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I m John Legend.
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He said something to me, he said, Brian, do you know what the number one killer in America is?
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I don t know, is it like heart disease?
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Is it cancer?
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And he goes, no, the number one killer in America is loneliness.
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Airbnb CEO, his name is Brian Chesky.
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He s a badass in this business.
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You re worth $30 billion.
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The problem with success is it tends to amplify things.
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No one ever told me how lonely you would get.
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It s almost like I had to go on this entire journey to realize I had everything I needed before I even started the journey.
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If I die, will I die Brian Chesky or the Airbnb guy just died?
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This is without a doubt the most unique episode of On Purpose I think we ve ever had.
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Before we jump into this episode, I d like to invite you to join this community to hear more interviews that will help you become happier, healthier, and more healed.
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All I want you to do is click on the subscribe button.
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I love your support.
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It s incredible to see all your comments, and we re just getting started.
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I can t wait to go on this journey with you.
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Thank you so much for subscribing.
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It means the world to me.
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The best-selling author and host.
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The number one health and wellness podcast.
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty.
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Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health and wellness podcast in the world, thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to become happier, healthier, and more healed.
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And you know that s my goal here, to create a community where we can all come together, feel connected by ideas and visions and thoughts that help us in our daily lives.
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And today s guest is someone who s achieved incredible success
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but also someone who I believe is carrying ideas and insights that can be really useful to us on our journey to whatever success may mean to you.
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I m talking about the one and only Brian Chesky, who s the co-founder and chief executive officer of Airbnb.
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In 2007, Brian and Joe Gebbia became Airbnb s first hosts.
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Since then, Brian has overseen Airbnb s growth to become a community of over 4 million hosts who have welcomed more than 1 billion guests across 200-plus countries and regions.
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Brian is a signatory to the Giving Pledge and is committed to donating the net proceeds of his CEO equity compensation to community, philanthropic, and charitable causes, something that I m so passionate about and so excited to dive into.
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Brian, welcome to On Purpose.
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Thank you for having me.
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Really excited to be here.
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This is awesome.
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I m truly honored.
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I think there s very few, as I was just saying to you offline, and I want to repeat what I said.
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I think it s hard to build something that matters.
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It s hard to scale something that matters.
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And it s hard to build and scale something that matters and keep making it matter.
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And you seem to be doing all those things.
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We try every day.
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Congratulations.
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It s been a joy watching it from afar and I m excited to build this relationship with you.
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I m excited to talk about this.
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Well, let s dive into it.
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I want to start off with my first question, which is what makes you happy today and how does it differ from what made you happy 16 years ago?
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I think that I ll start with what I thought would make me happy.
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And I ll tell you what does make me happy and how they re different.
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When I started this company like 15 years ago, I started my co-founders.
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I was totally broke.
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I had no status, had no power, no money, nothing.
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And I felt like what would make me happy was climbing a mountain and becoming incredibly successful.
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And the challenge is that, well, what do you do when you get to the top of the mountain?
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You ve achieved it.
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And what I ve realized is, at this point, I m 41 years old, and a lot of people ask me, why don t you just retire?
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Or why don t you do it all over again?
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And for me, I would tell them because the fun is just starting.
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But the fun of just starting isn t to get the next billion people.
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I kind of think of myself maybe more than a business person.
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You know, you re kind of who you are growing up, and I was a designer growing up.
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And I kind of think of Airbnb as like one of the world s biggest canvas.
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Almost never has a designer been given so much responsibility, so much opportunity.
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And what I love is, you know, like a musician wants to play music, a painter wants to paint, a builder wants to build, a climber wants to climb.
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And as an entrepreneur, I want to create and connect things and try to defy the notion of what a business person could be or what a designer could be.
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Because I never met someone like me growing up.
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And I m not saying anyone s going to try to be like me.
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But if I can remind people that there s leadership comes in many different faces, many different flavors, and that a creative person, you know, can run a company and it can run a really big company, a fortune 500 company, then that s, that s the very beginning.
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And I feel like what makes me happy now is working with people I love.
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Like the, one of the great things about success is you can choose the people you surround yourself with.
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And I get to work every single day with people I love on ideas that I m obsessed over.
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And I m just so obsessed.
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I think my motivations changed.
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I think when I started, my motivation was about myself becoming something.
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And once you achieve that, your motivation often turns outward.
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It s about, it s starting to be about giving to other people, to letting them experience a small part of what I was able to experience.
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And it becomes just about the work.
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So when you re not successful, you get validation when people praise you, but eventually like you do it for yourself, that you re not doing it for status or success because at some point you ve gotten all of it.
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Like how much more is going to make you happy?
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And so just doing things I love with people I care about, that s what makes me happy today.
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That s beautiful.
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I can see that it s true for you too.
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I can see that it s real for you as you re saying it, which is such a special place to be.
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It was interesting when you were talking about this idea of climbing a mountain.
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I ve often thought that
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There s one journey in life that we take that s upwards, up a mountain, and then there s another journey we all have to take that s inwards to the valley.
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And that s a journey that not everyone gets to take or everyone thinks about taking because we re so busy trying to get up.
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that we don t often get to go in.
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And it sounds like you ve been excavating that internal part for some time.
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You can learn a lot about yourself through this journey.
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And you re right.
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The biggest journey I ve probably embarked on is the one inside of myself.
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The brightest days of my life and the darkest days of my life have been the last 15 years.
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The highs are incredibly high.
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The lows can be incredibly low.
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The amount of stress can be unrelenting.
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The rewards are like hard to even grapple with.
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When you go on a journey like this, you learn a lot about yourself.
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And you start to also learn like what s important to you.
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Starting a company, you know, one of my first investors said, Brian, starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane on the way down.
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Maybe another way of saying it is like playing a video game.
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And it s like a thousand levels.
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And each level gets harder.
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In each level, you learn something about yourself.
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You do something that s uncomfortable.
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In each step of the game, you learn something.
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And the problem with success is it tends to amplify things.
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I mean, that can be good, but it also can amplify holes you have in yourself.
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People that are a little bit paranoid get very paranoid.
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People that are a little deceitful become like completely fraudulent liars.
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People that are a little narcissistic become like egomaniacs and stuff.
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And so this stuff can tend to amplify tendencies inside of yourself.
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And so,
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If you re afraid of conflict, that s going to actually manifest in like not actually dealing with things.
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If you can t, if you re not decisive, there s going to be an element of bureaucracy.
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If you re like get overwhelmed and you get paralyzed, there s going to be an action in the company.
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And so you learn so much about yourself.
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And I, through this process, I probably learned more about myself than I even have about business.
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And it s been an incredible journey.
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And yeah, it s like incredible lessons.
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And the company is like a mirror about you, right?
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Like when you see a company, it s like a walk in your house.
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And by walking your house, I can step a little bit in your mind.
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Because the house, you bought the house, you furnished the house, you made a thousand decisions.
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And it would take a while for me in conversation to understand you, but I walk in this house and I can understand the thousand decisions you made.
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A company is like that, but it s like a hundred thousand decisions or a million decisions.
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And so by seeing the company, you can like see into the person s mind everything they do.
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And not even everything they do, but everyone they surround themselves with and the culture they create and what they, and that s the thing that s like so crazy.
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I m intrigued.
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You said something there that really stood out to me.
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You said that the happiest thing and the best thing about being successful is that you get to choose the people you worked with.
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You obviously built this with friends and that s how it started.
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It started in a place of being around people you love with.
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What was the,
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biggest point of challenge in building something with people you love as you grow it?
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And what is it that you experienced?
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And what was the biggest lesson that you took away that actually kept it going?
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Because I can imagine as you re describing highs and lows, all of this changed for 16 years, but here you are still building it together.
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Think about how many stories you ve heard of founders.
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It s like a band.
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They come together and then eventually the band breaks up and people don t stay together.
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They resent each other.
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Maybe things end very ugly.
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It s like a band except like it becomes so much bigger than a band because it s not just the three of you.
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Imagine a band that starts three people and ends as 3000 people.
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And that amount of pressure, the amount of spotlight, the money, the changes in people s status and positioning, it can do a lot to break people up.
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But also, unlike a band where maybe, not to say you just have to agree on where you perform and what you sing, with a company you have to agree on who we re going to hire, what we re going to call, what markets we re going to go into, what s the prioritization, who we re going to raise money for.
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I can go down the list of the thousands of things you have to agree to.
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With Joe, Nate, and I, I often say it s really good to start a company with friends.
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Not everyone has friends to start a company with, but you want that reservoir of goodwill.
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And we made a decision.
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The decision was that no one decision is gonna supersede our friendship and our relationship, that we re never gonna have, we ll debate, we ll argue, but we ll never allow a situation where winning an argument is the most important thing.
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Because you think about a company as 100,000 decisions, it could also be 100,000 arguments.
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And if you get stuck on the first debate, or you like somebody won the debate, okay, great, you have 99,999 more things to discuss.
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And so the lesson I learned is, I mean, first of all, Jay, I was lucky.
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And a lot of people when I say I was lucky, they think, oh, you were at the right place at the right time with the right idea.
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And I said, well, maybe, but there s something I was much luckier about.
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And what I was most lucky about, what made me most fortunate was I met Joe and Nate, that we had this unbelievable chemistry.
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One time we had to do like some personality tests.
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It was like one of those core wheels.
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And we took this like personality test to see about our chemistry and they plotted our like personalities and they formed a perfect equilateral triangle.
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Not always you re gonna find people that are perfect complements to you.
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I d say a couple of things.
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Number one,
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You want to have a team with people that you are friends with or could see yourself becoming friends with, that you have a deep love and respect for, that you re going to probably spend more time with your co-founders than your spouse or your family if it goes well.
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If it doesn t go well, then maybe not.
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But that s the best case scenario, that people that have shared values.
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Because you can debate anything so long as you re trying to climb the same mountain in the same belief system.
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If you have different values, eventually those are going to become irreconcilable conflicts.
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But you probably also want complementary skills.
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The worst case is people with different values and same skills Right we do the same job.
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We step in each other s tolls, and we re trying to go in a different direction And so I think and then I think the final thing is just this mutual love and respect and never losing sight you know one of the things I tried to make sure of is like even as CEO I wanted to try to make sure that like
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Joe and Nate, you know, were included in things and we, I wanted to always make sure that people referred to us together.
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We thought of us as a, as a, as a unit.
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When we, when I like, when public, you write a founder s letter and a lot of people write letter and they just sign the name of the CEO.
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I made sure that it was from all of us and was representing all of us.
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I feel like they are the heart and the soul of the company.
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And
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It s like, you know, parents, like, you know, not every child has the fortune to have multiple parents.
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Not every company has the fortune to have multiple founders, but if they re together, they re not fighting and they have a mutual love and respect for one another, that s going to permeate the company, just like it permeates the health of a child.
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And Joan and I kind of thought ourselves as parents of the company as a child, I d never have had kids, but you know, there s something about that.
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And I think who you are in that relationship,
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permeates every single thing.
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If the founders fight, the employees fight.
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If they have respect for one another, that is going to be a role, a model that other people throughout the organization are going to copy.
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And that s what I ve learned from that.
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I think, I think what you re saying is very, very true.
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And it s remarkable that you ve been able to hold on to that.
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I mean, I remember just comparing it to something very minuscule, but I think a lot of people will be able to relate to.
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It s like, I think with your bros at college or at school, you d always be like, we re not going to fight over girls.
