Airbnb’s Next Phase — with Brian Chesky

Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, joins Scott to discuss a slew of updates, including how the firm is building a community, leveraging AI, and expanding its geographical reach. We also learn about Brian’s experiences with loneliness, and how work has impacted his relationships. Follow Brian on Twitter, @bchesky. (Disclosure: Scott invests in Airbnb). Scott opens by discussing why we need more third places. Algebra of Happiness: get out of the house. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:18Scott Galloway?

  Episode 249. 249 is the country code assigned to Sudan. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed, and businessman Frank McNamara forgot his wallet while dining out at a New York City restaurant, which is what inspired the first credit card diners club. It was made out of cardboard. I find that women are fine with just three inches, as long as it's MasterCard, Visa, or American Express. Go, go, go!

• 1:54Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 249th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. We discussed with Brian Airbnb's growth initiatives, as well as how the company is leveraging AI. We also get personal with Brian and hear about his own experience with loneliness and how work has impacted his relationship. Okay, what's happening? First off, let's bring this whole thing back to, let me think, what's our favorite topic? Me!

• 2:18Speaker 02

  The dog!

• 2:20Scott Galloway?

  I'm in Seattle, I'm at the Westin. That's a brand that to me has kind of gone nowhere. The Westin had this fascinating, I thought, really effective marketing campaign. I think it was in the 90s. And that is they did, it all starts with the consumer. They storyboarded out the consumer experience, which I think it sounds lame, but it's actually really helpful to just go moment by moment and story out how a customer interacts or a consumer interacts with your brand and your franchise. And what they found is generally speaking, the most profitable consumer was a business traveler. And then, so they mapped out, what do business travelers do? Business travelers essentially check in, maybe order some room service, maybe watch a movie on their TV, maybe do some email, and then they go to sleep. And that's about it. They don't check out the restaurant, they don't go to the gym, they're essentially just

• 3:05Scott Galloway?

  there to kind of sleep, get in, get out. And so, alright, make sure there's good wifi. And then what they decided was the real opportunity was in the bed. And they created something called the heavenly bed. And instead of spending, I think on average hotels in that kind of weight class are spending $200 or $300 on linens and pillows, they started spending $800. And they brought in feta linens and Egyptian, you know, 4 million thread count linens and hypoallergenic pillows, and they called it the heavenly bed. And it was genius. And more than that, the ad campaign was just so hot. It had these kind of black and white sepia pre-Instagram cool filters and tones, and

• 3:45Scott Galloway?

  they'd have just this ridiculously hot guy reading Proust or whatever his name is, The Philosopher. And he was so hot, he just couldn't control himself from falling asleep like a cute little puppy. And then it would say, "The bed will not let you," you know, "The heavenly bed, you know, before you hit page two," or whatever. Or they'd have this ridiculously hot woman. By the way, by the way, the biggest transition from a marketing messaging standpoint in the world of advertising has gone from sex, it used to be that sex sells, to rage. I say bring back sex. I say bring back sex. Anyways, I'm here speaking to a large online travel agency, one guest, excited to be here. I haven't been here in 10 or 15 years. Anyways, what else is going on? Covid nineteen is no longer considered a global health emergency.

• 4:30Scott Galloway?

  That's good news. I think it's sort of being handled like we handle kind of the flu, although I still know people getting it. Texas Governor Greg Abbott continues to display just a unique breed of head up his ass when it comes to gun reform laws. And the US is teetering towards an economic catastrophe due to our debt ceiling. But let's focus on some other news today. We've been thinking a lot about how AI is going to disrupt our labor force, for better or for worse. And right now, the general kind of theme is that AI is going to basically ruin humanity. That AI in an instant will decide that it doesn't need us, or doesn't like us, or wants to mix us up in some sort of soupy broth, some soupy human broth that generative AI finds tasty. We don't buy that. And granted, we know a lot less than a lot of the people talking about this.

• 5:15Scott Galloway?

