Speaker 1: He said something to me. He said, Brian, do you
Speaker 1: know what the number one kill in America is?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Is that like heart disease is a cancer? And he goes, No,
Speaker 1: the number one kill in America is loneliness.
Speaker 3: Airbnb CEO.
Speaker 2: His name is Brian Cheskey. He's a badass in this business.
Speaker 1: You're worth thirty billion dollars. The problem with success is
Speaker 1: at tends to amplify things. No one ever told me
Speaker 1: how lonely you would get. It's almost like I had
Speaker 1: to go on this entire journey to realize I had
Speaker 1: everything I needed before I even started the journey. If
Speaker 1: I die, well I die. Brian Cheskey or the Airbnb
Speaker 1: guy just died.
Speaker 3: This is, without doubt, the most unique episode of On
Speaker 3: Purpose I think we've ever heard. Before we jump into
Speaker 3: this episode, i'd like to invite you to join this
Speaker 3: community to hear more interviews that will help you become happier, healthier,
Speaker 3: and more healed. All I want you to do is
Speaker 3: click on the subscribe button. I love your support. It's
Speaker 3: incredible to see all your comments and we're just getting started.
Speaker 3: I can't wait to go on this journey with you.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for subscribing. It means the world to.
Speaker 2: Me, the best selling author in the most the number
Speaker 2: one healthy well innes.
Speaker 3: Podcast and Purpose with Jay Shetty. Hey everyone, welcome back
Speaker 3: to On Purpose, the number one health and wellness podcast
Speaker 3: in the world. Thanks to each and every one of
Speaker 3: you that come back every week to become happier, healthier
Speaker 3: and more healed. And you know that's my goal here
Speaker 3: to create a community where we can all come together
Speaker 3: feel connected by ideas and visions and thoughts that help
Speaker 3: us in our daily lives. And today's guest is someone
Speaker 3: who's achieved incredible success, but also someone who I believe
Speaker 3: is carrying ideas and insights that can be really useful
Speaker 3: to us on our journey to whatever success may mean
Speaker 3: to you. I'm talking about the one and only Brian Chesky,
Speaker 3: who's the co founder and chief executive officer of Airbnb.
Speaker 3: In two thousand and seven, Brian and Joe Gerbia became
Speaker 3: Airbnb's first hosts. Since then, Brian has overseen Airbnb's growth
Speaker 3: to become a community of over four million hosts who
Speaker 3: have welcomed more than one billion guests across two hundred
Speaker 3: plus countries and regions. Brian is a signatory to the
Speaker 3: Giving Pledge and is committed to donating the net proceeds
Speaker 3: of a CEO equity compensation to community, philanthropic and charitable causes,
Speaker 3: something that I'm so passionate about and so excited to
Speaker 3: dive into. Brian, Welcome to on Purpose.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you, really excited to be here. It's awesome.
Speaker 3: I'm truly honored. I think there's very few. As I
Speaker 3: was just saying to you offline, and I want to
Speaker 3: repeat what I said. I think it's hard to build
Speaker 3: something that matters. It's hard to scale something that matters,
Speaker 3: and it's hard to build and scale something that matters
Speaker 3: and keep making it matter. And you seem to be
Speaker 3: doing all those things.
Speaker 2: We try every day.
Speaker 3: Congratulations, It's been a joy watching it from AFAR, and
Speaker 3: I'm excited to build this relationship with you.
Speaker 2: I'm excited to talk about this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, let's dive into it. I want to start
Speaker 3: off with my first question, which is what makes you
Speaker 3: happy today and how does it differ from what made
Speaker 3: you happy sixteen years ago.
Speaker 1: I think that I'll start with what I thought would
Speaker 1: make me happy, and I'll tell you what does make
Speaker 1: me happy?
Speaker 2: And how they're different.
Speaker 1: When I started this company, like fifteen years ago, i
Speaker 1: started my co founders, I was totally broke. I had
Speaker 1: no status, had no power, no money, nothing, And I
Speaker 1: felt like what would make me happy was climbing a
Speaker 1: mountain and becoming incredibly successful. And the challenge is that, well,
Speaker 1: what do you do when you get the top of
Speaker 1: the mountain. You've achieved it. And what I've realized is
Speaker 1: that at this point, like I'm forty one years old
Speaker 1: and a lot of people ask me like, why don't
Speaker 1: you just retire, like or why don't you do it
Speaker 1: all over again? And for me, I would tell them
Speaker 1: because the fund is just starting. But the fund of
Speaker 1: just starting isn't to like get the next billion people.
Speaker 1: I kind of think of myself maybe more than a
Speaker 1: business person. You know, you're you're kind of who you
Speaker 1: are growing up. And I was a designer growing up,
Speaker 1: and I kind of think of Airbnb as like one
Speaker 1: of the world. It's the biggest canvas. Almost never has
Speaker 1: a designer been given so much responsibility, so much opportunity.
Speaker 1: And what I love is, you know, like a musician
Speaker 1: wants to play music, a painter wants to paint a
Speaker 1: builder wants to build, a climber wants to climb, and
Speaker 1: as an entrepreneur, I want to create and connect things
Speaker 1: and try to like defy the notion of what a
Speaker 1: business person could be or what a designer could be
Speaker 1: because I never met someone like me growing up. And
Speaker 1: I'm not saying anyone's going to try to be like me.
Speaker 1: But if I can remind people that there's leadership comes
Speaker 1: in many different paces, many different flavors, and that a
Speaker 1: creative person, you know, can run a company, and it
Speaker 1: can run a really big company, a Fortune five hundred company,
Speaker 1: then that's that's the very beginning. And I feel like
Speaker 1: what makes me happy now is working with people I love.
Speaker 1: Like the one of the great things about say success
Speaker 1: is you can choose the people you strosd up with,
Speaker 1: and I get to like work every single day with
Speaker 1: people I love on ideas that I'm obsessed over, and
Speaker 1: I'm just so obsessed. I think my motivation has changed.
Speaker 1: I think when I started with my motivation was about
Speaker 1: myself becoming something, and once you achieve that, your motivation
Speaker 1: often turn turns outward. It's about its starting to be
Speaker 1: about giving to other people, to lending them experience a
Speaker 1: small part of what I was able to experience, and
Speaker 1: it becomes just about the work. See, when you're not successful,
Speaker 1: you get validation when people praise you, but eventually like
Speaker 1: you do it for yourself, that you're not doing it
Speaker 1: for status or success, because at some point you've gotten
Speaker 1: all that, Like how much more is going to make
Speaker 1: you happy? And so just doing things I love the
Speaker 1: people I care about, That's what makes me happy today.
Speaker 3: That's beautiful. That's I can see that it's true for
Speaker 3: you too. I can see that it's real for you
Speaker 3: as you're saying it, which is such a special place
Speaker 3: to be. And it was interesting when you were talking
Speaker 3: about this idea of climbing a mountain. I've often thought
Speaker 3: that there's one journey in life that we take that's
Speaker 3: upwards up a mountain, and then there's another journey we
Speaker 3: all have to take that's inwards to the valley. And
Speaker 3: that's a journey that not everyone gets to take or
Speaker 3: everyone thinks about taking, because we're so busy trying to
Speaker 3: get up that we don't often get to go in right.
Speaker 3: And it sounds like you've been excavating that internal part
Speaker 3: for some time.
Speaker 1: You can learn a lot about yourself through this journey,
Speaker 1: And you're right, the biggest journey I've probably embarked on
Speaker 1: is the one inside of myself. The brightest days of
Speaker 1: my life and the darkest days of my life have
Speaker 1: been in the last fifteen years. The highs are incredibly high,
Speaker 1: the lows can be incredibly low. The amount of stress
Speaker 1: can be unrelenting, the rewards are like hard to even
Speaker 1: grap with. When you go on a journey like this,
Speaker 1: you learn a lot about yourself and you start to
Speaker 1: also learn, like what's important to you starting a company,
Speaker 1: you know, one of my first investors said Brian, Starting
Speaker 1: companies like jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane
Speaker 1: in the way down. Maybe another way of saying it
Speaker 1: is like playing a video game, and it's like a
Speaker 1: thousand levels, and each level gets harder. In each level,
Speaker 1: you learn something about yourself, you do something that's uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: In each step of the game, you learn something. And
Speaker 1: the problem with success is that tend to amplify things.
Speaker 1: I mean that can be good, but it all still
Speaker 1: can amplify holes you have in yourself. People that are
Speaker 1: a little bit paranoid get very paranoid. People that are
Speaker 1: a little deceitful become like completely fraudulent liars. People that
Speaker 1: are a little narcissistic become like egomaniacs and stuff. And
Speaker 1: so this stuff can tend to amplify tendencies inside of yourself.
Speaker 1: And so if you're afraid of conflict, that's going to
Speaker 1: actually manifest in life, like not actually dealing with things
Speaker 1: if you can't, if you're not decisive, there's going to
Speaker 1: be an element of bureaucracy. If you're like get overwhelmed
Speaker 1: and you get paralyzed, there's going to be an action
Speaker 1: in the company. And so you learn so much about yourself.
Speaker 1: And I through this process, I probably learned more about
Speaker 1: myself than I even have about business. And it's been
Speaker 1: an incredible journey. And yeah, it's like incredible lessons. And
Speaker 1: the company is like a mirror about you, right Like
Speaker 1: when you see a company, it's like walking your house.
Speaker 1: And by walking your house, I can step a little
Speaker 1: bit in your mind. Because the house you bought, the
Speaker 1: house you furnished, the house, you made a thousand decisions
Speaker 1: and it would take a while for me in conversation
Speaker 1: to understand you. But I walk in this house and
Speaker 1: I can understand the thousand decisions you made. A company
Speaker 1: is like that, but it's like one hundred thousand decisions
Speaker 1: or a million decisions. And so by seeing the company,
Speaker 1: you can like see into the person's mind everything they do,
Speaker 1: and not even in everything they do, but everyone they
Speaker 1: surround this self with and the culture they create and
Speaker 1: what they And that's the thing that's so crazy.
Speaker 3: I'm intrigued. You said something there that really stood out
Speaker 3: to me. You said that the happiest thing and the
Speaker 3: best thing about being successful is that you get to
Speaker 3: choose the people you worked with. You obviously built this
Speaker 3: with friends, Yeah, and that's how it started. It started
Speaker 3: in a place of being around people you love with
Speaker 3: What was the biggest point of challenge in building something
Speaker 3: with people you love as you grow it, and what
Speaker 3: is it that you experienced and what was the biggest
Speaker 3: lesson that you took away that actually kept it going?
Speaker 3: Because I can imagine as you're describing highs and lows,
Speaker 3: all of this change for sixteen years, but here you
Speaker 3: are still building it together.
Speaker 1: Think about how many stories you heard of founders. It's
Speaker 1: like a band. They come together and then eventually the
Speaker 1: band breaks up and people don't stay together, they resent
Speaker 1: each other, maybe things end very ugly. It's like a band,
Speaker 1: except like it's become so much bigger than the band
Speaker 1: because it's not just the three of you. Imagine a
Speaker 1: band that starts three people and ends as three thousand people.
Speaker 1: And that amount of pressure, the amount of spotlight, the
Speaker 1: money that changes in like people's status and positioning, it
Speaker 1: can do a lot to break people up. But also
Speaker 1: unlike a band, where maybe I'm not to say, you
Speaker 1: just have to agree on like where you perform and
Speaker 1: what you sing. With a company, you have to agree
Speaker 1: on like who we're gonna hire, what we're gonna call,
Speaker 1: what markets we're going to go into, what's the prioritization,
Speaker 1: Like who we're gonna raise money for. I can go
Speaker 1: down the list of like the thousands of things you
Speaker 1: have to agree to, And with Joe, Nate and I,
Speaker 1: I often say it's really good to start a company
Speaker 1: with friends. Not everyone has friends to start a company with,
Speaker 1: but you want that reservoir of goodwill. And we made
Speaker 1: a decision. The decision was that no one decision is
Speaker 1: going to supersede our friendship in our relationship, that we're
Speaker 1: never going to have well, debate will argue, but will
Speaker 1: never allow a situation where winning an argument is the
Speaker 1: most important thing. Because you think about a company as
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand decisions, it could also be one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand arguments. And if you get stuck the first debate,
Speaker 1: or you like somebody won a debate, okay, great, you
Speaker 1: have ninety nine, nine hundred and ninety nine more things
Speaker 1: to discuss. And so the lesson I learned is, I mean,
Speaker 1: first of all, Jay, I was lucky, and a lot
Speaker 1: of people when I say I was lucky, they think, oh,
Speaker 1: you're at the right place, the right time, with the
Speaker 1: right idea. And I said, well maybe, but there's something
Speaker 1: I was much luckier about. And what I was most
Speaker 1: lucky about, what made me most fortunate was I met
Speaker 1: Joe and Nate that we have this unbelievable chemistry. One
Speaker 1: time we had to do like some personality tests. It's
Speaker 1: like one of those core wheels, and we took this
Speaker 1: personality test to see about our chemistry, and they plotted
Speaker 1: our personalities and they formed a perfect equal adible triangle.
Speaker 1: Not always you're going to find people that are perfect
Speaker 1: compliments to you. I'd say a couple of things. Number One,
Speaker 1: you want to have a team with people that you
Speaker 1: are friends with or could see yourself becoming friends with
Speaker 1: that you have a deep love and respect for that.
Speaker 1: You're going to probably spend more time with your co
Speaker 1: founders than your spouse or family if it goes well.
Speaker 1: If it doesn't go well, then maybe not. But that's
Speaker 1: the best case scenario that people that shared values. Because
Speaker 1: you can debate anything so long as you're trying to
Speaker 1: climb the same mountain in the same volee system. You
Speaker 1: have different values, Eventually there's going to become irreconcilable conflicts,
Speaker 1: but you probably also want complimentary skills. The worst case
Speaker 1: is people with different values and same skills. Right, we
Speaker 1: do the same job, we step in each other's tolls,
Speaker 1: and we're trying to go in a different direction, And
Speaker 1: so I think, and then I think. The final thing
Speaker 1: is just this mutual love and respect and never losing sight.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: One of the things I tried to make sure of
Speaker 1: is like even as CEO, I wanted to try to
Speaker 1: make sure that like Joe and Nate, you know, were
Speaker 1: included in things. And I wanted to always make sure
Speaker 1: that people referred to us together we thought of us
Speaker 1: as a as a unit. When I like when public
Speaker 1: you write a founder's letter and a lot of people
Speaker 1: write letter and they just signed the name of the CEO.
