Does your 12 year old, a bunch of interest questions. You need a joining room, same room. And then it just basically does my entire trip. Why wouldn't you build kind of a thick layer of more elegant UI on top of an AI, of a LLM? Like the answer to your question is, why wouldn't we? I think we will. I mean, I think that's a great concept. And absolutely. We were actually the first plugin partner, but we pulled out. So they have Expedia, Kayak, OpenTable.

48:28We were one of them. And actually, I talked to Sam and we did what we could to try to help them advise on how to build the plugins. But ultimately, I pulled the cord on the plugin because I didn't like the interface. I was stuck with ChatGPT's current interface, which I thought was very text-based. It's like you've got to type in a paragraph, it gives you a paragraph, and it gives you these widgets, and they're just not really connected. So what I told Sam is I said, I think the best thing Airbnb can do is bring GPT-4 into Airbnb and design a really robust conversational interface. Imagine if one day Airbnb, its app, was like the ultimate concierge.

49:04But it wasn't just words, because I think words are like low bandwidth, right? I give you words, you give me words back. You want a multimodal words, images. You want to imagine trying to browse YouTube just with words. That would make no sense. So I think the same thing is true with Airbnb. So this app is a concierge that's like this intelligent host that can get to know you. It learns your preferences. It asks you questions. That's a great idea to be able to feed it additional data like credit card data. It can scour it. Now it develops a taste profile. Now it knows who you are. Then it can ask you other questions.

49:40Like, you know, Johnny Ive works on my team now. And one of the things he said is, why don't any internet companies ask you who you are and what you want? Right? Everyone basically uses data regressions to look at what you clicked on to assume your preferences. Well, let's just ask you, like, what are your life goals? Who are you? What do you want in your life? And then based on that, and somebody might say, I'm single and I'm kind of lonely and I'm looking to meet somebody. That's really helpful for us to know. versus like, I'm feeling like on a rut in my career. Like, so there's a lot of things we can do.

50:09And then based on that, we can start to package really interesting things for you. So that's exactly where I think this could go. And I think this was probably not possible without AI. I mean, I kind of tried to build this a few years ago and I think the technology just wasn't there. I think with AI, this is totally possible now. So you gave me my next two questions, Brian. Who are you and what are your life goals? Oh God. I'll be more specific. I was going to ask this question. I know you, but I don't know you well, but based on what I see and based on having been through on a much off-off-Broadway version of what you're going through, I don't get the sense you have much in your life outside of work.

50:51And I'm going to ask you, what do you have outside of your life and work? Where is it deficient? And how do you want your life to change over the next 10 years? That's the hardest question you've asked me. Business questions I find really easy. Personal questions are always hard. When I was with you in Miami a year ago, so pardon if I've kind of said this, but I said something similar. When I was in college, I had an image of my life. And my image was I have this great career. I'd have a family. I'd be really rooted in a specific community. And professionally, I feel like a 61 year old and a 41 year old's body.

51:30You know, I probably actually am. I mean, my peers, like we're a Fortune 100 company and like my actual competitors running similar size companies are like 60 years old or 50 years old. So in that way, I don't feel like I'm 41. I feel like I'm much older. But personally, in some weird way, I feel like a 25 year old and a 41 year old's body in the sense that I felt like a lot of my personal life, And I made this choice. I made this choice. Don't feel bad for me. But I kind of put it on hold. You know, I thought I have a family by now. I'm still single. I was in two long-term relationships. There were, I was, I really struggled to balance relationship with work.

52:03And Airbnb was my first love and everything became subordinate. And I became, I was the opposite of the founder that was distracted spending money. I became kind of like a monk, especially during the pandemic. I didn't leave my house. And when Airbnb was on the brink, I said, okay, my life's simple. It's 18 hours a day of work and then I sleep. I don't do anything else. I didn't even exercise. I did that for a year. I did it for like 400 days or something like that. It was more than a year. The good part was Airbnb went from like$18 billion to like$100 billion at the time. And it was a really successful company.