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Like we re not gonna fight over women.
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And then there d always be the guy who trades the friendship for a girl and then the whole thing s lost.
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And that s a short-term decision.
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Yeah, it s true.
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And I understand why people make short-term decisions.
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They make trade-offs, they wanna win.
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But as long as you think about the arc of your life and that life is only like who you re with and that you don t wanna be alone at the end of your life, and you certainly don t wanna be alone at the end of a journey.
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If I m climbing a mountain, I want friends by my side that can like provide supplies of me and like, you know, like,
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being the only one in power is actually quite lonely.
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Having been in that, a little bit of that position, I ve now could tell people that you wanna share it because otherwise it s incredibly isolating and lonely.
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And you know, like if you get all the credit, you could also get all the blame and it can be very difficult.
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And so be able to share that with Joe and Nate, and now to be able to share that with the people that I get to pick to surround myself with, I mean, that is one of the most fulfilling things.
1
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And you know, great relationships get better with age and they give you energy.
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They make you better.
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They hold your negative tendencies in check and they pull out like creative ambitions in you.
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They see potential in you that maybe you don t see in yourself.
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I did never imagined that I could be CEO of any company.
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I didn t think I d be CEO of a pizza shop, let alone be CEO of a, like a giant fortune 500 company did over $60 billion last year in bookings.
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Like that s completely crazy.
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And I ve learned a lot of lessons from this journey.
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One is I think we all were born with like unknown potential.
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And I think the other thing is sometimes the best people in your life will be people who see potential in you that you didn t see in yourself.
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And I often wonder, why did Joe and Nate even agree to let me be the CEO?
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Why did Joe tell me one day in 2007 to pack everything in the back of an old Honda Civic and drive up to San Francisco?
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Why did he think that was a good idea?
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And years later, he s told me.
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And he told me that we went to college together at RISD, and he saw something in me.
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And it s possible he saw something in me that I didn t even yet see in myself.
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And this is like the hero s journey.
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Somebody might believe in you.
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They might see something in you.
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And that s what I got with Joe and Nate.
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And I think I believed in what I think I saw.
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They saw potential in me.
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What I saw maybe was potential in this idea.
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That if people could experience what we experienced that first weekend, when we host three guests, that this would be an idea
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that would spread around the world.
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I think we have an easier time imagining living like this on Mars and living differently on this planet.
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But which of those two do you think is more likely to happen in the near term?
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It s really hard for us to imagine sociological changes.
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We can all imagine technological changes.
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We can imagine things getting bigger, faster, but it s hard to imagine us living differently.
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And I don t think that we were visionaries per se.
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I think we were expeditionaries.
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And I think we discovered something.
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One of my first investors, Paul Graham, he said, what do you know?
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What unique knowledge do you know that has allowed you, afforded you the ability to start this company that no one else has?
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What do you know that no one else understands?
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And I think that we discovered something.
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We discovered that people are fundamentally good.
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You read the newspaper.
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I think Chief Justice Earl Warren said, I don t turn to the front pages of the newspaper.
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It s filled with man s failures.
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I go to the sports page.
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It s filled with man s successes.
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I think we live in an abundance of data reinforcing that people aren t good.
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And we have probably as much data as almost anyone, because in the last 15 years, one and a half billion people have used Airbnb, one and a half billion guest arrivals in nearly every country in the world.
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More countries, I think, than Coca-Cola.
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Nearly the population of LA every night living together.
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And it s only reinforced what I think we naively believed in the beginning, these two simple ideas, that people are basically good.
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They re 99% the same.
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I think that Joe and Nate believed in me and my potential to be in this company.
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I think we collectively believe in the potential of each other.
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And I think also that this idea would be one that could spread around the world if only we could figure out how to communicate it to people.
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How special.
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I mean, that s, that is something that I definitely got a mini version experience of.
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I just finished a 40 city world tour.
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Really?
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For my second book.
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And we probably met about a hundred thousand people on the way.
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Oh my God.
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And much, much smaller than the 1 billion bookings, but I would agree with those two sentiments so strongly that we re 99% the same and people are all overall good.
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If people believed everyone was basically the same, then how could you hate someone else?
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Because to hate someone else is to hate yourself.
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And I think that we spend a lot of energy in society celebrating the 0.1% that makes us different.
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I think there s a good part of that.
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We call that diversity and heritage and culture, but there s a dark side of believing that we re like all very different.
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And that s that we believe that people are the other and that therefore it s harder to have empathy with somebody who isn t us.
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And I think that the best way to understand
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that somebody is similar to you is to walk in their shoes and to like, just, you know, there s an old saying, it s hard to hate someone up close.
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And I think there s something weird that s happening where the more digitally connected we seem to get, the more, the less physically connected we sometimes get.
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And I wonder if that has a way of like confusing us about people that we might argue about on the internet.
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No one else, no one s ever changed the most mind YouTube comment section.
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But if it s hard to live with somebody or to walk in their shoes and not change your mind, how could you not change your mind about something?
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SPEAKER_00
Because that would suggest that you ve experienced all of life up to that point and that your opinions are fully formed and that no new data could ever change your mind about anything.
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SPEAKER_00
How could that possibly, how d you even have your opinions in the first place?
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Based on probably experiences.
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And so how could you not change your experience, your opinion by new experiences with new people?
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And that s kind of the simple way we think about it.
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SPEAKER_01
I m so glad you raised this idea of, you talked about the incredible friendship that you have with your co-founders, but at the same time you brought up this idea of loneliness and you said you never want to be lonely at the end of a journey, you never want to be lonely at the end of building something big, and I think in the world today we are seeing loneliness
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proliferate and it s the loneliness that we re not around people, it s not loneliness that we re not surrounded by people, it s that we re surrounded by people but we don t feel understood, we don t feel seen, we don t feel heard, that we feel that we have to be someone apart from ourselves, even around the people that we re closest to.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so the idea of loneliness is expanding away, people are feeling disconnected from each other, yet you re talking about 16 years ago, you and a bunch of friends feeling so close to each other.
2
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When have you felt lonely in your life, and what have been your next thoughts and steps that you ve taken from that point?
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SPEAKER_00
I think loneliness, which is like the darkness or the absence of connection, and love and connection, have in hindsight been some of the driving forces in my entire life.
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If I were to think about my journey with loneliness,
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I think I grew up as a little bit of a lonely, isolated kid.
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SPEAKER_00
I was interested in art and design, but I also played sports.
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SPEAKER_00
I didn t really feel like I fit in growing up.
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I kind of felt like an outsider.
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I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, where a lot of people who felt that way would come together.
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But even at RISD, I didn t feel like I fit in there.
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Even as a hockey player?
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Even as a hockey player at an art school.
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I went to a military private school and then I went to an art college and I kind of had a foot in each and not fully.
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I had maybe issues of authority I didn t really fit in.
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It turned out to be
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a huge benefit to being a tech founder.
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But of course, who doesn t want to fit in it growing up?
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Like so much of our desire is to belong, because I think to belong is a deeply human trait.
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You know, we re tribal.
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We grew up to be in tribes of like 50, 100, 150 people.
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and to not be part of the tribe and not belong in a prior era would be a death sentence.
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And I think that ultimately today, we re probably living in one of the loneliest times in human history.
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If people were as lonely in yesteryear as they are today, they d probably perish because like you just couldn t survive without your tribe.
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And I think that...
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You know, for me, I didn t realize that this was a thing that I ve been, I was fighting throughout my life.
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And so when I was 25, 20, turning 26, I started being like two co-founders and we became the family.
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We became a family that hadn t had for 10 years since I really, 10 years since I left the house.
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And then suddenly we were a family, the three of us, and we re just hanging out together.
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We live together.
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We all like waked up, woke up around the same time, around 8 a.m.
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We d work till midnight, and then we d do it the whole the next day.
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We d go grocery shopping together.
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We d like go to the gym together.
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It was very communal.
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Then we hired people that were basically our friends.
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We wouldn t hire anyone we didn t like.
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And then we didn t have a lot of work-life boundaries.
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Everyone was young.
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We didn t have families.
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We d go out, like, drinking together and hang out together and dinner.
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And that became like a family.
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It became like a community.
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And that was incredible.
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And it was this deep, rich connection.
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And those were some of the closest friendships I ever had.
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But then something happens.
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We go on a rocket ship.
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And then I go from being a founder to a CEO.
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And I was one of three founders.
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And then I became one CEO, an individual role.
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And as I became a CEO, I started leading from the front at the top of the mountain.
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But then, you know, the higher you get to the peak, the fewer the people there are with you.
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And no one ever told me how lonely you would get.
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And I wasn t prepared for that.
2
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And I had this guilt about not working, because so much of my life was about being successful.
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Probably if I were to dig deep, because I thought that would make people love me, and that was probably adulation, but I probably didn t know it back then.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I probably thought that by being successful, I d feel really different.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I remember I got to this point where I was already feeling pretty isolated.
2
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And then the pandemic happened and I m living by myself in a house and I m finding myself on Zooms 24 seven, you know, like 16, 18 hours a day for an entire year of 2020.
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I, you know, help with a team.
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We navigate out of a crisis.
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People were predicting we d like, some people were that we would go out of business.
2
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We stared into the abyss, and we like got in a foxhole, we turned the company around, we took it public, and the day of our IPO, we reached a hundred billion dollar valuation.
2
SPEAKER_00
And remember, if you told me like a million dollars is more money than I ever imagined growing up, my parents are social workers, that was like an unfathomable amount of money.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I remember after going public,
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It was like, Oh my God, there s this like amazing exaltation.
2
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It was amazing.
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Like I d gotten to the mountain and then I wake up the next day and my life is exactly the same.
2
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I m alone.
2
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I wake up, I put on sweatpants, I go on an iMac and I have like 10, 12 hours of zoom meetings.
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And I just don t really have much of my life outside of work.
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My work was my life.
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SPEAKER_00
And then I remember having a 40th birthday party.
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and I had to make a list of people to invite.
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SPEAKER_00
And never in my life have I tried to like make a list of who my friends are, but when you have to make invitations, you have to make a list.
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SPEAKER_00
And I made a long list of people.
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SPEAKER_00
And then I kind of went down the list and I said, when s the last time I talked to these people?
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SPEAKER_00
And I realized that almost every single person in the list, if I were to ping, I d have to catch them up in my life.
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SPEAKER_00
I couldn t just dive into something, because I had not maintained those relationships.
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SPEAKER_00
And it was just something that like started, you know, and I started noticing, I started feeling more isolated.
2
SPEAKER_00
I would have more negative ruminations and stuff.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I didn t know at the time that I was lonely.
2
SPEAKER_00
I knew I was isolated, but I didn t know that that also meant loneliness.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I thought, I have all these people around me.
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SPEAKER_00
How could I possibly feel this way?
2
SPEAKER_00
And there were a couple of people that like,
2
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entered my life that gave me some awareness and consciousness, one at the deeply personal level and one more at the professional level.
2
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At the personal level, I ended up actually
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becoming friends and a person who became a mentor to mine was the former President of the United States, Barack Obama.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it was kind of a crazy story where I, you know, I, like many people, met him in the White House and then he, we keep in touch after the White House and he became a bit of a mentor to me.
3
SPEAKER_00
We developed a relationship and initially it was a purely professional relationship, but
3
SPEAKER_00
by 2021, after we went public, he kind of told me, like, I kind of told him what I was feeling.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I, he said, I think you re kind of lonely and you probably need to renew friendships.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he described that he had like these 10 or 15 friends.