Speaker 1: I made sure that it was from all of us
Speaker 1: and was representing all of us. I feel like they
Speaker 1: are the heart and the soul of the company. And
Speaker 1: it's like you know, parents, like you know, not every
Speaker 1: child has the fortune to have multiple parents, not every
Speaker 1: company has the fortune have multiple founders. But if they're
Speaker 1: together and they're not fighting, they have a mutual love
Speaker 1: and respect from another, that's going to permeate the company,
Speaker 1: just like it permeates the health of a child. And
Speaker 1: joan A and I kind of thought ourselves as parents
Speaker 1: in the company. As a child, I'd never have had kids,
Speaker 1: but you know there's something about that, and I think
Speaker 1: who you are and that relationship permeates every single thing.
Speaker 1: If the founders fight, the employees fight, if they have
Speaker 1: respect from one another, that is going to be a
Speaker 1: role a model that other people throughout the organization are
Speaker 1: going to copy. And that's what I've learned from that.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: I think what you're saying is very, very true, and
Speaker 3: it's remarkable that you've been able to hold on to that.
Speaker 3: I mean, I remember just comparing it to something very minuscule,
Speaker 3: But I think a lot of people will be able
Speaker 3: to relate to It's like I think with your bros
Speaker 3: at college or at school, you'd always be like, we're
Speaker 3: not going to fight over girls, We're not going to
Speaker 3: fight over women. And then they'd always be the guy
Speaker 3: who trades the friendship for a girl and then the
Speaker 3: whole thing.
Speaker 1: And that's a short term decision. And I understand why
Speaker 1: people make short term decisions. They make trade offs. They
Speaker 1: want to win. But as long as you think about
Speaker 1: the arc of your life and that life is only
Speaker 1: like who you're with, and that you don't want to
Speaker 1: be alone at the end of your life, and you
Speaker 1: certainly don't want be alone the end of the journey.
Speaker 1: If I'm climate malan, I want friends by my side
Speaker 1: that can provide supplies at me. And like, you know,
Speaker 1: like being the only one in power is actually quite lonely.
Speaker 1: Having been in that little bit of that position, I've
Speaker 1: now could tell people that you want to share it,
Speaker 1: because otherwise it's incredibly isolating and lonely. And you know,
Speaker 1: like if you get all the credit, you could also
Speaker 1: get all the blame and it can be very difficult.
Speaker 1: And so be able to share that with Joe and
Speaker 1: Nate and now to be able to share that with
Speaker 1: the people that I get to pick to surround myself
Speaker 1: with that, I mean, that is one of the most
Speaker 1: fulfilling things. And you know, great relationships get better with age,
Speaker 1: and they give you energy, they make you better. They
Speaker 1: hold your negative tendencies in check, and they pull out
Speaker 1: like creative ambitions in you. They see potential in you
Speaker 1: that maybe you don't see in yourself. I had never
Speaker 1: imagined that I could be CEO of any company.
Speaker 2: I didn't think it'd be.
Speaker 1: CEO of a pizza shop, let alone be SA like
Speaker 1: a giant fortune five hundred company to do over sixty
Speaker 1: billion dollars last year in bookings, Like that's completely crazy.
Speaker 1: And I've learned a lot of lessons from this journey.
Speaker 1: One is I think we all were born with like
Speaker 1: unknown potential. And I think the other thing is sometimes
Speaker 1: the best people in your life will be people who
Speaker 1: see potential in you that you didn't see in yourself.
Speaker 1: And I often wonder, like, why did Joe and Ny
Speaker 1: even agree to like, let me be the CEO. Why
Speaker 1: did Joe tell me one day in two thousand and
Speaker 1: seven to pack everything in the back of old Honda
Speaker 1: Civic and drive up to San Francisco? Why did he
Speaker 1: think that was a good idea? And years later he's
Speaker 1: told me, and he told me that we went to
Speaker 1: college together at Risdy and he saw something in me.
Speaker 1: And it's possible he saw something in me that I
Speaker 1: didn't even yet see in myself. And this is like
Speaker 1: the hero's journey. Somebody might believe in you, they might
Speaker 1: see something in you. And that's what I got with Joanna,
Speaker 1: and I think I believed in what I think I saw.
Speaker 1: They saw potentially me what I saw maybe was potential
Speaker 1: in this idea that if people could experience what we
Speaker 1: experienced that first weekend when we host three guests, that
Speaker 1: this would be an idea that would spread around the world.
Speaker 1: I think we have an easier time imagining living like
Speaker 1: this on Mars and living differently on this planet. But
Speaker 1: which of those two do you think is more likely
Speaker 1: to happen in the near term. It's really hard for
Speaker 1: us to imagine sch sociological changes. We can all imagine
Speaker 1: technological changes. We can imagine things getting bigger, faster. But
Speaker 1: it's hard to imagine us living differently. And I don't
Speaker 1: think that we were visionaries per se. I think we
Speaker 1: were expedition and I think we discovered something. One of
Speaker 1: my first investors, Paul Graham, he said, what do you know?
Speaker 1: What unique knowledge do you know that has allowed you
Speaker 1: afforded you the ability to start this company that no
Speaker 1: one else has? What do you know that no one
Speaker 1: else understands? And I think that we discovered something. We
Speaker 1: discovered that, like, people are fundamentally good. You know, you
Speaker 1: read the newspaper, I think Chief Justice Earl Warren said,
Speaker 1: I don't turn to the front page of the newspaper.
Speaker 1: It's filled with man's failures. I go to the sports page.
Speaker 1: It's filled with man's successes. I think we live in
Speaker 1: an abundance of data reinforcing that people aren't good. And
Speaker 1: we have probably as much data as almost anyone because
Speaker 1: in the last fifteen years, one and a half billion
Speaker 1: people have used Airvonba one and a half billion guest
Speaker 1: arrivals in nearly every country in the world, more countries,
Speaker 1: I think than Coca Cola. Nearly the population of Vallet
Speaker 1: every night living together and it's only reinforced what I
Speaker 1: think we naively believed in the beginning, these two simple
Speaker 1: ideas that people are basically good, they're ninety nine percent
Speaker 1: the same. I think that Joe and Nate believed in
Speaker 1: me and my potential to be this company. I think
Speaker 1: we collectively believed in the potential each other. And I
Speaker 1: think also that this idea would be one that could
Speaker 1: spread around the world if only we could figure out
Speaker 1: how to communicate it to people.
Speaker 3: How special I mean, that's that is something that I
Speaker 3: definitely got a mini version experience of. I just finished
Speaker 3: forty City World Tour really for my second book, and
Speaker 3: we probably met about one hundred thousand people on the
Speaker 3: way oh my events, and much much smaller than the
Speaker 3: one billion bookings. But I would agree with those two
Speaker 3: sentiments so strongly. There were nine nine percent the same
Speaker 3: and people are overall good.
Speaker 1: If people believed everyone was basically the same, then how
Speaker 1: could you hate someone else because they hate someone else
Speaker 1: is to hate yourself. And I think that we spend
Speaker 1: a lot of energy in society celebrating the point one
Speaker 1: percent that makes us different. I think there's a good
Speaker 1: part of that. We call that diversity and heritage and culture.
Speaker 1: But there's a dark side of believing that we're like
Speaker 1: all very different, and that's that we believe that people
Speaker 1: are the other and that therefore it's harder to have
Speaker 1: empathy with somebody who isn't us. And I think that
Speaker 1: the best way to understand that somebody is similar to
Speaker 1: you is to walk in their shoes and to like
Speaker 1: just you know, there's an old saying it's hard to
Speaker 1: hate someone up close, And I think there's something weird
Speaker 1: that's happening. We're the more digitally connected we seem to
Speaker 1: get the more the less physically connected we sometimes get,
Speaker 1: And I wonder if that has a way of like
Speaker 1: confusing us about people that we might argue about on
Speaker 1: the internet. No one else, no one's ever changed the
Speaker 1: most mind YouTube comment section. But if it's hard to
Speaker 1: live with somebody or to walk in the shoes and
Speaker 1: not change your mind, how could you not change your
Speaker 1: mind about something? Because that would suggest that like you've
Speaker 1: experienced all of life up to that point, and that
Speaker 1: you feel your opinions are fully formed, and that no
Speaker 1: new data could ever change your mind about anything.
Speaker 2: How could that pass?
Speaker 1: How do you even have your pins in the first
Speaker 1: place based on probably experiences, and so how could you've
Speaker 1: not change your experience your opinion by new experiences with
Speaker 1: new people. And that's kind of the kind of the
Speaker 1: simple way we think about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm so glad you raised this idea of you
Speaker 3: talked about the incredible friendship that you have with your
Speaker 3: co founders, but at the same time you brought up
Speaker 3: this idea of loneliness, and you said, you never want
Speaker 3: to be lonely at the end of a journey. You
Speaker 3: never want to be lonely at the end of building
Speaker 3: something big. And I think in the world today we
Speaker 3: are seeing loneliness proliferate. And it's the loneliness of not
Speaker 3: that we're not around people. It's not loneliness that we're
Speaker 3: not surrounded by people. It's that we're surrounded by people,
Speaker 3: but we don't feel understood, we don't feel seen, we
Speaker 3: don't feel heard, that we feel that we have to
Speaker 3: be someone apart from ourselves, even around the people that
Speaker 3: we're closest to. And so the idea of loneliness is
Speaker 3: expanding away. People are feeling disconnect from each other. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you're talking about sixteen years ago, you and a bunch
Speaker 3: of friends feeling so close to each other. When have
Speaker 3: you felt lonely in your life? And what have been
Speaker 3: your next thoughts and steps that you've taken from that point.
Speaker 1: I think loneliness, which is like the darkness or the
Speaker 1: absence of connection and love and connection, have in hindsight,
Speaker 1: been some of the driving forces in my entire life.
Speaker 1: If I were to think about my journey with loneliness,
Speaker 1: I think I grew up as a little bit of
Speaker 1: a lonely isolated kid. I was interested in art and design,
Speaker 1: but I also played sports. I didn't really feel like
Speaker 1: I fit in growing up. I kind of felt like
Speaker 1: an outsider. I went to the Red Island School Design,
Speaker 1: where a lot of people who felt that way would
Speaker 1: come together be even at Risdy, I didn't feel like I.
Speaker 2: Fit in there, even as a hockey player.
Speaker 1: Even as a hockey player, to arts like kind of
Speaker 1: like I went to like a military like private school,
Speaker 1: and then I went to an art college, and like
Speaker 1: I kind of had a foot in each and not
Speaker 1: fully like like and I would I had, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe issues of authority.
Speaker 2: I didn't really fit in.
Speaker 1: It turned out to be a huge benefit to being
Speaker 1: a tech founder, but of course, who doesn't want to
Speaker 1: fit in it? Growing up, like so much of our
Speaker 1: desire is to belong, because I think to belong is
Speaker 1: a deeply human trait.
Speaker 2: You know, we're tribal.
Speaker 1: We grew up to be in tribes of like fifty
Speaker 1: one hundred hundred fifty people, and to not be part
Speaker 1: of the tribe and not belong in a prior era
Speaker 1: would be a death sentence. And I think that ultimately
Speaker 1: today we're probably living in one of the loneliest times
Speaker 1: in human history. If people were as lonely in yesteryear
Speaker 1: as they are today, they'd probably perish because, like you
Speaker 1: just couldn't survive without your tribe. And I think that,
Speaker 1: you know, for me, I didn't realize that this was
Speaker 1: a thing that I've been I was fighting throughout my life,
Speaker 1: and so when I was twenty five twenty six, I
Speaker 1: started with my two co founders and we became the family.
Speaker 1: We became a family they hadn't had for ten years
Speaker 1: since I really ten years since I left the house.
Speaker 1: And then suddenly we were a family, the three of us,
Speaker 1: and we're just hanging out together. We lived together. We
Speaker 1: all like waked up, woke up around the same time
Speaker 1: around eight am. We'd work till midnight, and then we'd
Speaker 1: do it the whole the next day. We'd go grocery
Speaker 1: shopping together, we'd like go to the gym together. Was
Speaker 1: very communal. Then we hired people that were basically our friends.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't hire anyone we didn't like. And then we
Speaker 1: didn't have a lot of work life like boundaries. Everyone
Speaker 1: was young, we didn't have families. We'd go out, like
Speaker 1: drinking together and hang out together and dinner, and that
Speaker 1: became like a family. It became like a community, and
Speaker 1: that was incredible, and it was this deep, rich connection
Speaker 1: and those were some of the closest friendships I ever had.
Speaker 1: But then something happens. We go on a rocket ship,
Speaker 1: and then I go from being a founder to a CEO.
Speaker 1: And I was one of three founders, and then it
Speaker 1: became one CEO, a silent, an individual role. And as
Speaker 1: it became a CEO, I started leading from the front
Speaker 1: at the top of the mountain. But then you know,
Speaker 1: the higher you get to the peak, the fewer the
Speaker 1: people there are with you. And no one ever told
Speaker 1: me how lonely you would get. And I wasn't prepared
Speaker 1: for that, and I had this guilt about not working
Speaker 1: because so much of my life was about being successful.
Speaker 1: Probably probably if I were to dig deep, because I
Speaker 1: thought that would make people love me, and that was
Speaker 1: probably adulation, but I probably didn't know it back then,
Speaker 1: and I probably thought that by being successful, I'd feel
Speaker 1: really different. And I remember I got to this point
Speaker 1: where I was already feeling pretty isolated, and then the
Speaker 1: pandemic happened, and I'm living by myself in a house
Speaker 1: and I'm find myself on zooms twenty four to seven,
Speaker 1: like sixteen eighteen hours a day for an entire year
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty. I, you know, help with the team.
Speaker 1: We navigate out of a crisis. People were predicting we'd
Speaker 1: like some people were that we would go out of business.
Speaker 1: We stared into the byss and we got in a foxhoul.
Speaker 1: We turned the company around. We took it public in
Speaker 1: the day of our IPO. We reached one hundred billion
Speaker 1: dollar valuation. And remember if you told me, like a
Speaker 1: million dollars is more money I ever imagined growing up.
