Brian Chesky ON: The Crisis of Disconnection and Loneliness & How to Tap Into Your Creative Potential

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us in our daily lives. And today's guest is someone who's achieved incredible success, but also someone who I believe is carrying ideas and insights that can be really useful to us on our journey to whatever success may mean to you. I'm talking about the one and only Brian Chesky, who's the co founder and chief executive officer of Airbnb. In two thousand and seven, Brian and Joe Gerbia became

Airbnb's first hosts. Since then, Brian has overseen Airbnb's growth to become a community of over four million hosts who have welcomed more than one billion guests across two hundred plus countries and regions. Brian is a signatory to the Giving Pledge and is committed to donating the net proceeds of a CEO equity compensation to community, philanthropic and charitable causes, something that I'm so passionate about and so excited to dive into. Brian, Welcome to on Purpose.

the mountain. You've achieved it. And what I've realized is that at this point, like I'm forty one years old and a lot of people ask me like, why don't you just retire, like or why don't you do it all over again? And for me, I would tell them because the fund is just starting. But the fund of just starting isn't to like get the next billion people. I kind of think of myself maybe more than a business person. You know, you're you're kind of who you

are growing up. And I was a designer growing up, and I kind of think of Airbnb as like one of the world. It's the biggest canvas. Almost never has a designer been given so much responsibility, so much opportunity.

And what I love is, you know, like a musician wants to play music, a painter wants to paint a builder wants to build, a climber wants to climb, and as an entrepreneur, I want to create and connect things and try to like defy the notion of what a business person could be or what a designer could be because I never met someone like me growing up. And I'm not saying anyone's going to try to be like me.

But if I can remind people that there's leadership comes in many different paces, many different flavors, and that a creative person, you know, can run a company, and it can run a really big company, a Fortune five hundred company, then that's that's the very beginning. And I feel like what makes me happy now is working with people I love.

Like the one of the great things about say success is you can choose the people you strosd up with, and I get to like work every single day with people I love on ideas that I'm obsessed over, and I'm just so obsessed. I think my motivation has changed. I think when I started with my motivation was about myself becoming something, and once you achieve that, your motivation

often turn turns outward. It's about its starting to be about giving to other people, to lending them experience a small part of what I was able to experience, and it becomes just about the work. See, when you're not successful, you get validation when people praise you, but eventually like you do it for yourself, that you're not doing it for status or success, because at some point you've gotten all that, Like how much more is going to make

you happy? And so just doing things I love the people I care about, That's what makes me happy today.

all have to take that's inwards to the valley. And that's a journey that not everyone gets to take or everyone thinks about taking, because we're so busy trying to get up that we don't often get to go in right. And it sounds like you've been excavating that internal part for some time.

grap with. When you go on a journey like this, you learn a lot about yourself and you start to also learn, like what's important to you starting a company, you know, one of my first investors said Brian, Starting companies like jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane in the way down. Maybe another way of saying it is like playing a video game, and it's like a

thousand levels, and each level gets harder. In each level, you learn something about yourself, you do something that's uncomfortable. In each step of the game, you learn something. And the problem with success is that tend to amplify things. I mean that can be good, but it all still can amplify holes you have in yourself. People that are a little bit paranoid get very paranoid. People that are a little deceitful become like completely fraudulent liars. People that

are a little narcissistic become like egomaniacs and stuff. And so this stuff can tend to amplify tendencies inside of yourself. And so if you're afraid of conflict, that's going to actually manifest in life, like not actually dealing with things if you can't, if you're not decisive, there's going to be an element of bureaucracy. If you're like get overwhelmed and you get paralyzed, there's going to be an action in the company. And so you learn so much about yourself.

And I through this process, I probably learned more about myself than I even have about business. And it's been an incredible journey. And yeah, it's like incredible lessons. And the company is like a mirror about you, right Like when you see a company, it's like walking your house. And by walking your house, I can step a little bit in your mind. Because the house you bought, the house you furnished, the house, you made a thousand decisions and it would take a while for me in conversation

to understand you. But I walk in this house and I can understand the thousand decisions you made. A company is like that, but it's like one hundred thousand decisions or a million decisions. And so by seeing the company, you can like see into the person's mind everything they do, and not even in everything they do, but everyone they surround this self with and the culture they create and what they And that's the thing that's so crazy.

with friends, Yeah, and that's how it started. It started in a place of being around people you love with What was the biggest point of challenge in building something with people you love as you grow it, and what is it that you experienced and what was the biggest lesson that you took away that actually kept it going? Because I can imagine as you're describing highs and lows, all of this change for sixteen years, but here you are still building it together.

And that amount of pressure, the amount of spotlight, the money that changes in like people's status and positioning, it can do a lot to break people up. But also unlike a band, where maybe I'm not to say, you just have to agree on like where you perform and what you sing. With a company, you have to agree on like who we're gonna hire, what we're gonna call, what markets we're going to go into, what's the prioritization,

Like who we're gonna raise money for. I can go down the list of like the thousands of things you have to agree to, And with Joe, Nate and I, I often say it's really good to start a company with friends. Not everyone has friends to start a company with, but you want that reservoir of goodwill. And we made

a decision. The decision was that no one decision is going to supersede our friendship in our relationship, that we're never going to have well, debate will argue, but will never allow a situation where winning an argument is the most important thing. Because you think about a company as one hundred thousand decisions, it could also be one hundred

thousand arguments. And if you get stuck the first debate, or you like somebody won a debate, okay, great, you have ninety nine, nine hundred and ninety nine more things to discuss. And so the lesson I learned is, I mean, first of all, Jay, I was lucky, and a lot of people when I say I was lucky, they think, oh, you're at the right place, the right time, with the right idea. And I said, well maybe, but there's something

