Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Brian Chesky (co-founder of airbnb)

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Brian Chesky (Co-founder and CEO of Airbnb) is a businessman and industrial designer. Brian joins the Armchair Expert to discuss if gaining success lived up to the expectations, how he struggled to fit in at school, and what his first startup was. Brian and Dax talk about what being an industrial designer means, where the idea for Airbnb came from, and how detrimental loneliness can be to human health. Brian explains why streamers were okay with losing money for years, how fast technology is accelerating human society, and what rules should have been instituted for social media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Rather. I'm Monica Padman. And tonight on 60 Minutes, you're going to learn all about Brian Chesky. Who is Brian Chesky, Monica? Brian Chesky is the founder and CEO of Airbnb, a company we have partook many, many, many times. But guess what else? What?

It's my birthday. Happy birthday. This is the 24th. August 24th, we celebrate the day of our Lord on this wonderful day some 36 years ago. 36. A beautiful brown baby was brought home from the hospital into the loving arms of Ashok and Nermi. Yeah. What she didn't know is that eight years later, another little baby would be arriving,

and she wouldn't want to share the spotlight. Happy birthday, buddy. Thanks. I'm so happy you were born and you're with us. Me too. I thought I was going to die yesterday. Okay. Because I realized I had been delinquent on my seizure medication.

I was out. Oh, and how long had you gone without it? No, I just went to take it and I was like, I'm out. So I had to just go to bed and hope for the best. And you made it. I did, but I really caught myself. But for about 20 minutes, I thought, wow, what if I die tonight? Like, really?

And then it was weird. I was like, I won't know. Right. How weird that I won't know. See, you and I's brain work so differently. My first thought would be like, if I don't have a seizure tonight, I don't know that I'm going to take this anymore. Yeah, that's where my brain would go. That's where I thought you were going.

I did too, right? It felt like a setup for that. No, that's also not how it works. You have to like really taper off. I regret not asking Brian his opinion on titrating your medicine without any medical supervision. This was a really, I don't think, well, I didn't know the founding or genesis story of Airbnb and it's really fascinating. He has quite a story.

He really has quite a story and I really enjoyed talking to him. Yeah, me too. Also, I guess if you want to go to hang out with Ashton and Mila. Or Brian, he puts his own house up and you can stay with him. Yeah. There's like all this cool stuff happening with Airbnb. I want to stay with Ash and Mila. Me too.

I'm friends. I know. I guess I'll pay. I'm going to sign up. Let's sign up. All right. Please enjoy Brian Chesky. Trip Planner by Expedia.

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proven odor protection, free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc and baking soda. It's made with pH balancingbalancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. it's a brand new mic so i got a brand oh it's good yeah what is yours oh his is so these were just sent to us by sure and mine says Rather, which is who I always identify as.

Mine says Miniature Mouse. Miniature Mouse, which is her code name. And Rob says Wobby Wob. Oh, wow. A very special gift, the armchair expert yellow. I'm riding high on these new microphones. I'm so flattered. But you asked what was the impetus to Fold.

Monica and I liked to argue in my kitchen. You drop a topic on us and we're likely to be on the opposite sides of it. It's annoying for most people around us because they don't feel like arguing. They're not as passionate about these inane fucking topics, but we'll die over it. So that was one impetus. But then the other really from being in AA for so many years and hearing men share about their failures and how much I've learned from men's failures. And I thought, I'd like to host a show where we didn't talk about how you succeeded so much, but more about like, what have been your struggles?

I think there's a lot more to learn from that than someone like winning the fucking Super Bowl. Yeah, totally. That moment, there's nothing to really learn from. I'm not going to get there. Not with that attitude. No, well, that's true. We've already established,

I don't have the attitude of a winner. You couldn't be more in lockstep with what the ultimate thought is, which is in general, on a Monday for a celebrity, okay, you're rich and you're famous. Did it fix anything? Generally, it doesn't fix much. You're at a curiously similar place in your life, right? Totally. I saw you talking, you were a guest at Stanford, and I was thinking of all those students there. You're it. You, Zuckerberg, whatever the handful of people, they're all trying to be you. And they have a fantasy of what being you will feel like. And it's probably a little inaccurate.

I think a lot of people growing up, they want to be famous. They want to be very wealthy. And a lot of people growing up want to have status. And I've been thinking a lot about why that is. I grew up wanting to be very successful. And of course, there's nothing wrong with that. But I feel like a lot of us try to climb a mountain because we feel like when we get to the top of that mountain, something will be filled inside of us. And so long as we are climbing and looking up and knowing that only if I get there, I'm going

to feel a certain way. Some of the saddest, most difficult periods in people's lives isn't when they fail, but when they get to the top of that mountain and realize they don't feel any different. And I felt that way after our IPO. I came to Silicon Valley literally with nothing. Well, hold on. You had $1,050. I happen to know your story.

Yeah, yeah. Be careful. I know your story. Exactly. I had $1, dollars and I had a piece of foam rolled up mattress that I had duct taped in a ball in the back of an old Honda Civic. And you're coming up from LA. If I just go back a tiny bit more, I'm from upstate New York. My parents were social workers. And I remember mom, like she dedicated her life to service. And she

said, I chose a job for the love and I got paid no money. So you should choose a job that pays you a lot of money. So when I heard that, I thought, well, that is counterintuitive. My assumption from two social worker parents would be like, you've got to find something. No, she's like, we were looking at those US news reports of what jobs paid the highest. Anesthesiologist. Exactly. Anesthesiologist, neurosurgeon, investment banker. And I'm like, I could do that or be an artist. And my mom realized, oh my God, you picked the only job that's going to pay less than a social worker. My parents were like many parents in the 80s or even today

where I think it was like an age of ambition. I think the 80s was this idea of status and success. And I just struggled growing up. I always wanted to fit in. And I never quite did. When I was five years old, my dad got me involved in hockey. We had this shared dream that I'd be Wayne Gretzky at age five. And by six, I realized I wasn't going to get there.

Well, you were born in August instead of January. Yeah, exactly. The odds were totally stacked against me. I actually went to a sports academy, like a military prep school, when I was 13 years old. And I remember having this feeling like I was living parallel lives, my extensible public life and my true life. And the public life I was living was this life that everyone wanted to live growing up in upstate New York, which is to be a great athlete. That's the road to status when you're young. And that's the road to connection and belonging. And how do we feel together? How do we feel cool?

How do we get status growing up? Sports is very tangible. And the thing about sports, unlike say art, is it provides validation via the school. The other parents don't give you status, ensure you won when you're really good at music or drawing. That comes much later. But sports is a thing people participate in. It's quantifiable. You can measure it. There's a record.

We know how good you are. And I think there's a lot of good things about sports, but I think that when it takes over your life and it's not meant to be what you're meant to do, I'm sure that's a lot of kids' stories. So I went to this like military school. It was all boys. There was a girl's school across the street. A sister school. But the boys school, like 60 people per class, the girls school, like 20 people per class. Uh-oh. Those are not the odds you want.

So let's say not that different from an all boys school. And it was an intense experience for me. You know, I had to get up like really early early and drive an hour each way. The other problem I had was, I remember I was 13, 14. I was pretty decent. I had an August birthday and I hit puberty really late. Double whammy. I remember ninth grade, I'm 100 pounds. In 10th grade, I'm 110 pounds. This trajectory is not working out so well. Around that time, I also had this other life. That was the life of an artist. When I was six years old, I asked Santa for poorly designed Christmas toys so I could redesign them. I loved industrial design before I even knew there was a term for it. When I was 10 years old, I was at a friend's house,

and his dad was getting his backyard landscaped. His dad decided to do it himself. So he had all these architectural tools. He had a T-square and a drawing triangle and a compass and a protractor, all this vellum paper. And so then suddenly I got into like landscape architecture when I was like 10 or 11. I attempted to redesign the backyards of all my neighbor's homes. That was an unsuccessful consulting business. No one wanted to hire a 10-year-old. So then from there, I got involved in architecture. I'm like a kid. I didn't even know these were really fields. And then I remember I asked my dad to buy some shares in Disney stock. And we couldn't buy a lot.

But the reason I wanted is if you bought shares in Disney, you would get this thing called the annual report. And the annual report, they would send this big glossy brochure with renderings of theme park drawings that hadn't come out yet. And what I realized is that so much of my life had these two parallel paths.

The first was trying to fit into a world of other people's design. And in that case, that was like sitting still in a class, looking straight ahead. I probably had a lot of hyperactivity and impulsivity, and I was very difficult with authority. I was trying to fit in with athletics. I really struggled. And then I had this other life where instead of trying to fit in, I was trying to almost escape to a world of my own design and imagination.

And that was probably the closer thing to who I really was as a person. Were you a kid that could sit in your room for hours by yourself? Yeah. So I had unbelievable intensity around technical draughtsmanship. So I remember going to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. My parents are big Norman Rockwell fans. I remember going to like the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. My parents are big Norman Rockwell fans.

And I was able to, as a child, draw similar to that style, like very hyper-realistic. And I looked really small. When I was 14, I looked like I was 12 and I could draw like a 22-year-old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just have to point out, you and I have absolutely opposite experiences in life. Oh, really? Which is I looked 16 and was 12. I was 160 and 63 in ninth grade. Oh my God.

But I had the athletic prowess of a 10-year-old. I was completely flipped. People were underwhelmed by me, not overwhelmed. You were babysitting kids your own age. I was babysitting a child my own age. My dad was lying about it. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah.

My dad's drinking buddy, he had a kid that was my age, but he wasn't from a broken, divorced home, so he hadn't grown up really fast. He was a little immature. They would have me watch him, but they told me, like, you got to say your two grades ahead, which worked when we were in different school districts. And then we ended up in the same school district in the same class. Whoopsies. Whoopsies. Whoopsies.

Oh, my God. Okay, sorry I interrupted you, but I was just struck by how completely opposite. Yeah, no, it was really crazy. So I'm at this private school doing art and design the side. The problem is the private school is so small. We have like the same art teacher every single year, right? There wasn't big enough to have a department. So my art teacher was the same woman from eighth grade to the 11th grade. And what she focused on was pears. She had dedicated her life to painting a series of pears. Still lifes of pears. Oh, pear the fruit. Pears. And at some point I just realized I need to break out. I need to do something else. And so I have this crazy period in my life where I'm 16 and I have like a early life crisis. 16 was

probably the loneliest, darkest period of my life because I was finally hitting puberty. I was an adolescent. I didn't fit in. My whole dream was to be a hockey player. Were the kids at the school cruel or were you just largely invisible? More invisible. It was kind of like a little bit of an old money school and my parents are social workers. The way you would have status, I would say, was either you came from money or you're athletic or you were ingratiated by the administration. Or you were banging 10 of the 20 girls across the street. I had none of the above. I was kind of known as the artist when that was not cool. I think maybe as an adult, there's something cool about it. When you're 14, I can assure you that does not provide any

lifestyle perks at all. I remember I would go to do figure drawing. Figure drawing is like new drawing. And you do new drawing of women and you were like super cool. Then one day you'd have to do a new male figure drawing. And your friends would think you were gay. Yeah. And there was a lot of pretty funny stuff that would come up. Maybe it was 1998, and I was pretty lonely. I didn't have a lot of friends. I didn't know if I was a hockey player, artist, or something else, and I wanted to be something.

Being myself wasn't an option. I had to be something that would give me cash and prize and attention, and that's kind of the way I grew up. And I just felt pretty lost. And I had decided that I didn't want to be at that school anymore, and now it's 11th grade, and I leave that school. And I transfer to this I didn't want to be at that school anymore. And now it's 11th grade and I leave that school and I transfer this public high school. Oh, Jesus Christ. And like the end of 11th grade. Senior year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have like the jocks,

you have the cool kids, the druggies, you have the kids in black. Yeah. Remember all those like late nineties movies? Like you can't hardly wait. By then those are like 11 or 12 years of clicks that had risen up. And I just go in and I'm like, who am I? And you kind of had to pick a group. Am I a hockey player? Am I the really cool kid? Am I the drug kid? There really wasn't a creative group.

But I go to this school and I meet an art teacher who changes my life. Her name is Miss Williams. Shout out, Miss Williams. Shout out to Miss Williams. By the way, I'd felt like a failure already at this point in my life, which was kind of weird. I didn't feel successful. I didn't feel like I had made anything in my life. I didn't know who I was.

I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was invisible. And Miss Williams, unbeknownst to me, saw my artwork and told my mom, she said, one day he's going to be like a famous artist. Which made a big difference because it alleviated my mom's concerns that I would live in her basement. Yeah, famous artists make money. Well, normally posthumously, but that's... She didn't have to say that. Exactly.

And she really wanted me to make money while I was alive. So that was like, okay, shit. She didn't want money for your estate. Exactly. The grandchildren of the artist. No, she's like, we got to get paid now. Yeah, yeah. But she gave me the confidence to follow my passion.

At 16, I had this profound thought. I said, I'm going to decide to be happy the rest of my life if I do what makes me happy and I do with people I like then I'll be happy the rest of my life and what would make me happy at that time was drawing and art so I applied to the Rhode Island school design which you guys were saying RISD RIS RISD. RISD is very famous. Well, I know they were saying it in this interview at Stanford as if it was as popular as Stanford. When I heard RISD, I'm like, how the fuck are they spelling that? And then I realized it was an acronym. Yeah, yeah.

Rhode Island School of Design. But an acronym where we're choosing to make RISD its own word and then D stand alone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a pretty unusual. I have objections. Yeah, yeah. I think we need to think about that. RISD.

For the dyslexics, it's hard. Yeah, so it's a pretty unusual. I have objections. Yeah, yeah. I think we need to think about that. Rizd. For the dyslexics, it's hard. Yeah, exactly. And when you submit there, you're just putting your portfolio forward. You send them a bunch of your artwork. It was actually really funny because I remember I was going to study for the SATs because I thought, oh, I need to go to some Ivy League school and I'm going to need really great SATs. Then I realized, wait, at art school, you don't need very high scores.

So I totally changed my focus on a portfolio. And so you have to submit a portfolio. And then they used to have this thing called a drawing test. I guess it's to make sure they were authentic drawings of yours. And so you had to get a certain type of piece of paper. And you had to do these three drawings, I believe. One was of a bicycle. And then there were two other drawings.