Speaker 1: My parents are social workers. It was like an unfathomab
Speaker 1: amount of money. And I remember, after going public, is like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, there's this amazing exultation. It was amazing,
Speaker 1: like I'd gotten to them. I mount, and then I
Speaker 1: wake up the next day and my life is exactly
Speaker 1: the same.
Speaker 2: I'm alone.
Speaker 1: I wake up, I put on sweatpants, I go on
Speaker 1: to iMac, and I have like ten twelve hours of
Speaker 1: zoom meetings, and I just don't really have much of
Speaker 1: my life outside of work. My work was my life.
Speaker 1: And then I remember having a fortieth birthday party and
Speaker 1: I had to make a list of people to invite.
Speaker 1: And never in my life have I tried to like
Speaker 1: make a list to who my friends are. But when
Speaker 1: you have to make invitations, you have to make a list.
Speaker 1: And I made a long list of people, and then
Speaker 1: I kind of went down the list and I said,
Speaker 1: when's the last time I talked to these people? And
Speaker 1: I realized that almost every single person in the list,
Speaker 1: if I were to ping, i'd have to catch them
Speaker 1: up in my life. I couldn't just dive into something
Speaker 1: because I had not maintained those relationships. And it was
Speaker 1: just something that like started, you know, and I started
Speaker 1: noticing I started feeling more isolated. I would have more
Speaker 1: negative ruminations and stuff, and I didn't know at the
Speaker 1: time that I was isolated lonely. I knew it was isolated,
Speaker 1: but I didn't know that that also meant loneliness. And
Speaker 1: I thought, I have all these people around me, how
Speaker 1: could I possibly feel this way? And there were a
Speaker 1: couple of people that like entered my life that like
Speaker 1: gave me some awareness and consciousness, one at the deeply
Speaker 1: personal level and one more at the professional level. At
Speaker 1: the personal level, I ended up actually becoming friends, and
Speaker 1: a person who became a mentor of mine was the
Speaker 1: former president i'd say is Barack Obama.
Speaker 2: And it was kind of a.
Speaker 1: Crazy story where I, you know, I, like many people,
Speaker 1: met him in the White House, and then we keep
Speaker 1: in touch after the White House and he became a
Speaker 1: bit of a mentor to me. We developed a relationship,
Speaker 1: and initially it was a purely professional relationship, but by
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, after it went public, he kind of
Speaker 1: told me. I kind of told him what I was feeling,
Speaker 1: and he said, I think you're kind of lonely and
Speaker 1: you probably need to renew friendships. And he described that
Speaker 1: he had like these ten or fifteen friends, most of
Speaker 1: them he was friends with before his presidency, and they
Speaker 1: kept him grounded and rooted. And your roots come from
Speaker 1: your past, and your past is often your relationships. Because
Speaker 1: I kept asking him, like, how didn't you like lose
Speaker 1: your mind, He's like, it's hard to lose your mind
Speaker 1: when you have deep connections in relationships to others. And
Speaker 1: this is around the time I was like totally realized
Speaker 1: I hadn't maintained relationships. So one of the most important
Speaker 1: things I decided to do was renew the relationships that
Speaker 1: were in that invite list, those people that hadn't really
Speaker 1: kept in touch with. And so I rekindled relationships with
Speaker 1: my college friends, and I committed that we'd take like
Speaker 1: one or two trips year, because the problem is if
Speaker 1: you don't see your friends, you only text them. The
Speaker 1: only things you can talk about are like the same
Speaker 1: old stories from twenty years ago. Or you can talk
Speaker 1: about other things in your life, but you have no
Speaker 1: shared experience in zoom in phone calls and text messages
Speaker 1: or not shared experiences. You can only talk about an
Speaker 1: experience you had. And so I did that with my
Speaker 1: college friends, I did my high school friends. I started
Speaker 1: spending more time with my sister and other people in
Speaker 1: my life. I ended up getting like a dog, a
Speaker 1: Golden Retriever named Sophie Supernova, and the crazy thing Jay is.
Speaker 1: I can tell you, like the ride of Airbnb and
Speaker 1: having all the success and money and power and all
Speaker 1: this stuff, it can be amazing. I'm not saying it's
Speaker 1: not amazing, but I actually think I probably It's almost
Speaker 1: like I had to go on this entire journey to
Speaker 1: realize I had everything I needed before I even started
Speaker 1: the journey, that the thing that probably gave me the
Speaker 1: greatest life satisfaction was a thing that I didn't even
Speaker 1: need money for, and I didn't even need to have
Speaker 1: success to achieve relationships many of them I had before
Speaker 1: I started.
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Speaker 1: Oh, I think you had Robert Waldinger on your show
Speaker 1: and you know he I actually met him last week
Speaker 1: for the first time. He is as people listening are
Speaker 1: probably realize, he was a Harper professor who's run the
Speaker 1: longest study in human happiness. It started before he was
Speaker 1: even alive. It's an eighty five year study. And the
Speaker 1: question was what's the secret of happiness? And of course
Speaker 1: they don't think they thought there was a silver bullet answer,
Speaker 1: and of course it is, and it's relationships. And I
Speaker 1: think that that's what I've learned that like, as I've reconnected,
Speaker 1: I've felt like this light and this love hermeate me.
Speaker 1: And I think it's made me a better leader because
Speaker 1: one of the things Robert told me is fifty percent
Speaker 1: of CEOs are lonely. Now somebody listening to say, oh,
Speaker 1: poor CEOs, well, I would say, I don't think I
Speaker 1: want society be led by a bunch of lonely people.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 1: I don't want society be led by a bunch of
Speaker 1: lonely people because lonely people are less trusting of other people.
Speaker 1: They're more paranoid, they're less resilient, they will typically have
Speaker 1: less empathy because they will push people away. I don't
Speaker 1: think they're is connected. They make worse decisions. And so
Speaker 1: we do not live in a world where people are lonely,
Speaker 1: and we especially don't want to live in a world
Speaker 1: where leaders are lonely, and so this has been one
Speaker 1: of the defining things in my life. So I think
Speaker 1: the first part of the answer is for me to
Speaker 1: deal with my own sense of isolation and loneliness. And
Speaker 1: because again Jay, I thought loneliness was something that like
Speaker 1: people's grandparents experience in their life. I didn't think it
Speaker 1: was something the young person experiences. And the other person
Speaker 1: I met is the now and former Certain General the
Speaker 1: United States with doctor Vec Murphy. We hired him during
Speaker 1: the pandemic because a lot of people were afraid to,
Speaker 1: like you know, go into airbnbs and they were worried
Speaker 1: about like germs on services, and so we hired him
Speaker 1: to do this, like you know, basically create cleaning and
Speaker 1: sanitation protocols. But I remember having a conversation with him
Speaker 1: and he said something to me. He said, Brian, do
Speaker 1: you know what the number one killer in America is?
Speaker 1: I'm kind of paraphrase in the conversation and I said,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Is that like heart disease is a cancer?
Speaker 1: And he goes, no, the number one kill in America
Speaker 1: is loneliness. And I said, loneliness, what are you talking about?
Speaker 1: And he said, yeah, being chronically lonely is worse for
Speaker 1: your health than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day
Speaker 1: and can take fifteen years off your life. And not
Speaker 1: only that, but about half of Americans are lonely. Two
Speaker 1: out of three teenagers, by some studies, are lonely. And
Speaker 1: it's not just that they're lonely.
Speaker 2: I thought, this is.
Speaker 1: Leading to a lot of mental health issues. You know,
Speaker 1: one in four teenagers have suicidal ideations. You know, that's
Speaker 1: not just teenagers. You see, like you know, like there's
Speaker 1: a crisis with men and boys, there's a crisis with
Speaker 1: like one in three seniors or lonely. This is like
Speaker 1: so I started realizing this is like a really big crisis.
Speaker 1: It's maybe a way of say it's a crisis of disconnection.
Speaker 1: And I started realizing, like you know, global warming, maybe
Speaker 1: you could say that's disconnection with the earth, and that
Speaker 1: loneliness is disconnection from each other. And maybe loneliness at
Speaker 1: the most fundamental level starts with disconnection from yourself. That
Speaker 1: you're running away from something, and that sometimes trying to
Speaker 1: be successful and climbing a mountain is running away from something.
Speaker 1: You know, because you think that what you are isn't enough,
Speaker 1: and if you become war, you'll be you'll become something,
Speaker 1: and that is the problem because of course we never
Speaker 1: fully leave our history and our psychology. And so then
Speaker 1: I started learning about loneliness at the intellectual level and
Speaker 1: started asking what airbeingb's a global community. We have hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of people. Some of the best ways to
Speaker 1: connect with other people or through travel. I was using
Speaker 1: travel and Airbnb to like connect with my friends because
Speaker 1: most do me live in the same city as me.
Speaker 1: I started realizing, you know, you get to my age,
Speaker 1: you're forty one, you have a public company.
Speaker 2: You have a couple of choices.
Speaker 1: You can just stop and say, like retire, you can
Speaker 1: do something new, or you can say my work is
Speaker 1: just getting started. And for me, like I want to
Speaker 1: of course, I want to like keep getting a return
Speaker 1: for shareholders and make sure like if people give me money,
Speaker 1: they feel like it was a good decision, If employees
Speaker 1: put their trust in me, it was a good career decision.
Speaker 1: And I want all that to happen. But that can't
Speaker 1: be enough. That there's got to be something more. The
Speaker 1: artist to me, the designer and me wants to solve
Speaker 1: a problem. The problem can't just be a stock price,
Speaker 1: it's got to be something greater. And I have like
Speaker 1: the one of the biggest canvasses in the world of
Speaker 1: any designer ever. And while I'm a design is not products,
Speaker 1: I'm design connections between people. And so I started learning
Speaker 1: about loneliness. I started realizing that modern life seems to
Speaker 1: be making people lonely. And there's all sorts of theories.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's that, like you know, everything is digitized now.
Speaker 1: The mall is now Amazon, the theater is now Netflix,
Speaker 1: the Courci's stores now in Sikar, the office is now Zoom.
Speaker 1: And I'm a proponent of all these things. I use
Speaker 1: all these services and I love them. But you know
Speaker 1: the problem is, it's like ingredients, we evolved, I think,
Speaker 1: to be in physical proximity of another, and as we
Speaker 1: spend more time online, we seem to be spending less
Speaker 1: time together. And I think we have to be very
Speaker 1: very careful as society what kind of future we want
Speaker 1: to design for ourselves. So I guess for me, loneliness
Speaker 1: in its solution, which is reconnection, has been both a
Speaker 1: personal mission and now a bit of a professional mission.
Speaker 1: And a product or a service can't help with that,
Speaker 1: but a community can and if Airbnb can go from
Speaker 1: a travel service to a travel community, if we can
Speaker 1: be in the business of trust where you understand one
Speaker 1: other and we can help you connect with people in
Speaker 1: your life or meet other people, that to me would
Speaker 1: be where the next chapter is. And there's something about
Speaker 1: like solving your own problem then wanting to like, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to spread it to others is I think one
Speaker 1: of the most fulfilling things. They always say the best
Speaker 1: way to start a business solve your own problem, and
Speaker 1: I think that's what I've been trying to do.
Speaker 3: Thank you for coming to my ted to it.
Speaker 1: That was.
Speaker 3: A masterclass on loneliness and I mean that. And it's
Speaker 3: beautiful to see how it can so deeply correlate with
Speaker 3: what you've already built. And I think that's what as
Speaker 3: I'm watching you, and as people are listening and watching,
Speaker 3: I want you to take this away that you're not
Speaker 3: neglecting or negating any experience you've had. You're actually collecting
Speaker 3: they're awesome and bringing them all together and saying, look, actually,
Speaker 3: it's additive. I think a lot of us have this
Speaker 3: tendency in the material world to build something. Go ah,
Speaker 3: it wasn't it throw it away and then go try
Speaker 3: and build something else. And actually, what you're saying, actually
Speaker 3: I built this thing. It's great, but actually it could
Speaker 3: be so much better.
Speaker 2: And it's just the beginning exactly.
Speaker 1: And I also think that, like I'm not saying it
Speaker 1: never would have mattered, and don't try to be a
Speaker 1: tech founder and don't try to achieve success. I'm just
Speaker 1: saying their ingredients, yes, and that if you do it
Speaker 1: alone and you don't have relationships and you do something
Speaker 1: to fill something in you, it's not going to fully
Speaker 1: do that. But if you do it because you love it,
Speaker 1: and you get to do it with people you love,
Speaker 1: and you can do it out of a sense of
Speaker 1: gratitude in giving to other people. You know, Steve Jobs,
Speaker 1: one of my heroes, used to say, I get to
Speaker 1: work now with Johnny Ive. He started a firm called
Speaker 1: Love from Love from Me to You, And that was
Speaker 1: the theory that Steve said that. Steve said, the best
Speaker 1: way to show your love for the species is to
Speaker 1: put your heart and soul into something and give them
Speaker 1: to them. Steve said that design is a fundamental soul
Speaker 1: of a man made creation that reveals the self to
Speaker 1: subsequent layers and I think that ultimately my motivation has
Speaker 1: gone from more extrinsic to more intrinsic, that at this
Speaker 1: point in my life, I'm less worried about what people think.
Speaker 1: I don't really feel like I have to prove anything
Speaker 1: in people. Either I already have or I never will
Speaker 1: at some point. And I think at some point it
Speaker 1: just becomes about the thing. I just want to do
Speaker 1: the thing to the purest best of my ability and
Speaker 1: to feel like I give to others. And this is
Speaker 1: the other thing is it's amazing to be able to
Speaker 1: buy things and have things. Those experiences are awesome, But
Speaker 1: the things that probably give me most joy is like
Speaker 1: sharing things with others or giving things. I totally get now.
Speaker 1: I never understood, like why people like giving away things.
Speaker 1: I didn't really understand it was not intuitive to make
Speaker 1: growing up. I was parents of social worker, I was
Speaker 1: kind of middle class. And now I realize there's I
Speaker 1: don't want to say a selfishness to it, but you
Speaker 1: get something. You get something from giving. It's not just
Speaker 1: this moral obligation. You actually get something. And when you
Speaker 1: get is this sense of love and connection by giving something,
Speaker 1: by giving love, you kind of get it back in return,
Speaker 1: And I think, ultimately, like I think me as a
Speaker 1: I as a leader, I never saw something like me
Speaker 1: growing up. I went to design school and like, no,
Speaker 1: there was a there's weird thing Jay where I get
Speaker 1: to Risdy the reroons call design, and there was an
Speaker 1: obsession about getting designed the boardroom, and Joe and I
Speaker 1: were like so like audaciously thought why should design be
Speaker 1: in the board and we can run the boardroom. But
Speaker 1: of course, like designers that people never thought started companies.