I was much luckier about. And what I was most lucky about, what made me most fortunate was I met Joe and Nate that we have this unbelievable chemistry. One time we had to do like some personality tests. It's like one of those core wheels, and we took this personality test to see about our chemistry, and they plotted our personalities and they formed a perfect equal adible triangle. Not always you're going to find people that are perfect

compliments to you. I'd say a couple of things. Number One, you want to have a team with people that you are friends with or could see yourself becoming friends with that you have a deep love and respect for that. You're going to probably spend more time with your co founders than your spouse or family if it goes well. If it doesn't go well, then maybe not. But that's the best case scenario that people that shared values. Because you can debate anything so long as you're trying to

climb the same mountain in the same volee system. You have different values, Eventually there's going to become irreconcilable conflicts, but you probably also want complimentary skills. The worst case is people with different values and same skills. Right, we do the same job, we step in each other's tolls, and we're trying to go in a different direction, And so I think, and then I think. The final thing is just this mutual love and respect and never losing sight.

are the heart and the soul of the company. And it's like you know, parents, like you know, not every child has the fortune to have multiple parents, not every company has the fortune have multiple founders. But if they're together and they're not fighting, they have a mutual love and respect from another, that's going to permeate the company, just like it permeates the health of a child. And joan A and I kind of thought ourselves as parents

in the company. As a child, I'd never have had kids, but you know there's something about that, and I think who you are and that relationship permeates every single thing. If the founders fight, the employees fight, if they have respect from one another, that is going to be a role a model that other people throughout the organization are going to copy. And that's what I've learned from that.

that can provide supplies at me. And like, you know, like being the only one in power is actually quite lonely. Having been in that little bit of that position, I've now could tell people that you want to share it, because otherwise it's incredibly isolating and lonely. And you know, like if you get all the credit, you could also get all the blame and it can be very difficult.

And so be able to share that with Joe and Nate and now to be able to share that with the people that I get to pick to surround myself with that, I mean, that is one of the most fulfilling things. And you know, great relationships get better with age, and they give you energy, they make you better. They hold your negative tendencies in check, and they pull out like creative ambitions in you. They see potential in you

that maybe you don't see in yourself. I had never imagined that I could be CEO of any company.

even agree to like, let me be the CEO. Why did Joe tell me one day in two thousand and seven to pack everything in the back of old Honda Civic and drive up to San Francisco? Why did he think that was a good idea? And years later he's told me, and he told me that we went to college together at Risdy and he saw something in me. And it's possible he saw something in me that I didn't even yet see in myself. And this is like the hero's journey. Somebody might believe in you, they might

see something in you. And that's what I got with Joanna, and I think I believed in what I think I saw. They saw potentially me what I saw maybe was potential in this idea that if people could experience what we experienced that first weekend when we host three guests, that this would be an idea that would spread around the world. I think we have an easier time imagining living like this on Mars and living differently on this planet. But which of those two do you think is more likely

to happen in the near term. It's really hard for us to imagine sch sociological changes. We can all imagine technological changes. We can imagine things getting bigger, faster. But it's hard to imagine us living differently. And I don't think that we were visionaries per se. I think we were expedition and I think we discovered something. One of my first investors, Paul Graham, he said, what do you know?

What unique knowledge do you know that has allowed you afforded you the ability to start this company that no one else has? What do you know that no one else understands? And I think that we discovered something. We discovered that, like, people are fundamentally good. You know, you read the newspaper, I think Chief Justice Earl Warren said, I don't turn to the front page of the newspaper. It's filled with man's failures. I go to the sports page.

It's filled with man's successes. I think we live in an abundance of data reinforcing that people aren't good. And we have probably as much data as almost anyone because in the last fifteen years, one and a half billion people have used Airvonba one and a half billion guest arrivals in nearly every country in the world, more countries,

I think than Coca Cola. Nearly the population of Vallet every night living together and it's only reinforced what I think we naively believed in the beginning, these two simple ideas that people are basically good, they're ninety nine percent the same. I think that Joe and Nate believed in me and my potential to be this company. I think

we collectively believed in the potential each other. And I think also that this idea would be one that could spread around the world if only we could figure out how to communicate it to people.

But there's a dark side of believing that we're like all very different, and that's that we believe that people are the other and that therefore it's harder to have empathy with somebody who isn't us. And I think that the best way to understand that somebody is similar to you is to walk in their shoes and to like just you know, there's an old saying it's hard to hate someone up close, And I think there's something weird

that's happening. We're the more digitally connected we seem to get the more the less physically connected we sometimes get, And I wonder if that has a way of like confusing us about people that we might argue about on the internet. No one else, no one's ever changed the most mind YouTube comment section. But if it's hard to live with somebody or to walk in the shoes and not change your mind, how could you not change your

mind about something? Because that would suggest that like you've experienced all of life up to that point, and that you feel your opinions are fully formed, and that no new data could ever change your mind about anything.

not surrounded by people. It's that we're surrounded by people, but we don't feel understood, we don't feel seen, we don't feel heard, that we feel that we have to be someone apart from ourselves, even around the people that we're closest to. And so the idea of loneliness is expanding away. People are feeling disconnect from each other. Yeah, you're talking about sixteen years ago, you and a bunch of friends feeling so close to each other. When have

you felt lonely in your life? And what have been your next thoughts and steps that you've taken from that point.

an outsider. I went to the Red Island School Design, where a lot of people who felt that way would come together be even at Risdy, I didn't feel like I.