52:34The bad part, as I remember, I was almost turning 40. And I just felt like I had to create a 40th birthday party. And I had to make a list of who to invite. And I realized, oh my God, I have a lot of friends, but I haven't talked to these people in a long time. And so my invite list became along people I hadn't talked to. Basically, the short version was really lonely. I felt extremely lonely. And loneliness has kind of been a theme that has come and gone in my life. I've gone from really connected to really isolated. And so I have two goals in my life right now, professional and personal. The professional goal is like Airbnb is like, you know, successful.

53:12We did three and a half billion free cash flow last year. So we're like a unicorn by profit. it. So we've kind of done the first phase. So professionally, I want to do one more thing, which is reinvent the company, have a next act. Walt Disney had Disneyland, Steve Jobs had the iPod, the iPhone, Jeff Bezos had AWS. I don't want to be a one trick pony. I don't want my biggest idea to happen when we were 26. But my other goal is I want to actually have a personal life. And about a year ago, I was consulting with some friends. Actually, one of my mentors is President Obama. That's a whole other story, how I got to know him.

53:46But I told him I was feeling pretty lonely and I felt like I needed a partner. And he said, you don't need a partner right now, you need friends. And it was a really good advice. And so I said, before I try to find somebody, I'm going to just make sure I rekindle my old relationships. So over the last year, I've worked really hard. I've rekindled relationships with my college friends, high school friends, a lot of other people. And I feel at least more connected to my friend life. And then hopefully, eventually, I find a co-founder to get a family. I look at you. You're a handsome guy. You look jacked, by the way.

54:17You've clearly found time to work out. I do that now, finally. And you're 41. You're, in this world for a variety of reasons, very, very eligible. So you not having a partner, even with your work schedule, means there's something fucked up about you, to be blunt. And what is it? Have you identified what gets in the way of you finding a partner? Because you're literally the most eligible person I know. You're a nice man. You're soulful. You're very successful. My sense is you're close to your parents. You sort of check all these boxes. And even with all the stresses on a relationship your professional life brings to a partnership, there's a lot of people out there that would be willing to try and navigate that with you.

55:05So what's the problem, Brian? Let me be your mother. What's the problem here? A lot of people that aren't in healthy relationships are not in healthy relationships because they have addictions. You know, there are some really bad addictions, like you can be addicted to drugs or gambling or sex or food or whatever. I probably have the most healthy addiction, which is an addiction to work. But for whatever reason, work became my coping mechanism, you know, for everything in life. And I think that, you know, that has been amazing. It's maybe been the pretext for why you said everything you just said.

55:39I mean, if I didn't work and I didn't start to me, you wouldn't have said all that. You know, you would have said I'm a nice guy, but you wouldn't have said all that. But your strengths are sometimes your weaknesses. What makes me in some ways desirable is also why I've not been with people as I've been so focused on Airbnb. And I think for me, I've had that challenge of just trying to learn to not step away, but have a little more distance and a little bit more balance. I mean, like it's hard to meet people when you don't leave your house. And I didn't do that for very long. And so now I'm trying to get out more.

56:09So that's the answer. The answer is I was just working all the time. Where do you find strength and comfort and rejuvenation? I mean, do you meditate? I know you're working out. Like where do you find a sense of balance? I kind of have like maybe four things, four or five things. So first is the exercise. So I, I was, you know, my dad was like a huge like hockey fan growing up and he got me into hockey when I was five. And I actually went to a military school when I was 13, like a sports academy. Cause I was the smallest kid in my school. I hit puberty late. I was a hundred pounds as a freshman.