Speaker 1: And there's an old saying art is a question the
Speaker 1: problem in the world, and design is the answer. And
Speaker 1: Joe and I wanted to seek answers to problems in
Speaker 1: the world, and one answer was we can't pay rent.
Speaker 1: So we created this thing called Airben and Breakfasts airbeds
Speaker 1: instead of beds for airben and Breakfast. But ultimately, you know,
Speaker 1: I think a business person. I am a business person ostensibly,
Speaker 1: but I think a business person's goal is to make
Speaker 1: money and a designer's goal is to solve a problem.
Speaker 1: And of course I'm doing both. I probably sit at
Speaker 1: the intersection, but I don't get out of bed every
Speaker 1: day to make money. I get at bet every day
Speaker 1: to like design, something amazing, and of course I can
Speaker 1: pay money, I can fund it, and that's just a
Speaker 1: kind of motivation and that probably can keep me going
Speaker 1: for a really really long time. And I find that
Speaker 1: a lot of companies they get really cold as they
Speaker 1: get big. That you start something for love. You're the customer.
Speaker 1: You talk to the customers, and at some point the
Speaker 1: company grows and you start with the head and the heart,
Speaker 1: you like, putting your love into it. You're intuitive. No
Speaker 1: startup is data oriented because there is no data. If
Speaker 1: you have an idea, there is no data, So you
Speaker 1: go off your intuition. You do something because you believe
Speaker 1: in it. And then at some point you get so big,
Speaker 1: the company gets financialized, there's a lot more data, and
Speaker 1: you start making decisions with the heart and now with
Speaker 1: the head and one side of your head. And you
Speaker 1: look at the Fortune five hundred. How many CEOs and
Speaker 1: the Fortune five hundred are truly like have any creative
Speaker 1: background whatsoever? Identifies creators? Almost none? Okay, how many boards
Speaker 1: there's twelve members and average of a Fortune five hundred
Speaker 1: bard that's like probably six thousand members and the Fortune
Speaker 1: five and how many boards have like creative people?
Speaker 2: Not many?
Speaker 1: How many executive teams have it. And so I guess
Speaker 1: the question is, like, there's nothing wrong with the scientific method.
Speaker 2: There's nothing wrong.
Speaker 1: It's great, but we need to We talk about diversity
Speaker 1: a lot in corporate Mamaer, there's a type of diversity.
Speaker 1: We need a diversity of artists and scientists, of head
Speaker 1: and heart. You need all those things to solve the
Speaker 1: biggest problems today. And if Airbnb could be viewed as
Speaker 1: like a design driven company, like the world's biggest risky
Speaker 1: project that just never stopped, you know, a company with
Speaker 1: like a sense of a spirit, a sense you know,
Speaker 1: our logo is like an inverted heart. It was meant
Speaker 1: to be this idea almost of this like beating heart,
Speaker 1: like this lifeblood that would flow through the community. And
Speaker 1: I'm not saying we do all that. That might be
Speaker 1: an ideal that we've never gotten to but you can.
Speaker 1: But we can or will die trying.
Speaker 3: You've sparked a lot of thoughts for me that I'd
Speaker 3: love to share with you. That you've reminded me of
Speaker 3: so many things. My mind is connecting so many dots
Speaker 3: with what you're sharing. The first thing that came to
Speaker 3: mind is it's really there's a beautiful statement by Paul Tillich,
Speaker 3: who's a writer, who said that it's fascinating that there
Speaker 3: are two words in the English language for being alone,
Speaker 3: yet we only use one of them. And he said
Speaker 3: the two words are loneliness, which is the word we use,
Speaker 3: and the other is solitude. And when you said we're
Speaker 3: disconnected from the earth, we're disconnected from each other, but
Speaker 3: really we're disconnected from ourselves. It's because of a lack
Speaker 3: of solitude. When I lived as a monk, being comfortable
Speaker 3: being alone was the first lesson of the day. Wow,
Speaker 3: because the idea was.
Speaker 2: That how do you learn how to do that?
Speaker 3: Well, there's many technique techniques. One of the first techniques
Speaker 3: is if you just sit with yourself for long enough,
Speaker 3: you start to see so much in yourself that what
Speaker 3: connects back to what you said at the beginning. If
Speaker 3: you're able to explore and take an expedition into the
Speaker 3: darkest parts of yourself, if you're able to go into
Speaker 3: the inner sky and extrapolate all of the feelings, the messages,
Speaker 3: the emotions, the things you like, the things you don't like. Now,
Speaker 3: when you sit opposite another human you can see the
Speaker 3: complexity and the simplicity of them as well the challenges
Speaker 3: we've never looked at our own darkness.
Speaker 1: And there's a great one of the late great mythologists
Speaker 1: to the twentieth century you probably knows, Joseph Campbell. Of course,
Speaker 1: he had this great quote, the cave you fear to
Speaker 1: enter lies the treasure that you seek. And I think
Speaker 1: that so many of the things we do in life
Speaker 1: are to run away from things, to avoid opening that
Speaker 1: closet to see what that monster is.
Speaker 2: But that's where the treasure is exactly.
Speaker 3: And so being trained to sit with that monster with
Speaker 3: the discomfort of what that actually looks and feels like.
Speaker 3: And what you were just saying now about this heart
Speaker 3: and this head, or the design and the art and
Speaker 3: the creative and the entrepreneurial. I think it's so powerful
Speaker 3: because so you mentioned Steve is a is a hero
Speaker 3: of yours. Same with me. I feel like I've studied
Speaker 3: everything he's ever said or Wrisen and one of the
Speaker 3: things I love this was an interview that Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 3: was doing with Prime Minister Modi from India and he
Speaker 3: said this on stage to Mody. I believe this was
Speaker 3: in San Franz and Mark said to him, he said,
Speaker 3: when he was struggling with the direction of Facebook now
Speaker 3: meta in two thousand and nine, which is five years old,
Speaker 3: Facebook is right. He went to his mentor, his mentor
Speaker 3: having to be Steve Jobs, and he said to Steve,
Speaker 3: he said, what do I do. I'm struggling. I don't
Speaker 3: know which direction Facebook should go in. Now, if you
Speaker 3: think about two thousand and nine, Steve Jobs is undoubtedly
Speaker 3: one of the most connected humans on the planet, has
Speaker 3: access to money, tech, everything you could possibly ask for.
Speaker 3: And Steve says to him, I want you to go
Speaker 3: and live in an ushram in India. Wow, for I
Speaker 3: want you to go live then, I promise you if
Speaker 3: you go there, you'll figure out the direction of Facebook.
Speaker 3: And Mark said he actually went to that monastery, that ushram,
Speaker 3: and he said, in that ushroom, that's where he decided
Speaker 3: that at that time, Facebook was about connecting people.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, and yeah.
Speaker 3: And what I find fascinating. The reason why I like
Speaker 3: to share that story is I'm always fascinated by what
Speaker 3: a tech entrepreneur thinks as much as what I'm fascinated
Speaker 3: what a monk thinks, because it's that cross pollination, it's
Speaker 3: that extreme of diverse thought, where those two things don't collide,
Speaker 3: they don't have the same agenda. We're not living in
Speaker 3: an echo chamber. When you're talking to an artist and
Speaker 3: an entrepreneur, there's no echo chamber. You've broken it open
Speaker 3: now and so for me. MIT did a study on
Speaker 3: that where they found that the most innovate of employees
Speaker 3: inside an organization were people who didn't know people who
Speaker 3: knew the same people. There were people who knew people
Speaker 3: who had random connections, so their network chart was completely uncorrelated,
Speaker 3: whereas people who had networks who were correlated were less
Speaker 3: likely to be creative and.
Speaker 1: On a fewer unknown discoveries. And I feel like in
Speaker 1: my own life, like Steve has saying, you can't connect
Speaker 1: the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.
Speaker 1: I grew up playing ice hockey, I played team sports.
Speaker 1: I went to a military high school, a design college
Speaker 1: where I first studied fine art, then design. Then I
Speaker 1: went to MIT for a semester with a cross enrollment
Speaker 1: product development program. Then I went to Los Angeles as
Speaker 1: in a designer at a firm. Then I went to
Speaker 1: Silk and Valley with very little and like got thrust
Speaker 1: into the technology industry. And it turns out that like
Speaker 1: I did not know how any of these experiences would
Speaker 1: add up together, and they all came to me and
Speaker 1: every single one of them have used every single experience,
Speaker 1: but I could never have reversed engineered how to get there.
Speaker 1: And it is amazing that, like Steve used to say,
Speaker 1: the best engineers were also poets, and it was really
Speaker 1: saying that, like creativity is about connecting dots, it's about
Speaker 1: having disparate experiences and bringing them to together. And if
Speaker 1: you haven't had a lot of different experiences, if you
Speaker 1: aren't very multidisciplinary, you're not going to be ill. I mean,
Speaker 1: Einstein was like a violinist. I think a lot of
Speaker 1: the greatest scientists have leaps of the imagination. They're not
Speaker 1: just using empirical information. And a lot of the greatest
Speaker 1: artists they haven't organized minds. Sometimes they have a fascination
Speaker 1: with numbers, and so you start to you start to
Speaker 1: bring things together, and I think that is exactly what
Speaker 1: we probably need in this world. I mean, we need
Speaker 1: more creativity. You know, whenever you see two bad options,
Speaker 1: you don't like it. The right answer is the third option.
Speaker 1: The third option is one you haven't come up with
Speaker 1: yet that requires novel, innovative, imaginative thinking. Where does it
Speaker 1: even come from? Where does creativity come from? Activity?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: But I don't know if Einstein never said this, but
Speaker 1: there's a quote attribute to him that is that logic
Speaker 1: can take you from a di zy, but imagination can
Speaker 1: take you anywhere. I love that quote. Don't know if
Speaker 1: you said it, but I believe it. But where does
Speaker 1: that come from? Where does imagination and creativity come from?
Speaker 1: I think comes from a sense of openness, It comes
Speaker 1: from curiosity. It comes from maybe not first following your passion,
Speaker 1: but following your curiosity with a deep intensity, and being
Speaker 1: curious about so many different things, and trusting that you
Speaker 1: can be curious about something and learn about something, not
Speaker 1: knowing it will ever be useful, and have the trust
Speaker 1: to say that every single thing you'll do in your
Speaker 1: life you'll do with accumulation of every single experience you've
Speaker 1: had before, and that the more places you've gone, the
Speaker 1: more people you meet, the more things you learn, it
Speaker 1: will all come to you and you might not know
Speaker 1: ahead of time how it will be useful. And honestly,
Speaker 1: if I hadn't gone to military school, I probably wouldn't
Speaker 1: been so organized. If I didn't go to design school,
Speaker 1: we probably wouldn't have been as creative and innovative in
Speaker 1: our thinking. If I hadn't played team sports, I probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't have understood about camaraderie. If my parents are social workers,
Speaker 1: I don't think I would have had this focus on
Speaker 1: service and connecting people.
Speaker 2: And I could never have imagined any.
Speaker 1: Of those things being useful because growing up, I didn't
Speaker 1: know what I wanted to be. I wasn't athletic enough
Speaker 1: to be a famous athlete. I was enhanced enough to
Speaker 1: be an actor. I wasn't going to singer to be
Speaker 1: a musician. I did not think I was going to
Speaker 1: be an astronalm politician. And so I'm like, I don't
Speaker 1: know who I'm going to be. I don't know what
Speaker 1: I am, And like, the word entrepreneur was a word
Speaker 1: I'm not even sure I heard of growing up. It
Speaker 1: was like to me it was an obscure French term.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what it meant. And I saw Walt
Speaker 1: Disney as a kid on television. I thought one day
Speaker 1: I'll work for him, not thinking I would start a
Speaker 1: company just like him. And I never imagined that was possible.
Speaker 1: I guess we're all born with unknown potential, as I
Speaker 1: said before, but you have to live experiences as many
Speaker 1: as you can you put them together. And I hope
Speaker 1: my story inspires people, not for the remarkableness of it,
Speaker 1: but the ordinariness of who I was before to say that,
Speaker 1: like if I joined the Gift in Giving Pledge, if
Speaker 1: you ask my teachers in high school to predict which
Speaker 1: of their students would be a signatory the Giving Pledge,
Speaker 1: I do not think I would have been the top
Speaker 1: of their list. I don't think that takes anything away
Speaker 1: from the teachers. I think it just means that maybe
Speaker 1: that potential is in so many of us, and it's
Speaker 1: also maybe a little bit random in anything as possible,
Speaker 1: and you like the story you tell yourself might not
Speaker 1: be accurate. And I hope that my story inspires people
Speaker 1: from the ordinariness of where it came from. That I
Speaker 1: was just like everyone else, but like you know, one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand decisions later, with enough resilience, creativity, curiosity, and determination,
Speaker 1: you wake up one day you're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: look where I am.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: What I really value about that perspective is as you
Speaker 3: were defining creativity in so many brilliant ways. One thing
Speaker 3: that came to my mind was creativity is being able
Speaker 3: to connect the dots where everyone else sees anomalies. Yes,
Speaker 3: and so if you look at your journey just as
Speaker 3: a series of random dots, they're all anomalies. Social working,
Speaker 3: hockey player, design student, like, they're just random things. But
Speaker 3: you're able to actually paint this tapestry where you're going. Well, actually,
Speaker 3: everything that I do today and I've often felt that
Speaker 3: in my own life that I lived as a kid
Speaker 3: growing up in London. My favorite subjects at school were
Speaker 3: are in design, philosophy and economics. Those are my favorite
Speaker 3: things in the world. Spent my entire life being immersed
Speaker 3: in that world. When traded it in to go to
Speaker 3: cast Business School to study management science with a focus
Speaker 3: on behavor science, because I thought it gave me a career,
Speaker 3: only to give it all up, the safe job, to
Speaker 3: go live as a monk, to then come back to
Speaker 3: the real world, go back into the world of business
Speaker 3: because I just had to pay the bills and survive,
Speaker 3: went into consulting, then came out and do media now.