And then you had to fold the drawings a certain way. And you had to put them in this special size envelope. They were very specific instructions. And you had to mail in the drawing test. It's like early encryption. Yeah, exactly. That was their authentication method. And I kind of decided I'm going to go to RISD or I'm going to go to college,

but I'm not going to go to any other art or design school. But I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And I got into RISD and got a scholarship. They didn't give a lot of scholarships and this made a big difference because obviously RISD even back then was very expensive. So I decide to go to RISD. It's like this freeing period of my life. I got to tell you one other story. It's 1999. I have this fear of going to art school because I realized, wait a second,

I'm kind of an artist, but I'm also kind of like sports. Well, you don't like the cure. You're not emo. You're missing some of the components. Yeah. I had other interests. And so I felt I wasn't sure if I was ready to go to basically what was essentially a graduate school where I was like picking a narrow field. So I get to the Rhode Island School of Design. This is a beautiful campus, but there's no sports. I'm not going to be able to fit in. I don't know anything. I didn't fit into high school.

Now I'm going to an art school I don't fit in. There's no environment. Man without a home. And then I find out that they had only one sport. It was a club team. And the club team was a hockey team. Get out. But that's not the crazy thing. And I said and i said what's the hockey team's name and they say oh you

haven't heard of the risdy nads like gonads that's what happened in 1960 no no no this story this is where the story gets interesting i have never talked about this publicly if my team was here they'd probably bust down the door so here's what happens here's what happens. I'm like, the RISD NADs, they said yes. In 1963, three art students decided to create a sports team. And they decided to name the NADs. When the fans cheered, they go, go NADs. Oh, wonderful. It's a fuck you to the sport. Totally.

Yeah, participation. So I joined the RISD NADs. Yeah. My freshman year was a co-ed hockey team. Fuck yes. Here's where we start considering that you live in a simulation. Exactly. The story is going to get a little weird.

So I just want to, I just want to forewarn you, this is going to get a little bizarre. Do you mind if I take my pants off? You know what? I went to RISD. Once it's called go back. Honestly, people do that in CRIPS. It's freedom of expression. That's what we used to call it back then.

Actually, free speech used to be freedom of expression. It used to be a very progressive value 20 years ago. At RISD, that was everything. I need to be able to speak. It was just like a very different political environment. But anyways, halfway through my freshman year, these two seniors decide to go away to this thing called Winter Session. They go to Amsterdam and they just kind of disappear. And so me, my friend, and my RA, who's like a year older than me, take the team over. And we have this vision to create an international sports franchise out of an intramural hockey team. And we took over a team that had a perfect season.

0-16. Oh, wow. Who were they playing against? Was there a co-ed league? Oh, yeah, yeah. So we weren't allowed in any official leagues, so we had to create our own league. Instead of playing for the Stanley Cup,

we played for this thing called the Supportive Cup. Okay. And we would have United States Coast Guard, the Mass Maritime Academy, Clark College. And we had this co-ed cheerleading. They were called the jockstraps because they support the nads. Oh my God. Rolling's a bit. Yeah, yeah.

And the craziest part of the story is back in the late 90s, there was this mayor of Providence named Buddy Cianci. There was a whole podcast series about him called Crime Town. Yeah, yeah. I believe I've heard it. I don't want to overgeneralize, but nearly everyone in Rhode Island was corrupt in the 80s, 90s, right? Providence had the third largest coast and ocean in the country after New York and Chicago. Apparently, the Crime Town podcast basically says that he runs for mayor in the 70s on anti-corruption, anti-mafia, but of course doesn't have enough votes and then kind of joins the other side.

Pivots. He is, you know, a mayor in the 80s until he goes to prison. He gets out of prison in the 90s, develops a popular radio show, and something remarkable happens. He gets reelected mayor and actually revitalizes the city of Providence. They call him the Prince of Providence. So he controls the police. You know, he's the mayor and he's maybe mobbed up and who knows. And I thought to myself, that's exactly who we need as a hockey coach.

And so one of the members of our hockey team goes to City Hall with a jersey that says Cianci 00. And we said, Mayor, we want you to be our coach. What? No. And he you to be our coach. What? No. And he decides to be our honorary coach. Okay. He comes to games in a stretch limousine with big seven-foot Mounties and women in fur coats with cameras. And I remember the first thing he said is, I don't know shit about hockey, but I always find a way to win.

And I thought, this is the kind of leader that we need. Absolutely. And we basically would hold parades. We didn't need permits. You got the mayor behind you. And that was, to be honest kind of leader that we need. Absolutely. And we basically would hold parades. We didn't need permits. You got the mayor behind you. And that was, to be honest, my first startup. Sure. Absolutely.

You have a vision. You're putting together a team. You're trying to execute. You got some management duties. Although you did mention that they had a perfect record. Did the record suffer under your grand vision? My grand vision, it got a little messier. We did win a few games here and there. A little more pageantry than practice.

Yeah, exactly. But we were more performance artists than athletes. You know, we had this funny logo that people can Google, the RISD NADs, and we had a mascot that you can imagine. It was like an inverted Mickey Mouse. So the whole thing was like pretty. Very genitalia-centric. I would have loved this.

RISD was basically an environment for pranks. Yeah, this would have been a great school for me to go to. Yeah, you would have loved this. I regret not going there. You would have loved this. RISD was basically an environment for pranks. Yeah, this would have been a great school for me to go to. Yeah, you would have loved this. But I remember feeling, when I got to RISD, two other feelings. The first feeling was anything is possible. Because in my high school, the word disruptor is like cool now, I guess. Yeah, no, no, no. Not cool in the 90s in high school.

I spent a lot of time in the principal's office. Yeah, me too. Being anti-authority does not provide a lot of value when you're in high school. I spent a lot of time in the principal's office. Yeah, me too. Being anti-authority does not provide a lot of value when you're in high school. So at RISD, I remember a teacher said, you're a designer. Everything around you is designed by other designers. You can design the world you want to live in. And I thought to myself, that is a crazy thought that I can live in a world that I design rather than a world that other people design, that we inherit one world, but we can leave another. It was totally different than anything I had heard growing up. But I also had this unfortunate realization. I was into painting and drawing when I was at RISD. I felt like I was maybe born 100

years too late for what I wanted to do because I loved illustration and painting and drawing. But I noticed that photography, even back then, was almost all magazine covers. Even the late 90s were photography, not illustration. The market almost all magazine covers, even the late 90s, where photography, not illustration, the market was smaller. There was a supposed thing that Jean-Michel Basquiat said to Madonna. He said something like, I envy you because you make music for everyone, and I make art for rich people. And maybe he never said that, but I thought the story summed up how I felt. I wanted to make something for somebody else. Halfway through my freshman year, you have to pick a major. Can you imagine? You're 17, you decide, I'm going to art and design school. Now you're 17 and a half,

you're like, okay, what type of art and design? Are you kidding me? And so there's 18 majors. There's like architecture and graphic design and painting and ceramics and jewelry and metal. And then there's a teacher. He's a department head for this field called industrial design. And he says, industrial design is design of everything from a spaceship to a toothbrush and everything in between. Yeah, I think Steve Jobs made industrial design kind of ubiquitous. But pre-Jobs, this isn't something your average person even thinks about. I think that like the late 90s, you might remember Target had a bit of a design renaissance. The Volkswagen reissue was kind of interesting. But really, Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive, Johnny Ive we'll come back to later

because I know work with him. They really created what I felt like was a design renaissance. And so I went into industrial design. I ended up spending also a semester at MIT. I remember somebody once at RISD said, art is a question to a problem in the world and design is the answer.

And I said, I want to be part of the answers. I love that art makes you think, but I want to try to help solve problems. While we're saying cool shit, can I tell you one I read last weekend? There is a famous Michelangelo quote that he probably didn't say, but the question was, how did you make this perfect sculpture, David? And he said, it was very easy. I just took a piece of marble and I chiseled away every piece that wasn't David. I mean, fuck me. That one hit me. I

was reading. I was mean, fuck me. That one hit me. I was reading that and I was like, my God. Steve Jobs had another quote about design. He said, design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that reveals itself through subsequent layers. And I think those quotes mean the exact same thing. That a lot of

art design is a process of not inventing as much as discovery. That you're feeling and you're discovering and you're revealing something and it was always there and you're peeling back the essence. A lot of people think great design is simplicity, but I think that a lot of people misunderstand what simplicity is. They think simplicity is removing things. No, simplicity is about distilling something to its essence. And to distill something to its essence, you have to understand it so deeply.

The first principles, what's the history? How does glass bend? Why are we doing this? How do we make fewer parts? And that's what the Apple products were. The design renaissance of that period. Yeah, a Rolex is not simple, but there's nothing extraneous there.

It's very mechanical, utilitarian. I think that's a lot of what great design can be. It can be a lot of different things. But Apple, there was like a soul and a spirit to these products. They almost felt alive, sentient. To be honest, they felt like they were going to be friends to these people that were quite lonely. We should also get to that. Yeah, that's where we're going to land.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm at RISD. Are you attracting any girlfriends at this point? No. I like to joke that not only did I not have a date to go to prom, I ended up going to my friend and his date. My prom photo is one of my best friends, his date, and me holding him, holding her. That's my whole life. I get it. I totally get it.

To answer your question, I was super cool. Sorry, I have a question I've just been hanging onto and I really need to know. What did the bicycle look like that you drew? I think I drew from direct observation some mountain bike that I would? I think I drew from direct observation some mountain bike that I would have had that I would ride around. But it was super realistic? Yeah, it was very realistic looking. And I was kind of a realist surrealist artist that mostly worked in

charcoal and graphite somewhere between Rockwell and Adali where it was representative scenes, but with a little bit of surrealism and bending of time. I think I was very strong technically, but I don't know if I was a great artist growing up because I don't know if I yet had anything I wanted to say. I was kind of obsessed with the medium. I was obsessed with the technical ability to be able to do or say something and have a kind of mastery. Weirdly, I never really felt like an artist until I started a business. And it's almost because I was so naive because I didn't go to business school. I didn't know how to run a business that I started approaching it more intuitively, less mechanically.

No one taught me how to do anything. So I just started feeling it. That became how I started approaching business, that I approached it the way an artist or designer would, which seemed so counterintuitive. But again, Apple and Steve was kind of like that, right? Steve used to say he set the intersection of technology to humanities. I loved Walt Disney growing up and the man Walt Disney. He was also like a futurist.

He was a creative person, but he was also a technologist. He had this TV show in the 1950s called Man in Space. Werner Brunbrun was one of the original members of NASA research. And they basically popularized space travel before the 60s. And so there was this long lineage of what I felt like were technologists. There were also creative... Borderline sci-fi people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Steve and Walt were kind of like my idols. Of course, I didn't think I could grow up ever being like them, but I'm like, I'll work for somebody like that or work at one of those companies. And so I graduate RISD, but of course I made this promise to my mom that

I would get a job that was a real job. And of course, a real job was one that had health insurance. So I get to Los Angeles. It's 2005. I convince my friends from RISD to move across the country with me. We're living in West LA, Whitley Avenue off Bundy and Wilshire. Okay. What year? 2005, 2006.

I've just left that area. 2007. Yeah, I got my first house in six. I was at Santa Monica Boulevard in Euclid for 10 years. I was at Santa Monica and Barrington. We were all in the same area. That's very close. Similar area.

You were on like the nicer side of the tracks. Yeah. I was on the West LA side, but it was still really cool. And I got this funny job as a industrial designer at this very, very small firm. And we worked with entrepreneurs, basically no budgets. And I was doing all these interesting projects for all these different entrepreneurs who have these crazy ideas. And I had to design and create the strategy and the website and the marketing and the

distribution. The more services your boss could sell, the better. And that's actually really good for being an entrepreneur. You get to try a lot of things. And one day, my boss comes into work and he says, you're going to be on a reality TV show. And I'm like, what? And it turns out that Simon Cowell had the American Idol back then.

That was like the hottest show on television. And he wanted to create an inventor show, which was a spinoff called American Inventor. It was basically a precursor to Shark Tank. And then each contestant would get $50,000 for an invention, an idea. And they have to hire an industrial designer to make a prototype,

and the best prototype would win, and the winner would have their product manufactured. I basically was one of the designers that they hired. Right. You're like the dancing coach. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yes, I was the dancing coach without as much status. Yeah, yeah. And I ended up getting paired with a magician who had an invention for a better toilet seat. And of course, as you know, on reality television, they often choose colorful personalities. Yeah, of course. And this magician was a very interesting client.

Wild, would we say? Very wild. Magicians are a breed. Yeah. We've had a few of them. Yeah, they are. But there's different, like Vincent is also a magician. Oh, yeah, I would say he falls into that.

What do you want to say about them? There's a vibe and there's an in-your-bedroom-for-a-long-time-practicing. I think there's some per I would say he falls into that. What do you want to say about them? There's a vibe and there's in your bedroom for a long time practicing. I think there's some perversion. I'm not saying that poorly. Well, there's some control. There's an intuitive perversion about tricking people and a giddiness about, yeah, there's a type. Sorry

all magicians. Exactly. But he had this idea to invent a better toilet seat. I mean, there you go. That's a little perverse. That's your invention? Exactly. A toilet seat. Yeah. And so here I am on national television a better toilet seat. I mean, there you go. That's a little perverse. That's your invention? Exactly. A toilet seat. And so here I am on national television designing a toilet seat for a magician. I thought to myself, I thought the RISD professor

said I can design the world I want to live in and now I'm designing a toilet seat for a magician. This is a little different than what I thought. The iPod was the most popular product in the world and I was making toilet seats and I'm like, I'm going to design the iPod of toilet seats. It was called the Pure Flush. He wanted to call it Flush Pure.

I thought that was a little bit unseemly as a name. He insisted on the words pure and flush in them. So at least I convinced him that Pure Flush is better than Flush Pure. I agree. It sounds like you're flushing purity down the toilet, which we would never want to do. Whereas a Pure Flush is a Pure Flush.

Yeah, you know right where that is. Flush Pure, you apologize at the end. What problem was it solving? Shit streaks? I'm being sincere. His mother apparently had some respiratory illness, and he claimed that when you flush the toilet, there's this plume of bacteria that gets in the air.

Oh, yes, we've heard about those poop particles that get on your toothbrush. There's articles about this. Yeah, yeah. I don't know anything about this, but it was like a sealed toilet seat with carbon filters. Oh, fuck. That sounds kind of cool. I do want one. It was also like a toilet seat as a device. Yeah.