just couldn't survive without your tribe. And I think that, you know, for me, I didn't realize that this was a thing that I've been I was fighting throughout my life, and so when I was twenty five twenty six, I started with my two co founders and we became the family. We became a family they hadn't had for ten years since I really ten years since I left the house. And then suddenly we were a family, the three of us,

and we're just hanging out together. We lived together. We all like waked up, woke up around the same time around eight am. We'd work till midnight, and then we'd do it the whole the next day. We'd go grocery shopping together, we'd like go to the gym together. Was very communal. Then we hired people that were basically our friends. We wouldn't hire anyone we didn't like. And then we didn't have a lot of work life like boundaries. Everyone

was young, we didn't have families. We'd go out, like drinking together and hang out together and dinner, and that became like a family. It became like a community, and that was incredible, and it was this deep, rich connection and those were some of the closest friendships I ever had. But then something happens. We go on a rocket ship, and then I go from being a founder to a CEO. And I was one of three founders, and then it

became one CEO, a silent, an individual role. And as it became a CEO, I started leading from the front at the top of the mountain. But then you know, the higher you get to the peak, the fewer the people there are with you. And no one ever told me how lonely you would get. And I wasn't prepared for that, and I had this guilt about not working because so much of my life was about being successful.

Probably probably if I were to dig deep, because I thought that would make people love me, and that was probably adulation, but I probably didn't know it back then, and I probably thought that by being successful, I'd feel really different. And I remember I got to this point where I was already feeling pretty isolated, and then the pandemic happened, and I'm living by myself in a house and I'm find myself on zooms twenty four to seven, like sixteen eighteen hours a day for an entire year

of twenty twenty. I, you know, help with the team. We navigate out of a crisis. People were predicting we'd like some people were that we would go out of business. We stared into the byss and we got in a foxhoul. We turned the company around. We took it public in the day of our IPO. We reached one hundred billion dollar valuation. And remember if you told me, like a million dollars is more money I ever imagined growing up. My parents are social workers. It was like an unfathomab

amount of money. And I remember, after going public, is like, oh my god, there's this amazing exultation. It was amazing, like I'd gotten to them. I mount, and then I wake up the next day and my life is exactly the same.

And I made a long list of people, and then I kind of went down the list and I said, when's the last time I talked to these people? And I realized that almost every single person in the list, if I were to ping, i'd have to catch them up in my life. I couldn't just dive into something because I had not maintained those relationships. And it was just something that like started, you know, and I started

noticing I started feeling more isolated. I would have more negative ruminations and stuff, and I didn't know at the time that I was isolated lonely. I knew it was isolated, but I didn't know that that also meant loneliness. And I thought, I have all these people around me, how could I possibly feel this way? And there were a couple of people that like entered my life that like gave me some awareness and consciousness, one at the deeply

personal level and one more at the professional level. At the personal level, I ended up actually becoming friends, and a person who became a mentor of mine was the former president i'd say is Barack Obama.

you probably need to renew friendships. And he described that he had like these ten or fifteen friends, most of them he was friends with before his presidency, and they kept him grounded and rooted. And your roots come from your past, and your past is often your relationships. Because I kept asking him, like, how didn't you like lose your mind, He's like, it's hard to lose your mind when you have deep connections in relationships to others. And this is around the time I was like totally realized

I hadn't maintained relationships. So one of the most important things I decided to do was renew the relationships that were in that invite list, those people that hadn't really kept in touch with. And so I rekindled relationships with my college friends, and I committed that we'd take like one or two trips year, because the problem is if you don't see your friends, you only text them. The only things you can talk about are like the same

old stories from twenty years ago. Or you can talk about other things in your life, but you have no shared experience in zoom in phone calls and text messages or not shared experiences. You can only talk about an experience you had. And so I did that with my college friends, I did my high school friends. I started spending more time with my sister and other people in my life. I ended up getting like a dog, a Golden Retriever named Sophie Supernova, and the crazy thing Jay is.

I can tell you, like the ride of Airbnb and having all the success and money and power and all

this stuff, it can be amazing. I'm not saying it's not amazing, but I actually think I probably It's almost like I had to go on this entire journey to realize I had everything I needed before I even started the journey, that the thing that probably gave me the greatest life satisfaction was a thing that I didn't even need money for, and I didn't even need to have success to achieve relationships many of them I had before I started.

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and of course it is, and it's relationships. And I think that that's what I've learned that like, as I've reconnected, I've felt like this light and this love hermeate me. And I think it's made me a better leader because one of the things Robert told me is fifty percent of CEOs are lonely. Now somebody listening to say, oh, poor CEOs, well, I would say, I don't think I want society be led by a bunch of lonely people.

of the defining things in my life. So I think the first part of the answer is for me to deal with my own sense of isolation and loneliness. And because again Jay, I thought loneliness was something that like people's grandparents experience in their life. I didn't think it was something the young person experiences. And the other person I met is the now and former Certain General the

United States with doctor Vec Murphy. We hired him during the pandemic because a lot of people were afraid to, like you know, go into airbnbs and they were worried about like germs on services, and so we hired him to do this, like you know, basically create cleaning and sanitation protocols. But I remember having a conversation with him and he said something to me. He said, Brian, do you know what the number one killer in America is? I'm kind of paraphrase in the conversation and I said,

I don't know. Is that like heart disease is a cancer? And he goes, no, the number one kill in America is loneliness. And I said, loneliness, what are you talking about? And he said, yeah, being chronically lonely is worse for your health than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and can take fifteen years off your life. And not only that, but about half of Americans are lonely. Two out of three teenagers, by some studies, are lonely. And it's not just that they're lonely.