Speaker 3: And I completely agree with everything you've.
Speaker 1: Just said, probably the thing that makes you so unique
Speaker 1: is like you were a monk and you are an entrepreneur,
Speaker 1: and you lived in London and you lived in New York,
Speaker 1: and like the accumulation all those experiences together, right is
Speaker 1: made has made you who you are, not one of them,
Speaker 1: all of them. And I think that like the one
Speaker 1: advice I would give my college self is to try
Speaker 1: more things and have more experiences and don't seek status.
Speaker 1: And part of the reason why one should not seek
Speaker 1: status is because we can't even predict what industries will
Speaker 1: be around the future. Like growing up, status to me
Speaker 1: was like I don't know, it was like being an
Speaker 1: investment banker or something or something, and I don't know,
Speaker 1: it was like fields that may not even totally exist
Speaker 1: in their current form in the future. So you know,
Speaker 1: I like to say, like you should do things you're
Speaker 1: good up. You tend to be good at things you're
Speaker 1: interested and you should seek out whatever you're curious about,
Speaker 1: whatever you're interested in, and then you want to get
Speaker 1: to the frontier in some way. At some point you'll
Speaker 1: learn everything and you'll get to the edge of all
Speaker 1: that's known about that subject. And that is an uncomfortable period.
Speaker 1: Where you spere off the ledge of a cliff, and
Speaker 1: that is where you enter a frontier. And if you
Speaker 1: can then pure of the edge of cliff and then
Speaker 1: get a little bit further and extend or understand and
Speaker 1: give us a little bit more land, that is how
Speaker 1: you like add to as Steve Jobs said, that's how
Speaker 1: you give your love back to the species and create
Speaker 1: something for other people. And I think, I think it's
Speaker 1: amazing that like anyone can do that. You know you
Speaker 1: can do it because anyone can do it any scale,
Speaker 1: you know, and you can do it in your humble way,
Speaker 1: like on the side, something small, or you can do
Speaker 1: it in a really big way. But it feels the
Speaker 1: same no matter what the scale.
Speaker 3: You just thought us what you'd say to your youngest
Speaker 3: self if you met your youngest self. Now, let's do
Speaker 3: this exercise. What do you think your youngest self would
Speaker 3: say to you? What would it be proud of? And
Speaker 3: what would your youngest self say, we need to reconnect
Speaker 3: with this.
Speaker 1: The first thing my younger self would say is, oh
Speaker 1: my god, how did you do all this? And I
Speaker 1: would be totally perplexed. When I started, me and my friends,
Speaker 1: I said, this will be huge one day, thousands of
Speaker 1: people will do this like that was my sense of
Speaker 1: what was possible. It's hard to dream of something you've
Speaker 1: never been exposed to, and it's hard to imagine becoming
Speaker 1: something when you didn't have any data that you could
Speaker 1: ever do anything like that in your past. And so
Speaker 1: I do not think my younger self, I'd say, my
Speaker 1: college self, did not think I could run like a
Speaker 1: fortune five hundred company. You know, you know, for every
Speaker 1: one thousand, five hundred dollars spent in the world, one
Speaker 1: dollar spent in Airbnb, did I think I get lead
Speaker 1: an organization that's facility on?
Speaker 2: No, I did not think I did.
Speaker 1: And so that would be probably the thing I would
Speaker 1: be like surprised in a very positive way. But the
Speaker 1: other thing I would probably say, as well, I'm forty
Speaker 1: one years old when I live alone, and I probably
Speaker 1: thought by now I would have a family, and.
Speaker 2: I've always wanted to have one.
Speaker 1: And I think that for all the like attention adulation
Speaker 1: I get, I think I would have maybe looked at
Speaker 1: my life now or my recent life and identified a
Speaker 1: little bit of isolation. And I think the lesson is
Speaker 1: the couple things. One I think that things have happened
Speaker 1: in a different order than I imagined. It's hard to predict.
Speaker 1: I thought I wouldn't. I didn't think i'd be this
Speaker 1: far along in my career, and I probably think I
Speaker 1: probably thought i'd be further along and have something different
Speaker 1: in my personal life. And I also would probably I
Speaker 1: would hope the college me would tell myself, now, you
Speaker 1: don't have to keep proving something to anyone, because you've
Speaker 1: proven more to me than I ever thought was possible.
Speaker 1: And I think that, like part of me, and this
Speaker 1: is probably true of a lot of people, we have
Speaker 1: this tape loop of like whatever we thought ourselves as
Speaker 1: a child, like it's just frozen in times, repeating ourselves,
Speaker 1: and you just compulsively just keep doing something. And like
Speaker 1: many people have addictions, and I probably had one that
Speaker 1: was probably work, and I think i'd have to. I
Speaker 1: would hope my child self would or my younger self
Speaker 1: would remind me that, you know, maybe there would be
Speaker 1: a wisdom that like the happiest periods of my life
Speaker 1: were with other people.
Speaker 3: Thank you for that, thank you for opening up and
Speaker 3: going there. And I felt that what is a thought
Speaker 3: that you say you have? Too often?
Speaker 1: I wonder what they'll think speaking of doctor waldenker Robber,
Speaker 1: But I met him last week for the first time,
Speaker 1: and you've had them on your show.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, we've spent a lot of time together. I
Speaker 3: love them.
Speaker 1: Something you told me last week that really stood out
Speaker 1: to me said, one of the biggest regrets that people
Speaker 1: have in their life is having lived their life worrying
Speaker 1: what other people think. And I kind of understand why,
Speaker 1: like from a like evolutionary standpoint, like you kind of
Speaker 1: have to care people think because you have to fit in,
Speaker 1: and if you don't fit in, you don't belong.
Speaker 2: You're isolated.
Speaker 1: If you're isolated, it's a death sentence when there's the
Speaker 1: only thing you have is the village. But it turns
Speaker 1: out that like that is not true anymore, that like
Speaker 1: it's okay to be misunderstood, and that it doesn't maybe
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter what people think, or maybe it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter what you think today, and that some of the
Speaker 1: greatest things I've ever done I was at least temporarily misunderstood,
Speaker 1: and maybe it only matters what a few people think,
Speaker 1: and maybe just maybe the person that most matters what
Speaker 1: they think is yourself. Right that you just listen to
Speaker 1: your own voice, not other voices. And I think if
Speaker 1: I can do that, you know, artists will call the
Speaker 1: artistic integrity, right. You had Rick Rubin on the show.
Speaker 1: He talks about, like the best way to make a
Speaker 1: popular song is to make something you like, and that's
Speaker 1: about it, not make something for somebody else. And that's
Speaker 1: that's something I have to continue to do. And the
Speaker 1: crazy thing is the more successful you get, the more
Speaker 1: you start kind of performing for an audience. And you
Speaker 1: have to be very careful about performing for and appeasing
Speaker 1: an audience. And once you become something, people expect you
Speaker 1: to be that thing. You know, imagine like you happen
Speaker 1: to be something forever. But what if you change? What
Speaker 1: if you grow? What if you want to do different things?
Speaker 1: And that's a challenge I have right the air, and
Speaker 1: Bee brand means something. I be careful about changing that brand.
Speaker 1: It stands for something. And yet I, as a person,
Speaker 1: am not meant to be the same person every year.
Speaker 1: I mean how could I be? I learn, I grow,
Speaker 1: I change, I have new experiences, and so having the
Speaker 1: permission to continue to change and evolve and not be
Speaker 1: so self conscious of what people think, that's something that
Speaker 1: I always struggle with because I don't know part of me.
Speaker 1: I think I'm like a people pleaser, and one of
Speaker 1: my challenges historically be is like some people like, I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't always like interpersonal conflict. I like to appease people,
Speaker 1: make them happy, and that's got a good side, and
Speaker 1: it also can be a bit of a prison over time,
Speaker 1: and the bigger you get, the higher the walls get.
Speaker 3: I want to just point out something you said that
Speaker 3: was so subtle but so powerful for everyone's listening and watching.
Speaker 3: I've never heard it put that way, but the idea
Speaker 3: that we often think it doesn't matter what people think,
Speaker 3: and you said, it doesn't matter what they think today,
Speaker 3: And that was so subtle but so powerful, because I
Speaker 3: think when we live in a world we're like, oh,
Speaker 3: it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. It's it can
Speaker 3: be negligent. But the idea that it doesn't matter what
Speaker 3: they think today about what I'm thinking, and.
Speaker 1: Thank god, yeah, thank god.
Speaker 2: You know why.
Speaker 1: When we first came to the idea, one of my
Speaker 1: first investors said, don't worry about people stealing your idea.
Speaker 1: If it's any good, everyone will dismiss it. We tend
Speaker 1: to believe things were good. In hindsight, some of the
Speaker 1: most revolutionary people and ideas were revolutionary because they're misunderstood
Speaker 1: in their time. That if you have to be at
Speaker 1: some point in your life willing to be misunderstood and
Speaker 1: the solitude you can have are two things.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: Number one, to not be so attached to it, to
Speaker 1: realize that ultimately you can't predict the outcome. Just do
Speaker 1: what you believe, follow your heart, and if it's true,
Speaker 1: whatever has happened is meant to be. But the other
Speaker 1: thing you can do is to escape into the future,
Speaker 1: to say, to have this vision we call the vision
Speaker 1: for a reason, you've envisioned something that people don't see it,
Speaker 1: and say, I'm willing to be mis understood to try
Speaker 1: to follow this thing, and if I believe it enough,
Speaker 1: eventually other people might see it. And if you are
Speaker 1: able to be misunderstood just for a little bit, that's
Speaker 1: what it feels like to truly revolutionize something and change something.
Speaker 3: There's a beautiful statement which is probably my favorite, which
Speaker 3: you've just encapsulated so well. It's from Charles Houghton Cooley.
Speaker 3: He wrote it in eighteen ninety six or something, like that.
Speaker 3: So he said this early and when you hear it,
Speaker 3: you're like, wow, that was said yesterday. He said, the
Speaker 3: challenge today is I'm not what I think I am.
Speaker 3: I'm not what you think I am. I am what
Speaker 3: I think you think I am. Oh, And he said,
Speaker 3: we live in this perception of a perception of ourselves.
Speaker 3: So we don't even know what we look like. We
Speaker 3: are who we think other people think we are. And
Speaker 3: that's twice removed from yourself. And that distance we create
Speaker 3: from our understanding of ourselves versus what we think someone
Speaker 3: thinks of us totally, how will you ever know? What
Speaker 3: do you think is something you are still trying to
Speaker 3: understand about yourself? Or if you think you misunderstand a
Speaker 3: part of who Brian is, what are you still trying
Speaker 3: to understand?
Speaker 1: I think that we tend to have an outdated image
Speaker 1: of ourselves and that makes sense, right, Like, think about
Speaker 1: I'm forty one years old, so my image of myself
Speaker 1: is the average of the last forty one years. And
Speaker 1: if the average the last forty one years, the median
Speaker 1: is twenty years old. And so I still see myself
Speaker 1: a little bit like that person and people most people
Speaker 1: see me today and a lot of people are going
Speaker 1: to see me for the first time right now, and
Speaker 1: that's their impression, and that's a delta. And I often wonder,
Speaker 1: like sometimes I, you know, I probably have had a
Speaker 1: little bit of imposter syndrome, like what do people see me?
Speaker 2: And why do they follow me?
Speaker 1: And like because they do, Like at some point you're
Speaker 1: a leader, and you're a leader because people choose to
Speaker 1: follow you and you don't like impose yourself on them.
Speaker 1: They ultimately believe in something. And I think I'm still
Speaker 1: trying to like maybe come to terms with that, like
Speaker 1: what does this all mean? I think I'm still trying
Speaker 1: to understand what will make me happy, especially at a
Speaker 1: personal level. I think I've found what will make me
Speaker 1: happy at a professional level. I was really lucky that
Speaker 1: I discovered something that I love very early on. I
Speaker 1: found a perfect harmony between what I was good at,
Speaker 1: what I loved, and what kind of society valued, and
Speaker 1: those things just clicked into place and I was able
Speaker 1: to find it. But I think I've been on a
Speaker 1: lot longer journey to figure out like what will make
Speaker 1: me happy, like in a larger sense of the word.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that success and status to some
Speaker 1: extent have benefits, and you know, but it's not it's
Speaker 1: certainly to say it's not. Everything's an understatement. I think
Speaker 1: I'm still trying to I was still trying to learn that,
Speaker 1: and maybe I'm trying to figure out, you know, at
Speaker 1: this age with so much so many resources, like I
Speaker 1: almost feel like in a way, my life's just beginning,
Speaker 1: and so it's just beginning then, and I can't connect
Speaker 1: the dots looking forward. It's a discovery of who am
Speaker 1: I and who am I meant to become? Like is
Speaker 1: this my story or is this the end of the
Speaker 1: middle of the story the beginning of the story, and
Speaker 1: what am I meant to do next? And I'm kind
Speaker 1: of learning a lot more about myself every year.
Speaker 3: That's a brilliant mindset. That's so empowering, and I'm hoping
Speaker 3: for everyone's listening and watching.
Speaker 1: That is so.
Speaker 3: Phenomenal to hear from you, because that is the journey
Speaker 3: of life. Like the questions you just laid out, Like
Speaker 3: if you weren't asking those questions, how boring would life be?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 3: How unmeaningful and unfulfilling would it be? And the fact
Speaker 3: that you're ansking those questions at this.
Speaker 2: Point, maybe one of the things I ask, oh, of course,
Speaker 2: you can add wherever you want.
Speaker 1: So over a year ago it was February Russian Vita Ukraine.
Speaker 1: We got word that there'd be like millions or refugees.
Speaker 1: And when this broke out, I remember my co founder
Speaker 1: Joe calling me up and him telling me something. He said,
Speaker 1: when a crisis of the scale happens, we should ask
Speaker 1: ourselves one question, and that question is how can we help?
Speaker 1: And I always wanted to believe that if I was
Speaker 1: like a CEO durn World War two, I would have
Speaker 1: like been helpful, and I want I always try to
Speaker 1: use That's the other device I use. I try to
Speaker 1: think about how I'll be viewed in the future, but
Speaker 1: I also want to I always think in how do
Speaker 1: I want to be remembered even if no one will
Speaker 1: remember me? And I think anyone can do that. How
Speaker 1: do you want to be remembered by history, even if
Speaker 1: it's just an intellectual device, because maybe not a lot
Speaker 1: of people will remember. That's okay, but live your life
Speaker 1: as if you be remembered. And what I realized is
Speaker 1: one of the most important things. And then we ended
Speaker 1: up helping provide housing for one hundred thousand refugees, and
Speaker 1: it was an incredible team effort, but it came from
Speaker 1: this basic idea of how can I help? And maybe
Speaker 1: that is the other version of my question in my
Speaker 1: life at this point, you know, how can I help?