Not everything needs to be a device. Although, as the owner of a Brondle, and Totos are nice as well, I do love that my toilet seat is. Yeah, you have a device. I've got a remote, and I spray spray and it's one. I do like that. Ours didn't have any of those features. Right. It just had some air purification. It just had air purification. It was questionable whether that was necessary. Who knows? But then I'm thinking to myself at one point, what's the difference between me and these people? Like they're building businesses and I am designing toilet seats. You're carrying out their vision.

The difference was that they're pursuing their dream because they took a chance. And I hadn't yet. And not since the Rizzy Nats, I hadn't done anything audacious. I was now institutionalized. You know, the movie Shawshank Redemption. Do you remember the older inmate who leaves prison and he like, because they say what happened to Red, he got institutionalized. He got so used to the institution.

An entrepreneur has to change or challenge the institution. And when you get too used to or too conforming to an institution, you get what to change or challenge the institution. And when you get too used to or too conforming to an institution, you get what I would describe as institutionalized. And I remember my life was like, I'm driving in a car as a metaphor and the road in front of me looks exactly like the road behind me. I could see the rest of my life in the distance. And I think for some people that would have been reassuring. Stability, safety. And for me, all I thought about was like- You blew your one ride on planet Earth. Exactly.

Yeah. There's no adventure. I can literally see the end of my life disappearing into a horizon. Now, it might be 60 years from now, but the road disappears. And I remember at that time, it's 2007, a biography about Walt Disney comes out by Neil Gabler. And I pick up the biography and I read it. And it changes my life because Walt Disney had moved from Kansas City to Los Angeles with nothing at the age of 22 or something. And to me, the Hollywood was

actually Silicon Valley because I felt like in 2007, the gears of the world that were turning the world almost felt like they're in Silicon Valley. You know, Google was rising and Facebook was growing. YouTube had just come out. I discovered videos about Steve Jobs on YouTube. I watched all these keynotes. And the reason I only watched the keynotes because I was interested in design. I was actually more interested in Johnny Ive. I didn't even know who Steve Jobs was, to be honest. Is Johnny Ive the guy that helped him design? Yeah, he's the British guy who says aluminum, not aluminum. Yeah, yeah. Advertisement. Yeah, yeah. And he's one of the great industrial designers of the last hundred years. I mean, he maybe defined the function in the modern age. Most people give credit to Steve.

I've read his biography and I forget the order of events. He had designed some products that Steve himself had an emotional attachment to. He already knew that guy could execute his dream. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. or armchair expert, if you dare. Sasha hated sand, the way it stuck to things for weeks. So when Maddie shared a surf trip on Expedia Trip Planner, he hesitated. Then he added a hotel with a cliffside pool to the plan, and they both spent the week in the water.

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RISD the year after me. He's a basketball player. So he decides to start a basketball team. Yeah, these bozos can have this stupid hockey league. So we were the RISD Nads. So he created a team called the RISD Balls. And their tagline was, when the heat is on, the balls stick together.

This all schools as one big penis joke. The whole thing was basically a prank. And so what ends up happening is we become kind of rivals because we're kind of competing for fans. But then we're friends too. By graduation, I remember Joe telling me, he says, Brian, I think one day we're going to start a company together. We got to team up. And right after RISD, we had this weird internship where RISD created this little design firm, and this company hired us, Joe and I, named

Con Air. Con Air is the hair dryer company. Right, right, right. And the Con Air hired us to design a new hair dryer, and Joe and I got carried away with the project and tried to design a new strategy. Balls in a dildo. I love where you're going. It was called the blow this dry. Yes, exactly, exactly. Blow job dryer.

But Joe and I basically tried to design a new strategy for the company. Okay. And we also created this thing called the blow this dry. Exactly. Blow job dryer. But Joe and I basically tried to design like a new strategy for the company. Okay. And we also created this thing called the soap shirt. You put it on, you wash it off. Wait, what? Yeah, yeah. So the last day of the internship, I have to present to the executive team. And we do this presentation.

And no one says anything. At the end of the presentation, the CMO of the company, his name is Marty. He says, you drink too much coffee. Okay. And that that was all he said that was the nicest thing he could muster yeah exactly so fast forward to 2007 joe moves to san francisco in one day i get a package in the mail and i open the package and there's design of a c cushion and the shape of human buttocks with a handle on it and so i want you to imagine like two half circles. An imprint of a butt. But an inversed imprint, like an extrusion of a butt. Okay. So almost breasts. Yes. And it was called Crip Buns. And it was actually this really cool product that's incredibly well

designed that ended up in the Museum of Modern Art gift shop. So it was an art school thing where you just sit on the floor and you get charcoal in your butt. So he decides this like C-cushion. He writes me this letter. In the letter, he basically describes that he had started a company manufacturing C-cushions. It was selling. And all of a letter. In the letter, he basically describes that he had started a company manufacturing sea cushions. It was selling. And all of a sudden I realized, wait, Joe is like these people I'm working with.

He's an entrepreneur. This is like when you see a friend in a band and you're like, well, shit, I could be in a band. And you know, Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, he wrote a book called Hero of a Thousand Faces. And he said that basically every character in a movie, whether it's Star Wars or Hunger Games, a main character leaves their ordinary world.

They cross the threshold to a new magical world where they experience transformation. The person they were dies. They're reborn, going back to the world they came from and elevated versus themselves. In order to go to this magical world, you need this thing called the call to adventure. And you initially refuse it. This was my call to adventure. Joe says, come to San Francisco. Let's start a company.

And I initially refuse it. I said, no, I'm not going to do it. Was that your ego? Like I would be joining his thing. I think it was fear. I had this inner desire to be an entrepreneur. I never knew an entrepreneur growing up. The only entrepreneur I know was like Bob from Bob's Pizza. One of my friends, his dad had a bronze baby shoe company. I did not think an entrepreneur is an available option to me. I don't even think I heard that word in my childhood, the word entrepreneur. I think a lot of kids, they only dream of what they're exposed to. And I think a lot of people tell you, follow your passion. But I think that's very difficult because what do you

haven't found it yet? And I think a better piece of advice may be follow your curiosity and you have to be very proactive and very curious. But luckily I was exposed through industrial design to entrepreneurs. And so all of a sudden I had this moment in my life where I go into work and I quit my job. It's just totally impulsive. I don't have any money, obviously we haven't saved anything. And I then go home and I tell my friends who have convinced to move across the country to me that I'm bailing. And I'm going to go to San Francisco with basically a thousand dollars at the bank because I was making probably000, $48,000 a year. So I get $1,000 a week. And I was kind of living paycheck to paycheck. So I probably had like $1,000. I'm 25, turning 26.

I'm sure you all have had a decision in your life and then everything after changes. It's almost like you went on a different tree branch and it's just this whole new world change. Yeah, you get off on an exit. I never look back. And I get to San Francisco and Joe tells me we have a problem. The landlord has raised his rent 25%. Oh, boy. And we could barely make rent before.

But it turns out that that weekend in October 2007, an international design conference is coming to San Francisco. And all the hotels on the conference website they're promoting are sold out. And I remember we had an idea. Joe writes me an email. He says, what if we just turned our house into a bed and breakfast for the design conference? Wow. If we do that, then we can pay our rent. And I said, this is an incredible idea, but how are we going to be a bed and breakfast if we don't have beds? He opens his closet and in his closet, he had a bunch of air mattresses. So he pulled the air beds out of the closet. We inflated them. We put them on the living room floor and one of the extra bedrooms.

And we realized it's not a bed and breakfast. It's an air bed and breakfast. Wow. That's amazing. Wow. That's where the name comes from. I did not know that. Air bed and breakfast.

You know, Airbnb was like the world's largest RISD project that just never stopped. It started as a prank. And it was almost like, this is completely absurd. So we build this website in three days. It's air bed and breakfast. We used to say, come stay at Joe and Brian's original air bed and breakfast established in 2007. And we wanted to make ourselves sound old,

even though we're reusing the year we were in. I'm like, you almost don't want to sound new. We want to sound old. We're like, we're a bed and breakfast yeah we've been in operation for like four days we even tried to like make a little bed and breakfast sign we ended up hosting three people that weekend when i heard this story my immediate curiosity was so great you come up with that plan and you design this website do you connect with the promoters of the conference to get on their website because i'm, how do you reach these people? There were these design blogs that covered the conference.

Okay. I mean, I didn't really know anyone there, but Joe, because he had made Crip Buns, he had emailed all those blogs they had written about his current product. And so we emailed the same people. And people were charmed by this and it got an inordinate amount of activity. And they needed a place to stay.

I remember one night, Joe says, before we go to bed, I'm going to email these design blogs. I wake up the next morning, and all of a sudden, four design blogs had covered us. They had a photo, a paragraph of text. At this point, I said to Joe, we're like the Beatles. Right, right, yeah. I had no proportion.

It's like if you're lucky enough to get on the news when you're younger. You're like, well, I'm a movie star. I'm a movie star, yes, yes. And so we ended up having these three people stay with us, this woman from Boston, a 30-year-old guy from India, a mall serve, and then a 45-year-old Mormon, father of five from Utah. No kidding. What a grab bag.

It was the craziest thing in the world. There's something sacred about when you bring somebody into your home, something amazing happens. They're vulnerable. So they're putting their trust in you and you see their vulnerability. Well, it's a huge leap of faith by both parties. By both parties. And it's this commingled where you feel like

your life is on display through your house and they feel like an outsider is vulnerable that's entering your home. Two people could be in a highway. One cuts them off. Another person looks and gives them middle finger and says, I hope you die. Those same two people in a different context,

one could be taking care of the other. I think that we were so young and naive that we were so naive to believe this was a good idea. Well, by the way, your youth is a huge component in this. A hundred percent. When you're like 35, 40, you create a comfortable enough life for yourself. You don't want any kind of disruption to that. Totally. I think that one of the best cures for loneliness and unhappiness is to thank other people, give gratitude and serve other people.

It's counterintuitive that like doing things for others, sometimes you get more emotional benefit out of it than they do. But I also think that when Joe and I and then Nate started Airbnb, I was naive because we had this idealistic vision that people are basically fundamentally good and we're 99.9% the same.

And I think I was just young enough to believe that. And I remember telling the first person I told about this idea, he said, I hope that's not the only idea you're working on. People said this will never work. Strangers will never stay with other strangers. 1.5 billion people later. That's how many times Airbnb's been used. Airbnb is, I think, in as many countries and more countries than Coca-Cola.

On a typical night in 220 countries and regions around the world, we have the population of Los Angeles, 4 million people staying together from countries that never stayed together. And so we have data on how humans live. Yes, sometimes things go wrong, but the thing that surprises me is how statistically infrequent those are and how things go right. I remember hearing a story in 2012 and this summarizes it I'll never forget. A guy named Sebastian comes up to me he said there's a word you never use in your website that word is friendship. Six months ago the London riots broke out outside my room and I was very scared and the next day my mom called me to make sure I was okay. He said here's the interesting thing between the time the riots broke out and the time

my mom called me was a 24 hour period of time. And in that window of time, seven of my previous Airbnb guests called me just to make sure I was okay. He said, think about that. Seven of my guests called me before my own mother did. And I think that is not how it works every single time. But if we could just realize

that the other is not so other. People are mostly fundamentally good, that we are statistically 99% the same. And we spend a lot of energy, both good and bad, trying to distinguish that 0.1%. We might at our best call that diversity and celebrate it, or at our worst, say they're other and they're hateful. How could you hate someone who's 99.9% the same as you? And I think we live in this illusion, not that we think we're better than other people, but that we're separate from other people. In AA, we call this terminal uniqueness. Yes. What Airbnb has taught me by building a global travel community is in some

larger sense, everything's connected. Every one of us is connected. I mean, obviously there's individuality that I think is really great. The sense of personal freedom empowerment in the United States in particular, that has allowed a lot of social economic mobility. I'm probably a great case study of that. But the other side of the coin is that you don't want to do it alone. My high school yearbook quote was, I'm sure I'll amount to nothing. It was partly a joke, but behind every joke is probably some seriousness. But I also desperately wanted to be successful because I wanted what I thought was love. Now it was conditional love.

And it wasn't actually love. It was probably adulation. Slash envy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Slash I can get close enough to get some of this. Over the next 10 years, Airbnb took off. And we probably alongside Uber and a couple other companies became the startups of the 2010s. We made more money than we ever thought we could.

Everyone I went to high school with knew what I did. And I felt like I'd achieved everything. Then we go public at a hundred billion dollar valuation. Now I'm a designer that went to RISD whose parents are social workers. And to me, a million dollars is a lot of money. A hundred billion dollars was a number I had trouble. Sure. That's a made up number. Yeah. At some point it's just like a made up number. Yeah. And you'd think this is going to solve every problem. Oh, absolutely. And I've had this image that if I got successful, that I have all these people around me,

have all these friends, I'd have all this love, all this everything, and my life would be fixed. And the crazy thing is, Airbnb initially started as like a family. You know, I was single. I didn't have a family. So Airbnb became the family I did not have.

There's three of you that founded it? Yeah. But as we got more successful, suddenly the people working for me had families themselves. And so you don't drink with them. You don't hang out nights and weekends. And then suddenly everything around you, you're paying a lot of money and there's like this power imbalance. And then suddenly I remember waking up feeling totally isolated. Well, really quick, that is not unique to tech or you being a billionaire. It's just insanely isolating. Anyone working at the top of their field, I would say. Yeah. As you become the boss of everyone, immediately it's isolating. You're not on the team. You're the enemy. No one told me when I started on this journey, how lonely and isolating it would be. And that's

okay. I mean, it was for me to learn, I guess. And a lot of it's our own doing. I had done that. I had so isolated myself, totally focused on working, continually feeling like I'm not enough. We're not enough. We need to be better. And I had this guilt

whenever I would make time at friends and family. And the guilt was I wasn't working on the company. And that was how I would see connection was through the business. And then of course the pandemic hits by myself 24 seven. was I wasn't working on the company. And that was how I would see connection was through the business. And then of course the pandemic hits by myself 24 seven. We were preparing to go public and I always felt like we had made it. We're working on an IPO.

All of a sudden we lose like 80% of our business in eight weeks. And then everyone's saying, is this the end of Airbnb? Like there was a newspaper article like can Brian Chesky save for me? These are like actual articles. And I basically just hold up

working probably 16, 18 hours a day physically by myself on Zooms all day. The team rises to the occasion. And not only do we save the company, we go public. And there's no like bell ringing. It's all on Zoom. Oh, no kidding.