  In sum, we think that large language models, or LLMs, as we call them, will end up creating more jobs than they destroy. And the data supports that. PWC estimates that by 2030, AI could contribute up to $16 trillion to the global economy. And that $7 trillion is expected to come from increased productivity. For context, the US GDP is $23 trillion. The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2025, 97 million new jobs will be created across 26 countries compared to the estimated 85 million jobs that will be displaced. So in other words, they think it will be accretive to the labor force. And this is typically what happens with any new technology. And that is, in the short term, it's much easier to catastrophize, right? And that is, we're better at seeing risks than we are opportunities.

• 6:00Scott Galloway?

  And that makes a lot of sense, because for the majority of history, the majority of humans didn't have a ton of opportunity. What they had was a lot of risk around them, whether it was being eaten by a lion, or killed by an unfriendly foe, or disease, or drinking that water could give you something terrible. And his point is, we have an easier time going to catastrophe and going to the downside of risks than recognizing opportunity. And as a result, the media wants to tap into that willingness to catastrophize, and with any new technology, immediately begins envisioning all the bad things that are going to come from it. And what kind of job destruction will take place? So anyways, why are we talking about this? The former CEO of Tinder, Renata Nyborg, raised a pre-seed funding round for her AI-driven relationship coaching app.

• 6:45Scott Galloway?

  The amount was not disclosed, but its backers include Megan Jones Bell, the clinical director of mental health at Google, Jim Lanzon, the CEO of Yahoo, and also former CEO of Tinder, and Joe Zadeh, Z-A-D-E-H, Zadeh, isn't he on Euphoria? Wait, that's Undaya. Anyways, the former VP of Product at Airbnb, the AI-driven app, Amori, A-M-O-R-A-I, Amori targets young adults from 18 to 30 years of age and will offer personalized coaching exercises exclusively on iOS to leverage Apple's native health features and privacy standards. The pre-seed announcement goes on to say that the app is tackling the problem of loneliness, specifically amongst Gen Z. In an interview with Recode's Peter Kafka, Nyborg explained that from her own market

• 7:28Scott Galloway?

  research, young men felt more comfortable using some of the features because they knew it was AI, thus allowing them to ask vulnerable questions. She said that the point is to give users advice and ideas for how to do things in the real world. So this has us thinking about a few things. I don't, I don't know how, I find this a little bit uncomfortable. I find that technology combined with COVID-19 has done something incredibly damaging to humans, arguably the most damaging thing, and that is we're sequestering from each other. And I don't care if you're an orca, a dog, or an eight-year-old, we need to be in the presence of other human beings. And that is the key. Literally, what is the worst punishment in the world? Is it to incarcerate somebody? Yes. What's even worse than that? To incarcerate them and then to isolate them, solitary confinement.

• 8:12Scott Galloway?

  People go crazy when they're not, they don't have other human contact. And it's especially important for young people. And I like what Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said about this, and that is, we have friends, what we're not experiencing is friendship. And I just think about the amount of time that I spent just in the company of friends doing nothing when I was a kid. And what we have now is the number of kids who see their... Friends every day has been cut in half in the last 10 years and that has some benefit. There's much less drunk driving, there's much less unwanted teen pregnancy. But there's even articles in Conservative magazine saying we need more teen sex and more, more interaction because the kids are not all right, that the downside of all of

• 8:51Scott Galloway?

  this isolation and segregation and sequestering is having an enormous negative impact on the nation and the mental health of our kids. So you are no match for the billions of dollars technology deploys to figuring out dark psychological techniques for keeping you glued to your fucking phone. I can't resist it and I know the dangers of it and I'd realize, I just get exhausted. I'm like, why am I, why am I on these platforms? Why am I staring at my phone all the time? And I'm in this business and realize what mendacious fucks these people are. And at the same time, how do you try and arm a 12-year-old to figure this out? And I want to acknowledge, some of it is good. Studies show that teens who get between one and five hours a week of screen time are happier than those who get none at all.

• 9:36Scott Galloway?