Speaker 1: With everything I have?
Speaker 2: That?
Speaker 1: I mean, I've hired some of the most talented people
Speaker 1: in the world, we have enormous amounts of resources, we
Speaker 1: have this incredibly advanced technology, I have this pretty big megaphone.
Speaker 2: What do I do with that?
Speaker 1: And I hope that what I do provides me happiness.
Speaker 1: And I've noticed that the things that make me happy
Speaker 1: are like kind of helping and giving others. I don't
Speaker 1: mean to sound cliche, but like you start to realize
Speaker 1: like what provides happiness and value for you. And so
Speaker 1: that's kind of something that I keep thinking about. And
Speaker 1: that's what I love about, Like entrepreneurship and creativity and design,
Speaker 1: is you make something, maybe initially for yourself, but then
Speaker 1: for other people, and the real joy is seeing them
Speaker 1: use it.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I think I was really fortunate when I lived
Speaker 3: as a monk. Service was trained as the highest act.
Speaker 3: Service was like imprinted in US as the highest act
Speaker 3: that the act of giving, the act of serving others
Speaker 3: the interesting, and it was so counterintuitive to everything I'd
Speaker 3: learned growing up in London, because it was always about
Speaker 3: getting and achieving, and giving and serving were never part
Speaker 3: of even our vocabulary, let alone being a part of life.
Speaker 3: And I realize now, and I see that today, that
Speaker 3: when everyone, when anyone gets to point of getting everything,
Speaker 3: all they can do is give it away in the
Speaker 3: right in a way that fuel them to a mission
Speaker 3: that is aligned with their purpose, not just not just
Speaker 3: you know, wherever it goes exactly, but in a meaningful way.
Speaker 3: You talked a bit about which I loved about the
Speaker 3: you know, the younger self saying back to you that
Speaker 3: you know you thought that things would happen in a
Speaker 3: different order.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: When you think about that, being single being in your words,
Speaker 3: like being lonely. You're such a mastermind at so many things.
Speaker 3: What's the thought that blocks that? What's the worry that
Speaker 3: comes up, the anxiety that stops you from masterminding that
Speaker 3: part of your life.
Speaker 1: I've been able to look and sign myself to know
Speaker 1: a number of things. I think that I grew up
Speaker 1: feeling a little bit like an outsider. I wanted to
Speaker 1: feel like anyone like I belong and I found through
Speaker 1: achievement that, you know, I would feel these feelings that
Speaker 1: I thought were like love of it, and I would
Speaker 1: feel better, you know, and all that. And I think
Speaker 1: it's this incredible and positive to a point, but if
Speaker 1: you're not careful, it can become all consuming. And the
Speaker 1: thing about a tech company or a startup is like
Speaker 1: it's like imagine you, like again, you have a three
Speaker 1: percent van that's now thirty thousand percent man, or you know,
Speaker 1: a three million person. It just there's always more you
Speaker 1: can do. It can if you're not careful, become like
Speaker 1: a one dimensional addiction. And I think that it's like
Speaker 1: the thing that made me successful was my singular focus,
Speaker 1: but I have to be careful that the thing that
Speaker 1: could then turn against me is my singular focus. And
Speaker 1: so I think it's like, what I the way to
Speaker 1: live my life in the next twenty years can't exactly
Speaker 1: be what I did last one years, But last one
Speaker 1: years worked out pretty well, so why would I do
Speaker 1: anything differently? But of course, if I don't do anything differently,
Speaker 1: and I'll be fifty or sixty and nothing will have changed.
Speaker 1: And so I think it's really out like seeking community.
Speaker 1: The word community means harmony, to live in, harmony, in
Speaker 1: balance and having that, And so I think it's just
Speaker 1: old habits and habits that have been rewarded. So, but
Speaker 1: you've got to be very careful about those habits. I
Speaker 1: think that. I think that's what it is. And I
Speaker 1: also just yeah, I don't know, what do you think.
Speaker 3: When I listen to you and being with you for
Speaker 3: the time that we're spending together, and obviously it's the
Speaker 3: first time we've met. Yeah, you're someone who has extreme
Speaker 3: clarity about what you want, who you are, what you're
Speaker 3: working on, what you're struggling on. And my question would be,
Speaker 3: or my hypothesis is, does that clarity exist around what
Speaker 3: you want in the personal space.
Speaker 1: I think that's a big insight. Yeah, and maybe that's
Speaker 1: what I'm still trying to discover.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say that you sound so clear, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that if you actually had clarity, then I don't think
Speaker 3: it would be hard. It's hard to have clarity. That's
Speaker 3: the hard clarity.
Speaker 2: That's a good point.
Speaker 3: And so when you have clarity, it will be so
Speaker 3: much more easy if you to create, you can't create
Speaker 3: something if you don't have clarity, that's a great point,
Speaker 3: and so that would be my Yeah, I love that
Speaker 3: at least, and that's what I was going to ask you,
Speaker 3: my what at least are those sprinklings of those clues.
Speaker 3: Let's let's go with that word, what is what are
Speaker 3: the clues of what you think could develop into clarity
Speaker 3: around what you're looking for in a personal way. You've
Speaker 3: talked about so prolifically about what you want professionally, which
Speaker 3: is this using Airbnb as this phenomenal platform to build
Speaker 3: community and connect people and you know, eradicate loneliness, which
Speaker 3: I love, Like, I love that. That's phenomenal clarity and
Speaker 3: so inspiring and I could get behind that today, right,
Speaker 3: Like that's so what do you need to get behind yourself?
Speaker 3: In the personal space?
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm professionally like a sixty year old
Speaker 1: and a forty one year old's body, and personally like
Speaker 1: a twenty five year old and a forty one year
Speaker 1: old's body, because I'm like I'm foot in the future
Speaker 1: and foot in the past, or like I'm in totally
Speaker 1: different time scales professionally and personally, and it kind of
Speaker 1: makes sense right where I am a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: my life maybe was a little more on hold or
Speaker 1: done in a differ order than I imagined. So the
Speaker 1: question is, like, how do I get clarity when I
Speaker 1: started Airbnb? Before before we started Airbnb, I didn't know
Speaker 1: I wanted to start a tech company and I wanted
Speaker 1: to be like about bringing helping bring people together. And
Speaker 1: I was going to start with these two people, and
Speaker 1: I was going to be a technology founder, and I
Speaker 1: was going to marry art and science and do all stuff.
Speaker 1: I couldn't have known any of that, but there were
Speaker 1: some things I did professionally that are probably clues to
Speaker 1: what should be done personally. The first thing is I
Speaker 1: had endless curiosity. I had role models, heroes, people I
Speaker 1: looked up to, and you know both you know, well
Speaker 1: known people and lesser known people. I had an intense curiosity.
Speaker 1: I was drawn to certain types of people, and I
Speaker 1: had action. You know, it's like, if you can't follow
Speaker 1: your passion, you follow your curiosity, where does it take you?
Speaker 1: And you know, like, you're not going to start a
Speaker 1: company by like never like starting, and you're not going
Speaker 1: to build a personal life you want by not starting either,
Speaker 1: and so you just go on that journey.
Speaker 2: And you will, you will.
Speaker 1: I think you will find what you want if you
Speaker 1: start and you keep moving.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that feels right something like that.
Speaker 3: I'm excited to see you, you know, I'm excited to
Speaker 3: hear about how you take that short moment of clarity
Speaker 3: that we've gained into the future.
Speaker 2: Because no, that's great.
Speaker 3: I really, I really really feel that you've found in
Speaker 3: your life that you've always been exactly where you're meant
Speaker 3: to be, not in the luck sense, like you said,
Speaker 3: of the right timing, but that each one of your
Speaker 3: experiences totally has made you make better decisions.
Speaker 1: And I think that that maybe the like exciting thing
Speaker 1: is like what if I can't connect the dots looking forward,
Speaker 1: but I will realize in hindsight, Wow, everything just fell
Speaker 1: into place, like this thing led to that thing led
Speaker 1: to that thing. Yeah, and that would be fun, be
Speaker 1: fun to check in in a handful of years and
Speaker 1: see what played out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. And it's so it's so interesting
Speaker 3: that you keep quite. I've never met someone who loves
Speaker 3: quotes as much as I do, so it's uh, it's
Speaker 3: fun hearing them back from you and how they've played
Speaker 3: out in your life, What if anything today, apart from
Speaker 3: everything we've talked about, we talked about so many things,
Speaker 3: What if anything today keeps you up at night? What
Speaker 3: do you sleep pretty well?
Speaker 1: I don't know if I sleep that well. And I
Speaker 1: not to use another quote, but Pablo Casa is saying
Speaker 1: the older you get, the stronger the wind gets, and
Speaker 1: it's always in your face. And I think that could
Speaker 1: be true of companies. What keeps me up at night
Speaker 1: is you know, like people ask me the professional context,
Speaker 1: So what keeps you up at night in the company, Like,
Speaker 1: is this something happening? What keeps me up at night
Speaker 1: is something not happening. What keeps me up at night
Speaker 1: is the idea that we grow into something that I like,
Speaker 1: was meant to disrupt two thousand and nine. Everybody takes off.
Speaker 1: So we start in twousand and seven, two eight, it
Speaker 1: takes off. By two thousand and nine, I go on
Speaker 1: a ten year journey. It's now late twenty nineteen, and
Speaker 1: I remember having a dream, a bad dream, that I
Speaker 1: woke up and I was running a company that's unrecognizable
Speaker 1: from anything I ever intended to start. It was like
Speaker 1: I was in a wilderness for ten years and I
Speaker 1: just back and I remember going on a hike in Bilinas, California,
Speaker 1: where Joe had like a summer house, and we went
Speaker 1: on a hike Joni and I and I told them
Speaker 1: about this dream and they said, well, what did you find?
Speaker 1: I said, I was horrified because the company we set
Speaker 1: up the start is unrecognizable we have today.
Speaker 2: And they go, what do you mean.
Speaker 1: I go, well, people are complaining that it's big, it's bureaucratic,
Speaker 1: it's slow moving, people are more complacent. Costs is rising,
Speaker 1: grosses slowing. It's starting to feel like a corporation. And
Speaker 1: I didn't know what to do. I felt like we
Speaker 1: needed to like not blow it all up, but change
Speaker 1: it all, like take the house back to the studs.
Speaker 1: But the problem was we're about to go public, and
Speaker 1: that's like a really bad time to do that. But
Speaker 1: I had this image in my head of this kind
Speaker 1: of company that I want to have. This image was
Speaker 1: to build the most creative place on earth, to build
Speaker 1: the world's biggest startup, to build a company that was
Speaker 1: like felt small, that was completely focused not on a
Speaker 1: product or service, but a community. I was starting to
Speaker 1: come a conclusion by two thousand nineteen that you can't
Speaker 1: be big and have a soul like that. At some point,
Speaker 1: those things were at odds that the problem was being big,
Speaker 1: and I didn't know what to do. And all of
Speaker 1: a sudden we get word in February twenty twenty that
Speaker 1: our China business has collapsed by eighty percent because this
Speaker 1: thing called COVID, Like what's covid? And then within eight
Speaker 1: weeks you lose eighty percent of your business. And I've
Speaker 1: never had a near death experience, but it's been described
Speaker 1: to me as your life flashes before your eyes. And
Speaker 1: I had a near business death experience and then suddenly
Speaker 1: everything making clear to me. If I was seeing this
Speaker 1: chair three years ago, I would not have been clear.
Speaker 1: I don't think I would have the clarity ad today.
Speaker 1: There's something about almost losing everything and everything I had I,
Speaker 1: at least at that time, I thought was the professional
Speaker 1: that gives you clarity. Imagine your house is on fire
Speaker 1: and someone says you can take twenty percent of the
Speaker 1: things out of your house. Suddenly you have to make
Speaker 1: that choice, and you get really clear about what's important.
Speaker 1: People started telling you I want to air me exist
Speaker 1: you say why, and they tell you it's as if
Speaker 1: they're giving the eulogy before you're even dead, and how
Speaker 1: you want to be remembered, and you start to ask yourself,
Speaker 1: I don't know what's going to happen, but how do
Speaker 1: I want to be remembered? And at that point we
Speaker 1: stepped into action and we basically rebuilt the company from
Speaker 1: ground up. And this is to again bring it back
Speaker 1: one more time to Steve Jobs. I met two people
Speaker 1: at that point in my life who changed my life.
Speaker 1: One was Johnny Ive, who was Steve's partner in design,
Speaker 1: and the other was heiroki Asi, who was Steve's creative director,
Speaker 1: and they told me about the way Steve ran the company.
Speaker 1: And actually a funny even further aside is I remember
Speaker 1: one time I remember went to Steve's house. I never
Speaker 1: met him, but and I saw these books on the
Speaker 1: shelf from ropin' amin i'mer and asked is like, wife, like,
Speaker 1: what is what they're rap?
Speaker 2: And I'm air books.
Speaker 1: But as I started studying, I realized that it was
Speaker 1: this idea that you almost like Rober happened on the
Speaker 1: whole bomb in his head, that this idea that the
Speaker 1: leader collects all the information and that you're the center.
Speaker 1: That it's not a pyramid, you're not top down, you're
Speaker 1: inside out. You're the sun of a solar system. But
Speaker 1: your job is to emit light and bring decision making in,
Speaker 1: to pull in this shared consciousness. And I started realizing
Speaker 1: there was a whole new way to run a company,
Speaker 1: a company that wasn't divisions. Think about what that sounds
Speaker 1: like divisions. We are divided, but totally integrated as small, lean,
Speaker 1: elite as possible, creative and analytical, technology and humanities. That
Speaker 1: we'd have one flow. We wouldn't be metrics oriented, we'd
Speaker 1: be basically idea oriented, and we'd measure the results and
Speaker 1: that we would just there's this really specifically ran a
Speaker 1: company and that was basically the way I found ourselves
Speaker 1: out of a crisis. And so the lessness story is
Speaker 1: through that I was able to get a lot of
Speaker 1: clarity through this crisis. I was forced to answer and
Speaker 1: ask all these questions that I ever had to do before.