The entire IPO and every single thing, all my memories are on a screen. By the way, I had this like weird side thought. I've never had a dream where I had a screen in a dream. I've never been on my phone in a screen. By the way, I had this weird side thought. I've never had a dream where I had a screen in a dream. I've never been on my phone in a dream. Oh my God, true. Not me. Every dream, I can't get my phone to work

and I need to do it to save somebody or get out of somewhere or find my way out and it will not work. That's really unique because a lot of people have described they don't have screen memories in their dreams and yet we spend so much time on screens. And I think one of the things that screens do is they can press time, right? Because we tend to remember things spatially. You have five major inputs and only

one of them is being serviced. Your memories are made of the smells, the texture, what you were feeling on your skin, what the atmosphere was, what you were hearing. And this is just two of those. Yeah. And they're like not even fully even fully dimensional. We go from $30 billion company down to $18 billion to then $100 billion. And one of the saddest periods of my life was after we went public. And I'm the CEO of a $100 billion company. Because you're where you were supposed to be when everything got fixed. In the bottom of the mountain, you have hope. You still believe in the story as long as I get to the top.

Yes. But the problem is when you get to the top of the mountain, oftentimes you're at the top by yourself. Of course. You're disconnected. It was never the money, the status, the success that was going to fill it. And of course this stuff can provide a lot of benefits. You're not asking anyone to feel bad for you. No one should feel bad. And I do think people should achieve their dreams. Don't go into it knowing that just success is going to fill some hole in you because it's a very, very long lesson. So I'm like really isolated at this point. I don't know what to do. And a couple characters enter my life. One of them was President Obama. I had met him at the very end of his

second term as president. After making the cereal? Yeah, exactly. To fund the company, originally we were air bed and breakfast. The air beds weren't selling. So we decided to sell collectible breakfast cereal. We sold it for the Democratic National Conventions. So we sold Obama-themed breakfast cereal called Obama O's, like Cheerios. We called it the Breakfast of Change. And Captain McCain's, which was basically Cap'n Crunch. We called it a Maverick in every bite.

And so I like to say we were cereal entrepreneurs. And I remember meeting President Obama. Talk about a guy who probably experiences deeper than anyone can, like president of the United States, especially if you're black, should heal everything. How could you not believe it's going to heal everything? And a revered one, a revered president, one that people love. Yes. And so I met him because I was like part of this global entrepreneur summit, kind of this honorary ambassadorship. You get to have your photo of the president.

I remember the first time I met him, I said, Hey, Mr. President, I am Brian Chesky of Airbnb. He goes, I know you're stealing all my people. And basically we were hiring all these people for our communications team because we had a lot of regulatory challenges. And the White House is not a big place. It's like 100 people or something. And so he kind of knew of us, but he was playful about it.

Then, of course, they lift the embargo in Cuba and he goes Cuba. And he decides to bring all these business leaders within the Cuba, except only one American business seemed to have any substantial business in Cuba, and that was us. And the reason why was because in the late 80s, the fall of the Soviet Union, ironically, Fidel Castro said, we have to turn to entrepreneurship and be self-reliant, because we don't have the subsidies of the Soviet Union. And so they basically turned homes into hotels. They called them casas particularis. They turned homes into restaurants. They called them paladars.

Those are the best restaurants in Cuba. Exactly. And Cuba, ironically, has a culture of entrepreneurship, even though it's communist. And so I ended up getting to know President Obama. He leaves office. I ended up developing a really close relationship with him. And at one point, we ended up having a standing conversation every week where he would give me kind of assignments.

A lot of it was about leadership and trying to be intentional and thoughtful as a leader. He becomes like this bit of a mentor to me. It's also surreal. I'm almost like, why is he spending so much time with me? I still can't figure that out. But I remember getting to early 2021 and I write him a letter.

I guess I described myself as basically everything I just said. I asked him this question. I said, describe myself as basically everything I just said. I asked him this question. I said, how did you not lose your shit as president? How do you stay grounded? And he said, you're connected to your roots and your roots are the relationships in your past. And he described this idea that you should have,

you know, he picked an arbitrary number, like 15 friends and you should be really close to them. And I started thinking, do I have 15 friends? And of course I thought I had all these friends. And then I thought to myself, well, if I pinged any of them, would it be random that I just pinged them? And I realized it would be. And I couldn't just call a bunch of people because I had been so isolated. And I had done it by not paying attention to friendships and relationships. So then I decided to reconnect with my college friends that I was

living in LA with. I reconnected with my high school friends and I started spending time with them, taking trips. And it totally changed everything about my life. The irony of all of it was these were all the friends I had before I started Airbnb. I'm sure the most fun you've had through this whole process was weekend one with the fucking air mattresses.

Exactly. And then I meet another person who also changed my perspective on this stuff. His name is Vivek Murthy. Oh, yeah. We know Vivek. Oh, you know Vivek. We've had him on. Oh, you've had him on.

He's so, so kind. So I hired him as a consultant in 2020 because the pandemic had occurred and everyone was freaked out to stay in Airbnbs because they're like, if I'm in an Airbnb, is this like a disease that lives on a surface? Will I get it? So we hired him to create this, what we called cleaning protocol. And I remember having a conversation with him and I'm going to paraphrase the conversation. He said, do you know what the number one killer in America is?

And I'm like, I don't know. Is it heart disease? Is it cancer? He said, no, the number one killer in America is loneliness. When I was first Surgeon General, he was Surgeon General under President Obama. He said, I was trying to pick like a signature issue. And I think he was looking at like opioids and obesity. I think he was looking at a number President Obama. He said, I was trying to pick like a signature issue. And I think he was looking at like opioids and obesity. I think he was looking at a number of issues. He started noticing that there was this dark thread that was running through all these ailments. And that thread was loneliness.

And he started describing that about half of Americans identify as lonely. And that if you're chronically lonely, it is pernicious to your health. He said it's worse than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. It's worse than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And it takes equivalent of 15 years off your life. I think it's because if you look at our evolutionary history, humans were about 200,000 years old, modern homo sapiens. Pre-civilization were hunter gatherers. And we lived in a community.

We lived in tribes of what, 50 to 150 people, probably why we can maintain about that many relationships. And we didn't have like DoorDash and Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente and like an ambulance and a fire department. We only had the village. We had the tribe. And so being isolated was a death sentence. We've become so individualistic. We've become so self-sufficient and independent, but it's actually the depending on one another that is like the fabric of your life source. We get energy in life from love and that love has to come from within and from others. And I think that if you're isolated, it's very typical that you might push people away. And so I started learning about loneliness. Loneliness has been rising, I think,

since the 1950s, but it had an inflection point about 10, 15 years ago. And I started wondering, why are people so sad? Why are they so anxious? Why are half of teenagers having feelings of sadness and hopelessness? Why are one in four teenagers having suicidal ideations? Why are men having a loneliness recession? The average American today spends 10 fewer hours a week with friends than 10 years ago. Then you go deeper. A lot of things are digitized. The mall is now Amazon. The theater is now Netflix. The grocery store is now Instacart. The office is now Zoom. And each one of these things is a step forward for humanity. But the aggregate means that a lot of us are spending time alone. Fewer people are in families. Fewer people go to the bowling alley or church. Fewer people getting married. Fewer people having kids.

And I want to be clear. I'm happy to be alive today, but I think we have to be careful. Technology likes efficiency, and human connection is often inefficient. No one tries to take human connection out of society, but as society grows and evolves so quickly, it's very easy for us to wake up one day and be isolated. And I think that social media used to be called social networking 20 years ago. And most people don't realize this language change. But it used to be you had friends. And then eventually your friends became followers. And your friends became followers. There was less intimacy.

And there was less intimacy. Then you started performing. And the problem is your Instagram followers aren't coming to your funeral. No one changed someone else's mind in the YouTube comments section. They'll never help you move a couch in your apartment. Yeah. And so none of these things are wrong. They're just ingredients.

And as long as we balance these ingredients with physical community and physical relationships, then we're going to be okay. But if we don't, and we are completely isolated, living digital lives, then we are going to recreate the movie WALL-E. Do you remember the Pixar movie WALL-E?

We're on these self-driving pods, looking at screens, looking at everything, but seeing nothing and being totally disconnected from our own bodies. This is something that I've been thinking a lot about. And I'm not saying that we, Airbnb, are going to solve this problem. But a question you have when you're in my position is, what do you do with the rest of your life? And I have a few choices. I could stop doing Airbnb and do something else. I could build a mega yacht. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Be with some oligarchs. I don't want to do that. I could build a mega yacht. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Be with some oligarchs down in...

I don't want to do that. I could go into philanthropy, but I like to make things rather than fund things. Of course, I'll do that. I could go to space. I don't really like heights. So space is not really a good opportunity for me. Given what's happening in the world,

I want to like point Airbnb's product and community around trying to make the world feel smaller and to bring people together. And so that's kind of what I want to dedicate the next handful of years. This might shock people. So your own house is on Airbnb. I've had five people stay with me. It sounds like a publicity stunt. It started as a publicity stunt.

It sounded like go Nats. But now five guests later, it's actually now becoming a part of my life. And maybe it started a little bit as a stunt, but I was reminded of why I started the company. They come as strangers and they leave as friends. I and my dog, Sophie Supernova, a two-year-old golden trevor, we're the host. People come. The first night I make them dinner. I make them my famous Chesky's chips, which are a chocolate chip recipe that's been in

the family for many years after I got it off Google. Many, many years. Yeah, many, many years. We just talk late into the evening. I then take them on a tour of the office. It's added so much richness to my life. Here's my only fear of that scenario. Have they not come as fans? That's not the healthiest dynamic for friendship. Some of them come as fans. It's a good question. Starts as a fan, but ends, they see you're human. They hear you taking a shit in the morning. Exactly. Hard to stay someone's fan. The veneer cracks quickly. Honestly, maybe they kind of come because they have some big ambitions. And if you leave with something fairly genuine at the end, it can be pretty special. But yeah, I've had a bunch of people stay with me.

I also lived on Airbnb last year. I stayed in like 15 homes, hopping like city to city. And that was pretty amazing. It's been an incredible journey. What's happening with you romantically? Not a lot. Are you putting effort into it? Do you care?

I do care. Because I'm going to argue, you know, the big thing that Obama left off this list of how he navigated the White House experience is he had these two girls that ultimately didn't give a fuck he was president. That's a really good point. And he had a wife that didn't give a fuck he was the president. You need some people in your life that don't give a fuck about what you do. I just got back from 15 days with an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old. Like, there ain't no break from that.

And there's no buying your way out of any of it. I think that things in my life have happened in a different order than I expected. When I was in college, I probably thought by the age of 41, I'd have a family and maybe wouldn't be as far in my career. And of course, I went on this complete rocket ship. A lot of what I've maybe been trying to do professionally is design the world that I wish to live in. And I think what I've been seeking my whole life in some way is seeking connection, seeking love, seeking to be a part of something and to be a part of other people and having them in my life. I'm quite certain you would advise a young entrepreneur that having a

great idea doesn't mean anything. No one's going to knock at your door and go, excuse me, sir, do you have a brilliant idea I can realize for you? You're not ever going to be sitting at home and someone's going to knock on your door and go, Brian, I think I'm in love with you. Oh, that's a really good point. It's the exact same thing as being an entrepreneur. No one's going to do that for you. No one's going to show up magically. You have to be out there. You have to put in the effort. I don't mean to shame you about being single. Yeah, because I definitely don't want us to end. And it sounds like that's the only way to have meaningful relationships or ones that don't involve fandom because often that does still happen in relationships.

So it's not like without that. Yeah, I know people who have married a fan. I don't advise that. Sure. Well, you'll see these rich guys around L.A. with a gal that's 25 years younger than them and 16 deviations more attractive. I think, you know, we can assume that's not the greatest.

Yeah, it can happen even in regular dynamics. It's something to monitor in general. Yeah. And I think what President Obama was saying to you about the 15 friends is that it's buying the original people who don't care if you're a billionaire. I'm agreeing with that. I'm throwing one other thing that helps, which is, as you've already discovered, service leads to this self-love and this self-esteem. That's what the result of service is, right? And I will just say, if you've already discovered that, there is no greater act of service than having to fucking deal with these kids for 18 years.

It's endless service. So I'm only saying the apex of service is having these dependents. I totally agree. It is, but it's apex of service is having these dependents. I totally agree. It is, but it's service, but they're connected to you. Your ego is, I don't want to say completely removed from your children. It's not at all, but just the very act of doing many, many things all day long that you would otherwise choose not to has a very positive impact on the people that I know. As long as they're doing the work. Now, there are a lot of people that have kids that don't do a fucking

thing and I don't think they get the rewards out of it either. I totally agree. I mean, I think this is part of the next chapter of my life. Is figuring out how to take your expertise and apply it to this issue of loneliness. Well, that and personally not being alone and eventually having a family. That is absolutely something that I would like to do.

Need a co-founder. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you've kind of had a right sizing of your goals. Yeah. You reached the one. I think you're the second Mauritius person we've talked to, which is insane. He's got $12 billion. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's a good chunk of change. But I want to add he's pledged the giving pledge. Oh, I love that. Yeah. Great. The first charitable gift I did, actually President Obama and I, we did something together where I put in a hundred million dollars to create a scholarship for public

service. I remember him telling me a story of, he basically was still paying off his college loans until he wrote the Audacity Hope in his early forties. And I started realizing so many people probably go into public service, but that doesn't pay very well. I also thought to myself, travel is one of the ultimate educations. And if we're going to have people working in public service, I kind of want them to travel the world and take the best ideas ever and bring them back. And so we basically created this scholarship where it's a hundred scholarships a year for college students that want to go into public service. And then we give them a 10 years of travel credit so they can travel and also course, pay their last dollar of education. This is something that I did because when you do the Giving Pledge, you have to write a letter.

It's like, what are you going to focus on? I'm like, I don't even know. But I'll tell you where I'll start. If you ask my teachers in high school, one of them is successful to join the Giving Pledge. I don't think any of them would have picked me. Right. I'm not a guy who said I'm going to be a failure. Exactly. It's hard to get by on that guy. And so we're born with unknown potential. It's hard to dream of something if you've never been exposed to it. Well, there's all this data that's been surfacing recently about if you look at the people who do ascend through their social class, generally the common denominator is they were exposed to someone else that had ascended that already. So your exposure to someone else from a higher socioeconomic bracket

is the most determinative factor of whether you will or not. It's amazing that being exposed to things is sometimes the ultimate education. Well, and it's why everyone is beating over the head about representation in Hollywood. It's the same thing. It's like, if people don't see themselves,

how would they ever know that it's a possibility? Okay, I want to ask you a couple of fun questions because you're very smart. Now, one of my curiosities was because you've demonstrated a genius in one area, do people sometimes ascribe like just a generalized genius to you? Because I find this is happening a lot

with some of the tech billionaires. It's like, because Elon's great at this, maybe we should listen to his advice about sports or something. I've had to be very careful. Silicon Valley can confuse you a little bit. You have a ton of power. You can have an idea. Suddenly one day you wake up, hundreds of millions of people are using your product. They call you a visionary. They're almost like you're selling magic. You can see into the future.