3
SPEAKER_00
Most of them he was friends with before his presidency and they kept him grounded and rooted.
3
SPEAKER_00
And your roots come from your past and your past is often your relationships.
3
SPEAKER_00
Cause I kept asking him like, how didn t you like lose your mind?
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SPEAKER_00
He s like, it s hard to lose your mind when you have
3
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deep connections and relations to others.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is around the time I was like totally realized I hadn t maintained relationships.
3
SPEAKER_00
So one of the most important things I decided to do was renew the relationships that were in that invite list, those people that I hadn t really kept in touch with.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I rekindled relationships with my college friends.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I committed that we d take like one or two trips a year.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because the problem is if you don t see your friends, you only text them, the only things you can talk about are like the same old stories from 20 years ago.
3
SPEAKER_00
Or you can talk about other things in your life, but you have no shared experience.
3
SPEAKER_00
In Zoom, in phone calls and text messages are not shared experiences.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can only talk about an experience you had.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I did that with my college friends.
3
SPEAKER_00
I did it with my high school friends.
3
SPEAKER_00
I started spending more time with my sister and other people in my life.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ended up getting like a dog, a golden retriever named Sophie, supernova.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the crazy thing, Jay, is I can tell you like the ride of Airbnb and having all the success and money and power and all this stuff, it can be amazing.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m not saying it s not amazing.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I actually think I probably, it s almost like I had to go on this entire journey to realize I had everything I needed before I even started the journey.
3
SPEAKER_00
That the thing that probably gave me the greatest life satisfaction was a thing that I didn t even need money for and I didn t even need to have success to achieve.
3
SPEAKER_00
Relationships, many of them I had before I started.
3
SPEAKER_01
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3
SPEAKER_01
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3
SPEAKER_01
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3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I think you had Robert Waldinger on your show and, you know, he, I actually met him last week for the first time.
3
SPEAKER_00
He is, as people listening are probably realized, he was a Harvard professor who s run the longest study on human happiness.
3
SPEAKER_00
It started before he was even alive.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s an 85 year study.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the question was, what s the secret of happiness?
3
SPEAKER_00
And of course, they don t think they thought there was a silver bullet answer.
3
SPEAKER_00
And of course it is, and it s relationships.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think that that s what I ve learned, that like, as I ve reconnected,
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve felt like this light and this love permeate me.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think it s made me a better leader.
3
SPEAKER_00
Cause one of the things Robert told me is 50% of CEOs are lonely.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now somebody listening to say, Oh, poor CEOs.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, I would say, I don t think I want society to be led by a bunch of lonely people.
3
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t want society to be led by a bunch of lonely people because lonely people are less trusting of other people.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re more paranoid.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re less resilient.
3
SPEAKER_00
They will typically have less empathy because they will push people away.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t think they re as connected.
3
SPEAKER_00
They make worse decisions.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so we do not live in a world where people are lonely.
3
SPEAKER_00
We especially don t want to live in a world where leaders are lonely.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so this has been one of the defining things in my life.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I think the first part of the answer is for me,
3
SPEAKER_00
to deal with my own sense of isolation and loneliness.
3
SPEAKER_00
And again, Jay, I thought loneliness was something that like people s grandparents experienced in their life.
3
SPEAKER_00
I didn t think it was something that a young person experiences.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the other person I met is the now and former Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Rebecca Murphy.
3
SPEAKER_00
We hired him during the pandemic because a lot of people were afraid to like, you know, go into Airbnbs and they were worried about like germs on surfaces.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so we hired him to do this, like, you know, basically create cleaning and sanitation protocols.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I remember having a conversation with him.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he said something to me, he said, Brian, do you know what the number one killer in America is?
3
SPEAKER_00
I m kind of paraphrasing the conversation.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I said, I don t know, is it like heart disease?
3
SPEAKER_00
Is it cancer?
3
SPEAKER_00
And he goes, no, the number one killer in America is loneliness.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I said, loneliness?
3
SPEAKER_00
What are you talking about?
3
SPEAKER_00
And he said, yeah, being chronically lonely is worse for your health than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and can take 15 years off your life.
3
SPEAKER_00
And not only that, but about half of Americans are lonely.
3
SPEAKER_00
Two out of three teenagers by some studies are lonely.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s not just that they re lonely, it s that this is leading to a lot of mental health issues.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, one in four teenagers have suicidal ideations.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, that s not just teenagers.
3
SPEAKER_00
You see like, you know, like there s a crisis with men and boys.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a crisis with like one in three seniors are lonely.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is like, so I started realizing this is like a really big crisis.
3
SPEAKER_00
It may be a way to say it s a crisis of disconnection.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I started realizing like, you know, global warming, maybe you could say that s disconnection with the earth.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that loneliness is disconnection from each other.
3
SPEAKER_00
And maybe loneliness at the most fundamental level starts with disconnection from yourself, that you re running away from something.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that sometimes trying to be successful and climbing a mountain is running away from something.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, because you think that what you are isn t enough and if you become more you ll become something.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that is the problem because of course we never fully leave our history and our psychology.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so then I started learning about loneliness at the intellectual level and started asking, well, Airbnb is a global community.
3
SPEAKER_00
We have hundreds of millions of people.
3
SPEAKER_00
Some of the best ways to connect with other people are through travel.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was using travel and Airbnb to like connect with my friends because most of them didn t even live in the same city as me.
3
SPEAKER_00
I started realizing, you know, when you get to my age, you re 41, you have a public company, you have a couple of choices.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can just stop.
3
SPEAKER_00
and say, like, retire, you can do something new, or you can just say, my work is just getting started.
3
SPEAKER_00
And for me, like, I want to, of course, I want to, like, keep getting a return for shareholders and make sure, like, if people give me money, they feel like it was a good decision.
3
SPEAKER_00
If employees put their trust in me, it was a good career decision.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I want all that to happen.
3
SPEAKER_00
But
3
SPEAKER_00
That can t be enough.
3
SPEAKER_00
That there s got to be something more.
3
SPEAKER_00
The artist in me, the designer in me wants to solve a problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
The problem can t just be a stock price.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s got to be something greater.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I have like one of the biggest canvases in the world of any designer ever.
3
SPEAKER_00
And what I m going to design is not products.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m going to design connections between people.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I started learning about loneliness.
3
SPEAKER_00
I started realizing that modern life seems to be making people lonely.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there s all sorts of theories.
3
SPEAKER_00
Maybe it s that like, you know, everything is digitized now.
3
SPEAKER_00
The mall is now Amazon.
3
SPEAKER_00
The theater is now Netflix.
3
SPEAKER_00
The grocery store is now Instacart.
3
SPEAKER_00
The office is now Zoom.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m a proponent of all these things.
3
SPEAKER_00
I use all these services and I love them.
3
SPEAKER_00
But you know, the problem is it s like ingredients.
3
SPEAKER_00
We evolved, I think, to be in physical proximity with one another.
3
SPEAKER_00
And as we spend more time online, we seem to be spending less time together.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think we have to be very, very careful as a society what kind of future we want to design for ourselves.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I guess for me, loneliness,
3
SPEAKER_00
And its solution, which is reconnection, has been both a personal mission and now a bit of a professional mission.
3
SPEAKER_00
And a product or a service can t help with that, but a community can.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if Airbnb can go from a travel service to a travel community,
3
SPEAKER_00
if we can be in the business of trust, where you understand one another and we can help you connect with people in your life or meet other people, that to me would be where the next chapter is.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there s something about like solving your own problem and then wanting to like, you know, trying to spread it to others is I think one of the most fulfilling things.
3
SPEAKER_00
They always say the best way to start a business is to solve your own problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think that s what I ve been trying to do.
3
SPEAKER_01
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
3
SPEAKER_01
That was like,
4
SPEAKER_00
That was a masterclass on loneliness and I mean that and it s beautiful to see how it can so deeply correlate with what you ve already built and I think that s what, as I m watching you and as people are listening and watching, I want you to take this away that
4
SPEAKER_00
You re not neglecting or negating any experience you ve had.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re actually collecting.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re awesome.
4
SPEAKER_00
And bringing them all together and saying, look, actually, it s additive.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think a lot of us have this tendency in the material world to build something, go, ah, it wasn t it, throw it away, and then go try and build something else.
4
SPEAKER_00
And actually what you re saying, actually, I built this thing, it s great, but actually it could be so much better.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s just the beginning.
4
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I also think that like, I m not saying it never would have mattered and don t try to be a tech founder and don t try to achieve success.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m just saying they re ingredients and that if you do it alone and you don t have relationships and you do something to fill something in you, it s not going to fully do that.
4
SPEAKER_01
But if you do it,
4
SPEAKER_01
because you love it and you get to do it with people you love and you can do it out of a sense of gratitude and giving to other people.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, Steve jobs, one of my heroes used to say, um, I get to work now with Johnny Ive.
4
SPEAKER_01
He started a firm called love from love from me to you.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that was the theory that Steve said, the Steve said, the best way to show your love for the species is to put your heart and soul into something and give them to them.
4
SPEAKER_01
Steve said that design is a fundamental soul, the manmade creation that reveals itself through subsequent layers.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think that ultimately my motivation has gone from more extrinsic to more intrinsic.
4
SPEAKER_01
That at this point in my life I m less worried about what people think.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t really feel like I have to prove anything to people.
4
SPEAKER_01
Either I already have or I never will at some point.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think at some point it just becomes about the thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
I just want to do the thing to the purest, best of my ability and to feel like I give to others.
4
SPEAKER_01
And this is the other thing is it s amazing to be able to buy things and have things.
4
SPEAKER_01
Those experiences are awesome, but.
4
SPEAKER_01
The things that probably give me most joy is like sharing things with others or giving things.
4
SPEAKER_01
I totally get now.
4
SPEAKER_01
I never understood like why people like giving away things.
4
SPEAKER_01
I didn t really understand it.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was not intuitive to me growing up.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was parents of social workers, kind of middle class.
4
SPEAKER_01
And now I realize there s, I don t wanna say a selfishness to it, but you get something.
4
SPEAKER_01
You get something from giving.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s not just this moral obligation.
4
SPEAKER_01
You actually get something.
4
SPEAKER_01
And when you get is this sense of love and connection by giving something,
4
SPEAKER_01
And by giving love, you kind of get it back in return.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think ultimately, I think me as a leader, I never saw something like me growing up.
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I went to design school and there was this weird thing, Jay, where I get to RISD, the Renown School of Design, and there was this obsession about getting design in the boardroom.
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And Joe and I were so audacious, we thought, why should design be in the boardroom?
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But of course, like designers, the people never thought started companies.
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And there s an old saying, art is a question, the problem in the world and design is the answer.
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And Joe and I wanted to seek answers to problems in the world.
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And one answer was we can t pay rent.
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So we created this thing called air bed and breakfast, air beds instead of beds for air bed and breakfast.
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And but ultimately,
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You know, I think a business person, I am a business person ostensibly, but I think a business person s goal is to make money and a designer s goal is to solve a problem.
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And of course I m doing both.
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I probably sit at the intersection, but I don t get out of bed every day to make money.
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I get out of bed every day to like design something amazing.
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And of course I can pay money, I can fund it.
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And that s just a kind of motivation.
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And that probably can keep me going for a really, really long time.
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And I find that a lot of companies,
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They get really cold as they get big.