And I started realizing, like you know, global warming, maybe you could say that's disconnection with the earth, and that loneliness is disconnection from each other. And maybe loneliness at the most fundamental level starts with disconnection from yourself. That you're running away from something, and that sometimes trying to be successful and climbing a mountain is running away from something.

You know, because you think that what you are isn't enough, and if you become war, you'll be you'll become something, and that is the problem because of course we never fully leave our history and our psychology. And so then I started learning about loneliness at the intellectual level and started asking what airbeingb's a global community. We have hundreds of millions of people. Some of the best ways to

connect with other people or through travel. I was using travel and Airbnb to like connect with my friends because most do me live in the same city as me. I started realizing, you know, you get to my age, you're forty one, you have a public company.

be enough. That there's got to be something more. The artist to me, the designer and me wants to solve a problem. The problem can't just be a stock price, it's got to be something greater. And I have like the one of the biggest canvasses in the world of any designer ever. And while I'm a design is not products, I'm design connections between people. And so I started learning about loneliness. I started realizing that modern life seems to

be making people lonely. And there's all sorts of theories. Maybe it's that, like you know, everything is digitized now. The mall is now Amazon, the theater is now Netflix, the Courci's stores now in Sikar, the office is now Zoom. And I'm a proponent of all these things. I use all these services and I love them. But you know the problem is, it's like ingredients, we evolved, I think, to be in physical proximity of another, and as we spend more time online, we seem to be spending less

time together. And I think we have to be very very careful as society what kind of future we want to design for ourselves. So I guess for me, loneliness in its solution, which is reconnection, has been both a personal mission and now a bit of a professional mission.

And a product or a service can't help with that, but a community can and if Airbnb can go from a travel service to a travel community, if we can be in the business of trust where you understand one other and we can help you connect with people in your life or meet other people, that to me would be where the next chapter is. And there's something about like solving your own problem then wanting to like, you know, trying to spread it to others is I think one

of the most fulfilling things. They always say the best way to start a business solve your own problem, and I think that's what I've been trying to do.

tendency in the material world to build something. Go ah, it wasn't it throw it away and then go try and build something else. And actually, what you're saying, actually I built this thing. It's great, but actually it could be so much better.

gratitude in giving to other people. You know, Steve Jobs, one of my heroes, used to say, I get to work now with Johnny Ive. He started a firm called Love from Love from Me to You, And that was the theory that Steve said that. Steve said, the best way to show your love for the species is to put your heart and soul into something and give them

to them. Steve said that design is a fundamental soul of a man made creation that reveals the self to subsequent layers and I think that ultimately my motivation has gone from more extrinsic to more intrinsic, that at this point in my life, I'm less worried about what people think. I don't really feel like I have to prove anything in people. Either I already have or I never will at some point. And I think at some point it

just becomes about the thing. I just want to do the thing to the purest best of my ability and to feel like I give to others. And this is the other thing is it's amazing to be able to buy things and have things. Those experiences are awesome, But the things that probably give me most joy is like sharing things with others or giving things. I totally get now. I never understood, like why people like giving away things. I didn't really understand it was not intuitive to make

growing up. I was parents of social worker, I was kind of middle class. And now I realize there's I don't want to say a selfishness to it, but you get something. You get something from giving. It's not just this moral obligation. You actually get something. And when you get is this sense of love and connection by giving something, by giving love, you kind of get it back in return, And I think, ultimately, like I think me as a I as a leader, I never saw something like me

growing up. I went to design school and like, no, there was a there's weird thing Jay where I get to Risdy the reroons call design, and there was an obsession about getting designed the boardroom, and Joe and I were like so like audaciously thought why should design be in the board and we can run the boardroom. But of course, like designers that people never thought started companies. And there's an old saying art is a question the

problem in the world, and design is the answer. And Joe and I wanted to seek answers to problems in the world, and one answer was we can't pay rent. So we created this thing called Airben and Breakfasts airbeds instead of beds for airben and Breakfast. But ultimately, you know, I think a business person. I am a business person ostensibly, but I think a business person's goal is to make money and a designer's goal is to solve a problem.

And of course I'm doing both. I probably sit at the intersection, but I don't get out of bed every day to make money. I get at bet every day to like design, something amazing, and of course I can pay money, I can fund it, and that's just a kind of motivation and that probably can keep me going for a really really long time. And I find that a lot of companies they get really cold as they get big. That you start something for love. You're the customer.

You talk to the customers, and at some point the company grows and you start with the head and the heart, you like, putting your love into it. You're intuitive. No startup is data oriented because there is no data. If you have an idea, there is no data, So you go off your intuition. You do something because you believe in it. And then at some point you get so big, the company gets financialized, there's a lot more data, and you start making decisions with the heart and now with

the head and one side of your head. And you look at the Fortune five hundred. How many CEOs and the Fortune five hundred are truly like have any creative background whatsoever? Identifies creators? Almost none? Okay, how many boards there's twelve members and average of a Fortune five hundred bard that's like probably six thousand members and the Fortune five and how many boards have like creative people?

our logo is like an inverted heart. It was meant to be this idea almost of this like beating heart, like this lifeblood that would flow through the community. And I'm not saying we do all that. That might be an ideal that we've never gotten to but you can. But we can or will die trying.

and the other is solitude. And when you said we're disconnected from the earth, we're disconnected from each other, but really we're disconnected from ourselves. It's because of a lack of solitude. When I lived as a monk, being comfortable being alone was the first lesson of the day. Wow, because the idea was.

the emotions, the things you like, the things you don't like. Now, when you sit opposite another human you can see the complexity and the simplicity of them as well the challenges we've never looked at our own darkness.