Yeah. You can get high on your own supply. You can develop messianic tendencies. That's what it's called, messianic tendencies. Yeah, that's one of the terms for it. Messianic, what does that mean? Messiah. But it's almost like a confusing amount of power, but it's different than a celebrity. It's more like I can see over the horizon. The rest of the world looks like that's an incredibly important skill set. But if it doesn't have some boundaries and you let it run wild. Well, it's also the crux of the isolation, which is you're unique. You're other than the rest.

And the problem is being so special is a double-edged sword. I've had to be very careful trying to speak. Once you make a lot of money, you're very successful. People might be inclined to believe you about everything. And then when you add the tech patina, of course, you could theoretically be in authority on everything

because everything could be disrupted by technology. And you can say, well, with AI, accelerating technology, here's what it means for all of us. And of course, that could theoretically be an authority in everything because everything could be disrupted by technology. And you could say, well, with like AI, accelerating technology, here's what it means for all of us. And of course, that could know no boundaries. And we're relying on the handful of people that seem to have understood it. And they're like, he must know something. I don't know something. I'm going to go to them for everything. But you have to police yourself.

A hundred percent. And I think sometimes you just have to remind yourself and other people that at the end of the day, I'm just another person. And yes, maybe that 0.1% of me is different than you. And there's some really unique attributes that have allowed me to be successful, but that's the 0.1%. Yeah.

And it's such a little part of your life. It's such a little part of me. And 99.9% is still that regular person. You got to brush your teeth. You got to watch what you eat. You got to exercise. You got to fight being depressed all the time. Yeah, you're like tired. you hate how your clothes look exactly

yeah your hair sucks yeah this is what our real daily life is a real person and no matter who you are that's the experience of being human yeah stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare this episode is brought to you by tresame wants silky smooth hair that's still full of natural If you dare. heat protectants and a silky smooth serum for a sleek finish. Wave goodbye to Frizz and say hello to three days of smooth hair with the Tresemme Keratin Smooth Weightless Collection. Visit tresemme.com to learn more. Order up for Damien. Hey, how did your doctor's appointment go, by the way? Did you ask about Rebelsis? Actually, I'm seeing my doctor later today. Did you say Rebelsis? My dad's been talking about Rebelsis. Rebelsis? Really?

Yeah, he says it's a pill that... Well, I'll definitely be asking my doctor if Rebelsis is right for me. Rebelsis. Ask your doctor or visit Rebelsis.ca. Order up for Rebelsis. For just $4.99, you can get a Subway 6-inch Black Forest ham sub made with our new fresh sliced deli. Order up for Rebelsis. Okay, so obviously right now we're in the center of many strikes that are happening. And this is really an issue that was driven by technology in essence. So I'm sure you're already aware of it, but for people who aren't fully abreast.

So in the old days, you did a television show under a SAG contract. When it aired, you got X amount of money. When it re-aired, you got a little bit of the money. Every time they profited by reselling ads on this episode they once paid you for, you shared in it a little bit. Then streaming came along, and what's a rerun? There's no such thing as a rerun. It's just all there all the time.

How would they even say what a rerun is, right? It broke the model of residuals, which is one of the main issues that we're fighting over right now. And so in the pandemic that year, you lost $200 million. And then last year you created $3.4 billion in free cashflow. So you've cracked that for your own business. And my question is, do you have thoughts on the challenges these streamers are facing? And do you have an opinion on what's happening with all these? Only Netflix is profitable, right? Yeah. I think there's a lot of things going on.

By the way, I just violated the thing I said. I know, I was like, what did you just do? I just wanted to let you know. I'm in on the irony. But I do think that because you understand the tech world so much, and these are ultimately tech companies that you will have insight.

But yes, I am violating the thing I just said. Yeah, I think there used to be tech companies. And in some larger sense, almost every company becomes or starts to look and feel like a technology company as it uses more technology. The first thing is that Hollywood is, I think, governed by this process that we call the creative process. It's intuitive. It's very much governed by art and creatives. And the Silicon Valley is governed by a different process. And we call that the scientific method. And the scientific method is based on empirical data, which is that which can be measured. As things got digital, you can measure everything. And so what happened was Silicon Valley was run more by scientists and technologists. This is not a good or bad thing. It's just different cultures. And in certain industries, like Amazon, can make retail more efficient. And then your package comes cheaper and faster with wider selection. I think that there has been a little bit of a disconnect between the culture of Silicon Valley and the culture of

streaming, which is about ubiquity. It's about looking at the data and trying to figure out what somebody wants. Right, the data can't really tell you that intuitive thing. The data can't really tell you everything going on. I mean, if I were to just describe also what's happened to business, there was a fundamental miscalculation about how profitable these streamers would become. Netflix was growing quickly. They were not historically very profitable, but they were going on the Amazon ride and their market cap was incredibly high. They were disrupting the entire content world. And really quick for people who don't know that model, which is we're happy to lose money to gain market share. Then we can use that market share to basically become profitable through economies of scale

or lack of competition. There's a bunch of reasons why. You get big first, then you make money. And of course, Google is the most extreme example where they launched with no business model and now they do more than 50 billion in free cash flow a year, probably even more than that. And so that was the theory.

People used to put their content on Netflix. There was this cute little tech company. No one was very afraid of it. And all of a sudden, in the late 2010s, it becomes so ubiquitous. It crosses over 100 million members. And everyone starts realizing that people are not going to continue to have cable.

They're going to cut the cord. They are going to choose to watch things when they want to watch them. When they want, on demand. And there's some good parts about it, but I think there's some downsides. It's less collective. There's less of a monoculture.

We don't have as much of a shared language. And so then content becomes really long tail. What's long tail mean? Oh, long tail means instead of all of us watching Seinfeld, there's not one show, there's a thousand shows and we can be diced up and I can get the art school hockey player show and you can get the actor, very niche. And we don't have these shared collective experiences and there's less of a sense of intuition. People want to take fewer creative risk. They'll take initial much bigger risk. They'll try anything, but they won't stick with it because they are very much beholden by data. And so if you put out something and the data doesn't show it works, you just kind of abandon it because you don't have the same conviction. So Netflix is now growing. They're

throwing tons of money at content, get subscribers and all these other companies say, we need to create competing services. So now you have all these companies creating competing services, creating all this content. And then in early 2021, Netflix hits a wall. They had totally expanded the United States. They kind of ran out of US subscribers. They were writing international growth, but eventually saturated international growth. They stopped growing and they weren't making profit. In an investor's world, there's two types of investors, growth investors and profit investors. And once you stop growing, then they want profits. And at one point, Netflix started running out of both. And so their market cap plummets. As their market cap plummets,

then that is a comp, a comparable that all of their streamers are compared against. And so then all their market caps go down. Right. So now suddenly their market caps are down and investors are basically telling them, we're not looking for growth, we're looking for profit. Well, if they're looking for profit with whatever contract they had done or whatever agreement they had with the actors the first time, now they got to cut cost. Yes.

So the last thing they can do if they have to cut cost is paying people more. And so that creates a conflict. And what ends up happening is it becomes a huge amount of competition. People aren't paying as much money collectively, like a cable bundle is like $100, plus a movie is a $10 ticket. We're not collectively paying as much money, but we're producing a lot more content and something's got to give. Yeah, yeah. And what something's got to give is then this disconnect. So now you have a situation where, of course, the creative people feel like, number one, we're creating all this work. We're just training data for AI is the concern. We don't have the lifestyle we used to have. And the studios, on the other hand, are like, we have pressure. We have to cut more costs. They're kind of, not to be so sympathetic to the studios, but they're caught up in this Netflix tornado. They don't even know what the fuck they're doing.

The presidents are turning over every 13 months. They're trying to now be tech companies. It turns out that there may be room for one or two big tech streaming businesses, but there's not room for six, seven, eight. And the more competitors you have, the more prices get driven down, which is good for consumers. But as prices go down, then there's less money to pay other people. As there's less money to pay other people, then what happens is there's less money to invest in content. As there's less money to invest in content, people take fewer creative risks. They don't do as much production. And then one day you wake up and content is a little more like fast food. And it starts converging more like social media, fast disposable. And then you start realize, it feels like we're missing something. So then you have this divide. And this divide has been

growing and growing and growing. And you knew at some point it had to burst. And I think that this is a metaphor for what's happening for a lot of industries. There's this challenge that technology is accelerating things so fast that the rules keep changing. And we live with hundreds of years of institutions and one day they just don't exist anymore. And it's actually speeding up. There's this old story, Tom Friedman from New York Times told me, this is a parable,

but there'll be a point to the story. This is like a thousand years ago and maybe this never happened. A man invents a game of chess and he goes to his local king and he says, look, look what I've invented. And the king says, oh my God, how can I repay you? He said, the way you can repay me is give me enough rice to feed my family for the rest

of my life. And the king says, surely I'll grant your wish. How much rice is that? He said, all you got to do is take one grain of rice and put on the first square of a chess board, then double it to two grains in the second square, then four grains, then eight grains. And the king laughs thinking, oh my God, I'll give you a mound of rice. Not realizing that one to the power of 64

is I think nine quintillion grains of rice. That's gonna be hard to fill. The reason that story is important is all the gains are in the second half of the chessboard. One, two, four, eight, 16, 32, the numbers are small. That's a metaphor for what's happening in society. We as society are entering the second half of the chessboard of technological progress. Well, because it's now

amplifying itself. Exactly. And so what happens is you're going to experience 100 years of human history in the next 20 or 30 years. Oh, maybe six. Or maybe six. So it gets faster and faster and faster. Albert Einstein had this old saying, I don't know if he ever said it again, who knows if anyone ever sees this? Everything's apocryphal. But the best way to keep your balance in a bicycle is to keep moving. The problem is the faster the road gets, the faster you have to pedal on that bicycle to keep your balance. And that becomes disorienting for people.

And I'll add, and here's where we get to the quintessential issue, is that we're all held hostage by the global competition. that we're all held hostage by the global competition. So it's not like any country can make a decision to interrupt this because the fear, of course, will be, well, they'll fall behind all of the global competitors. So you're in this crazy standoff where everyone's just going to keep it floored because we can't fall behind China or Russia and vice versa. There's a momentum around society.

I don't say this as a good or bad thing. I say this as a thing to be conscious of, that we have to be very careful about the faster something grows and is unleashed in the world, the more you have to understand ahead of time the unintended consequences. Which is virtually impossible to do.

And the other thing is that it's not to say the new things we're going to build are not as good or better than the old things we're going to build, but buildings are designed by architects. That's a multi-thousand-year-old field that we've learned over thousands of years. We're going to replace that with digital spaces we're designing, but we don't have the same history and understanding of how those spaces make us feel. That's a metaphor for a lot of things. So we have to be very careful. I think it's like an unbelievable

Promethean moment of technology. AI is going to accelerate it. I think that the most important thing for the writers and the studios is to come together to really understand one another. I think a lot of people are, for example, very- This is like your tour of meeting your enemies. They need to be sitting face to face. And the only way they're going to work this out is together. Because the end of the day, they got to make movies together. They got to create entertainment together. And actually, they have a codependence that the studios really aren't going to succeed without the talent and the talent isn't going to succeed without the studios. And they're going to need to figure out a way to work this out together.

It's going to be really important that they do this. You know what? Kutcher should elect himself because he has his feet in both worlds in a very elegant way. People that can have a foot in the business and the creative process, if you can understand both sides and bring them together, that is going to be the thing that will really solve this. And this is, by the way, something that many industries are going to go through. This might be a very specific thing, but this is not the only industry that's being disrupted.

Monica hates this point. We've argued about this a little bit. Oh, great. Here we go. Let me first say I love you. Thanks. I say the whole trying to predict what guardrails, this is the term everyone likes to use what guardrails, this is the

term everyone likes to use, guardrails we're going to put in place, to me is a little laughable because I ask you. We're 10 years into the social media experiment. You have a time machine. You can go back. You can make rules. I don't think any one of us even understands what rule we could have put in place having already now seen the result of it. We know and we still don't have an answer. Even when we go back in time, I don't know what we could do. in place, having already now seen the result of it. We know and we still don't have an answer. Even when we go back in time, I don't know what we could do. They would do age limits. They would do no followers.

They would do stuff now in retrospect trying to decrease a dopamine output. In hindsight, I think with social media, a couple things that probably would have made things a lot better. Number one, enforce real identities on the internet. Not to say there's not a place for some anonymity and people that can be whistleblowers, but generally speaking, it's hard to hate people up close and it's hard when you're using your real name and identity.

Yes, you gotta live with the consequences. The second thing is, I think the metric Facebook should have used is people I care about share things they care about. So I want to see my best friends with their children in like a life moment, rather than people I barely care about sharing things they barely even know or have read about.

And there's a qualitative issue with the content. Right, ultimately as leaders, we need to build a product that we want ourselves, not a product that is popular. And I think the difference is that initially things that are popular may or may not be the kind of things that we actually want. And I think that if you only follow the data,

the data will tell you what people use, but it doesn't tell you what they want long-term. And it doesn't tell you whether follow the data, the data will tell you what people use, but it doesn't tell you what they want long-term. And it doesn't tell you whether this is something is good for them. Or is sustainable. Yeah. Could have even potentially done a follower's limit. Like you can only follow a hundred people. Right. Then ultimately that's everyone's max and you're choosing who you really want. I think that like the advertising model required a lot of media performing and impressions. From a pure product perspective, though, the thing that social media yearns for

and what would make it better is more intimacy. And more intimacy requires probably a little bit smaller circles where you have real identity, real meaningful connection, and people can be really candid with one another. But of course, there's something tantalizing about celebrities and

influencers and performing and media and consumption and likes and validation. If I can't follow Rihanna anymore, I'm quitting. Exactly. And maybe those should be- You can, but you have to remove me, I guess. Never. You know, when I was a kid, we watched television, we played with friends, and eventually those things converge. And that social media is the convergence of hanging out with friends and television in one media platform. And maybe in some ways, those should actually be different.