  However, the least happiest are the ones who use screens for 20 hours or more, right? There is sort of a, there is a zone, if you will. Online dating is evidenced by the fact that the market doubled in size between 2018 and 2021, is where people are now meeting. But it's not created equal. A Pew survey found that 64% or approximately 2/3 of men say they have felt insecure because of the lack of messages they've received, while 4 in 10 women say the same. On the flip side, 54% of women say they have felt overwhelmed by the number of messages they received on dating sites in the past year, while just 25% of men say the same. So what do we have here? It's a dynamic where a few things are kind of on supercharge here, or have a chaser, a turbo effect.

• 10:18Scott Galloway?

  The first is, bottom line is, women are choosier than men. And when you have an online platform, you get to apply all of those filters and there's no opportunity for a second impression. If you speak to most couples, most of them will acknowledge that one person was more interested in the other in the beginning. And with online, there's no second shot, there's no chance to let vibe, humor, body language, pheromones, all that stuff come into play. It's just a series of very base criteria and it ends up... That the majority of the women want a small, all want the same small number of men and there's sort of this Porsche polygamy or this mating inequality where a small number of men online get the majority, the majority of the interest. The stat I heard that absolutely blew me away was 50 women on Tinder, 46 women show

• 11:02Scott Galloway?

  almost all of their attention to just four men, leaving 46 men vying for the attention of just four women. So you have this kind of mismatch where I think online dating is not, is not helping. Is there some good that comes out of it? Absolutely. You'll meet a lot of people, especially in today's age, that met online. It's efficient for people that don't have a lot of time, but there's a real downside. Now, what's the solution? The solution is, in my view, one, we need to level up young people, specifically young men. I don't believe you should have social programs just targeted on men. Why? It'd become too politicized and too much of a hot potato. So what you do is you reverse a generation of economic policies that have transferred wealth from young people to old people. Someone under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy than they were 40 years ago.

• 11:43Scott Galloway?

  Someone over the age of 70 is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. The biggest tax deductions, of course, favor old people who own homes and make their money from investments, not young people who rent or make their money from current income. So let's restore some economic vitality, young people, more vocational programs. We need to figure out a way to massively invest in third places. Parks, public institutions, the YMCA, the Boy Scouts, whatever it might be, after-school programs, athletic leagues. Give people the opportunity to randomly meet each other in a safe place and develop the skills where they can express interest in friendship, where they can express an interest

• 12:24Scott Galloway?

  in developing mentors, or they can express an interest potentially in a romantic relationship while making the other person feel safe, or being in a safe place or a safe context, or doing something in the agency of others, donating at a nonprofit or spending time at a nonprofit. We need more of that. There's just not enough of it. We're just not bumping off of each other. We don't trust each other enough. And what am I scared of? A world where just as right now Netflix and Instagram are becoming sort of a good plan B for always staying at home and never going out and actually smelling and touching and feeling others, you get out of practice. And we just don't interact. We're becoming a nation of of recluses. And it's, I think it's really unhealthy, especially for young people.

• 13:07Scott Galloway?

  So what do we do in an AI age where you get fed up? And you can literally invent a digital version of Scarlett Johansson. And this is a movie called Her, which is eerie how much it's becoming true. What happens when you have an AI-driven bot that can not only train you, not only do a great job working you out, but can also maybe start to play, take the place of a friend? Start to take the place of a lover, right? I'm lonely. I don't want to go out and deal with the awkwardness of a first date or trying to approach a strange woman in a, in a public setting. Or I don't want to go on this date. I find the majority of guys I go out on a date with are just like, quite frankly, not up to snuff. So I'll sit at home, watch Netflix, go online, hang out with my, my pets,

• 13:50Scott Galloway?