of yours. Same with me. I feel like I've studied everything he's ever said or Wrisen and one of the things I love this was an interview that Mark Zuckerberg was doing with Prime Minister Modi from India and he said this on stage to Mody. I believe this was in San Franz and Mark said to him, he said, when he was struggling with the direction of Facebook now meta in two thousand and nine, which is five years old,

Facebook is right. He went to his mentor, his mentor having to be Steve Jobs, and he said to Steve, he said, what do I do. I'm struggling. I don't know which direction Facebook should go in. Now, if you think about two thousand and nine, Steve Jobs is undoubtedly one of the most connected humans on the planet, has access to money, tech, everything you could possibly ask for. And Steve says to him, I want you to go

and live in an ushram in India. Wow, for I want you to go live then, I promise you if you go there, you'll figure out the direction of Facebook. And Mark said he actually went to that monastery, that ushram, and he said, in that ushroom, that's where he decided that at that time, Facebook was about connecting people.

now and so for me. MIT did a study on that where they found that the most innovate of employees inside an organization were people who didn't know people who knew the same people. There were people who knew people who had random connections, so their network chart was completely uncorrelated, whereas people who had networks who were correlated were less likely to be creative and.

in a designer at a firm. Then I went to Silk and Valley with very little and like got thrust into the technology industry. And it turns out that like I did not know how any of these experiences would add up together, and they all came to me and every single one of them have used every single experience, but I could never have reversed engineered how to get there.

And it is amazing that, like Steve used to say, the best engineers were also poets, and it was really saying that, like creativity is about connecting dots, it's about having disparate experiences and bringing them to together. And if you haven't had a lot of different experiences, if you aren't very multidisciplinary, you're not going to be ill. I mean, Einstein was like a violinist. I think a lot of the greatest scientists have leaps of the imagination. They're not

just using empirical information. And a lot of the greatest artists they haven't organized minds. Sometimes they have a fascination with numbers, and so you start to you start to bring things together, and I think that is exactly what we probably need in this world. I mean, we need more creativity. You know, whenever you see two bad options, you don't like it. The right answer is the third option. The third option is one you haven't come up with

yet that requires novel, innovative, imaginative thinking. Where does it even come from? Where does creativity come from? Activity?

from curiosity. It comes from maybe not first following your passion, but following your curiosity with a deep intensity, and being curious about so many different things, and trusting that you can be curious about something and learn about something, not knowing it will ever be useful, and have the trust to say that every single thing you'll do in your life you'll do with accumulation of every single experience you've had before, and that the more places you've gone, the

more people you meet, the more things you learn, it will all come to you and you might not know ahead of time how it will be useful. And honestly, if I hadn't gone to military school, I probably wouldn't been so organized. If I didn't go to design school, we probably wouldn't have been as creative and innovative in our thinking. If I hadn't played team sports, I probably

wouldn't have understood about camaraderie. If my parents are social workers, I don't think I would have had this focus on service and connecting people.

I didn't know what it meant. And I saw Walt Disney as a kid on television. I thought one day I'll work for him, not thinking I would start a company just like him. And I never imagined that was possible. I guess we're all born with unknown potential, as I said before, but you have to live experiences as many

as you can you put them together. And I hope my story inspires people, not for the remarkableness of it, but the ordinariness of who I was before to say that, like if I joined the Gift in Giving Pledge, if you ask my teachers in high school to predict which of their students would be a signatory the Giving Pledge, I do not think I would have been the top of their list. I don't think that takes anything away

from the teachers. I think it just means that maybe that potential is in so many of us, and it's also maybe a little bit random in anything as possible, and you like the story you tell yourself might not be accurate. And I hope that my story inspires people

from the ordinariness of where it came from. That I was just like everyone else, but like you know, one hundred thousand decisions later, with enough resilience, creativity, curiosity, and determination, you wake up one day you're like, oh my god, look where I am.

you're able to actually paint this tapestry where you're going. Well, actually, everything that I do today and I've often felt that in my own life that I lived as a kid growing up in London. My favorite subjects at school were are in design, philosophy and economics. Those are my favorite things in the world. Spent my entire life being immersed

in that world. When traded it in to go to cast Business School to study management science with a focus on behavor science, because I thought it gave me a career, only to give it all up, the safe job, to go live as a monk, to then come back to the real world, go back into the world of business because I just had to pay the bills and survive, went into consulting, then came out and do media now. And I completely agree with everything you've.

And part of the reason why one should not seek status is because we can't even predict what industries will be around the future. Like growing up, status to me was like I don't know, it was like being an investment banker or something or something, and I don't know, it was like fields that may not even totally exist in their current form in the future. So you know, I like to say, like you should do things you're

good up. You tend to be good at things you're interested and you should seek out whatever you're curious about, whatever you're interested in, and then you want to get to the frontier in some way. At some point you'll learn everything and you'll get to the edge of all that's known about that subject. And that is an uncomfortable period. Where you spere off the ledge of a cliff, and

that is where you enter a frontier. And if you can then pure of the edge of cliff and then get a little bit further and extend or understand and give us a little bit more land, that is how you like add to as Steve Jobs said, that's how you give your love back to the species and create something for other people. And I think, I think it's

amazing that like anyone can do that. You know you can do it because anyone can do it any scale, you know, and you can do it in your humble way, like on the side, something small, or you can do it in a really big way. But it feels the same no matter what the scale.

ever do anything like that in your past. And so I do not think my younger self, I'd say, my college self, did not think I could run like a fortune five hundred company. You know, you know, for every one thousand, five hundred dollars spent in the world, one dollar spent in Airbnb, did I think I get lead an organization that's facility on?