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You start something for love.
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You re the customer.
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You talk to the customers.
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And at some point, the company grows.
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And you start with the head and the heart.
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You like putting your love into it.
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You re intuitive.
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No startup is data-oriented, because there is no data.
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If you have an idea, there is no data.
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So you go off your intuition.
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You do something because you believe in it.
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And then at some point you get so big, the company gets financialized.
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There s a lot more data.
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And you start making decisions with the heart and now with the head, and one side of your head.
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And you look at the Fortune 500, how many CEOs in the Fortune 500 are truly like, have any creative background whatsoever, identify as creatives?
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Almost none.
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Okay, how many boards there s 12 members an average of a fortune 500 board.
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That s like probably 6,000 member So the portion of ever and how many boards have like creative people not not many how many executive teams have it?
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And so I guess the question is like there s nothing wrong with the scientific method.
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There s nothing wrong.
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It s great and
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But we talk about diversity a lot in corporate America.
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There s a type of diversity we need, a diversity of artists and scientists, of head and heart.
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You need all those things to solve the biggest problems today.
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And if Airbnb could be viewed as like a design driven company, like the world s biggest RISD project that just never stopped, you know, a company with like a sense of a spirit, a sense, you know, our logo is like an inverted heart.
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It was meant to be this idea almost of this like,
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beating heart, like this lifeblood that would flow through the community.
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And I m not saying we do all that.
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That might be an ideal that we ve never gotten to.
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But we can, or we ll die trying.
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You ve sparked a lot of thoughts for me that I d love to share with you, that you ve reminded me of so many things.
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My mind is connecting so many dots with what you re sharing.
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The first thing that came to mind is, there s a beautiful statement by Paul Tillich, who s a writer who said that, it s fascinating that there are two words in the English language for being alone, yet we only use one of them.
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And he said the two words are loneliness, which is the word we use, and the other is solitude.
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And when you said we re disconnected from the earth, we re disconnected from each other, but really we re disconnected from ourselves, it s because of a lack of solitude.
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When I lived as a monk, being comfortable, being alone was the first lesson of the day because the idea was... And how do you learn how to do that?
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Well, there s many techniques.
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One of the first techniques is if you just sit with yourself for long enough, you start to see so much in yourself that connects back to what you said at the beginning.
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If you re able to explore and take an expedition into the darkest parts of yourself, if you re able to go into the inner sky and extrapolate all of the feelings, the messages, the emotions, the things you like, the things you don t like, now when you sit opposite another human, you can see the complexity and the simplicity of them as well.
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The challenge is we ve never looked at our own darkness and incompleteness.
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There s a great, one of the great mythologists of the 20th century you probably know is Joseph Campbell.
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He had this great quote, the cave you fear to enter lies the treasure that you seek.
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And I think that so many of the things we do in life are to run away from things, to avoid opening that closet to see what that monster is.
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But that s where the treasure is.
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Exactly, and so being trained to sit with that monster, with the discomfort of what that actually looks and feels like.
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And what you were just saying now about this heart and this head or the design and the art and the creative and the entrepreneurial, I think is so powerful because, so you mentioned Steve is a hero of yours, same with me, I feel like I ve studied everything he s ever said or written.
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And one of the things I love, this was an interview that Mark Zuckerberg was doing with Prime Minister Modi from India.
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And he said this on stage to Modi.
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I believe this was in San Fran.
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And Mark said to him, he said, when he was struggling with the direction of Facebook, now Meta, in 2009, which is five years old, Facebook is, right?
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He went to his mentor.
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His mentor happened to be Steve Jobs.
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And he said to Steve, he said, what do I do?
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I m struggling.
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I don t know which direction Facebook should go in.
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Now, if you think about 2009, Steve Jobs is undoubtedly one of the most connected humans on the planet, has access to money, tech, everything you could possibly ask for.
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And Steve says to him, I want you to go and live in an ashram in India.
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Wow.
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I want you to go live there.
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And I promise you, if you go there, you ll figure out the direction of Facebook.
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And Mark said he actually went to that monastery, that ashram.
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And he said in that ashram, that s where he decided that at that time, Facebook was about connecting people.
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Oh, wow.
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I didn t know that story.
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Yeah.
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And what I find fascinating, the reason why I like to share that story is
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I m always fascinated by what a tech entrepreneur thinks as much as what I m fascinated what a monk thinks, because it s that cross-pollination.
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It s that extreme of diverse thought where those two things don t collide.
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They don t have the same agenda.
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We re not living in an echo chamber.
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When you re talking to an artist and an entrepreneur, there s no echo chamber.
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You ve broken it open now.
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And so for me, MIT did a study on that where they found that the most innovative employees inside an organization were people who didn t know people who knew the same people.
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There were people who knew people who had random connections.
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So their network chart was completely uncorrelated.
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Whereas people who had networks who were correlated were less likely to be creative and entrepreneur.
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Fewer unknown discoveries.
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And I feel like in my own life, like Steve has a saying, you can t connect the dots looking forward.
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You can only connect them looking backwards.
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I grew up playing ice hockey.
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I played team sports.
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I went to a military high school.
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Design College, where I first studied fine art, then design.
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Then I went to MIT for a semester.
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We had a cross-enrollment product development program.
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Then I went to Los Angeles as a designer at a firm.
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Then I went to Silicon Valley.
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with very little and got thrust into the technology industry.
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And it turns out that I did not know how any of these experiences would add up together.
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And they all came to me.
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And every single one of them I ve used.
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Every single experience.
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But I could never have reversed engineered how to get there.
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And it is amazing that like, you know, Steve used to say the best engineers were also poets.
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And he was really saying that like creativity is about connecting dots.
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It s about having disparate experiences and you can bring them together.
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And if you haven t had a lot of different experiences.
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If you aren t very multidisciplinary, you re not going to be able, I mean, Einstein was like a violinist, right?
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I think a lot of the greatest scientists have leaps of the imagination.
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They re not just using empirical information.
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And a lot of the greatest artists, they have an organized minds.
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Sometimes they have a fascination with numbers.
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And so you start to, you start to bring things together.
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And I think that is exactly what we probably need in this world.
5
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I mean, we need more creativity.
5
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You know, whenever you see two bad options, you don t like it.
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The right answer is the third option.
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The third option is one you haven t come up with yet that requires novel, innovative, imaginative thinking.
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Where does it even come from?
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Where does creativity come from?
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If creativity, you know, I don t know if Einstein ever said this, but there s a quote attributed to him.
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that is that logic can take you from A to Z, but imagination can take you anywhere.
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I love that quote.
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Don t know if he said it, but I believe it.
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But where does that come from?
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Where does imagination and creativity come from?
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I think it comes from a sense of openness.
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It comes from curiosity.
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It comes from maybe not first following your passion, but following your curiosity with a deep intensity.
5
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Hey everyone, this is Molly and Matt and we re the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.
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It s a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
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Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more.
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We re back with season two of the podcast, which means more opportunities to glow up and become a more responsible and better adult, one life lesson at a time.
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And let me just tell you, this show is just as much for us as it is for you.
5
SPEAKER_00
So let s figure this stuff out together.
5
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This season, we re going to talk about whether or not we re financially and emotionally ready for dog ownership.
5
SPEAKER_01
We re going to figure out the benefits of a high yield savings account.
5
SPEAKER_00
And what exactly are the duties of being a member of the wedding party?
5
SPEAKER_01
All that plus so much more.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let s learn about all of it and then some.
5
SPEAKER_00
Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
5
SPEAKER_02
Guess what, Bango?
5
SPEAKER_02
What s up, Will?
5
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So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
5
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I know, that s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
5
SPEAKER_03
It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
5
SPEAKER_02
Mango, I m going to cut you off right there.
5
SPEAKER_03
Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
5
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, that s a better idea.
5
SPEAKER_03
So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
5
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Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
5
SPEAKER_03
Is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto?
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SPEAKER_03
Also, what happened to Esperanto?
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SPEAKER_02
Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
5
SPEAKER_02
How do dollar stores stay in business?
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SPEAKER_02
And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
5
SPEAKER_02
There absolutely is.
5
SPEAKER_03
And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
5
SPEAKER_03
But if you love mind-blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune in to Part-Time Genius.
5
SPEAKER_02
Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
5
SPEAKER_05
When the Taliban banned music in Afghanistan, millions were plunged into silence.
5
SPEAKER_05
Radios were smashed.
5
SPEAKER_05
Cassettes burned.
5
SPEAKER_05
You could be beaten or jailed or killed for breaking the rules.
5
SPEAKER_05
And yet, Afghans did it anyway.
5
SPEAKER_05
This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol.
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SPEAKER_05
The danger they endured.
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They said my head should be cut off.
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The joy they brought to the nation.
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You re free completely.
5
SPEAKER_00
No one is there to destroy you.
5
SPEAKER_05
I m John Legend.
5
SPEAKER_05
Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
5
SPEAKER_04
and being curious about so many different things and trusting that you can be curious about something and learn about something not knowing if it will ever be useful.
5
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And have the trust to say that every single thing you ll do in your life, you ll do with accumulation of every single experience you ve had before.
5
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And that the more places you ve gone, the more people you meet, the more things you learn, it will all come to you.
5
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And you might not know ahead of time how it will be useful.
5
SPEAKER_04
And honestly, if I hadn t gone to military school,
5
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I probably wouldn t have been so organized.
5
SPEAKER_04
If I didn t go to design school, we probably wouldn t have been as creative and innovative in our thinking.
5
SPEAKER_04
If I hadn t played team sports, I probably wouldn t have understood about camaraderie.
5
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If my parents were social workers, I don t think I would have had this focus on service and connecting people.
5
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And I could never have imagined any of those things being useful.
5
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Because growing up, I didn t know what I wanted to be.
5
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I wasn t athletic enough to be a famous athlete.
5
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I wasn t handsome enough to be an actor.
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I wasn t going to singer to be a musician.
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I did not think I was going to be an astronaut politician.
5
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And so I m like, I don t know who I m going to be.
5
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I don t know what I am.
5
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And like the word entrepreneur was a word I m not even sure I heard of growing up.
5
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It was like to me it was an obscure French term.
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I didn t know what it meant.
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And I saw Walt Disney as a kid on television.
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I thought one day I ll work for him not thinking I would start a company just like him.
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And I never imagined that was possible.
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I guess we re all born with unknown potential as I said before.
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But you have to live experiences, as many as you can, you put them together.
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And I hope my story inspires people, not for the remarkableness of it, but the ordinariness of who I was before.
5
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To say that, like, if I joined, you mentioned the Giving Pledge.
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If you ask my teachers in high school to predict which of their students would be a signatory of the Giving Pledge, I do not think I would have been the top of their list.
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I don t think that takes anything away from the teachers.
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I think it just means that maybe that potential is in so many of us, and it s also maybe a little bit random, and anything is possible, and the story you tell yourself might not be accurate.
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And I, I hope that my story inspires people from the ordinariness of where it came from, that I was just like everyone else, but like, you know, a hundred thousand decisions later with enough resilience, creativity, curiosity, determination, you wake up one day, you re like, Oh my God, look where I am now.
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What I really value about that perspective is,
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As you were defining creativity in so many brilliant ways, one thing that came to my mind was creativity is being able to connect the dots where everyone else sees anomalies.
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Yes.
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And so if you look at your journey, just as a series of random dots, they re all anomalies, social working.