  and maybe have a virtual friend, maybe have a virtual romantic partner. And then I totally leave the community. I totally become sequestered. I think probably the biggest opportunity is with seniors who are lonely and quite frankly, may not establish, may not just have the opportunities to establish new relationships. I think that's a really interesting application. What I'm afraid of is on the front end, that people give up. What's the key to having a great partner, great friends, great romantic opportunities? Rejection. Or specifically, your ability to endure rejection. And I don't care how sophisticated the AI is. The magic and mystery of relationships and people is that they are unpredictable. There's not an algorithm there. You're never going to laugh out loud uproariously, I don't think,

• 14:35Scott Galloway?

  when your AI model or your AI, whatever you would want to call it, rendering or, or digital friend makes a joke. I just don't think that's going to happen. And I don't, I don't, this makes me very uncomfortable that we're going to have a series of people that are totally isolated with each other, which will reduce empathy, which will reduce social skills, which will reduce the ability to negotiate, to come to some sort of agreement around, all right, recognizing that people deserve a certain amount of grace, that at some point you have to realize, maybe it's not about you, and just be supportive of people. I think we're just going to lose all of these fucking skills and we're going to raise an entire generation of, of a world of individuals, right? We always, already have this hyper individualism where we respect people

• 15:20Scott Galloway?

  or individualism over the institution and think that everyone has rights to show up to the school board and yell or to shitpost government, not recognizing or... Or pass legislation that benefits them and nobody else. We don't feel this connective tissue towards institutions. What happens when everything is just a digital version of relationships? What happens then? Anyways, we need to level up young people. We need to create a cohort that is more social, has more respect for each other, more connective tissue. We need to have more economically and emotionally viable men. And we need a society that values, that makes us happier. And what is the key to happiness across every demography, culture, and income level? Relationships.

• 16:01Scott Galloway?

  The opportunity to create a context where people connect with one another in person. In person is the shooting match. That's the point of a society, that we can take care of each other. But before we take care of each other, we've got to actually meet in person. We'll be right back for our conversation with Brian Chesky.

• 16:27Scott Galloway?

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• 17:12Scott Galloway?

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• 17:30Scott Galloway?

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• 18:50Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb.

• 18:58Scott Galloway?

  Brian, where does this podcast find you?

• 19:00Speaker 04

  I'm in New York City right now, actually.

• 19:02Scott Galloway?

  So to a certain extent, you're sort of this leading economic indicator of not only what's going on in the travel industry, but what's going on in the economy. Do you have any observations around what's going on in your sector and how that extrapolates to what's going on in the broader economy?

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's a good question, Scott. I mean, I've been surprised over the last couple of years how strong travel's been. It's been really surprising. I mean, we've had like so much discussion around, you know, the economy slowing down, travel is discretionary, it's a large discretionary purchase. Most of our business is leisure. You imagine most leisure purchases. Would be the kind of things you'd start cutting down. And yet it's been incredibly resilient. Obviously, Q4 was our record kind of earnings and we weren't really, you know, we wouldn't have forecasted that like say a year earlier. That being said, without being overly exuberant, I do anticipate the economy is going to be in for a little bit slower year because, you know, you just look at like rising fuel cost. It's getting more expensive to fly.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  My sister who lives in New York said she was trying to get a flight to Boston. It was like $600. You know, I do definitely seeing a lot of broader economic indicators that suggest that things are probably going to be slowing a little bit.

• 20:12Scott Galloway?

  And what are some of the micro trends? Is it a lot? I remember you talking a lot about how there was a greater percentage of people booking longer than 30 days. What are the, some of the trends around as it relates to the types of vacations people are taking or the impact on remote work?