Speaker 1: But I hope on the personal side, I don't need
Speaker 1: a crisis to answer those questions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly where I think we're headed. That you
Speaker 3: have you have an opportunity to avoid the crisis. Yes,
Speaker 3: in order to not.
Speaker 2: Be not everyone needs that crisis.
Speaker 3: No you don't. It sounds like do you do you
Speaker 3: still when you present ideas, this a visual you see
Speaker 3: them feel you can see everything that you're talking about,
Speaker 3: and I can, I can see it with you.
Speaker 1: Everything in my head, my mind is like a three
Speaker 1: dimensional model, and all my ideas. Think of it like
Speaker 1: a tree. The trunk of the tree is your very
Speaker 1: first principles, your root ideas, and then they have branches,
Speaker 1: and the branches have branches, and those branches have leads
Speaker 1: or it's like a space, a three dimensional space. It's
Speaker 1: multi dimensional and colorful. And this is what we called
Speaker 1: the model, your model of the world that you want
Speaker 1: to live in. And as you gain more information, you
Speaker 1: keep changing the model in your head. I kind of
Speaker 1: describe my mind running airbnbas. Imagine a chessboard and there's
Speaker 1: that you have to see if he moves ahead. Now,
Speaker 1: imagine like a die, a thousand sided die, each playing
Speaker 1: a separate game of chess, all simultaneously anticipating in understanding relationships.
Speaker 1: As hard as that is, if you can start to
Speaker 1: organize all the ideas in your mind but not be rigid,
Speaker 1: continually changing and orienting it, like, you know, this is
Speaker 1: how I tend to see things in three dimensions spatially.
Speaker 1: It's really rich, vivid colors, and that's just how I think,
Speaker 1: you know. I think other people will think in abstract
Speaker 1: thoughts or numbers, some think in terms of language, But
Speaker 1: that's how I do it, you know, And it probably
Speaker 1: doesn't surprise you given my background.
Speaker 3: And do you see yourself in that or is that
Speaker 3: happening and you're observing it?
Speaker 2: You know, you might have hit on something.
Speaker 1: There have been times where I'm trying to design a
Speaker 1: world that other people want to I want other people
Speaker 1: to live in, and I think it's like I want
Speaker 1: to vicariously live through them. It's like I want to
Speaker 1: design this house that's the nicest house world for everyone
Speaker 1: to live in. But I'll be in the workshop design
Speaker 1: the house, and sometimes I have to stop to say,
Speaker 1: maybe I should step inside the house, and.
Speaker 2: I think that.
Speaker 1: I think that's a crux of it, actually, and the
Speaker 1: answer your question. I sometimes see myself in the house,
Speaker 1: and sometimes I see myself just kind of almost like
Speaker 1: a monk or you know, a in a technical and
Speaker 1: design monastery, like you know, and that's kind of what
Speaker 1: the pandemic was. I described it almost like a monastery,
Speaker 1: except with zoom. But if you didn't know I was
Speaker 1: on zoom, you just think I was meditating all day, right,
Speaker 1: Like I'd just be sitting in one chair. And so
Speaker 1: that's a great thing. Is I think that sometimes many
Speaker 1: times we as leader, especially tech founders. I think that
Speaker 1: many tech founders basically design the kind of world they
Speaker 1: want to live in because the world they grew up
Speaker 1: in was inadequate in some way and did not make
Speaker 1: them happy. I think the challenge of those tech leaders
Speaker 1: is to make sure that they step inside that world
Speaker 1: and live that world themselves. And you don't do it,
Speaker 1: then sometimes you start to like forget why you do
Speaker 1: things and you get disconnected. Wow, just kind of you're
Speaker 1: making me think of all this.
Speaker 2: Now you're making me think too.
Speaker 3: I love it, No, And that resonates so deeply and
Speaker 3: strongly because I also think that without purpose, tech entrepreneurs
Speaker 3: also can sometimes not even just tech entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs in
Speaker 3: general or anyone can build something that they monetize that
Speaker 3: they would never want to live in too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and sometimes people don't know why they're doing it. Correct,
Speaker 1: they started it for a reason. Maybe the reason was
Speaker 1: extrinsic I want to be rich and successful, but maybe
Speaker 1: it was intrinsic, maybe there was something. But even so,
Speaker 1: then you find yourself waking up one day asking why
Speaker 1: am I still doing this? And you know the number
Speaker 1: of people that forget why they're doing it, the number
Speaker 1: of people that are self driving cars. There's a destination
Speaker 1: that's in the car they're driving towards it, but they
Speaker 1: don't even know what that destination is. And that's when
Speaker 1: you don't look inside yourself, and if you're not careful,
Speaker 1: you will basically be on a super highway going somewhere,
Speaker 1: not knowing why you're going there, and you may wake
Speaker 1: up and end up in a destination that wasn't where
Speaker 1: you intended. I think this having this clarity is so important.
Speaker 2: Who am I? What do I value? Like?
Speaker 1: What do I want to do in this world? It's
Speaker 1: like taking the time to reflect. I think the best
Speaker 1: businesses are really introspective by introspective leaders. Like when we
Speaker 1: started the company, were really clear, here's our mission and
Speaker 1: it wasn't just like a mission statement, it's like, here's
Speaker 1: exactly what we're trying to do, and now what changes here?
Speaker 2: Are values.
Speaker 1: Here's the kind of people I want to like work with. Well,
Speaker 1: what do they all have in common? They're curious, they're optimistic,
Speaker 1: they're kind of creative, they tend to like like hosting
Speaker 1: other people. Okay, those become what we call values. What
Speaker 1: are the shared lessons? What are the shared stories? And
Speaker 1: the more you can start to be really reflective, You're right,
Speaker 1: the more you're clear about what you want, the more
Speaker 1: you get it. Our problem isn't in life, probably that
Speaker 1: we don't get what we want. The problem is we
Speaker 1: don't know what we want maybe or we pursue things
Speaker 1: on your consciously wanting that our counterproductive to make us happy.
Speaker 1: And if we can just wrap our arms around that,
Speaker 1: some of the hardest things to change our own thoughts,
Speaker 1: but in a weird way, they also seem like the
Speaker 1: most possible to change. And so that that's something that
Speaker 1: I've seen and like. Some of the loneliest people I've
Speaker 1: met are some of the richest people I've met. Some
Speaker 1: the most isolated people I met are some of the
Speaker 1: most successful people I met. The most confused people I've
Speaker 1: met are the most powerful, because at some point the
Speaker 1: power and success can be confusing. You know you had
Speaker 1: a purpose, but you also have all these demands and
Speaker 1: you stakeholders. You can get fused by appeasing people, and.
Speaker 2: You like that. I think that happened to me.
Speaker 1: Like I think I started Airbnb and I had a
Speaker 1: really clear vision, and I think I've got into a
Speaker 1: wilderness where I kind of got confused. And a lot
Speaker 1: of founders have described becoming confused. A lot of leaders
Speaker 1: get confused, and I totally see how that happens. And
Speaker 1: I think finding your way back home is key.
Speaker 3: I would be intrigued to see if you close your
Speaker 3: eyes now or whenever you chose to, to see what
Speaker 3: you saw when you look at your personal life. You're
Speaker 3: talking about your professional life as being all these thousands
Speaker 3: of decisions moving, and.
Speaker 1: You say, like, I kind of that period of self reflection, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I think I saw somebody who.
Speaker 2: Was kind of.
Speaker 1: Almost punishing myself in romanticizing suffering because I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: at some extent, I maybe believe that I was going
Speaker 1: to give everything to the company and it was like
Speaker 1: this selfless act. But it became so selfless that I
Speaker 1: then could start to lose a sense of myself.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know how weird it is.
Speaker 1: I always kind of joked like if I die, well
Speaker 1: I die Brian Chesky or the Airbnb guy just died,
Speaker 1: you know, like and like am I Brian or my
Speaker 1: and being like, you know, like they get really one
Speaker 1: is an icon that's a noun and verb you knows
Speaker 1: ubiquitously around the world, and the others a person that
Speaker 1: not a lot of people know, really know. And when
Speaker 1: you it's very careful. I started becoming the company, and
Speaker 1: this company started becoming me, and I think seventy percent
Speaker 1: of that was good because that meant the company, I
Speaker 1: think was a person, had a face as humanistic, it
Speaker 1: was in the details. But when you become a company,
Speaker 1: you seize to be a person, and then you lose
Speaker 1: a sense of yourself and then you become an icon.
Speaker 1: And by icon, I don't mean famous, I mean iconography.
Speaker 1: Icon is short for an iconography, and iconography is for
Speaker 1: for a symbol for something, And of course people are
Speaker 1: much more than symbols. And I started seeing that I
Speaker 1: started becoming a symbol and a thing, and I stopped
Speaker 1: listening to myself.
Speaker 2: And by the way, like.
Speaker 1: You get pressure from shareholders to like drive a stock price,
Speaker 1: you get pressure from you know, employees to make it
Speaker 1: a better work environment. You get pressure from host but
Speaker 1: no one gives you pressure for yourself and your personal life.
Speaker 1: If you don't create that own pressure, you will like
Speaker 1: that will be the like that's the one person that
Speaker 1: may not put their hand up. Hey, everyone else will.
Speaker 1: And if you don't listen to yourself. And I think
Speaker 1: that's been part of the second chapter of my life
Speaker 1: is like kind of designing the world I want to
Speaker 1: live in and then living in that world and choosing
Speaker 1: to actually live in that world, and you'd be I mean,
Speaker 1: you've interviewed so many people, so but I'm so surprised
Speaker 1: how many leaders don't actually live in that world. I
Speaker 1: tend to think that like some yeah, some of the
Speaker 1: most successful people are people that they get so disconnected
Speaker 1: from what they intend to do and when they started,
Speaker 1: and so reconnecting. I mean, so much of this, I
Speaker 1: guess I tend to see everything through that lens, but
Speaker 1: so much of it is about reconnecting that reconnection, that
Speaker 1: path back home.
Speaker 3: I love what you're saying about the iconography and how
Speaker 3: the human meshes with the iconography, and you described earlier the.
Speaker 1: And maybe everyone does that I just did it in
Speaker 1: a bigger sorry decay, it just did in a bigger way,
Speaker 1: like you could totally get how like I am Brian Airbnb.
Speaker 2: They start to merge.
Speaker 1: But be you, even people who don't have a giant company,
Speaker 1: who they really are and the person they're like supposed
Speaker 1: to be are merging. And as those two things merge,
Speaker 1: you lose who you really are.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's method acting. It's literally method acting. It's
Speaker 3: like we are all pretending to play a role, only
Speaker 3: to believe that that role that we pretended to be
Speaker 3: is now us and has replaced us. And it's even hard.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you why, because when you built Airbnb, it
Speaker 3: had iconography. Yes, Brian didn't ever have iconography like, there
Speaker 3: wasn't a there wasn't like a mission list and a
Speaker 3: value list like before when Brian existed before. And so
Speaker 3: if you were to draw the iconography of Brian the person,
Speaker 3: not the Airbnb, I'm intrigued as to what that would
Speaker 3: look like if you started to design that.
Speaker 2: I see a child.
Speaker 1: I see like a childlike curiosity and energy and love
Speaker 1: that I think I've always held on to. I also
Speaker 1: see the world like through this idea of family and community.
Speaker 1: And I think when people hear the word family think
Speaker 1: of like their parents, their siblings, their children. And I
Speaker 1: think I see like you know, I asked like my
Speaker 1: co founder Joe, I asked him, like what would airbnb,
Speaker 1: would success be for airbingbe? He had this crazy audacious idea,
Speaker 1: he said, to redefine the word family. And I've realized that,
Speaker 1: like so much of my life has been trying to
Speaker 1: do that. I see this like childlike person of curiosity
Speaker 1: and wonder that I've never left that sense of wonder,
Speaker 1: that I'm open to be vulnerable and guided by love
Speaker 1: and like treating wanting to treat those around me like family.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by that is I try to
Speaker 1: do anything for them. And and I hope, I hope
Speaker 1: that my friends, if they ever heard this, they would
Speaker 1: feel like that resonates. And that's not just a pure ideal,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's what I mean, that's the iconography. I
Speaker 1: would hope that iconography is true to some extent. I
Speaker 1: guess as I think about it even deeper, I've used
Speaker 1: the word loneliness, connection and community, but maybe at some
Speaker 1: deeper level, the deepest word is family. And what Bond's
Speaker 1: family is love, and like I think that, like, as
Speaker 1: families have gone smaller and smaller, we've gotten more and
Speaker 1: more isolated. And if we could re expand that word,
Speaker 1: And maybe that's like too idealistic, but like just to
Speaker 1: leave in a little bit to your like close friends
Speaker 1: and to other people and just try to, like you,
Speaker 1: expand that circle. That's kind of what I would want.
Speaker 1: You know, if I design the world around me, then
Speaker 1: I better design it with other people in it.
Speaker 3: And as you see that, do you do you see
Speaker 3: the child or are you the child as you visualize that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny. I kind of see both.
Speaker 3: I see like are you seeing the child sitting there?
Speaker 3: Or are you seeing the vision through the eyes of
Speaker 3: where you would be.
Speaker 1: I feel like a timeless image of myself, like I
Speaker 1: might young and old at the same time, Like it's
Speaker 1: not just one age. I'm like I can see the
Speaker 1: child of me, and I could also see this like
Speaker 1: grown up that I always like that is protecting and
Speaker 1: so I have like both sides, the protector offering security
Speaker 1: and bringing people together and the child who is vulnerable
Speaker 1: and seeks love and wants to just be open and
Speaker 1: totally curious. It's almost like I have this image, you know,
Speaker 1: like you're, like you say, at the family, the dinner table,
Speaker 1: where you like like you're a kid or your parents,
Speaker 1: your siblings or whatever. My image is that, but it's
Speaker 1: a very big table with a lot of people, and
Speaker 1: you know, and that's not just my close family that
Speaker 1: I might have. It's you know, maybe like the the
Speaker 1: broader people in my life that I have around me.