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hockey player, design student, like they re just random things, but you re able to actually paint this tapestry where you re going, well, actually everything that I do today, and I ve often felt that in my own life, that I lived as a kid growing up in London, my favorite subjects at school were art and design, philosophy and economics.
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Those are my favorite things in the world.
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Spent my entire life being immersed in that world.
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when traded it in to go to Cass Business School to study management science with a focus on behavioral science because I thought it gave me a career, only to give it all up, the safe job to go live as a monk, to then come back to the real world, go back into the world of business because I just had to pay the bills and survive, went into consulting, then came out and do media now, and I completely agree with everything you ve just said.
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And probably the thing that makes you so unique is like, you were a monk.
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and you are an entrepreneur, and you lived in London, and you lived in New York.
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And like the accumulation of all those experiences together is made you who you are, not one of them, but all of them.
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And I think that like the one advice I would give my college self is to try more things and have more experiences and don t seek status.
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And part of the reason why one should not seek status is because we can t even predict what industries will be around the future.
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Like growing up status to me was like, um, I don t know, it was like being an investment banker or something or something.
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And I don t know, it was like fields that may not even totally exist in their current form in the future.
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So, you know, I like to say like, you should do things you re good at, but you tend to be good at things you re interested in.
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You should seek out whatever you re curious about.
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whatever you re interested in, and then you want to get to the frontier in some way.
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At some point, you ll learn everything and you ll get to the edge of all that s known about that subject.
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And that is an uncomfortable period where you peer off the ledge of a cliff.
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And that is where you enter a frontier.
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And if you can then peer over the edge of a cliff and then get a little bit further,
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and extend our understanding, give us a little bit more land, that is how you like add to, as Steve Jobs said, that s how you give your love back to the species and create something for other people.
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And I think, I think it s amazing that like anyone can do that, you know, you can do it, cause anyone can do it at any scale, you know, and you can do it in your humble way, like on the side, something small, or you can do it in a really big way, but it feels the same, no matter what the scale.
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You just told us what you d say to your younger self.
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If you met your younger self now, let s do this exercise.
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What do you think your younger self would say to you?
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What would it be proud of?
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And what would your younger self say, we need to reconnect with this?
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The first thing my younger self would say is, oh my God, how did you do all this?
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And I would be totally perplexed.
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When I started Meet My Friends, I said, this will be huge.
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One day, thousands of people will do this.
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That was my sense of what was possible.
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It s hard to dream of something you ve never been exposed to, and it s hard to imagine becoming something when you didn t have any data that you could ever do anything like that in your past.
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And so I do not think my younger self, let s say my college self, did not think I could run a Fortune 500 company,
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You know, for every $1,500 spent in the world, $1 spent on Airbnb.
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Did I think I could lead an organization that s facilitating?
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No, I did not think of that.
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And so that would be probably the thing I would be like surprised in a very positive way.
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But the other thing I would probably say as well, I m 41 years old and I live alone.
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And I probably thought by now I would have a family and I ve always wanted to have one.
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And I think that for all the attention, adulation I get, I think I would have maybe looked at my life now or my recent life
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and identified a little bit of isolation.
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And I think the lesson is a couple of things.
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One, I think that things have happened in a different order than I imagined.
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It s hard to predict.
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I didn t think I d be this far along in my career and I probably thought I d be further along and have something different in my personal life.
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And I also would probably, I would hope the college me would tell myself now, you don t have to keep proving something to anyone.
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because you ve proven more to me than I ever thought was possible.
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And I think that like part of me, and this is probably true of a lot of people, we have this tape loop of like whatever we thought of ourselves as a child, like it s just frozen in times repeating ourselves and you just compulsively just keep doing something.
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And like many people have addictions and I probably had one that was probably work.
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And I think I d have to, I would hope my child herself or my younger self would remind me that
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you know, maybe there d be a wisdom that like the happiest periods of my life were with other people.
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Thank you for that.
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Thank you for opening up and going there.
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I felt that.
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What is a thought that you say you have too often?
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I wonder what they ll think.
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Speaking of Dr. Waldenker, Rob Rowan.
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I love Rob.
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He s a good friend.
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SPEAKER_00
But I met him last week for the first time and you ve had him on your show, right?
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Yeah.
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We ve spent a lot of time together.
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I love him.
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Something he told me last week that really stood out to me, he said, one of the biggest regrets that people have in their life is having lived their lives worrying what other people think.
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And I kind of understand why from a evolutionary standpoint, you kind of have to care what people think, because you have to fit in.
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And if you don t fit in, you don t belong.
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You re isolated.
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If you re isolated, it s a death sentence when the only thing you have is the village.
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But it turns out that that is not true anymore, that it s OK to be misunderstood.
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And that it doesn t, maybe it doesn t matter what people think, or maybe it doesn t matter what they think today.
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And that some of the greatest things I ve ever done, I was at least temporarily misunderstood.
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And maybe it only matters what a few people think.
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And maybe, just maybe, the person that most matters, what they think is yourself, right?
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That you just listen to your own voice, not other voices.
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And I think if I can do that, artists are called the artistic integrity, right?
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You had Rick Rubin on the show, he talks about like the best way to make a popular song is to make something you like, and that s about it.
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Not make something for somebody else.
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And that s something I have to continue to do.
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And the crazy thing is the more success you get, the more you start kind of performing for an audience.
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And you have to be very careful about performing for and appeasing an audience.
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And once you become something, people expect you to be that thing.
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You know, imagine like you happen to be something forever, but what if you change?
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What if you grow?
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What if you want to do different things?
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And that s a challenge I have, right?
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The Airbnb brand means something.
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I need to be careful about changing that brand.
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It stands for something.
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And yet.
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I, as a person, am not meant to be the same person every year.
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I mean, how could I be?
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I learn, I grow, I change, I have new experiences.
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And so having the permission to continue to change and evolve and not be so self-conscious of what people think, that s something that I always struggle with because, I don t know, part of me, I think I m like a people pleaser.
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And one of my challenges historically is like some people like, I m like, I don t always like interpersonal conflict.
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I like to appease people, make them happy.
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And that s got a good side.
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And it also can be a bit of a prison over time.
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And the bigger you get, the higher the walls get.
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I want to just point out something you said that was so subtle, but so powerful for everyone who s listening and watching.
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I ve never heard it put that way, but the idea that,
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we often think it doesn t matter what people think.
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And you said, it doesn t matter what they think today.
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And that was so subtle, but so powerful because I think when we live in a world where we re like, oh, it doesn t matter what anyone else thinks, it can be negligent.
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But the idea that it doesn t matter what they think today about what I m thinking.
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And- Thank God.
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Yeah.
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Thank God.
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You know why?
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When we first came to the idea, one of my first investors said, don t worry about people stealing your idea.
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If it s any good, everyone will dismiss it.
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We tend to believe things were good in hindsight.
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Some of the most revolutionary people and ideas were revolutionary because they were misunderstood in their time.
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That if you have to be at some point in your life, willing to be misunderstood and the solitude you can have are two things.
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I think number one, to not be so attached to it, to realize that ultimately you can t predict the outcome.
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Just do what you believe, follow your heart.
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And if it s true,
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whatever has happened is meant to be.
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But the other thing you can do is to escape into the future, to say, to have this, we call it a vision for a reason.
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You envision something that people don t see yet and say, I m willing to be misunderstood to try to follow this thing.
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And if I believe in enough, eventually other people might see it.
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And if you are able to be misunderstood just for a little bit, that s what it feels like to truly revolutionize something and change something.
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There s a beautiful statement, which is probably my favorite, which you ve just encapsulated so well.
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It s from Charles Horton Cooley.
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He wrote it in 1896 or something like that.
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He said this early, and when you hear it, you re like, wow, that was said yesterday.
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He said, the challenge today is I m not what I think I am.
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I m not what you think I am.
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I am what I think you think I am.
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Oh.
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And he said, we live in this perception of a perception of ourselves.
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So we don t even know what we look like.
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We are who we think other people think we are.
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And that s twice removed from yourself.
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And that distance we create from our understanding of ourselves versus what we think someone thinks of us.
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Totally.
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How will you ever know?
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What do you think is something you are still trying to understand about yourself?
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Or if you think you misunderstand a part of who Brian is, what are you still trying to understand?
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I think that we tend to have an outdated image of ourselves.
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And that makes sense, right?
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Like think about I m 41 years old.
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So my image of myself is the average of the last 41 years.
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And if the average last 41 years, the median is 20 years old.
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And so I still see myself a little bit like that person.
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And people, most people see me today.
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And a lot of people are gonna see me for the first time right now.
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And that s their impression.
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And that s a Delta.
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And I often wonder like,
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Sometimes I probably have had a little bit of an imposter syndrome, like what do people see in me and why do they follow me?
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Because they do.
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At some point you re a leader and you re a leader because people choose to follow you and you don t impose yourself on them.
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They ultimately believe in something.
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Still trying to like maybe come to terms with that.
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Like what does this all mean?
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I think I m still trying to understand what will make me happy, especially at a personal level.
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I think I ve found what will make me happy at a professional level.
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I was really lucky that I discovered something that I love very early on.
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I found a perfect harmony between what I was good at, what I loved, and what kind of society valued.
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And those things just clicked into place and I was able to find it.
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But I think I ve been on a lot longer journey to figure out like what will make me happy, like in a larger sense of the word.
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And it turns out that success and status to some extent have benefits and, you know, but it s not, it s certainly to say it s not, everything s an understatement.
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I think I m still trying to, I was still trying to learn that.
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Maybe I m trying to figure out, you know, at this age with so much, so many resources, like I almost feel like in a way my life s just beginning.
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And so it s just beginning then and I can t connect the dots looking forward.
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It s a discovery of who am I and who am I meant to become?
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Like, is this my story or is this the end of this, the middle of the story, the beginning of the story and what am I meant to do next?
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And I m, I m kind of learning a lot more about myself every year.
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That s a brilliant mindset.
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That s, that s so empowering and I m hoping for everyone who s listening and watching, that is so phenomenal to hear from you because
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that is the journey of life.
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Like the questions you just laid out, like if you weren t asking those questions, how boring would life be?
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Like how unmeaningful and unfulfilling would it be?
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And the fact that you re asking those questions at this point.
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Maybe one other thing can I add?
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SPEAKER_01
Oh, of course you can add whatever you want.
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So over a year ago, it was February, Russia invaded Ukraine.
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We got word that there d be like millions of refugees.
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And when this broke out, I remember my co-founder, Joe,
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calling me up and him telling me something.
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He said, when a crisis of this scale happens, we should ask ourselves one question.
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And that question is, how can we help?
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And I always wanted to believe that if I was like a CEO during World War II, I would have like been helpful.
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And I want, I always try to use, that s the other device I use.
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I try to think about how I ll be viewed in the future, but I also want to, I always think in a crisis, how do I want to be remembered?
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Even if no one will remember me.
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And I think anyone can do that.
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How do you want to be remembered by history?
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Even if it s just a intellectual device, because maybe not a lot of people remember, that s okay.
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But live your life as if you d be remembered.
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And what I realized,
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was one of the most important things.
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And then we ended up helping provide housing for over 100,000 refugees, and it was an incredible team effort.
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But it came from this basic idea of how can I help?
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And maybe that is the other version of my question of my life.
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At this point, you know, how can I help?
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With everything I have that, I mean, I ve hired some of the most talented people in the world.
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We have enormous amounts of resources.
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We have this incredibly advanced technology.