• 20:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, the first thing Scott is before the pandemic, we were mostly like a short term stay business around like 14% of nights or something like that was longer than 30 days. Now it's around a fifth of our business nearly is longer than 30 days. And actually, here's the funny thing, nearly half our business is longer than a week, which is basically, here's the thing to think about that. That's like outside hotels, right? Very few people stay in hotel for longer than a week. That's kind of the cutoff. So that is probably the biggest change from short term to short and longer term. The second thing is that we saw a major population redistribution. Before the pandemic, everyone was going to New York, everyone was going to Las Vegas, everyone's going to LA, everyone's going to Rome, everyone's going to Paris. They're still going to those places. But what I think the pandemic did is when they couldn't fly, they couldn't cross borders

• 21:12Speaker 04

  and all these city centers were shut down, people were forced to get in the car and drive a tank of gas somewhere else. And so they were kind of introduced to these small markets like, I don't know, Hudson or like Sonoma or Petaluma. And so you started having people getting more habituated. They started going to national parks, you know, they started going to state parks. Now, a little of these two trends have reverted just a little bit from the pandemic peak, right? You 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. The people, 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.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  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. So 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.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  And the problem has been borders have been basically kind of closed or constrained. And 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 grew 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, the internet, 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. And you're going to have these corridors. China to Japan, China to Korea, Korea to Japan, you know, China to Southeast Asia.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  So a lot of inter-Asia travel will be really big. Those are, I mean, I could keep going, but those are just some of the trends.

• 23:29Scott Galloway?

  And where do you, when you look at 20, 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 implied in that multiple is a certain level of growth expectation. Where does that growth come from?

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I'll give you like kind of short term, long term. So 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, you know, we did nearly $65 billion in bookings. So that meant that like, you know, 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 can 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.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  Just 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 like what I just call like 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, but 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.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  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, you know, 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, this is by far the biggest, is, and this is stuff you and I have talked about, it's just expanding what Airbnb is, right? Imagine 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.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  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. Everyone 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.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  They're complaining about prices, they're complaining about cleaning fees, they're complaining about chores, they'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.

• 27:03Scott Galloway?

  What 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, you know, this is, you know, this is, I don't want to call it velvet rope, but you know, Airbnb Plus, thoughts?

• 27:34Speaker 04

  I think it's a great idea. I mean, you know, you know, I'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, 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 it 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. 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 Airbnb person, it means something.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  And they're like you, and you feel like they're trusted. And you know, first of all, that they're a real person with a verified identity, and they have a reputation in the platform. They 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 Airbnb 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. But I think this is a great opportunity. And also, we've talked this, I want to move Airbnb beyond a transaction.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  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, you know, like every connection to community can't be a transaction, right? Then it's 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.

• 29:19Scott Galloway?

  Would you ever go vertical? Would you ever actually own assets? I think of, you know, Lyft. My sense is Lyft is going away. It's a subscale number two. It gets cheap enough. Would you ever have road B and B and acquire the company? And 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.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I totally think so. I mean, whether or not like we want to start with like 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, to 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 Or 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 eight million units or listings on Airbnb.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  If you imagine each unit is got is a value of about half a million dollars per unit, which is a decent proxy. That's four trillion dollars of representative real estate. So it's just hard with any amount of money to really make a dent in that. Like, we could do, we can, we can have assets as brand statements. Like, we could have a space that's like 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 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.

• 31:07Scott Galloway?

  Talk about the product you're launching.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  So the first thing, Scott, is I kind of just came to the conclusion that we have tons of new ideas. And, 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. And then, of course, we lose 80% of our business in eight weeks. People said we're gonna like go out of business. Is this the end of Airbnb?

• 31:51Speaker 04

  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 gonna 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. We looked 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.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  We created a map of all 150 product screens and app screens, every user policy and every customer service touch point. 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. There'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.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  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. It'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'd 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? So 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,

• 34:02Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:16Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 34:21Scott Galloway?

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• 35:06Scott Galloway?

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• 35:28Speaker 02

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• 35:58Scott Galloway?

  I read a lot of articles about different communities pushing back or upset about the reduction in housing stock and the impact it has on rentals. And then I hear about you coming to some sort of accommodation with the local government. And 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.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  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? You 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 like 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. And we thought, this is a great model.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  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 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, what's our, let's say, what would you say our relationship with the city in New York is? Well, it depends. You're talking with the city council, or the mayor's office? Are you talking about the average voters? Are you talking about people in which boroughs? Are you talking about when they're traveling? Or, you know, 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

• 38:09Speaker 04

  exist? And it wasn't clear. You know, 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. We now are one of the largest collectors or 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.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  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 or yeah. So every city has slightly different versions, but if you register and you collect taxes, this is what's happened in 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's redistributed. And it's 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 like going to, I don't know, pick the like small town, there often aren't even hotels. So there's Airbnb or you're not going there.