56:43I was 125 pounds entering my senior high school. I was a pretty decent hockey player, but I was too small. My senior year, I break my leg, I start doing physical therapy and I decided I didn't want to be skinny my whole life. So I got into bodybuilding and I, I had a bet with a friend that I would be one of the most muscular teenagers in the country in two years. And I didn't, but I actually ended up competing in bodybuilding and powerlifting and that became an outlet for me. And it's a very efficient way to obviously stay healthy. So that's kind of one track. The second is art and design, which is what makes me kind of weird.

57:15I'm the only, the only people who went to like a military high school and then like an arts bodybuilder from RISD. Yeah. There aren't that many bodybuilders at RISD. There weren't a lot of guys walk around RISD with a dozen hard boiled eggs in a plastic container, except for me. And I was, and I was the egg white guy. And so the other one is drawing. I just love anything creative and drawing. And I, and that's also what makes me a little different in tech is I'm not a software engineer. I, I did HTML growing up, but I'm a designer and designers don't usually run tech companies. Um, the third thing is just connections at friends.

57:43I mean, I think this It's maybe cliche, but like the most important thing to rejuvenate me are other social connections. I've talked about loneliness. I think the number one, I've listened to a lot of your podcast and different things about the crisis of men. And I think 50 % of their crisis is loneliness. I think the other part is they don't have the sense of worth and identity in society. But like, you know, the problem with lonely people is they tend to push other people away. And when you're lonely, your sense of vigilance goes up and you like are more skeptical of other people. And you like, it just, it creates this really pernicious downward cycle.

58:13And so really spending time with other people is critical. And I think the last one is, yeah, like maybe traveling and then just, I don't really meditate, but so those are probably the things I do. And given you're only 41, it's hard for me to imagine you're going to run Airbnb when you're 61. I just think at some point you're going to decide you're going to want to do something. You're going to want to explore another dimension in your life, whether it's teaching or nonprofit or public service. Have you given any thought to that? I definitely think I'll do this for at least one to two more decades, to be honest.

58:47I'm 41. If you told me when I was 26 at a company, I probably would have told you I can do this until I'm 40. I'll just say I have more energy today than I did when I was 26. I am more excited to come to work every day than I was at 26. I feel like a beginner all over again, maybe especially with AI and all this new stuff. So, you know, my two idols that I looked up to were Walt Disney and Steve Jobs, partly because they're creative people that ran basically tech companies. And Walt Disney died at the age of 65. And when he died, he was still running Disney. He was actually building what we now know as Disney World.

59:25And Steve died at the peak and he was 56. So I remember Bill Gates once telling me you can't run a tech company over, I think, the age of 60. He said something like that. I don't know where that came from. So maybe there's some magic number where like at the age of 60, you just get a little bit too not relevant. And we don't know because Bezos retired, you know, basically in his mid 50s. Steve died at 56. So I don't know where the peak of a founder is, but I definitely think 10 to 15 more years, I'll definitely be at the top of my game. And then there might be an age, you're right, where like maybe I'm just too out of touch with young people want.

59:57We'll have to see. Maybe it depends on how curious I am. You know, I don't want to leave Airbnb. I could imagine one day starting another company. I mean, shareholders don't really want a public company CEO to have another thing on the side. But I definitely have a lot of capacity in me. I think whatever I do, whether it's with Airbnb or not, I think part of my purpose is to try to help bring people together around the world. Remind them that people are fun and really good. The other is not so other. We're mostly the same. We're genetically 99 % the same. And I think that's one big cause I have to help bring people together.

1:00:30The other thing I care about, Scott, is like design and creativity. Like how many Fortune 500 companies are run by creative people? How many Fortune 500 companies have a creative person on the executive team? I mean, even Apple doesn't have a creative person on the executive team. So you talked a little bit about young men, and then this will be the last question I'll let you go. You're advising a young man. Someone looks to you and says, okay, I'm struggling with this notion of masculinity and what it means to be a man. What advice would you give to a young man on masculinity? I think to be a man is to be responsible.