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I have this pretty big megaphone.
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What do I do with that?
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And I hope that what I do provides me happiness.
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And I ve noticed that the things that make me happy are like kind of helping and giving others.
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I don t mean to sound cliche, but like you start to realize like what provides happiness and value for you.
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And so that s kind of something that I keep thinking about.
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And that s what I love about like entrepreneurship and creativity and design is you make something maybe initially for yourself, but then for other people.
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And the real joy is seeing them use it.
7
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Absolutely.
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I think I was really fortunate when I, when I lived as a monk, service was trained as the highest act.
7
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Service was like imprinted in us as the highest act that the act of giving the act of serving others.
7
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Interesting.
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Yeah.
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And it was so counterintuitive to everything I d learned growing up in London because it was always about getting and achieving and giving and serving were never part of even our vocabulary, let alone being a part of life.
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And I realize now, and I see that today, that when anyone gets to a point of getting everything, all they can do is give it away in the way that fuels them to a mission that is aligned with their purpose, not just wherever it goes, but in a meaningful way.
7
SPEAKER_01
You talked a bit about, which I loved, about the youngest self saying back to you that you thought that things would happen in a different order.
7
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Yeah, totally.
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When you think about that, being single, or in your words, being lonely, you re such a mastermind at so many things, what s the thought that blocks that?
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What s the worry that comes up, the anxiety that stops you from masterminding that part of your life?
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I ve been able to look inside myself to know a number of things.
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I think that I grew up feeling a little bit like an outsider.
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I wanted to feel like anyone, like I belong, and I found through achievement.
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that, you know, I would feel these feelings that I thought were like love and I would feel better, you know, and all that.
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And I think it s this incredible and positive to a point, but if you re not careful, it can become all consuming.
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And the thing about a tech company or a startup is like, it s like, imagine you, like, again, you have a three person band that s now a 30,000 person band or, you know, a three million person.
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It just, there s always more you can do.
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It can, if you re not careful, become like a one-dimensional addiction.
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And I think that it s like the thing that made me successful was my singular focus.
7
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But I have to be careful that the thing that could then turn against me is my singular focus.
7
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And so I think it s like what I, the way to live my life in the next 20 years can t exactly be what I did in the last 20 years.
7
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The last 20 years worked out pretty well.
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So why would I do anything differently?
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But of course, if I don t do anything differently, then I ll be 50 or 60 and nothing will have changed.
7
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And so I think it s really about like seeking community.
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The word community means harmony, to live in harmony and balance and having that.
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And so I think it s just old habits and habits that been rewarded.
7
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So, but you got to be very careful about those habits.
7
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I think that, I think that s what it is.
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And I also just, yeah, I don t know.
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What do you think?
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SPEAKER_01
When I listened to you and being with you for the time that we re spending together, and obviously it s the first time we ve met.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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You re someone who has extreme clarity about what you want, who you are, what you re working on, what you re struggling on.
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And my question would be, or my hypothesis is, does that clarity exist around what you want in the personal space?
7
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I think that s a big insight.
7
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Yeah.
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And maybe that s what I m still trying to discover.
7
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Yeah.
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I would say that you sound so clear that if you actually had clarity, then I don t think it would be hard, but it s hard to have clarity.
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SPEAKER_01
That s the hardest thing in life is to have clarity.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s a good point.
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And so when you have clarity, it will be so much more easy for you to create.
7
SPEAKER_01
You can t create something if you don t have clarity.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s a great point.
7
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And so that would be my.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I love that.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that s what I was going to ask you, my, what at least are those sprinklings of those clues?
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Let s, let s go with that word.
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What is, what are the clues of what you think could develop into clarity around what you re looking for in a personal way?
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You ve talked about so prolifically about what you want professionally, which is this using Airbnb as this phenomenal platform to build community and connect people and,
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you know, eradicate loneliness, which I love, like I love that.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s phenomenal clarity and it s so inspiring and I could get behind that today, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
Like that s, so what do you need to get behind yourself in the personal space?
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I feel like I m professionally like a 60 year old in a 41 year old s body and personally like a 25 year old in a 41 year old s body because I m like, I have a foot in the future and a foot in the past, or like I m in totally different timescales professionally and personally.
7
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And it kind of makes sense, right, where I am.
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a whole bunch of my life maybe was a little more on hold or done in a different order than I imagined.
7
SPEAKER_00
So the question is like, how do I get clarity?
7
SPEAKER_00
When I started Airbnb before, before we started Airbnb, I didn t know I wanted to start a tech company and I wanted to be like about bringing, helping bring people together.
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SPEAKER_00
And I was going to start with these two people and I was going to be a technology founder and I was going to marry art and science and do all this stuff.
7
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I couldn t have known any of that.
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But there were some things I did professionally that are probably clues to what should be done personally.
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The first thing is I had endless curiosity.
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I had role models, heroes, people I looked up to and, you know, both, you know, well-known people and lesser known people.
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I had an intense curiosity.
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I was drawn to certain types of people.
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SPEAKER_00
Um, and I had action, you know, it s like if you can t follow your passion, you follow your curiosity.
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Where does it take you?
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And you know, like you re not going to start a company by like never, like,
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starting and you re not going to build a personal life you want by not starting either.
7
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And so you just go on that journey and you, you will, you will, I think you will find what you want if you start and you keep moving.
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Yeah, that s what was right.
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Something like that.
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I m excited to see you, you know, I m excited to hear about how you take that short moment of clarity that we ve gained into the future because that s great.
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I really, really feel that you ve found in your life that you ve always been exactly where you re meant to be, not in the luck sense, like you said, of the right timing, but that each one of your experiences has made you make better decisions.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think that that may be the like exciting thing is like, what if I can t connect the dots looking forward, but I will realize in hindsight, wow, everything just fell into place.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like this thing led to that thing led to that thing.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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And that would be fun.
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SPEAKER_00
It d be fun to check in, in a handful of years and see what played out.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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Yeah, definitely.
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Definitely.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s so, it s so interesting that you keep quoting this.
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I ve never met someone who loves quotes as much as I do.
7
SPEAKER_01
So it s a, it s fun hearing them back from you and how they ve played out in your life.
8
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What if anything today, apart from everything we ve talked about, we ve talked about so many things, what if anything today keeps you up at night?
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SPEAKER_00
Or do you sleep really well?
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I don t know if I sleep that well, and I, not to use another quote, but Pablo Casa had a saying, the older you get, the stronger the wind gets, and it s always in your face.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I think that could be true of companies.
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What keeps me up at night is, you know, like people ask me in the professional context, what keeps you up at night at the company?
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Like, is this something happening?
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SPEAKER_01
What keeps me up at night is something not happening.
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What keeps me up at night is the idea that we grow into something that I like was meant to disrupt.
8
SPEAKER_01
2009 Airbnb takes off.
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So we started in 2007, 2008, it takes off by 2009.
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I go on a 10 year journey.
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It s now late 2019.
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And I remember having a dream, a bad dream, that I woke up and I was running a company that was unrecognizable from anything I ever intended to start.
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SPEAKER_01
It was like I was in a wilderness for 10 years and I just, and I came back.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I remember going on a hike in Bolinas, California, where Joe had like a summer house.
8
SPEAKER_01
And we went on a hike, Joni and I, and I told them about this dream.
8
SPEAKER_01
And they said, well, what did you find?
8
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I said, I was horrified because the company we set up to start is unrecognizable, we have today.
8
SPEAKER_01
And they go, what do you mean?
8
SPEAKER_01
I go, well, people are complaining that it s big, it s bureaucratic, it s slow moving, people are more complacent, cost is rising, gross is slowing.
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SPEAKER_01
It s starting to feel like a corporation.
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And I didn t know what to do.
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I felt like we needed to like, not blow it all up, but change it all.
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SPEAKER_01
Like take the house back to the studs.
8
SPEAKER_01
But the problem was we re about to go public and that s like a really bad time to do that.
8
SPEAKER_01
But I had this image in my head of this kind of company that I want to have.
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SPEAKER_01
This image was to build the most creative place on earth, to build the world s biggest startup, to build a company that was like felt small, that was completely focused not on a product or service, but a community.
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SPEAKER_01
I was starting to come to the conclusion by 2019 that you can t be big and have a soul.
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SPEAKER_01
Like at some point, those things were at odds, that the problem was being big.
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SPEAKER_01
And I didn t know what to do.
8
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And all of a sudden we get word in February, 2020, that our China business has collapsed by 80% because this thing called COVID.
8
SPEAKER_01
We re like, what s COVID?
8
SPEAKER_01
And then within eight weeks, you lose 80% of your business.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I ve never had a near death experience, but it s been described to me as your life flashes before your eyes.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I had a near business death experience.
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And then suddenly everything became clear to me.
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SPEAKER_01
If I was sitting in this chair three years ago, I would not have been clear.
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I don t think I would have the clarity I had today.
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SPEAKER_01
There s something about almost losing everything, and everything I had, at least at that time, I thought was professional, that gives you clarity.
8
SPEAKER_01
Imagine your house is on fire, and someone says you can take 20% of the things out of your house.
8
SPEAKER_01
Suddenly you have to make that choice.
8
SPEAKER_01
And you get really clear about what s important.
8
SPEAKER_01
People start telling you, I want Airbnb to exist, and you say, why?
8
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And they tell you.
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SPEAKER_01
It s as if they re giving you the eulogy before you re even dead and how you want to be remembered.
8
SPEAKER_01
And you start to ask yourself, I don t know what s going to happen, but how do I want to be remembered?
8
SPEAKER_01
And at that point, we stepped into action and we basically rebuilt the company from the ground up.
8
SPEAKER_01
And this is to, again, bring it back one more time to Steve Jobs.
8
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I met two people at that point in my life who changed my life.
8
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One was Johnny Ive, who was Steve s partner in design.
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And the other was Hiroki Asai, who was Steve s creative director.
8
SPEAKER_01
And they told me about the way Steve ran the company.
8
SPEAKER_01
And actually, a funny even further aside is, I remember one time, I remember I went to Steve s house, I never met him, and I saw these books on the shelf from Rappan Amonheimer, and I asked his wife, what is with the Rappan Amonheimer books?
8
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But as I started studying, I realized that
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It was this idea that you, almost like Robert, kept the whole bomb in his head, that this idea that the leader collects all the information and that you re the center, that it s not a pyramid.
8
SPEAKER_01
You re not top down, you re inside out.
8
SPEAKER_01
You re the son of a solar system, but your job is to like emit light and bring decision-making in, to pull in this shared consciousness.
8
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And I started realizing,
8
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There was a whole new way to run a company.
8
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A company that wasn t divisions.
8
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Think about what that sounds like.
8
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Divisions.
8
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We are divided, but totally integrated.
8
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As small, lean, elite as possible.
8
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Creative and analytical.
8
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Technology and humanities.
8
SPEAKER_01
That we d have one flow.
8
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A new season of Bridgerton is here.
8
SPEAKER_02
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
8
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I m your host, Gabrielle Collins.
8
SPEAKER_02
And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
8
SPEAKER_02
Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad.
8
SPEAKER_02
Is Betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor?
8
SPEAKER_02
Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown s pen.
8
SPEAKER_02
We re discussing it all.
8
SPEAKER_02
I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season.
8
SPEAKER_02
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
8
SPEAKER_02
Then,
8
SPEAKER_02
Fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
8
SPEAKER_02
Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
8
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And that was basically the way I found ourselves out of a crisis.