• 39:35Scott Galloway?

  Do you have lobbyists in Washington? Do 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?

• 39:54Speaker 04

  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 LaHaine and before him, a really good team before him. So 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're 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.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  And so I actually spent time meeting many of the cities. And 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 were trying to regulate us and I thought when people don't like you, you gotta 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." And 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

• 41:22Speaker 04

  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. And the last thing we did was we connected 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 schoolteachers. And there are also a lot of people in the creative class, right?

• 42:06Speaker 04

  Because really creative people tend to have unsteady income, they tend to host a lot. And so you've 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. I 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.

• 42:34Scott Galloway?

  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?

• 42:43Speaker 04

  Well, let me preface 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 my community before me. And I reached out to him. He 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 Mneeka 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 talk to and I talk 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.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  And 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 I've been, 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. And we're going to want to do stuff because even the experts say this is probably more powerful than nuclear energy.

• 44:07Scott Galloway?

  And how are you leveraging it at Airbnb? What's your vision for it?

• 44:10Speaker 04

  There's basically three to five large models, right? So you have OpenAI, you have two at Google, you have Microsoft Research, Anthropic, right? So these are like your big models and OpenAI is GPT-4 is 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. So 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.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  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 gonna like, you're only gonna want to give your data to a company you trust. So 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, the interface. And what I think Google and OpenAI will both tell you is there, 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.

• 45:35Speaker 04

  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. But 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.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  And I think at like a simple example, we'll be 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 connecting 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. And 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?

• 47:00Speaker 04

  So there's like a listing with 400 reviews, be able to summarize the review, be 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. And I think that we can probably increase productivity of every software engineer by 30% this year. And so those are, those are the immediate things we're going to do.

• 47:32Scott Galloway?

  I actually thought of you when I was on ChatGPT-4 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 ChatGPT-4, 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. Create a three-day itinerary for me, you know, hotels, flights, cars, the tickets, everything. It asks me a series of questions. Do you have tickets yet?

• 48:15Scott Galloway?

  Does your 12-year-old, you know, a bunch of interest, you know, questions, you know, adjoining room, same room. And then it just basically does my entire, entire trip. Why wouldn't you build kind of a thick layer of more elegant UI on top of a, of an AI, of a LLM?

• 48:32Speaker 04

  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, they have Expedia, Kayak, OpenTable. We were one of them. And actually, I talked to Sam and we were, we did, 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 I was 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.

• 49:17Speaker 04

  Imagine if one day Airbnb, its app was like the ultimate concierge. But 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 like, imagine trying to like 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 like intelligent host that can get to know you. It learns your preferences. It asks you questions. Maybe 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 like, you know, Johnny Ive works on my team now.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  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 regression 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. And then based on that, we could 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.

• 50:43Scott Galloway?

  So you gave me my next two questions, Brian. Who are you and what are your life goals?

• 50:49Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 50:50Scott Galloway?

  I'll be more specific. I was gonna ask this question. I don't, I know you, but I don't know you well. But based on what I see and based on, you know, having been through on a much, you know, 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. And I'm gonna ask you, like, what do you have outside of your life and work? Where is it deficient? And what, you know, how do you want your life to change over the next 10 years?

• 51:21Speaker 04

  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 in a 41 year old's body. You know, I probably actually am. I mean, my peers, like, were a Fortune 500 company and like, my actual competitors running similar sized 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

• 52:02Speaker 04

  like a 25 year old in 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. I 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. And 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, I'm, okay, my life's simple. It's 18 hours a day at 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.