in my personal life. And I also would probably I would hope the college me would tell myself, now, you don't have to keep proving something to anyone, because you've proven more to me than I ever thought was possible. And I think that, like part of me, and this is probably true of a lot of people, we have this tape loop of like whatever we thought ourselves as a child, like it's just frozen in times, repeating ourselves,

and you just compulsively just keep doing something. And like many people have addictions, and I probably had one that was probably work, and I think i'd have to. I would hope my child self would or my younger self would remind me that, you know, maybe there would be a wisdom that like the happiest periods of my life were with other people.

they think is yourself. Right that you just listen to your own voice, not other voices. And I think if I can do that, you know, artists will call the artistic integrity, right. You had Rick Rubin on the show. He talks about, like the best way to make a popular song is to make something you like, and that's about it, not make something for somebody else. And that's that's something I have to continue to do. And the crazy thing is the more successful you get, the more

you start kind of performing for an audience. And you have to be very careful about performing for and appeasing an audience. And once you become something, people expect you to be that thing. You know, imagine like you happen to be something forever. But what if you change? What if you grow? What if you want to do different things? And that's a challenge I have right the air, and Bee brand means something. I be careful about changing that brand.

It stands for something. And yet I, as a person, am not meant to be the same person every year. I mean how could I be? I learn, I grow, I change, I have new experiences, and so having the permission to continue to change and evolve and not be so self conscious of what people think, that's something that I always struggle with because I don't know part of me. I think I'm like a people pleaser, and one of my challenges historically be is like some people like, I'm like,

I don't always like interpersonal conflict. I like to appease people, make them happy, and that's got a good side, and it also can be a bit of a prison over time, and the bigger you get, the higher the walls get.

be negligent. But the idea that it doesn't matter what they think today about what I'm thinking, and.

eventually other people might see it. And if you are able to be misunderstood just for a little bit, that's what it feels like to truly revolutionize something and change something.

So we don't even know what we look like. We are who we think other people think we are. And that's twice removed from yourself. And that distance we create from our understanding of ourselves versus what we think someone thinks of us totally, how will you ever know? What do you think is something you are still trying to understand about yourself? Or if you think you misunderstand a part of who Brian is, what are you still trying to understand?

that's their impression, and that's a delta. And I often wonder, like sometimes I, you know, I probably have had a little bit of imposter syndrome, like what do people see me?

I discovered something that I love very early on. I found a perfect harmony between what I was good at, what I loved, and what kind of society valued, and those things just clicked into place and I was able to find it. But I think I've been on a lot longer journey to figure out like what will make me happy, like in a larger sense of the word. And it turns out that success and status to some extent have benefits, and you know, but it's not it's

certainly to say it's not. Everything's an understatement. I think I'm still trying to I was still trying to learn that, and maybe I'm trying to figure out, you know, at this age with so much so many resources, like I almost feel like in a way, my life's just beginning, and so it's just beginning then, and I can't connect the dots looking forward. It's a discovery of who am

I and who am I meant to become? Like is this my story or is this the end of the middle of the story the beginning of the story, and what am I meant to do next? And I'm kind of learning a lot more about myself every year.

use That's the other device I use. I try to think about how I'll be viewed in the future, but I also want to I always think in how do I want to be remembered even if no one will remember me? And I think anyone can do that. How do you want to be remembered by history, even if it's just an intellectual device, because maybe not a lot of people will remember. That's okay, but live your life as if you be remembered. And what I realized is

one of the most important things. And then we ended up helping provide housing for one hundred thousand refugees, and it was an incredible team effort, but it came from this basic idea of how can I help? And maybe that is the other version of my question in my life at this point, you know, how can I help? With everything I have?

that's kind of something that I keep thinking about. And that's what I love about, Like entrepreneurship and creativity and design, is you make something, maybe initially for yourself, but then for other people, and the real joy is seeing them use it.

And I realize now, and I see that today, that when everyone, when anyone gets to point of getting everything, all they can do is give it away in the right in a way that fuel them to a mission that is aligned with their purpose, not just not just you know, wherever it goes exactly, but in a meaningful way. You talked a bit about which I loved about the you know, the younger self saying back to you that you know you thought that things would happen in a different order.

you're not careful, it can become all consuming. And the thing about a tech company or a startup is like it's like imagine you, like again, you have a three percent van that's now thirty thousand percent man, or you know, a three million person. It just there's always more you can do. It can if you're not careful, become like a one dimensional addiction. And I think that it's like the thing that made me successful was my singular focus, but I have to be careful that the thing that

could then turn against me is my singular focus. And so I think it's like, what I the way to live my life in the next twenty years can't exactly be what I did last one years, But last one years worked out pretty well, so why would I do anything differently? But of course, if I don't do anything differently, and I'll be fifty or sixty and nothing will have changed. And so I think it's really out like seeking community.

The word community means harmony, to live in, harmony, in balance and having that, And so I think it's just old habits and habits that have been rewarded. So, but you've got to be very careful about those habits. I think that. I think that's what it is. And I also just yeah, I don't know, what do you think.

around what you're looking for in a personal way. You've talked about so prolifically about what you want professionally, which is this using Airbnb as this phenomenal platform to build community and connect people and you know, eradicate loneliness, which I love, Like, I love that. That's phenomenal clarity and so inspiring and I could get behind that today, right, Like that's so what do you need to get behind yourself? In the personal space?

started Airbnb? Before before we started Airbnb, I didn't know I wanted to start a tech company and I wanted to be like about bringing helping bring people together. And I was going to start with these two people, and I was going to be a technology founder, and I was going to marry art and science and do all stuff. I couldn't have known any of that, but there were some things I did professionally that are probably clues to what should be done personally. The first thing is I

had endless curiosity. I had role models, heroes, people I looked up to, and you know both you know, well known people and lesser known people. I had an intense curiosity. I was drawn to certain types of people, and I had action. You know, it's like, if you can't follow your passion, you follow your curiosity, where does it take you?