That we can watch things and consume content like we always have. And then we connect with people. And maybe being careful about conflating those two things is a big insight. Also, Taiwan, I believe, they've kind of enacted a system where their algorithm incentivizes togetherness as opposed to polarization. They've got basically the reverse algorithm that YouTube had that was taking you into a more and more fundamentalist. Yeah, yeah. The reverse of kind of feedback loops that get you more and more niche and more and more narrow, which can be, you know, both amazing and dangerous depending upon where it goes. And I think with AI,

it is quite difficult to know. Yeah, like what are we going to say? You want to talk about anonymity. Now you have this force that's not even human. The biggest risk to AI, I think, everyone's worried that AI will replace us, but I think the bigger risk is AI becomes us and we can't discern the difference. Yeah. We are already approaching a period of time where you're not going to know who a real person is.

Well, I was thinking about submitting your portfolio for Rhode Island. How would the fucking person there know if you created it with AI? There's no way to know. So yeah, that blurry haze between tech and reality is very... Yeah, you'd have to go do something in person. It's an unbelievably

powerful tool, but I think it makes us confront some questions we probably weren't as a society prepared to answer. Like, what is a human being? And I never thought in my lifetime that would be something we'd have to say. Define. What is consciousness? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I never thought in my lifetime that would be something we'd have to say. Define. What is consciousness?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And can a machine be conscious? And if it can't be conscious, then what makes us conscious? Aren't we just electricity? We're running algorithms. We have stories. We have confirmation bias. We have a theory, and we exclude all other things. So it makes us ask a bunch of very difficult questions that we probably weren't prepared to answer. We probably were still trying to get used to what social media did and what the phones did and the devices did.

And now something even more extreme is happening. But I ultimately think the great thing about humans is we have an incredible sense of survival as a species. And I have an optimism that we as a species are gonna bend towards light, bend towards connection, bend towards survival, that ultimately

there's some moderating force that will keep us together. And maybe it's just this innateness in our DNA that we have to be very careful about doing things that are self-destructive, that will impair all the entire species. I am ultimately optimistic. Technology should probably not be thought of as good or bad. It should be thought of as power. Nuclear energy can light up a city or destroy a city. It's only how you use it. And if we can actually marry technology with the humanities, bring creative people together with technologists to try to solve problems,

bring soul into business, and not leave anyone behind, we can work together to design the world that we want to live in, or we can perish as divided fools, isolated, alone, recreating the movie WALL-E. I do think that is a choice we can make with the tools that we have. It just requires a will for all of us to cooperate. I think it's going to require a dead canary in the coal mine.

Someone's going to have to go down in an epic fashion for everyone to wake up and go, oh, fuck. So what happened? Brazil just did what? Yeah. We're going to need a cooperation. And the problem is as we get more isolated, we tend to trust people less. And as we trust people less, we cooperate less. And we need to reverse that and cooperate more to design and solve any problems that we have in this world. Brian, this has been so fun. So fun. I know.

The time just gone right by. Yeah, zip by. That's the state of flow. Wow. I'm going to ask you some mechanical questions and stuff off air. Okay. Like about your cars? Yeah, yeah. Like knowing he's not a mechanic, but I'm going to listen to some mechanical questions and stuff off air. Okay. Like about your cars? Yeah, yeah.

Like knowing he's not a mechanic, but I'm going to listen to whatever he says. Yeah, yeah. I'm a tech founder, so I can talk about anything with authority. And I can pretend like I know it, and you can't know if I'm bullshitting you. That's right. Because I'll just use some tech lingo. You might be AI. Yeah, exactly.

We just don't know. I can't say for certain that I'm not. None of us can. Brian, so great to sit and talk with you. I'm really glad that you're focused on loneliness. Be well, and I hope we get to talk to you again soon. Thank you very much. Next up is the

fact check. I don't even care about facts. I just want to get into your pants. Hello! Hi. Happy birthday week. Oh. Actually, today is the birthday. Today birthday week. Oh. Actually, today. Today is the birthday. Today's the big day.

Happy birthday to her. She's a babe with dark hair. Oh, God. Happy birthday. Thanks. Oh, my God. We're so happy. Bob, aren't we so happy? So happy. Oh, my God. We're pretending it's Thursday right now. Yeah. Oh my God, we're so happy. Wob, aren't we so happy? So happy. Oh my God. We're pretending it's Thursday

right now. Yeah. Oh, come on. It's Thursday. It is Thursday. Yeah. It's one of the weird ones, you know, 36. Yeah, it's not ideal. No, it's, well, except. Tell me. Two times three is six. That's very choice. That part's cool. That's

very nice. Yeah, like 37 it feels worse yo sure yeah although it does add up to 10 oh there's always a way to find a silver line i remember 36 and going i don't like being closer to 40 than i was right yeah you're on the other side of that little arbitrary hump between 30 and 40. Yeah. You know what? I made my own hump. Like, to me, 37 is where it turns.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Because I'm still on the front end of the 35s. Right. Right. Right. That's a great, that's a very healthy way to look at it.

Yeah. I still have a year of that. Yeah. But none of it means anything. That's a great, that's a very healthy way to look at it. Yeah, I still have a year of that. Yeah. But none of it means anything. That's what's hysterical. You know, you just keep retabulating because you go like, okay, well, 38, well, now I am 40, right? You kind of accept it. Yeah.

And then you've got a nice kind of six years, seven years after that. Yes. Where you don't tip onto the other side of 50, which I'm at, right? Right. Yeah. But I got to say, I'm. You're embracing it. I'm groovy with it.

Good. In fact, I'm weirdly more groovy with 48 than I was 38. Oh, interesting. Uh-huh. And I wonder if you having have, you know, at least a big bit of career fulfillment, if it doesn't feel as panicky, say, as it did for me. Yeah, it doesn't feel panicky. I mean, the family part feels a little panicky.

A little panicky. But I'm still, I don't even know what I want there. Right, sure. It's not panicky in the sense of, oh my God, like time's running out and I know I want this. I needed a kid yesterday. Yeah. It's not that. It's just like, oh wow, okay. And maybe time will just happen and then it will have happened or it won't have happened.

And that's also fine. Yeah. I'll just keep watching those videos. Which ones? Of Delta and Linkin. Oh God, I found a bunch more today. Of Doubt Family. Oh, God, I found a bunch more today. Well, I hadn't gone through any of my old ones,

but Bree sent me one of my favorite songs that was my father and my mother's favorite songs. And she and I used to listen to it. And she goes, oh, my God, this happened to come on a radio station I was listening to. And then it reminded me, oh, that was the song I used to dance to, Lincoln with Non-Stop. So then I searched in my videos way back, going back nine years.

Yep. And I think I was on a Samsung just before the moment that all the dancing stopped. Whatever. I couldn't locate it. But what I did locate it was a bunch of videos of Lincoln and Delta, Delta walking super funny. And I immediately thought, well, Monica's going to need to see these too. Yeah, you need to send them all over. I need them.

You have a huge capacity for love, whether you have kids or not. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, a huge capacity to love these little kids. Well, yeah, I love them. And a new weird thing is happening where one of the videos that came up was this like teeny tiny doodle. Uh-huh. You know how they're like really, like they fit in your hand at first? Okay.

So Jess and I sometimes when we're on walks, we point out dogs like that maybe I could like. What is the criteria that will lead you guys to think maybe you would like it? If it's too small, no. If it's like fully grown, too small. If it's a puppy, of course, everyone loves puppies. Yes. But if it's fully grown, but it's too small, that's not for me. Okay.

You don't want a small dog. No. And if it like has a mean face, no, not for me. Not for you. Yeah. Okay. Mostly they're not for me. In fact, I don't know that we've ever found one that's been a yes.

Really? But then a little Instagram thing came up, and it was this teeny tiny doodle, and it was so cute. What makes a teeny tiny doodle? It was a puppy. Oh, you're not talking about a small drawing. No. I'm like, you're bouncing back and forth between finding cute little drawings, scribbles, and dogs. I was not linking the doodle and the doodle.

Doodle dog. Doodle dog. Yeah. Okay. So you do like pictures of puppy doodles. Yeah. Okay. dog okay so you do like pictures of puppy doodles yeah okay and they're so small which is it's cute because they're puppies but anyway so i sent it to jess and i said i like this one yeah and he said no you can't have that because it will probably get stepped on oh then you'll feel really guilty

about that he he said lady would step on it oh my gosh that's i you know it's an assumption yeah well just because lady lady's my cleaner aka my ceo she's my perfect human yes she like does so much she's so efficient she's probably running around well now we're into we're assuming a lot is Is there anything that leads you to believe she's not agile? Have you seen her tumble in your presence? I haven't. She's very agile. Does she ever trip coming in the house?

Scuff baseboards or anything? No, no, no, no. She never trips. There's no reason to think she's clumsy. It's not about clumsy. It's that she's so focused. She's like me. She's so focused on what she has to do.

And so she's running around. She can't have this little dog around her foot. What if the doodle was in its crate while she cleaned? I mean, that seems like a workaround. I never thought about that. Also, who's to say she won't be like playing with the doodle. She will. And then maybe grooming it.

Maybe you'll come home because she handles all these things you don't think of. She would figure out how to groom it. We had a hurricane yesterday. Yeah, we had a hurricane, well, Saturday. I hate this. I hate this game. I know you do. But there's nothing worse than listening to people talk about something five days ago.

That is not true. Every podcast I listen to is obviously at least a week prior. And it does not bother me at all. I and I get a little anxious that we're jinxing stuff by living in the future. Well, I'd have to mull that over. Because you know I'm susceptible to a jinx hypothesis. But yeah, no. No, no, no, no.

It's terrible. It just feels old. We're saying it's my birthday today. That feels a little unfair to my birthday. Okay. Because we are going to record on my birthday. I know, but that'll be Monday. And we'll have to pretend like it's not my birthday.

That's so sad. I can see where you're upset. Not my birthday. That's so sad. I can see where you're upset. Could you just change your birthday to September or whatever the three days later would be so all this makes sense? I could try. Okay.

Start celebrating on the 27th maybe? I could try. But okay, the hurricane that never was. Yeah. We had a hurricane on Sunday. And of course, leading up to it, there was so many warnings. Armageddon. Yes, like go to the store. At Target, there were no

flashlights apparently. So any run on toilet paper? Probably. I didn't do any of that. I didn't either. Kristen prepared a lot. She did. She did. I mean, with all the outside stuff, which ultimately was the right call because it did rain a ton. But she was really worried about the winds and stuff.

I'm like, we're not going to. They said maybe 25 miles. That's nothing. Santa Ana's are way. I was never really. But that's very. That's very you. In keeping for me to go like nothing's really going to happen.

But it did rain. But something more exciting than that happened which is because it was raining so hard lincoln's performances of cats got canceled oh no she was supposed to have two shows on sunday and they canceled both of them so then it was like oh fuck now we're all bum that's what we were doing today yeah scramble let's go to the movies. Oh. Let's go see Strays. What's Strays? It's a movie about dogs, but Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx voice the dogs. It's supposed to be like raunchy. And it's hard R.

Yeah. Very raunchy. And we took the children. But that's neither here nor there. It's at 3. It's 2.40. I buy tickets. I'm like, everyone in the car.

So I'm in the car first. I've pulled it up so everyone can jump in so we can sprint to the theater and i feel an earthquake but you can't really feel it in the car because you have suspension but i'm noticing the car is moving really and i'm like oh it's so weird is that am i in driving my foot's on the brake no i look i'm in park my foot's not on the brake that's weird and then i think god I think there's an earthquake. And then I was thinking, what crazy timing. Because it was at like the apex of the torrential downpour. Like, wow, now for an earthquake? So then the girls come out of the house and I immediately say, hey, did you guys just feel an earthquake?

And they're like, no. So I'm like, oh, okay. Well, I guess I imagined that. So then I wake up and I'm reading the next morning the news highlights. And one of them is 5.1 earthquake out of Ojai. I go immediately to the article, 2.41 p.m. Yeah. The exact moment we were sitting in the car.

Yes. I had a similar sitch. You felt it? Well, no. Okay. So yesterday, Sunday morning, my dad calls. Well, the day before, you know, they're texting, it's going to be crazy. They're worried as well probably.

Yeah, they're like, it's going to be crazy. And I was like, I know. Everyone says it's going to be nuts. And then my dad actually said, actually, they're saying it's not going to be as bad as predicted. So, like, you're probably going to be fine. I was like, great. Then on Sunday, they call in the morning, and he said, hey, don't go anywhere, okay? And I was like, dad.

Dad, I'm turning 36 on Thursday. I know. I was like, I'm fine. I was like, it's fine. It's fine out there. I see it. It's raining kind of regular, just like it was earlier this year. It's fine.

And I was getting so petulant. Uh-huh. And because I am a scared person. Right. You don't need any help getting scared. Right. But it worked. It was like, now I'm so not scared.

Now I'm like, it's fine. It's absolutely nothing. Because it's in opposition to your parents' authority. Yes. Yes. You can't tell me not to go anywhere. This is a goal. I'm about to be 36.

We potentially have a life hack here. I know, but don't. I might, though. What are you going to do? Behind the scenes. What are you going to do, BTS? I'm going to wait until you express kind of a goal that you're circling, and then I'm going to have your dad call you and tell you why you

shouldn't pursue x y or z goal one that i see you have some fear around okay because your insolence will be stronger than your fear oh well that's not a bad idea yeah it seems like if i were your life coach this would be a good technique yeah and he said well i guess you're probably getting better information. They're like watching CNN or whatever. Karen Bass says, blah, blah, blah. I was like, okay, well, I'm staring at it and I'm not on the coast and it's fine. He was like, okay, just don't go anywhere. He like said it again. You're not allowed to go anywhere. You're grounded for the day. Look, I got to go. I have to work. So I hang up and immediately, so Liz and I were maybe going to hang out. And so I texted her and I was like, do you still want to hang out?

Okay. Because it was raining. Yeah. Yeah. And she said, well, I do, but we got that alert. We also all like the city got an alert to not go anywhere. Oh, I have all those turned off. It went out to everyone's anywhere. Oh, I have all those turned off. It went out to everyone's phone?

Yeah. Oh, okay. And I said, I know, but it seems fine. And I was acting so rebellious. Doesn't it feel good? Be honest. Kind of. Kind of.

And then we got on a FaceTime and we were discussing for 45 minutes whether or not we should go meet at the Starbucks. And we did go. Oh, good. Yeah. The Reserve on Hillhurst? Yeah. Oh, fun. And I got a hot chocolate, which was so exciting during the hurricane.