• 52:45Speaker 04

  The good part was Airbnb went from like eighteen billion dollars, like a hundred billion dollars at the time, and it was a really successful company. The bad part, as I remember, I was almost turning forty, and I just felt like I had to, I had to create a for forty 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 like, I haven't talked to these people in a long time. And so my invite list became a long people I hadn't talked to. I, 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.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  The professional goal is like Airbnb is like, you know, successful, we did three and a half billion free cash flow last year, so we're like a unicorn by profit. 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 have been when we were twenty-six. 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 nother story how I got to know him, but I told him like 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.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  And it was 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 like 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.

• 54:31Scott Galloway?

  I look at you, you're a handsome guy, you look jacked, by the way, you've clearly found time to work out.

• 54:36Speaker 04

  I do that now, finally.

• 54:38Scott Galloway?

  And you're forty-one, 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 like, 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.

• 55:23Scott Galloway?

  So what's the problem, Brian? Let me be your mother. What's the problem here?

• 55:27Speaker 04

  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. I mean, if I didn't work, and it started 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 is I've been so focused on Airbnb.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  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 and 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. So that's the answer. The answer is, I was just working all the time.

• 56:31Scott Galloway?

  Where do you find strength and comfort and rejuvenation? I mean, do you meditate? I know you're working out. Like, where do you, where do you find a sense of balance?

• 56:40Speaker 04

  I kind of have like, maybe four things, four or five things. So first is 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. I was the smallest kid in my school. I hit puberty late. I was 100 pounds as a freshman. I was 125 pounds entering my senior high. 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 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

• 57:24Speaker 04

  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. I'm the only people went to like a military high school and then like an arts.

• 57:36Scott Galloway?

  Bodybuilder from RISD. Yeah, there aren't that many bodybuilders at RISD.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  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 did HTML growing up, but I'm a designer and designers don't usually run tech companies. The third thing is just connections with friends. I mean, I think this may be 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 have listened to a lot of your podcasts 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.

• 58:23Speaker 04

  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. And 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 um, so those are, those are probably the things I do.

• 58:44Scott Galloway?

  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?

• 59:02Speaker 04

  I definitely think I'll do this for at least one to two more decades, to be honest. Like, I'm 41. If you told me when I was 26 to start a company, I probably would have told you I can do this until I'm 40. I have, I'll just say, I have more energy today than I did when I was 26. I am more excited to come to work to Airbnb 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. And Steve died at the peak and he was 56.

• 59:45Speaker 04

  So I remember Bull 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 what young people want. We'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, but I don't, 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.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  There's, I think, whatever I do, whether it's with Airbnb or not, like, I think part of my purpose is try to help bring people together around the world, remind them that people are fundamentally 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. The 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. Apple doesn't have a creative person on the executive team.

• 1:01:03Scott Galloway?

  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?

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  I think to be a man is to be responsible. Not 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 whether you believe it or not, like, well, let's say it was, what are you gonna 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 of value to others?

• 1:02:00Scott Galloway?

  Brian Chesky is a co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. 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.

• 1:02:20Speaker 04

  Oh, thank you much, Scott. Love talking to you.

• 1:02:31Scott Galloway?

  Algebra 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 gotta tip your hat to them. It's such a lot of, you know, so much responsibility, juggling work in a competitive economy and also have three kids who are incredibly demanding. It's just, 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. So recognize if you're stressful, just keep on keeping on. Typically, typically, usually, you get happier in your 40s and 50s, which isn't to say you

• 1:03:16Scott Galloway?

  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.

• 1:03:33Scott Galloway?

  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 on smartphones. And 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.

• 1:04:16Scott Galloway?

  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. All of it involves one thing, human contact. And the serendipity of human contact. You know, nothing that's 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 and involves other people.

• 1:05:01Scott Galloway?

  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. Go 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.

• 1:05:45Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Caroline Shager and Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer. Andrew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod on the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly markets show.

• 1:06:09Scott Galloway?

  Okay, 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... I'm not an Easter parade right now. We all go 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.

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