And you know, like, you're not going to start a company by like never like starting, and you're not going to build a personal life you want by not starting either, and so you just go on that journey.

is something not happening. What keeps me up at night is the idea that we grow into something that I like, was meant to disrupt two thousand and nine. Everybody takes off. So we start in twousand and seven, two eight, it takes off. By two thousand and nine, I go on a ten year journey. It's now late twenty nineteen, and I remember having a dream, a bad dream, that I woke up and I was running a company that's unrecognizable

from anything I ever intended to start. It was like I was in a wilderness for ten years and I just back and I remember going on a hike in Bilinas, California, where Joe had like a summer house, and we went on a hike Joni and I and I told them about this dream and they said, well, what did you find? I said, I was horrified because the company we set up the start is unrecognizable we have today.

of company that I want to have. This image was to build the most creative place on earth, to build the world's biggest startup, to build a company that was like felt small, that was completely focused not on a product or service, but a community. I was starting to come a conclusion by two thousand nineteen that you can't be big and have a soul like that. At some point, those things were at odds that the problem was being big,

and I didn't know what to do. And all of a sudden we get word in February twenty twenty that our China business has collapsed by eighty percent because this thing called COVID, Like what's covid? And then within eight weeks you lose eighty percent of your business. And I've never had a near death experience, but it's been described to me as your life flashes before your eyes. And I had a near business death experience and then suddenly

everything making clear to me. If I was seeing this chair three years ago, I would not have been clear. I don't think I would have the clarity ad today. There's something about almost losing everything and everything I had I, at least at that time, I thought was the professional that gives you clarity. Imagine your house is on fire and someone says you can take twenty percent of the things out of your house. Suddenly you have to make that choice, and you get really clear about what's important.

People started telling you I want to air me exist you say why, and they tell you it's as if they're giving the eulogy before you're even dead, and how you want to be remembered, and you start to ask yourself, I don't know what's going to happen, but how do I want to be remembered? And at that point we stepped into action and we basically rebuilt the company from ground up. And this is to again bring it back

one more time to Steve Jobs. I met two people at that point in my life who changed my life. One was Johnny Ive, who was Steve's partner in design, and the other was heiroki Asi, who was Steve's creative director, and they told me about the way Steve ran the company. And actually a funny even further aside is I remember one time I remember went to Steve's house. I never met him, but and I saw these books on the shelf from ropin' amin i'mer and asked is like, wife, like, what is what they're rap?

a company that wasn't divisions. Think about what that sounds like divisions. We are divided, but totally integrated as small, lean, elite as possible, creative and analytical, technology and humanities. That we'd have one flow. We wouldn't be metrics oriented, we'd be basically idea oriented, and we'd measure the results and that we would just there's this really specifically ran a company and that was basically the way I found ourselves

out of a crisis. And so the lessness story is through that I was able to get a lot of clarity through this crisis. I was forced to answer and ask all these questions that I ever had to do before. But I hope on the personal side, I don't need a crisis to answer those questions.

keep changing the model in your head. I kind of describe my mind running airbnbas. Imagine a chessboard and there's that you have to see if he moves ahead. Now, imagine like a die, a thousand sided die, each playing a separate game of chess, all simultaneously anticipating in understanding relationships.

As hard as that is, if you can start to organize all the ideas in your mind but not be rigid, continually changing and orienting it, like, you know, this is how I tend to see things in three dimensions spatially. It's really rich, vivid colors, and that's just how I think, you know. I think other people will think in abstract thoughts or numbers, some think in terms of language, But that's how I do it, you know, And it probably doesn't surprise you given my background.

that's a great thing. Is I think that sometimes many times we as leader, especially tech founders. I think that many tech founders basically design the kind of world they want to live in because the world they grew up in was inadequate in some way and did not make them happy. I think the challenge of those tech leaders is to make sure that they step inside that world and live that world themselves. And you don't do it, then sometimes you start to like forget why you do

things and you get disconnected. Wow, just kind of you're making me think of all this.

don't even know what that destination is. And that's when you don't look inside yourself, and if you're not careful, you will basically be on a super highway going somewhere, not knowing why you're going there, and you may wake up and end up in a destination that wasn't where you intended. I think this having this clarity is so important.

we don't get what we want. The problem is we don't know what we want maybe or we pursue things on your consciously wanting that our counterproductive to make us happy. And if we can just wrap our arms around that, some of the hardest things to change our own thoughts, but in a weird way, they also seem like the most possible to change. And so that that's something that I've seen and like. Some of the loneliest people I've

met are some of the richest people I've met. Some the most isolated people I met are some of the most successful people I met. The most confused people I've met are the most powerful, because at some point the power and success can be confusing. You know you had a purpose, but you also have all these demands and you stakeholders. You can get fused by appeasing people, and.

you it's very careful. I started becoming the company, and this company started becoming me, and I think seventy percent of that was good because that meant the company, I think was a person, had a face as humanistic, it was in the details. But when you become a company, you seize to be a person, and then you lose a sense of yourself and then you become an icon. And by icon, I don't mean famous, I mean iconography.

Icon is short for an iconography, and iconography is for for a symbol for something, And of course people are much more than symbols. And I started seeing that I started becoming a symbol and a thing, and I stopped listening to myself.