Yes. Did you, I know you don't like rain, but I thought maybe this could be one you like, because it was a straight up Michigan summer rain. It was still 79 degrees out. It was so warm out. It was warm and it smelled incredible. It did smell good. Very unique rain for LA.

Yes. I did like it actually. But I wanted it to be done by today. Okay. Well, you got your wish. It is, but I want it to be sunnier. Right. For your birthday.

Yeah. Yeah. I wanted it to at least be sunny four days from then. Anyway, so we get to the Starbucks, and Liz opens her phone and says, wait, my roommate said that she felt some shaking. Oh. And she's new to L.A., we should add, right? Yes, the roommate and Liz.

Yes, yes, yes. And I said, no absolutely not she's like really and and I said yeah I mean little tremors in LA are normal so maybe something tiny but it's fine I was really in like it's fine everything's fine mode yeah and she's like okay monica says little tremors are normal and that it is fine and it was probably nothing and then yeah like 20 minutes later we get an alert that there was like a 5.1 or five yeah that's significant i know but we i didn't feel it at the starbucks no you're on my walk would you feel it in on a walk yeah i mean i think so yeah you feel it on a walk? Yeah, I mean, I think so. Yeah.

You feel it in your house. I mean, that usually is accompanied by some loud noises. Things shifting, dressers and stuff shifting. Yeah. I've never, I think I've only had like a picture fall down once or twice in 28 years. Yeah. My new house is going to be so protected from the big earthquake.

It is? Yeah, that's it. You already know that's part of the design? Mm-hmm. Beautiful bill, my contractor. Uh-huh. Because we're installing caissons

because my foundation's bad. Yes. So now they're reinforcing the whole house with these caissons and they're drilled into the bedrock. Okay.

And he said when the earthquake comes everyone's going to want to be at your house. Oh, come over. Yeah. I'll try to make my way up the street in the middle of the 6.8. All shaky. Yeah. I have another big, this is an Easter, actually, it's not an Easter egg. Duck, duck, goose?

It's sort of a duck, duck, goose. It's a, this happened yesterday, or this, you'll have seen this yesterday. We ended up doing a TikTok, Liz and I. Okay. And it, in the rain. Oh, fun. It's Taylor Swift theme, which, you know. Of course.

I love. Yeah. And I fell down making a TikTok. Oh, oh, oh. Yeah. Cause it had running and it was all wet and slippery. But I did it. You did it?

Yeah. And 35-year-old me wouldn't have done it. What do you mean you did it? You did the dance or you mean you left the fall in? You did what? Oh, no, she didn't get the fall, which was so sad. I want to see the fall. I know.

Yeah. I mean, you see the very beginning of it, but then it cuts out. Okay. No, I did the TikTok. I hate doing them. I hate doing these dances and all the things that Liz tries to make me do. But that's why they were. I know.

Yeah. And also- It's really a grumpy old man. I know. And I did kind of get into it. Oh, good. Yes. You got a whole new thing happening now.

Oh, God. Now that I'm 36? Yeah. A whole new thing happening now now that i'm 36 yeah a whole new era of social media tiktoks and dances yeah i was really embarrassed as i get that's a good indicator that you're doing something fun but you know i don't i hate embarrassing i know you do i cry uh-huh but it's really fun for everyone else and i I could feel when I was falling, like I could feel that I might cry. Okay. But I didn't. Was it, do you think it has a lot to do with who's watching you?

Obviously, you feel very safe to be goofy and folly in front of Liz. I do, but actually, I don't think it has anything to do with who's around. You have that same fall in front of Matt Damon. It's the same as if it's in front of Jess. That's your claim? Okay, no. Obviously, there's a scale. Okay.

But even the people who I don't have any reservation about looking stupid in front of, the embarrassment is still there, and I still want to cry. Right. It's not about the person. Okay, great. It's about me failing.

Uh-huh. Oopsies. We all fail, though. I know. And fall. It's pretty pleasurable to watch other people fail. It's very funny. Also, I think because there's like, oh, my God, are you okay?

There's always like an are you okay? And then it's embarrassing. Listen, this happens nonstop in the activities I like, which is like dirt bikes and stuff. So you're with a bunch of guys. Ricardo has been on a few of these where you're on little motorcycles going around the mountainsides and up and down ravines. And people are crashing. And it looks really funny. And you're trying to decide if they're really hurt or they're going to laugh it off.

to decide if they're really hurt or they're going to laugh it off. And that crazy tension of those two does lead to some of the most explosive laughter ever when you see the person's not crying. Yeah, yeah. Oh, there's something, there's an elation there that's hard to recreate. Yeah, that's true. I don't know evolutionarily why that's set up that way, but it is curious. I think because there's a relief. Yeah, yeah.

Which causes laughter. Well, also when people get hurt, it's because their body moved in a way it wasn't supposed to. So it's kind of just innately funny to watch someone flail or move in a way that physics doesn't want them to. Yeah. And then the immediate stakes of are we going to the hospital? No, they're laughing. Oh, my God. That was hysterical.

Yes. One in particular, Kenny and I, Ken Kennedy and I, were snowboarding in the Sierra Nevadas. And it was a different kind of trip than we had taken in the past. We generally would go snowmobiling up by Mammoth. And there's really well-groomed trails. And it's great. In this case, we were on the west side of the Sierra Nevadas. We found one dude

who became our guide okay and we rented these long track snowmobiles and we're just in the middle of a mountain there's no trails we're just riding and we're trusting this guy and this guy hits this jump and clears this gap and you're kind of jumping uphill so that you'd clear this gap and land on higher ground so he does. I do it and follow him. I turn around to watch Kenny do it. And Kenny goes sailing, clears the gap, and then hits just nose to the edge of the raised ground. And his whole body shoots like Superman,

completely over the handlebars and off the snow. He just flung perfectly onto the higher ground. And I was like, if he's not hurt, that was absolutely hysterical. Yeah. And was he okay? He was okay. And I was beyond, I couldn't catch my breath. I was laughing.

Wow. I mean, it was quite a goofy, goofy accident. Yeah. It's funny. Yeah. It's a good time for everyone else. It's a great time. Anyway, check out that TikTok from yesterday if you want.

If you want to see some rain dancing. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So this is for Brian Chesky. When we interviewed him, what was novel and preposterous is that he was letting people stay at his house. Yes. And then since then, we've seen Ashton and Mila.

They put out a call to action for people to stay at their house with them. So? Ballsy. Uh-huh. Would you ever do it? No. Well, I guess they must have the ability to screen them. Oh, sure. They're

going to pick. Yeah. But still. I don't think it's their property in Santa Barbara, little one. It's their beach house. Yeah. Not their big family. But they're going to be there. Right. But they're going to be there. That's the most important part. Yeah. I think, yeah, letting

someone stay at your house isn't that big of a deal But spending a weekend with strangers Is an interesting proposition It is I'm excited to see how it turns out Yeah but Brian has such a crazy story What an interesting guy Like started out as an artist

Well now I also I'm grateful for the interview Because I'm now aware of Red D or whatever it's called. Rhode Island School. RISD. RISD. And I feel like that was.

I can't believe you didn't know that. I know it's embarrassing. It's not embarrassing. For someone who has a perverse interest in these high-end schools, it fell under my. But that's because it's in the art world. But you know about SCAD. SCAD. Do you not know about SCAD?

SCAD is what animals leave behind. They're droppings. That's SCAT. SCAT. What's SCAD? SCAD. Do you not know about SCAD? SCAD is what animals leave behind. They're droppings. That's SCAT. SCAT. What's SCAD? SCAD is Savannah College of Art and Design. And it's also, SCAD and RISD are- You think people outside of Georgia know?

A hundred percent. Okay, I'm just asking. SCAD and RISD are the two biggest art schools. What about, here's the ones I knew. What about Pratt or what was the other one? Pratt's huge. Is it? Yeah, look up Pratt. Hold on.

I'm going to type in biggest. Does your computer have 3% battery right now? Because that would be normal. 96. Oh, wow. I'm all charged up. Okay. There's a big one in Chicago, SAIC. That sounded like a fart. Oh.

It wasn't. I'm not starting to fart at 36. Oh, I can't wait. No. I'm going to start farting when I'm your age. 48? Yeah. Okay, great.

That's a long time to wait, but I look forward to it. For your 60th birthday. Oh, big fart on my birthday. What if you come over and you hand me a card and I open it up and it's blank? And I go, what's this? And you go, well, your present's here. You would love that. Yeah.

Okay, you're finally comfortable in front of me. You're 40 years. Maybe I'll fall down in front of you. And have a fart fall out on accident. But it was pre-planned, but you pull it off like, oh, that's great. Yeah, because then it would be like,

oh, I'd have that initial laugh of you falling and terror. And then a big laugh and terror if I heard a fart. Because I'm like, now she's really going to be. But if you were the mastermind the whole time, If I was in control of it, it'd be fine.

But when someone farts when they fall, there is nothing funny. That's better. That's best, right? It is. That's the high watermark. Yes. Yes. Because they've lost complete control.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, it's funny. Okay. Okay. Number one, RISD.dy okay that's number one yep number two is saic school of the art institute of chicago okay okay never heard of it but that

sounds great three is cal arts oh part of that four is pratt ah yay Where is scat? Uh-oh. No, it is huge. It's huge. Five is Maryland Institute College of Art. No, it's not. Okay. This is Cooper Union. Oh, Cooper's Union. That's the other one I was going to say.

Oh, really? Yes, because my brother got scholarships to both Pratt and Cooper's Union for pottery. Did he try for scat? And did not go. I know, which is such a, that is like so sad for me. Because we could have so many good bowls. Oh, yeah. Well, and he probably at this point would be a ceramic engineer, which is what most of those,

that was like the beginning of the ceramics engineering fields. It would have been like if he got into coding in 83. He'd be like so far ahead. Oh, my God. Yes. He'd be like so far ahead. Oh, my gosh. Yes. He'd be a Bill Gates. He's happy. So I guess it doesn't matter.

But yeah, it would have been fun. We were all, my mom and I were sad. Do you think he regrets it? I could ask him. Yeah. I'll ask him. I think he can't say that because he has three kids he loves and it all worked out in the way it worked out.

He certainly wouldn't trade anything for the three girls. And maybe he would think he wouldn't have those because he has three kids he loves and it all worked out in the way it worked out. He certainly wouldn't trade anything for the three girls. And maybe he would think he wouldn't have those three girls if he went there. But maybe we can ask him to. Isolate. Yeah. Compartmentalize that section and just say. Put the family aside and just working. Would he rather be a leading ceramic engineer?

Okay. Six, Cooper Union. Seven, Carnegie Mellon University School of Art. Eight, School of Visual Arts. No. No, you're not counting that one either. I don't count that. Okay.

Nine, Otis College. Of the Elevator College? Of Art and Design. Of Art and Elevators? That's not one. Okay. Ten, Columbus College. Okay, they don't.

Oh. No. So you're throwing this whole list out because it doesn't have SCAD on it? SCAD? Rob, do you know SCAD? Where is it? Savannah. Wait. Savannah, Georgia. You guys. Stop. Well, hold on.

You can only get so offended because I didn't know RISD. I didn't know the number one. No, I know, but I'm feeling just like how could you think it was that popular and no one else thinks so? They do. Like people are going to be sounding off in the comments. I believe you.

Yeah, we believe you. We just can't make ourselves know it. You don't have to know it. Well, now you know it. Maybe it's fallen out of favor. Did it move to Chicago? And now it goes by the name of Chicago Institute of whatever you read. Bright, what happened to SCAD?

It's ranked number nine in best colleges. In Georgia? In the South. In the South. The same takes a top spot in Art and Objects Best Art Schools ranking. Can't wait for it. Art and objects 2021 ranked at number one. See, it's, yeah.

In art schools, right? In art schools, yeah, yeah. But by, okay, it's just. It depends on where you're looking. It depends on who makes the list is what it depends on. No, it's number one on one person's list. That's right. They've been accused of racial discrimination. Oh, maybe that's why it's number one on one person's list. That's right. They've been accused of racial discrimination. Oh, maybe that's why it's fallen out of favor.

That makes sense. Well, hold on. I'm going to defend it. My mom's from Savannah, so that makes sense. Okay. Now, another list. Oh, I love lists. Keep the lists coming.

Best paying jobs in 2023. Because he was looking that up. Yes. And he and I both had the same one. Yeah, everyone knows number one. Anesthesiologist. Yes, and it's still number one. It's still number one.

I'm shocked. I want to see when I graduated high school, it was like $750,000 starting. What's it say? Does it give a number? It has median salary 208 000 well i've got that number way wrong yeah do you know this has been explained to me though okay apparently the reason anesthesiologists have the highest salaries is they have the very highest liability insurance so it's most expensive for them to practice so the the price reflects that

huh that's the explanation I was given. Okay. That's interesting. So this is from U.S. News. News and Report? Yep. Oh, my God. We love their list.

Very trusted. Okay. Anesthesiologist. Number two is oral and maxillofacial surgeon. Repairing cleft palates and lips and impacted teeth. Oh, okay. Stuff like that. Everything in the mouth area.

Mm-hmm. Okay. It also has a median salary of $208,000. Okay. That seems low. I agree. But that median, so taking all of them from across the land. I know.

But still, I'd imagine the highest paying. But I guess it's starting salary. Well, we don't know. I don't know if it is. Well, it has to be, right? I don't know. It doesn't say. It just says median salary.

But what's the whole headline say? It says best paying jobs. One question experts recommend you wait. All right. Never mind. All right. I thought it was a starting salary thing. Should I read the Taylor Swift? Yeah, read that. say it says best paying jobs one question experts recommend all right never mind all right i thought it was a story yeah read that let's check in with that there's a curiosity that lends to your argument that she might do the podcast which is why would she do at a commencement exactly what is in it for her but i guess she has full control over that. That is the difference. Yes, but I'm still not sure what even motivates her to do it

because it's a big amount of effort and there's some degree of failure that's possible. Not for her. Did you love that thing I sent you? It's maybe worth playing. Yes. You sent me a video on Instagram, a reel. Of this comedian, Andrew Schultz.

I don't know him. So I saw a post of his and it was about the strike. And it was very provocative. But of course, it was something that I liked the criticism or I liked at least the line of questioning. And so I started following him. And look, he's very provocative. There'll be clips you'll hate of his.