1:01:05Not to say that women aren't responsible, but like there's something about being a man, which is about having responsibility, having accountability, being mature, being a grown up, being curious, not thinking of the world as something that's being taken away from you. Because because whether you believe it or not, like, well, let's say it was. What are you going to do about it? So I ultimately think like being a man is to be a person that is in service to others and just ask yourself like how can you be in service and just ask yourself like how you can be a value to others. Brian Chesky is a co-founder and CEO of Airbnb.

1:01:45be. Since launching in 2007, the firm has grown to a community of over 4 million hosts who have welcomed more than 1.4 billion guests across 220 countries and regions. Brian joins us from New York City. Brian, I'm always so happy to see you and I'm glad you continue to prosper. Oh, thank you so much, Scott. I love talking to you.

1:02:13Algebra of happiness. So we had a thoughtful question from a man in his 30s or a young man in his 30s who has three kids. And I think to myself, Jesus, I didn't have my first kid until I was 42. I had some economic security. I think parents in their 30s with three kids, I mean, you just got to tip your hat to them. It's such a lot of, you know, it's so much responsibility, juggling work in a competitive economy and also have three kids who are incredibly demanding. It's tough on everyone. And my message, and I've said this out there, is that the least happy years in your adult life are generally from 25 to 45 because of the stress of professional ambition, coupled with aging parents, coupled with kids.

1:02:51So recognize if you're stressful, just keep on keeping on. And typically, usually, you get happier in your 40s and 50s, which isn't to say you won't be happy, but recognize that's a stressful time in life. So that's not what I wanted to talk about. I used to think my role as a dad was first and foremost to kind of be an authority figure and a mentor and a guide and a disciplinarian and to be kind of the heavy, the dad. And I've had so many friends, and I'm so exposed to people generally in the news where kids are struggling because of social media mostly. and people who put money ahead of the well-being of the commonwealth and can create distance from the type of between themselves and the massive amount of depression that they have fomented at the hands, mostly social media and smartphones.

1:03:36And I've decided that my job, especially on weekends, my job as dad is to, one, get my kids off their phones and most importantly out of the house. And I think this is true, and my lesson here is that a young person, Don't be in your house. Get out of your house. Sleep there and that is it. Say yes to anything that involves other people. I do think we are sequestering from each other and nothing really wonderful is going to happen to you. I mean, really wonderful, really wonderful, an amazing promotion. You're going to meet someone that you're just super into. You're going to have one of those ridiculously joyous experiences on a trip or an event with somebody or friends.

1:04:18all of it involves one thing, human contact and the serendipity of human contact. Nothing that surprising happens on a Zoom call. You kind of have a sense for what's going to happen in episode five, season two of Succession. You have a pretty good idea. The most surprising, wonderful things, the real upside in life involves one thing. It is outside of your home. It involves other people. And what's my job now on weekends? To get my kids out of the house, malls, movies, putt shack, whatever it might be. And your job as a young person is to have the discipline to get out of the house. Don't work out at home with an app on your phone.

1:04:59Go to Equinox or take a run or invite someone out for a run. Don't do Nespresso at home. Go to a coffee place. Maybe even initiate a conversation with someone in line or next to you. Go to a church group. Go to a riding club. Take a course. Just get out of the fucking house. Enjoy each other's companies. Spread germs, but the good kind. Be in the presence of other people. Get out of your house. Get off of your phone. This episode was produced by Caroline Shager and Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Box Media Podcast Network.

1:05:37We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice as read by George Hahn. and on Monday with our weekly markets show.

1:05:51Okay, are we done? Are we done? I took an edible last night. Daddy's a little slow. Daddy's a little slow. He's not, I'm not my usual charming, charismatic self. I'm not the life of the party. I'm not an Easter parade right now. It'll work out. Although it's beautiful here in Seattle. I think Seattle is such an overrated city. It's like a giant Westin Hotel exploded. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier.

1:06:40CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.