And if you don't listen to yourself. And I think that's been part of the second chapter of my life is like kind of designing the world I want to live in and then living in that world and choosing to actually live in that world, and you'd be I mean, you've interviewed so many people, so but I'm so surprised

how many leaders don't actually live in that world. I tend to think that like some yeah, some of the most successful people are people that they get so disconnected from what they intend to do and when they started, and so reconnecting. I mean, so much of this, I guess I tend to see everything through that lens, but so much of it is about reconnecting that reconnection, that path back home.

value list like before when Brian existed before. And so if you were to draw the iconography of Brian the person, not the Airbnb, I'm intrigued as to what that would look like if you started to design that.

he said, to redefine the word family. And I've realized that, like so much of my life has been trying to do that. I see this like childlike person of curiosity and wonder that I've never left that sense of wonder, that I'm open to be vulnerable and guided by love and like treating wanting to treat those around me like family. And what I mean by that is I try to do anything for them. And and I hope, I hope that my friends, if they ever heard this, they would

feel like that resonates. And that's not just a pure ideal, I mean, that's what I mean, that's the iconography. I would hope that iconography is true to some extent. I guess as I think about it even deeper, I've used the word loneliness, connection and community, but maybe at some deeper level, the deepest word is family. And what Bond's family is love, and like I think that, like, as families have gone smaller and smaller, we've gotten more and

more isolated. And if we could re expand that word, And maybe that's like too idealistic, but like just to leave in a little bit to your like close friends and to other people and just try to, like you, expand that circle. That's kind of what I would want. You know, if I design the world around me, then I better design it with other people in it.

totally curious. It's almost like I have this image, you know, like you're, like you say, at the family, the dinner table, where you like like you're a kid or your parents, your siblings or whatever. My image is that, but it's a very big table with a lot of people, and you know, and that's not just my close family that I might have. It's you know, maybe like the the broader people in my life that I have around me.

That's I think the image I have. And I think that's in a space that's very well designed, very well designed, and I have a design aesthetic that's like fairly modern but also whimsical. I don't like the cold. I don't like coldness and modernism. I like it to be like colorful and so.

giant companies, you learn scale. When you start a company you're tiny, you have to do everything you have to like you know, like things don't even think about. Like you have an office which is your apartment, and you need to like buy a coffee maker and go buy the coffee. And you need to like have a name for your company. You actually need to check out that name's trademark, and you got to bun a domain name, and you got to like have a story for the company.

And like then you've got to like make sure you have a legal corporation. You now found a lawyer. You got to interview the lawyers, and then you got to like actually decide where you're going to make and you say, how do I make things? Like and I could go down the one hundred thousand things. You're in the tedious details. And then if you go onto rocket ship that I go on fifteen years later, you know a billion and

a half times has been used. You end up at some massive scale, a scale that's bigger than you've ever imagined. But as a founder, you never let go of those details.

what about this? What about this? What about this? And go into the smaller and small detail, and then I go back to the present scale. It's like a satellite map, it's like the powers of ten. Zoom out to space, zoom in with a microscope, and that is just a way to think about things. And you were constantly doing that when you run a company. You see the big picture and you say, what does it mean? You dive right in and you zoom out, and a lot of

leaders they struggle. They can only do that medium altitude. They can't see the fullest picture, or they get stuck and they can't access the smallest of details. In the entire universe exists in the smallest detail, and that's what you discover when you zoom and zo. You start to realize the relationships, and it allows you to both run something large and still connect with somebody at the most intimate human level and not lose your mind along the way.

alone and separate as you think you are. And I think that's a really good thing to remind yourself, and that we are so much more connected to everything else, and that I think so much of creativity is just first embracing the fact that everything is connected in some way and it's your job to discover and make connections

and find relationships and similarities. And by the way, that's a great way to connect with people to know that, like, wow, what makes them so fascinating is they're really different from me in some of these ways. But what is going to bond us is that we're actually so connected and there are almost no humans on this planet that you don't have some fundamental connections to and if you don't

see them, you have to keep looking. And once you keep looking, that becomes the bond, that becomes the thing that you share between them. How do you do that with curiosity and interest? Fascinating? Just be fascinated all the time, And it's almost like that's contagious. If you're fascinated, I'm fascinated. Somebody once said that to me, a director who I was doing a film too, and he said, if you're fascinated,

I'm fascinated. And I'm like, well, okay, like I really do and it's like, and so, what what do you find fascinating?

But if somebody is obsessed with basketball, then teach physics through basketball, stree biology through basketball, teach history through basketball the history of so you just you find something you're interested. And I think the great thing about starting a company is I had no interest in learning about accounting. I had no abstract interest in learning about leadership and management and organization. I had no abstract interest in understanding like

technical architecture. But I did interest in how we should account for all the money we're making, what technology platform we should be on to enable Airbnb, and through something I was already interested in Airbnb. I was able to learn all these other things, but if I had to learn them abstractly, the way we're taught in school, I don't think anything would have stuck. And so Airbnb became

that model this world. And I have learned almost everything through this world that I've been generally constructing, co constructing with my coworkers and with the community. And it's just like I like to joke that Airbnb is like the world's biggest Risdi project that just never stopped, and we just kept building it and kept building and kept building it and kept building it. And as the bigger we build,

the more I learned and the more I discover. And yeah, I've seen so much of the world through the creation of this really big house, so to speak.

are your final five. The first question is what is the best insight advice that you've ever heard, or received or read.

being human partners for each other. And you definitely did that for me today. You brought out of me things I didn't know that I haven't gone to for a while. So thank you so much for inspiring me enlightening me in so many ways. I actually had a special internal experience myself.

is all in service of you. So thank you for everyone who's been listening and watching, And thank you Brian, thank you jam. If you love this episode, you will also love my interview with Charles Douhig on how to hack your brain change any habit effortlessly, and the secret to making better decisions.