8
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And so the lesson of the story is through that, I was able to get a lot of clarity through this crisis.
8
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I was forced to answer and ask all these questions that I never had to do before, but I hope on the personal side, I don t need a crisis to answer those questions.
8
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Yeah, that s exactly where I think we re headed, that you have an opportunity to avoid the crisis in order to not be in it.
8
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Not everyone needs that crisis.
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No, you don t.
8
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It sounds like, do you still, when you present ideas, they re so visual, you see them.
8
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I feel like you can see everything you re talking about, and I can see it with you.
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In my head, my mind is like a three-dimensional model.
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And all my ideas, think of it like a tree.
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The trunk of the tree is your very first principles, your root ideas.
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And then they have branches and the branches have branches and those branches have leaves.
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Or it s like a space, a three-dimensional space.
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It s multi-dimensional.
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dimensional and colorful.
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And this is what we call the model, your model of the world that you want to live in.
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And as you gain more information, you keep changing the model in your head.
8
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I kind of describe my mind running Airbnb as imagine a chessboard.
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And there s that you have to see a few moves ahead.
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Now imagine like a die, a thousand sided die, each playing a separate game of chess, all simultaneously anticipating and understand relationships.
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As hard as that is, if you can start to organize all the ideas in your mind,
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but not be rigid, continually changing and orienting it.
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Like, you know, this is how I tend to see things in three dimensions, spatially, it s really rich, vivid colors.
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And that s just how I think.
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You know, I think other people will think in abstract thoughts or numbers.
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Some think in terms of language, but that s how I do it.
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You know, and it probably doesn t surprise you given my background.
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And do you see yourself in that or is that happening and you re observing it?
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you know, you might ve hit on something.
8
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There have been times.
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where I m trying to design a world that other people want to, I want other people to live in.
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And I think it s like, I want to vicariously live through them.
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It s like, I want to design this house, that s the nicest house in the world for everyone to live in, but I ll be in the workshop designing the house.
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And sometimes I have to stop to say, maybe I should step inside that house.
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And I think that, I think that s a crux of it actually.
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And to answer your question,
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I sometimes see myself in the house and sometimes I see myself just kind of almost like a monk or, you know, in a technical design monastery.
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Like, you know, and that s kind of what the pandemic was.
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I described it almost like a monastery, except with Zoom.
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But if you didn t know I was at Zoob, you d just think I was meditating all day, right?
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Like I d just be sitting in one chair.
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And so that s a great thing is I think that sometimes many times we as
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leaders, especially tech founders, I think that many tech founders basically design the kind of world they want to live in because the world they grew up in was inadequate in some way and did not make them happy.
8
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And I think the challenge with those tech leaders is to make sure that they step inside that world and live that world themselves.
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And when you don t do it, then sometimes you start to forget why you do things and you get disconnected.
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Wow.
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You re making me think of all this now.
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You re making me think too, I love it.
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No, and that resonates so deeply and strongly because I also think that without purpose tech entrepreneurs also can sometimes, not even just tech entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs in general or anyone
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one can build something that they monetize that they would never want to live into.
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Yeah.
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Sometimes people don t know why they re doing it.
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Correct.
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They, they started it for a reason.
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Maybe the reason was extrinsic.
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I want to be rich and successful, but maybe it was intrinsic.
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Maybe there was something, but even so.
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Then you find yourself waking up one day asking, why am I still doing this?
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And you know, the number of people that forgot why they re doing it, the number of people that are self-driving cars, there s a destination that s in the car, they re driving towards it, but they don t even know what that destination is.
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And that s when you don t look inside yourself.
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And if you re not careful, you will basically be at a super highway going somewhere, not knowing why you re going there.
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And you may wake up and end up in a destination that wasn t where you intended.
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I think this, having this clarity is so important.
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Who am I?
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What do I value?
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Like, what do I want to do in this world?
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It s like, it s taking the time to reflect.
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And I think the best businesses,
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are really introspective by introspective leaders.
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Like when we started the company, we were really clear.
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Here s our mission.
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And it wasn t just like a mission statement.
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It s like, here s exactly what we re trying to do.
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And now it changes.
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Here are our values.
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Here s the kind of people I want to like work with.
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Well, what do they all have in common?
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They re curious.
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They re optimistic.
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They re kind of creative.
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They tend to like, like hosting other people.
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Okay.
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Those become what we call values.
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What are the shared lessons?
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What are the shared stories?
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And the more
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you can start to be really reflective.
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You re right, the more you re clear about what you want, the more you get it.
9
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Our problem isn t in life probably that we don t get what we want.
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The problem is we don t know what we want maybe, or we pursue things we unconsciously wanting that are counterproductive to what will make us happy.
9
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And if we can just wrap our arms around that,
9
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some of the hardest things to change are our own thoughts.
9
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But in a weird way, they also seem like the most possible to change.
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And so that s something that I ve seen.
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Some of the loneliest people I ve met are some of the richest people I ve met.
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Some of the most isolated people I ve met are some of the most successful people I ve met.
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Some of the most confused people I ve met are the most powerful.
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Because at some point, the power and success can be confusing.
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You know, you had a purpose, but you also have all these demands and these stakeholders and you can get fused by appeasing people.
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And you, like, I think that happened to me.
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Like, I think I started Airbnb and I had a really clear vision.
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And I think I ve gotten to a wilderness where I kind of got confused.
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And a lot of founders have described becoming confused.
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A lot of leaders get confused.
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And I totally see how that happens.
9
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And I think finding your way back home is key.
9
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I would be intrigued to see if you close your eyes now or whenever you chose to, to see what you saw when you looked at your personal life.
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You re talking about your professional life as being all these thousands of decisions moving.
9
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And you say like, I kind of that period of self-reflection, right?
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Yeah.
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Like I think I saw somebody who was kind of
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almost punishing myself and romanticizing suffering.
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Because I thought, in some extent, I maybe believed that I was going to give everything to the company.
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And it was like this selfless act, but it became so selfless that I then could start to lose a sense of myself.
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I mean, you know how weird it is?
9
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I always kind of joked, like, if I die, will I die Brian Chesky or the Airbnb guy just died?
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You know, like, and like, am I Brian or my Airbnb?
9
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And like,
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you know, like they get really, one is an icon.
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That s a noun and verb, you know, ubiquitously around the world.
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The other is a person that not a lot of people know, really know.
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And when you, it s very careful that I started becoming the company and this company started becoming me.
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And I think,
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70% of that was good, because that meant the company, I think, was a person, had a face, is humanistic, it was in the details.
9
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But when you become a company, you cease to be a person, and then you lose a sense of yourself, and then you become an icon.
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And by icon, I don t mean famous, I mean iconography.
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Icon is short for an iconography, and iconography is for a symbol for something.
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And of course, people are much more than symbols.
9
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And I started seeing that I started becoming a symbol and a thing.
9
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And I stopped listening to myself.
9
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And by the way, like you get pressure from shareholders to like drive a stock price.
9
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You get pressure from, you know, employees to make it a better work environment.
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You get pressure from hosts, but no one gives you pressure for yourself and your personal life.
9
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If you don t create that own pressure, you will like, that will be the, like, that s the one person that may not,
9
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put their hand up, hey, everyone else will.
9
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And if you don t listen to yourself, and I think that s been part of the second chapter of my life is like kind of designing the world I want to live in and then living in that world and choosing to actually live in that world.
9
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And you d be, I mean, you ve interviewed so many people, so, but I m so surprised how many leaders don t actually live in that world.
9
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I tend to think that like some, yeah, some of the most successful people are people that
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they get so disconnected from what they intend to do when they started.
9
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And so reconnecting, I mean, so much of this, I guess I tend to see everything through that lens, but so much of it is about reconnecting, that reconnection, that path back home.
9
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I love what you were saying about the iconography and how the human meshes with the iconography.
9
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And you described earlier the- And maybe everyone does that.
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I just did it in a bigger, sorry to cut, I just did it in a bigger way.
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Like you could totally get how like I and Brian at Airbnb, they start to emerge, but I bet you even people who don t have a giant company, who they really are and the person they re like supposed to be are merging.
9
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And as those two things merge, you lose who you really are.
9
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I mean, it s method acting.
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It s literally method acting.
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It s like we are all pretending to play a role only to believe that that role that we pretended to be is now us and has replaced us.
9
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And it s even harder, I ll tell you why, because when you built Airbnb, it had iconography.
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Yes.
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Brian didn t ever have iconography.
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There wasn t a mission list and a value list before when Brian existed, before.
9
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If you were to draw the iconography of Brian, the person, not the Airbnb, I m intrigued as to what that would look like if you started to design that.
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I see a child.
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I see like a childlike curiosity and energy and love that I think I ve always held on to.
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I also see the world like through this idea of family and community.
9
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And I think when people hear the word family, they think of like their parents, their siblings, their children.
9
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And I think I see like, you know, I asked like my co-founder Joe, I asked him like, what would Airbnb, what would success be for Airbnb?
9
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He had this crazy audacious idea.
9
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He said to redefine the word family.
9
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And I ve realized that like so much of my life has been trying to do that.
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I see this like childlike person of curiosity and wonder that I ve never left that sense of wonder that I m open to be vulnerable and guided by love and like treating or wanting to.
9
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treat those around me like family.
9
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And what I mean by that is I d try to do anything for them.
9
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And I hope, I hope that my friends, if they ever heard this, they would feel like that resonates and that s not just a pure ideal.
9
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I mean, that s the iconography.
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I would hope that iconography is true to some extent.
9
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I guess, as I think about it even deeper, I ve used the word loneliness, connection, and community, but maybe at some deeper level, the deepest word is family.
9
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And what bonds family is love.
9
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And I think that as families have gotten smaller and smaller,
9
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we ve gotten more and more isolated.
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And if we could re-expand that word, and maybe that s like too idealistic, but like just even a little bit to your like close friends and to other people and just try to like re-expand that circle.
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That s kind of what I would want.
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You know, if I design the world around me, then I better design it with other people in it.
9
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And as you see that, do you see the child, or are you the child?
9
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As you visualize that.
9
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Yeah, it s funny, I kind of see both.
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Like, are you seeing the child sitting there, or are you seeing the vision through the eyes of where you would be?
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I feel like a timeless image of myself.
9
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Like I m like young and old at the same time.
9
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Like it s not just one age.
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I m like, I can see the child of me and I can also see this like grown up that I always like that is protecting.
9
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And so I have like both sides, the protector offering security and bringing people together and the child who is vulnerable and seeks love and wants to just be open and totally curious.
9
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It s almost
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like I have this image, you know, like you re like, you sit at the family, the dinner table where you like, like you as a kid with your parents, your siblings or whatever, my image is that, but it s a very big table with a lot of people.
10
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And, you know, and, and that s not just my close family that I might have, it s, you know, maybe like the, the broader people in my life that I have around me.
10
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That s, I think the image I have.
10
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And I think that s in a space that s very well designed, very well designed.
10
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And I have a design aesthetic that s like fairly modern, but also whimsical.
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I don t like the cold.
10
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I don t like coldness of modernism.
10
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I like it to be like colorful.
10
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And so, yeah.
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I saw, if you re okay with that, I want to share something that came for me.
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To me, the clarity is that it s not even the merger often.
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What you said so beautifully was like, I see my younger self and I see where I am now and the now is protecting, but the childlike is that love, that joy, that community, the family.