Speaker 1: That's I think the image I have. And I think
Speaker 1: that's in a space that's very well designed, very well designed,
Speaker 1: and I have a design aesthetic that's like fairly modern
Speaker 1: but also whimsical. I don't like the cold. I don't
Speaker 1: like coldness and modernism. I like it to be like
Speaker 1: colorful and so.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I saw if you're okay with I want to
Speaker 3: show something that came for me to me. The clarity
Speaker 3: is that it's not even the merger. Often what you
Speaker 3: said so beautifully is like I see my younger self
Speaker 3: and I see where I am now, and now it's protecting.
Speaker 3: But the childlike is that love, that joy, that community,
Speaker 3: the family, and it's like they're hand in hand. Like
Speaker 3: it's not a merger of the two. It's not an
Speaker 3: integration it's a hand in hand.
Speaker 2: It's really great.
Speaker 3: There's a wisdom that you have today that you didn't
Speaker 3: have then, and there's a wisdom you have den that
Speaker 3: you don't have now, and it's just hand in hand
Speaker 3: and walking together.
Speaker 1: I've always wanted to believe that I can have the
Speaker 1: wisdom of my grandparents and the curiosity of a child
Speaker 1: in one that I have a foot.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Walt Disney, one of my other idols, used to and
Speaker 1: in the front of Disneyland, he says, here you leave
Speaker 1: the world of today and into the world of tomorrow,
Speaker 1: yesterday and fantasy. He said, I have a foot in
Speaker 1: the future and the foot in the past. And I
Speaker 1: think that's partly what. I have a foot in the future,
Speaker 1: and that future is one of maybe curiosity and looking
Speaker 1: forward and futurism and technology, and then I've also a
Speaker 1: foot in the past.
Speaker 2: The foot in the past is my roots.
Speaker 1: I think I I oscillate between the two, you know,
Speaker 1: culture and technology, massive scale, one of the become one
Speaker 1: of the biggest in the world with like they desire
Speaker 1: to always be a startup and always be close knit.
Speaker 2: It's like these twos.
Speaker 1: To paradoxes, competing forces yeah, And I think that that
Speaker 1: is a tension that it's I think it's a really
Speaker 1: interesting tension. Now you're making me think about all this,
Speaker 1: Like I'm sure I've never some of this stuff. I
Speaker 1: never really not only I have not talked about it.
Speaker 1: Some of the stuff I'm kind of not even really
Speaker 1: thought about that until now I'm just really thinking about it.
Speaker 1: One of the things when you're like you run a
Speaker 1: giant companies, you learn scale. When you start a company
Speaker 1: you're tiny, you have to do everything you have to
Speaker 1: like you know, like things don't even think about. Like
Speaker 1: you have an office which is your apartment, and you
Speaker 1: need to like buy a coffee maker and go buy
Speaker 1: the coffee. And you need to like have a name
Speaker 1: for your company. You actually need to check out that
Speaker 1: name's trademark, and you got to bun a domain name,
Speaker 1: and you got to like have a story for the company.
Speaker 1: And like then you've got to like make sure you
Speaker 1: have a legal corporation. You now found a lawyer. You
Speaker 1: got to interview the lawyers, and then you got to
Speaker 1: like actually decide where you're going to make and you say,
Speaker 1: how do I make things? Like and I could go
Speaker 1: down the one hundred thousand things. You're in the tedious details.
Speaker 1: And then if you go onto rocket ship that I
Speaker 1: go on fifteen years later, you know a billion and
Speaker 1: a half times has been used. You end up at
Speaker 1: some massive scale, a scale that's bigger than you've ever imagined.
Speaker 1: But as a founder, you never let go of those details.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's like a founder is different than professional manager. A
Speaker 1: professional manager never saw it small. And as a founder,
Speaker 1: not only did you see it small, you created what
Speaker 1: was small. And so as you see the full scale,
Speaker 1: you tend to zoom out and zoom in, and zoom
Speaker 1: out and zoom in. And it's actually a really helpful
Speaker 1: skill in life. Whenever you need a different perspective, you
Speaker 1: can zoom in or you can zoom out, and I
Speaker 1: tend to do both. I go in and sorry, well
Speaker 1: what about this? What about this? What about this? And
Speaker 1: go into the smaller and small detail, and then I
Speaker 1: go back to the present scale. It's like a satellite map,
Speaker 1: it's like the powers of ten. Zoom out to space,
Speaker 1: zoom in with a microscope, and that is just a
Speaker 1: way to think about things. And you were constantly doing
Speaker 1: that when you run a company. You see the big
Speaker 1: picture and you say, what does it mean? You dive
Speaker 1: right in and you zoom out, and a lot of
Speaker 1: leaders they struggle. They can only do that medium altitude.
Speaker 1: They can't see the fullest picture, or they get stuck
Speaker 1: and they can't access the smallest of details. In the
Speaker 1: entire universe exists in the smallest detail, and that's what
Speaker 1: you discover when you zoom and zo. You start to
Speaker 1: realize the relationships, and it allows you to both run
Speaker 1: something large and still connect with somebody at the most
Speaker 1: intimate human level and not lose your mind along the way.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's that balance between recognizing what's possible through scale,
Speaker 3: but at the same time being able to be embracing
Speaker 3: of your own insignificance.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So you see the significance, but yeah you recognize Yeah
Speaker 3: it's insignificant.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's so fascinating.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The paradox is the only thing that's fascinating. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, the human mind is apparent all of these
Speaker 3: Everything that we see that's magical about the world is
Speaker 3: a paradox that everything is connected, but everything's doing its
Speaker 3: own thing. Yes, right, like the ocean, the sun are
Speaker 3: doing their own thing. Yeah, they're connected yet doing their
Speaker 3: own thing.
Speaker 1: And I think the more you start to see why
Speaker 1: I went to scale, you sort of see your right
Speaker 1: that more and more things are connected. But because everything
Speaker 1: is connected doesn't mean they're all the same. And the
Speaker 1: more you learn about the details the things, the more
Speaker 1: you realize how different everything is, and so you but
Speaker 1: then you realize they're actually in some deeper way related
Speaker 1: and that you spend the rest of your life kind
Speaker 1: of in that discovery.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And you know what I've observed that is the
Speaker 3: connecting force, at least up until now in my life,
Speaker 3: is that everything that we've just talked about, everything in
Speaker 3: the universe that we see is serving uniquely. What connects
Speaker 3: it is that it's serving. The sun is serving, the
Speaker 3: water is serving, the trees are serving the trunk of
Speaker 3: the tree that leaves you talk about the flowers, they're serving.
Speaker 3: Everything is giving.
Speaker 1: A service, Everything is interdependent on everything else. That we
Speaker 1: tend to have this illusion that we're separate from one another.
Speaker 1: And I think that even like loneliness might be a
Speaker 1: reality which is the way you perceive the world, but
Speaker 1: a loneness may be an illusion that you're not as
Speaker 1: alone and separate as you think you are. And I
Speaker 1: think that's a really good thing to remind yourself, and
Speaker 1: that we are so much more connected to everything else,
Speaker 1: and that I think so much of creativity is just
Speaker 1: first embracing the fact that everything is connected in some
Speaker 1: way and it's your job to discover and make connections
Speaker 1: and find relationships and similarities. And by the way, that's
Speaker 1: a great way to connect with people to know that, like, wow,
Speaker 1: what makes them so fascinating is they're really different from
Speaker 1: me in some of these ways. But what is going
Speaker 1: to bond us is that we're actually so connected and
Speaker 1: there are almost no humans on this planet that you
Speaker 1: don't have some fundamental connections to and if you don't
Speaker 1: see them, you have to keep looking. And once you
Speaker 1: keep looking, that becomes the bond, that becomes the thing
Speaker 1: that you share between them. How do you do that
Speaker 1: with curiosity and interest? Fascinating? Just be fascinated all the time,
Speaker 1: And it's almost like that's contagious. If you're fascinated, I'm fascinated.
Speaker 1: Somebody once said that to me, a director who I
Speaker 1: was doing a film too, and he said, if you're fascinated,
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated. And I'm like, well, okay, like I really
Speaker 1: do and it's like, and so, what what do you
Speaker 1: find fascinating?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I often de say to people similarly that if
Speaker 3: you don't find someone interesting, it's because you're not interested. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like you're not interested enough. There is something interesting about.
Speaker 1: Something interesting about everyone and everything, and that is what
Speaker 1: the curate that is, I think what curiosity is. And like,
Speaker 1: you know, you find the game within the game, you
Speaker 1: find like in school, Like I think so many people
Speaker 1: in school, like they're not interested in subjects because they're abstract.
Speaker 1: But if somebody is obsessed with basketball, then teach physics
Speaker 1: through basketball, stree biology through basketball, teach history through basketball
Speaker 1: the history of so you just you find something you're interested.
Speaker 1: And I think the great thing about starting a company
Speaker 1: is I had no interest in learning about accounting. I
Speaker 1: had no abstract interest in learning about leadership and management
Speaker 1: and organization. I had no abstract interest in understanding like
Speaker 1: technical architecture. But I did interest in how we should
Speaker 1: account for all the money we're making, what technology platform
Speaker 1: we should be on to enable Airbnb, and through something
Speaker 1: I was already interested in Airbnb. I was able to
Speaker 1: learn all these other things, but if I had to
Speaker 1: learn them abstractly, the way we're taught in school, I
Speaker 1: don't think anything would have stuck. And so Airbnb became
Speaker 1: that model this world. And I have learned almost everything
Speaker 1: through this world that I've been generally constructing, co constructing
Speaker 1: with my coworkers and with the community. And it's just
Speaker 1: like I like to joke that Airbnb is like the
Speaker 1: world's biggest Risdi project that just never stopped, and we
Speaker 1: just kept building it and kept building and kept building
Speaker 1: it and kept building it. And as the bigger we build,
Speaker 1: the more I learned and the more I discover. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I've seen so much of the world through the creation
Speaker 1: of this really big house, so to speak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's pretty well.
Speaker 1: It is pretty well, and it's just getting started.
Speaker 2: Hopefully, it's just getting started. Brian.
Speaker 3: This is without doubt the most unique episode of On
Speaker 3: Purpose I think we've ever heard really in four years.
Speaker 3: And I don't just say stuff like that, you can
Speaker 3: check with these guys. But we end every episode with
Speaker 3: a final five. These are five questions I ask pretty
Speaker 3: much ninety percent of them to all guests, and these
Speaker 3: are your final five, Brian. They have to be answered
Speaker 3: in one word to one sentence maximum, and I will
Speaker 3: probably destroy that pattern, but we'll try so, Brian, these
Speaker 3: are your final five. The first question is what is
Speaker 3: the best insight advice that you've ever heard, or received
Speaker 3: or read.
Speaker 1: It's better to have one hundred people love you than
Speaker 1: a million people that just sort of like you, and
Speaker 1: so do things that don't scale, and if you do,
Speaker 1: maybe people love something you love so much they'll tell
Speaker 1: everyone about it and you might end up with millions
Speaker 1: of people.
Speaker 2: After all. That's kind of a long sentence, but it's
Speaker 2: a great sentence.
Speaker 3: It's beautiful. It's perfect. Second question, what is the worst
Speaker 3: insight advice you've ever heard, read, received, or come.
Speaker 1: Across anything that involves chasing status? Not because it's bad,
Speaker 1: but because it's actually a horrible way to even get it.
Speaker 3: Love that answer, yeah. Question number three, how would you
Speaker 3: define your current purpose.
Speaker 1: To try to help bring the world together, even if
Speaker 1: it's in the end a small way?
Speaker 3: Question number four, if you were being remembered after you
Speaker 3: were physically gone, what would you hope to hear.
Speaker 2: We miss them?
Speaker 3: A fifth and final question. I asked this question to
Speaker 3: every guest who's ever been on the show. If you
Speaker 3: could create one law that everyone in the world had
Speaker 3: to follow. What would it be?
Speaker 1: Sometimes people ask me, impose one thing on the world
Speaker 1: would it be? And I'd say, everyone would have a
Speaker 1: passport and everyone would walk in.
Speaker 2: Someone else's shoes.
Speaker 1: And I think if they were to do that, there'd
Speaker 1: be like such a greater awakening in the world. So
Speaker 1: maybe everyone was forced to live someone else's life and
Speaker 1: to step in someone else's shoes, and the more different
Speaker 1: the better.
Speaker 3: Well, said Brian Tesca. Everyone, Brian, that was, as I said,
Speaker 3: the most unique. I think it's really interesting something that
Speaker 3: came to my mind and heart. And since this has
Speaker 3: been such an intuitive conversation, I feel I should share it.
Speaker 3: You know, in our professional life, we have business partners,
Speaker 3: but in our personal life, I don't think we often
Speaker 3: think about having human partners. And I really appreciate you
Speaker 3: dancing with me today, going there with me today, and
Speaker 3: being human partners for each other. And you definitely did
Speaker 3: that for me today. You brought out of me things
Speaker 3: I didn't know that I haven't gone to for a while.
Speaker 3: So thank you so much for inspiring me enlightening me
Speaker 3: in so many ways. I actually had a special internal
Speaker 3: experience myself.
Speaker 1: Well, I think I've learned about myself through this process.
Speaker 1: It's amazing the amount of time you can go through
Speaker 1: in your life without stopping and taking a look at things.
Speaker 1: And when you do, my God, like that just changes
Speaker 1: your perspective on everything, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, thank you so much, Thank you, grateful for you.
Speaker 2: I think you have me to thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Set your honor such a pleasure. And everyone who's been
Speaker 3: listening and watching. If you're with us, then make sure
Speaker 3: that you I want you to let me know what
Speaker 3: was your favorite moment. There are so many great moments,
Speaker 3: but grab a screenshot of where you found your favorite moments.
Speaker 3: We can see all the seconds and minutes so that
Speaker 3: everyone can go listen to it. I love seeing what
Speaker 3: deeply connects and penetrates through to our community because this
Speaker 3: is all in service of you. So thank you for
Speaker 3: everyone who's been listening and watching, And thank you Brian,
Speaker 3: thank you jam. If you love this episode, you will
Speaker 3: also love my interview with Charles Douhig on how to
Speaker 3: hack your brain change any habit effortlessly, and the secret
Speaker 3: to making better decisions.
Speaker 1: Look, am I hesitating on this because I'm scared of
Speaker 1: making the choice. Because I'm scared of doing the work,
Speaker 1: or am I sitting with this because it just doesn't
Speaker 1: feel right yet