10
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And it s like they re hand in hand.
10
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Like it s not a merger of the two.
10
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It s not an integration.
10
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It s a hand in hand.
10
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Oh, it s really great.
10
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There s a wisdom that you have today that you didn t have then.
10
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And there s a wisdom you had then that you don t have now.
10
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And it s just hand in hand and walking together.
10
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I ve always wanted to believe that I can have the wisdom of my grandparents and the curiosity of a child.
10
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There you go.
10
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in one, that I have a foot, you know, Walt Disney, one of my other idols, used to, in the front of Disneyland, he says, here you leave the world of today and enter the world of tomorrow, yesterday, and fantasy.
10
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He said, I have a foot in the future and a foot in the past.
10
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And I think that s partly what I have.
10
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a foot in the future.
10
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And that future is one of maybe curiosity and looking forward and futurism and technology.
10
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And then I have also a foot in the past.
10
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The foot in the past is my roots.
10
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I think I, I oscillate between the two, you know, culture and technology.
10
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massive scale, become one of the biggest in the world with like the desire to always be a startup and always be close knit.
10
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It s like these two paradoxes competing forces.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
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And I think that, that is a tension that it s, I think it s a really interesting tension.
10
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Now you re making me think about all this.
10
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Like I m sure I ve never, some of the stuff I ve never really, not only have not talked about it, some of the stuff I m kind of not even really thought about that until now.
10
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I m just really thinking about it.
10
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One of the things when you re like a, like you run a giant companies, you learn scale.
10
SPEAKER_00
When you start a company, you re tiny.
10
SPEAKER_00
You have to do everything.
10
SPEAKER_00
You have to like,
10
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Things you don t even think about.
10
SPEAKER_00
You have an office, which is your apartment, and you need to buy a coffee maker and go buy the coffee.
10
SPEAKER_00
And you need to have a name for your company, and you actually need to check if that name s trademarked.
10
SPEAKER_00
And you ve got to buy a domain name, and you ve got to have a story for the company.
10
SPEAKER_00
And then you ve got to make sure you have a legal corporation, you ve got to find a lawyer, you ve got to interview the lawyers, and then you ve got to actually decide what you re going to make.
10
SPEAKER_00
And you say, well, how do I make things?
10
SPEAKER_00
And I could go down to a hundred thousand things here in the tedious details.
10
SPEAKER_00
If you go on a rocket ship that I go on 15 years later, you know, a billion and a half.
10
SPEAKER_00
times it s been used, you end up at some massive scale, a scale that s bigger than you ve ever imagined.
10
SPEAKER_00
But as a founder, you never let go of those details.
10
SPEAKER_00
You know, it s like a founder is different than a professional manager.
10
SPEAKER_00
A professional manager never saw it small.
10
SPEAKER_00
And as a founder, not only did you see it small, you created what was small.
10
SPEAKER_00
And so as you see the full scale, you tend to zoom out and zoom in and zoom out and zoom in.
10
SPEAKER_00
And it s actually,
10
SPEAKER_00
a really helpful skill in life.
10
SPEAKER_00
Whenever you need a different perspective, you can zoom in or you can zoom out.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I tend to do both.
10
SPEAKER_00
I go in and say, well, what about this?
10
SPEAKER_00
What about this?
10
SPEAKER_00
What about this?
10
SPEAKER_00
And go into the smaller and smaller detail.
10
SPEAKER_00
And then I go back to the present scale.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s like a satellite map.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s like the powers of 10.
10
SPEAKER_00
Zoom out to space, zoom in with a microscope.
10
SPEAKER_00
And that is just a way to think about things.
10
SPEAKER_00
And you re constantly doing that when you run a company.
10
SPEAKER_00
You see the big picture and you say, what does it mean?
10
SPEAKER_00
You dive right in and you zoom out.
10
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of leaders, they struggle.
10
SPEAKER_00
They can only do that medium altitude.
10
SPEAKER_00
They can t see the fullest picture or they get stuck and they can t access the smallest of details.
10
SPEAKER_00
And the entire universe exists in the smallest detail.
10
SPEAKER_00
And that s what you discover when you zoom in and zoom out.
10
SPEAKER_00
You start to realize the relationships.
10
SPEAKER_00
And it allows you to both run something large and still connect with somebody at the most intimate human level and not lose your mind along the way.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
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It s that balance between recognizing what s possible through scale, but at the same time being able to be embracing of your own insignificance.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
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It s like you see the significance, but yet you recognize it s insignificant and that paradox is where.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s so fascinating.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
The paradox is the only thing that s fascinating.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
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You know, the human mind is a part, all of these, everything that we see that s magical about the world is a paradox, that everything s connected, but everything s doing its own thing.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
10
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Right?
10
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Like the ocean and the sun are doing their own thing, yet they re connected, yet they re doing their own thing.
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And I think the more you start to see why I want to scale, you sort of see, you re right, that more and more things are connected.
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But because everything s connected doesn t mean they re all the same.
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And the more you learn about the details of things, the more you realize how different everything is.
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And so you, but then you realize they re actually in some deeper way related and that you spend the rest of your life kind of in that discovery.
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Yeah.
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And, and you know what I ve observed that is the connecting force, at least up until now in my life.
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is that everything that we ve just talked about, everything in the universe that we see is serving uniquely.
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What connects it is that it s serving, the sun is serving, the water is serving, the trees are serving, the trunk of the tree, the leaves you talked about, the flowers, they re serving.
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Everything is giving a service.
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Everything s interdependent on everything else that we tend to have this illusion that we re separate from one another.
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And I think that even like loneliness might be a reality, which is the way you perceive the world, but aloneness may be a illusion that you re not as alone and separate as you think you are.
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And I think that s a really good thing to remind yourself and that we are like so much more connected to everything else.
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And that I think so much of creativity is just first embracing the fact that everything is connected in some way and it s your job to discover and make connections and find relationships and similarities.
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And by the way, that s a great way to connect with people.
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To know that like, wow, what makes them so fascinating is they re really different from me in some of these ways.
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But what is gonna bond us is that we re actually so connected.
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And there are almost no humans on this planet that you don t have some fundamental connections to.
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And if you don t see them, you have to keep looking.
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And then once you keep looking, that becomes the bond, that becomes the thing that you share between them.
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And how do you do that?
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With curiosity and interest.
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Fascinating, just be fascinated all the time.
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And it s almost like that s contagious.
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If you re fascinated, I m fascinated.
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Somebody once said that to me, a director who I was doing a film shoot and he said, if you re fascinated, I m fascinated.
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And I m like, well, okay, like I really do.
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And it s like,
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And so what do you find fascinating?
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Yeah, yeah.
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Yeah, I often say to people similarly that if you don t find someone interesting, it s because you re not interested.
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Yeah.
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Like you re not interested enough.
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There is something interesting about every person you meet.
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There is something interesting about everyone and everything.
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And that is what the cure that that is, I think what curiosity is.
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And like, you know, you find the game within the game, you find like,
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In school, I think so many people in school, they re not interested in subjects because they re abstract.
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But if somebody s obsessed with basketball, then teach physics through basketball, biology through basketball, teach history through basketball.
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So you find something you re interested in.
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I think the great thing about starting a company
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is I had no interest in learning about accounting.
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I had no abstract interest in learning about leadership and management and organization.
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I had no abstract interest in understanding like technical architecture, but I had an interest in how we should account for all the money we re making, what technology platform we should be on to enable Airbnb.
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And through something I was already interested in Airbnb, I was able to learn all these other things.
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But if I had to learn them abstractly, the way we re taught in school, I don t think anything would have stuck.
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And so Airbnb became that model, this world.
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And I have learned almost everything through this world that I ve been generally constructing, co-constructing with my coworkers and with the community.
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And it s just like, I like to joke that Airbnb is like the world s biggest RISD project that just never stopped.
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And we just kept building it and kept building it and kept building it and kept building it.
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And it s the bigger we build, the more I learn and the more I discover.
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And yeah, I ve seen so much of the world through the creation of this really big house, so to speak.
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Yeah.
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And that s pretty wild.
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It is pretty wild.
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And it s just getting started, hopefully.
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It s just getting started.
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Brian, this is without a doubt the most unique episode of On Purpose I think we ve ever had.
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Really?
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In four years.
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No way.
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And I don t just say stuff like that.
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You can check with these guys.
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We end every episode with a final five.
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These are five questions I ask, pretty much 90% of them to all guests, and these are your final five, Brian.
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They have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum, and I will probably destroy that pattern, but I ll try.
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So, Brian, these are your final five.
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The first question is, what is the best insight, advice that you ve ever heard or received or read?
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It s better to have 100 people love you
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than a million people that just sort of like you.
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And so do things that don t scale.
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And if you do, maybe people love something you love so much, they ll tell everyone about it, and you might end up with millions of people after all.
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It s kind of a long sentence.
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It s a great sentence, it s beautiful, it s perfect.
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Second question, what is the worst insight advice you ve ever heard, read, received, or come across?
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Anything that involves chasing status, not because it s bad, but because it s actually a horrible way to even get it.
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Love that answer.
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Yeah.
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Question number three, how would you define your current purpose?
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To try to help bring the world together, even if it s in the end a small way.
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Question number four, if you were being remembered after you were physically gone, what would you hope to hear?
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We miss him.
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Fifth and final question, I ask this question to every guest who s ever been on the show.
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If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
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sometimes people ask me, if you can impose one thing on the road, what would it be?
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And I d say, everyone would have a passport and everyone would walk in someone else s shoes.
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And I think if they were to do that, there d be like such a greater awakening in the world.
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So maybe everyone was forced to live someone else s life and to step in someone else s shoes and the more different the better.
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Well said.
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Brian Teske, everyone.
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Brian, that was, as I said, the most unique.
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I think it s really interesting, something that came to my mind and heart.
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And since this has been such an intuitive conversation, I thought I should share it.
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You know, in our professional life, we have business partners, but in our personal life, I don t think we often think about having human partners.
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And I really appreciate you dancing with me today, going there with me today and being human partners for each other.
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And you definitely did that for me today.
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You brought out of me things I didn t know.
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that I haven t gotten to for a while.
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So thank you so much for inspiring me and enlightening me in so many ways.
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I truly had a special internal experience myself.
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Well, I think I ve learned about myself through this process.
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It s amazing the amount of time you can go through in your life without stopping and taking a look at things.
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And when you do, my God, like that just changes your perspective on everything, doesn t it?
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Absolutely.
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Thank you so much.
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Thank you.
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I m so grateful for you.
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Well, thank you for having me today.
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Thank you so much.
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Such an honor, such a pleasure.
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And everyone who s been listening and watching, if you re with us, then make sure that you...
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I want you to let me know what was your favorite moment.
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There are so many great moments, but grab a screenshot of where you found your favorite moments so we can see all the seconds and minutes so that everyone can go listen to it.
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I love seeing what deeply connects and penetrates through to our community because this is all in service of you.
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So thank you for everyone who s been listening and watching and thank you, Brian.
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Thank you, Jay.
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If you loved this episode, you will also love my interview with Charles Duhigg on how to hack your brain, change any habit effortlessly, and the secret to making better decisions.
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Look, am I hesitating on this because I m scared of making the choice, because I m scared of doing the work?
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Or am I sitting with this because it just doesn t feel right yet?
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Guess what, Will?
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What s that, Mango?
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I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
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I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
11
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We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
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And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
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So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
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Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.