Oh, really? And there'll be clips you will laugh hysterically at. Oh, funny. Well, this one I will. But this is him talking about Taylor Swift, which is so funny.

To Taylor, by the way. You saw Taylor? It was the greatest live concert I've ever seen in my life. The only person you can compare Taylor Swift to is Michael Jackson. There's nobody else. You're doing a disservice

to any other artist if you compare Taylor Swift to that. I'm being honest with you. It is the most amazing live concert I've ever seen. And you've seen Beyonce. Son, I've seen Beyonce. And this is going to hurt feelings here, but you're doing a disservice to Beyonce

to compare her to Taylor Swift because Taylor is in another galaxy. I was a Taylor hater. I'm going there because my wife wants to go. I've been making fun of this girl for a decade. Within one song, I'm standing up. I knew you were trouble when you walked in. I felt like such a phony.

I went in there not thinking I was going to be blown away. And it was spectacular. I hate we have to compare him. It's unfair to Beyonce. The only person you can compare Taylor to is Michael Jackson. If you talk about hits, I don't want to do this, but we can do it. You can't tell me Beyonce has the same amount of hits, no features, as Taylor. No features.

Take away the features, you can't even name them. Wait, are you talking about no Destiny's Child? No Destiny's Child, no Jay-Z, no Sean DePaul. Oh, you mean with nobody? No features! I'm not giving her features off! What I hate is that y'all need to bring Beyonce into it. Y'all need to just compare Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson, and it's close.

We do not want to have the conversation. But we that's great. I love how much you know. I know we don't want to have this conversation. But we can have it. No features. All of it. Oh, it's so good. No features. God, did that crack me up.

Me too. He's an incredible looking guy too, Andrew Schultz. He's got this thick ass fucking mustache. He looks like he just rolled out of the 40s, like a picture i can't tell if maybe he's italian or something he has some he has some privilege to be critical of everyone which i like i think it makes him maybe arab people get away with that as well if they're arab he doesn't look it but but i could be kind of arab i don't know okay i'm just guessing why he's so fearless and skewering every other ethnicity.

I loved that, though. Oh, so funny. I love Beyonce. We love Honey Bee. I think she's the most powerful performer. She's insane. Yeah. And the voices. We could do other things. Beyonce's voice is, you know,

top three. I'll look at the list list That'll be my next list Okay Okay See if any Savannah singers are on there Okay So number three is Obstetrician and gynecologist

Wonderful Also 208 There's a lot in this 208 Suspicious amount in 208 But it's US news And report Just regular US newsS. news.

Oh, this is just U.S. news. Number four is surgeon. That's pretty general. General, yeah. General surgeon. Five, orthodontist. Six, physician. Lower than an orthodontist.

So far. I guess an orthodontist, you're selling a lot of gear. That probably helps. So far, we're still at $208,000. It hasn't dipped below. No. You think there's this glitch in there? Maybe.

Seven, psychiatrist. Okay. Number eight. Now we're down to $195,000. So all those were tied for top. Yeah. First, basically. Kind of.

Yeah. Yeah. Now we're down to $195,000. This is number eight. nurse anesthetist. I've never heard anesthetist. I've only heard anesthesiologist. As a type of advanced practice registered nurse, nurse anesthetists work with patients regarding anesthetic treatment before, during, and after surgery, as well as with therapy or other medical procedures that use anesthesia. They give that blast of Versed.

Yeah. Yeah, before you get the propofol. Did you listen to any of the new serial? No. So there's a new serial. It's not Sarah Koenig, but it's still in the serial world. It's about eggig. Okay. But it's still in the cereal world. It's about egg freezing. Oh.

Specifically at Yale, all these women were complaining that they could feel it, the retrieval. Okay. They were like dismissed a bunch and just said, well, you shouldn't be able to feel it. They were under twilight anesthesia, which is interesting because I was under full. So I don't know why they were on this like halfway thing. But this is at Yale. Very trusted brand. Oh, yeah.

One of the premier brands. I would feel so safe if I was there. A lot of people complained, whatever, and they ended up finding out a nurse was siphoning off the fentanyl and replacing it with saline. Oh. Wow. I know.

Okay, that explains that. Yeah. It's just so complicated. It's horrific for the people who are like, uh. No one's listening so complicated. I mean, it's horrific for the people who are like, uh. And like no one's listening to them. I got a call. You know, I get called by people who are dealing with addiction issues.

And this was like third tier. But someone they loved was a nurse who had been stealing tons. They were talking about how much they had in the house. No. And how they didn't know how to confront it. Yeah. And I was like, ooh, man, yeah. That's not the right job for me or an addict.

No. There's just no way you could. Exactly. Yeah. You can't. Well, let me, I shouldn't say that. There's probably tons of sober people that actually are working with that, and they're not fucked up by it. But if you were to relapse i don't know how you then extract yourself from

that yeah you know that's like getting sober in a crack house oh yikes um okay number nine is pediatrician that's 170 10 is pilot okay 134 friendly skies 11 dentist a 12 it manager 159 13 podiatrist uh for the feet 14 financial manager 15 marketing manager 16 lawyer 17 petroleum engineer 18 prosthodontist repairing and restoring people's smiles. Similar to that other thing. Yes, but for half the fee. 19 sales manager, 20 pharmacist. That's the one my parents were always like, you can always be a pharmacist.

That's what they wanted for you as a backup? Yeah. Okay. 21 optometrist, 22 actuary. That's interesting. I'm surprised optometrist is behind. Anyways. Yeah.

Well, there's less people with eye issues than dental. Do you mean because of the dental? Yeah, it just seems like eyes require as much careful. Yeah. I don't know. It's just interesting. But maybe you're right. Maybe there's a volume thing where people aren't.

That's true for me. I've been to the dentist far more than I've ever been to an optometrist. Yeah. 22, actuary. 23, software developer. 24, computer network architect. 25, political scientist. And that's it.

That's that. What's the political scientist make? Political scientist's it. That's that. What's the political science? Political scientists, 120. 120, okay, great. Okay. So that's the current list. Yeah. I don't know.

Let's put it this way. Not one of those professions can own a home in Los Angeles. I know. When you drive around L.A., you're like, how on earth does everyone make enough money to own? But that's median. Here it would be more. Sure, sure, sure, sure. And hopefully enough to be able to do that.

But a very small, small, small house in LA is over a million dollars. I know. So if you were making $200,000 and you're really walking with $100,000, you'd probably be making— Your mortgage would be $6,000 a month on a million. Yeah. You'd think about, yes, it would be different here, but still. Yeah.

Okay, let me look up. Salary anesthesiologist— Good luck spelling that. Los Angeles. $350,000 to $600,000. Okay Good luck spelling that. Los Angeles. 350 to 600. Okay. That explains that. Average, 474.

Okay. So they can be a homeowner. Yeah. Yeah. But this is a big old city with millions of people that all own. There's millions and millions of houses over a million dollars. It's really wild. It is.

Okay. Did Basquiat say to madonna i envy you because you make music for everyone yeah according to madonna she's the source he used to say he was jealous of me because music is more accessible and it reached more people he loathed the idea that art was appreciated by an elite group. Were they lovers or friends? Lovers. Lovers. Yep. Well, she sampled all of it. Who else?

Oh, Rodman. I was just watching a Rodman documentary and she was at the height of the Rodmanists. I don't know. Those are the two that, Basquiat and Rodman. That's already an eclectic group. Didn't she marry, what's his name?

Guy Ritchie. Yeah, she was married to Guy Ritchie. Okay. Okay. Sean Penn. Oh, yeah's married to Guy Ritchie. Okay. Okay. Sean Penn. Oh, yeah. Sean Penn. Mercurial.

Mercurial. Like a thermometer. Mercury. Mercurial. Okay. Hero's Journey came up yet again. Here it is again. Wow.

Carl Sagan? No. The other one. Carl. No, not Carl. She did is again. Wow. Carl Sagan? No. The other one. Carl. No, not Carl. She did Tupac too. She did Tupac. What?

Are you sure? She's had all the genius, artistic geniuses. That's what it says. Wow. And John F. Kennedy Jr. Oh my goodness. He was Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell. He was Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell.

He was so attractive. John F. Kennedy Jr.? Yes. I can see where women thought that he was, of course, as you would already be able to predict, a little triggering for me. He looked very waspy. You know what he looked? He looked very Martha's Vineyard. So you should start liking him.

He's an essential Martha's Vineyard inhabit so you should start liking him. Well, he's the quintessential Martha's Vineyard inhabitant. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, he just had very— Yeah, that nautical look, like he would always be on a sailboat with his collar popped on his polo shirt. Well, or airplane. R.I.P. Okay.

But also— Flying to Martha's Vineyard or from Martha's Vineyard. He was? Yeah. No. Uh-huh. Got into bad weather. I didn't even mean that.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. Uh-huh. Do you know that he has the opposite of round features? Probably another reason I didn't find him hot. He has very sharp features. Sharp features, yeah. Okay, so my ear is really itching.

I hope that spider didn't get in there. Oh, could have. Probably laid eggs. Ew. Oh, why'd you say that? Don't want to give the snakes up your butt something to eat. Ugh. Gross.

Okay, wow, this was crazy. So you said there was a Michelangelo quote, how did you make the David? I took a block of stone and I chiseled away everything that wasn't David. This was crazy. So you said there was a Michelangelo quote, how did you make the David? I took a block of stone and I chiseled away everything that wasn't David. Yeah. It's like maybe real. Yeah.

The book I read it in even said it's probably not real, but it's still great. Right. And I think hopefully I said that when I brought it up. Yeah. It's like an extrapolation of the quote. He is quoted saying every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to release it.

Okay. So, but then, your version is cooler. Yeah. But also, so I had done, you know,

I had done this, I had done the fact check and then a couple days ago I was watching Only Murders in the Building. It's back. I love that show. Oh, good.

The second season's good? This is the third. Okay. I just, I don't know. I love that show. Oh, good. The second season's good? This is the third. Okay. I just, I don't know. I love that show. Okay, great. I didn't realize it was back, so it was very exciting. I got to watch three episodes.

It's weekly, which is so annoying, so I had to wait. But I caught up, and then I wanted more, so I went back to the first season. Oh, wow. Great. And I just had it on in the background, And Steve Martin says, he was talking about carving an elephant sculpture. And he said, you get a block of marble and you carve away everything that's not the elephant. Oh, it made it into that show. Yeah.

And I had never heard. It was such a sim. Oh, wow. Yeah, that is. Very ding, ding, ding. Yeah. Anyway, it's a great show. I watched the second episode of The Telemarketer, Doc. And it's so good. Oh, it's a great show. I watched the second episode of The Telemarketer, Doc, and it's so good.

Oh, it's episodes? Yeah, it's every Sunday night, 10 p.m. Eastern, a new episode comes out. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. You haven't seen the first one, right? Yeah, I need to watch it. Okay, are humans 99.9% the same?

Yes. Human beings are 99.9% identical in their genetic makeup. That is from National Human Genome Research Institute. Very trusted. Mm-hmm. Okay. Do people dream about their screens? Oh, right.

He said people don't, but I do all the time. You do. Okay, so I'm going to read something. Okay. I asked Alice Robb, author of the forthcoming book, Why We Dream, The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey, to explain our phone's relative absence from our dreams. And she introduced me to what is called the, quote, threat simulation hypothesis of dreaming. This theory basically suggests that the reason why we dream is that dreams allow us to work through our anxieties and our fears in a more low-risk environment so we're able to practice for stressful events. This hypothesis also posits that because our dreams are an evolved defense mechanism, we tend to dream more often about fears and concerns that were

relevant to our ancestors. So less about, say, hacking and more about running from wild animals. People tend not to dream quite as much about reading and writing, which are more recent developments in human history, and more about survival-related things like fighting, even if that has nothing to do with who you are in real life. Rob tells me that there's also evidence to suggest it's not totally accurate. For instance, analyzing data from more than 16,000 dream reports, researchers have shown that cell phones appear in 3.5% of women's dreams

and 2.69% of men's. Anytime I'm having a high anxiety, stressful dream, it always involves my phone. I always can't get the info I need, and I always can't get my map to guide me out of there. I always can't get it to work to get me an Uber. I'm always stranded somewhere. And it's the same thing.

I have a virus on my phone, to work to get me an Uber. I'm always stranded somewhere. And it's the same thing as I think I might have told you. I have a virus on my phone. So it's like it has opened up 85 screens and it will not let me get to the pertinent screen. I'm trying to erase this malware and yeah. But also think about how many people's dreams are about work and school. Those are modern things.

Well. Those are as modern as a cell phone or relative to running from animals school yeah that's a new phenomenon people didn't go to school until the 1900s not as new as screens not as new as screens but they're saying uh the fears of our ancestors everyone has a fear of being naked in school or they don't have their homework or they're not ready for the test or I'm on a movie set and I don't know, I haven't read the script. Yeah.

Well, whatever. You're in the 2.69. Okay. I guess I like that, I suppose. I wonder if it tracks indexes higher for left-handed. Oh, gosh. Does Taiwan's algorithm promote more togetherness?

There's a platform called Polis, or Polis, an entirely new kind of online space, exactly the opposite of social media platform that encourages strife. VTaiwan used a platform called Polis, designed by Seattle-based technologists that turned the engineering of the tech giants on its head. Like any other social media platform, Polis would let anyone share their feelings on the issues with everyone else

and agree and disagree with the opinions of others, but that's where the similarity ended. As people expressed their views, rather than serving up the comments that were the most divisive, it gave the most visibility to those finding consensus. Consensus across not just their own little huddle of ideological fellow travelers, but the other huddles too. across not just their own little huddle of ideological fellow travelers,

but the other huddles too. Divisive statements, trolling, provocation. You simply couldn't see those. That brings me to two corrections I need to make. One is, in a previous fact check, I was saying that Spain decriminalized drugs, and I mixed that up with Portugal. So I had that wrong. It's Portugal. That was pointed out in the comments and that is true.

The other one that people really took to the comments over is we were talking about determining sex. And this weird figure that two-thirds of children from parents over 40 are female. And then we were talking about what mechanisms might be. And many people wrote, and some of them a little aggressively, cannot believe you don't know sperm determines sex. Right. Yes, I know that. Yeah.

There is a lot of work right now being done in exploring if the ovum might be deciding what sperm it lets in, that the ovum might itself have some kind of deciding mechanism that makes it deciding whether it lets a male or female sperm into the egg to begin with. Right. So that's why it's not there. It's not so black and white. But yeah. And the boy's sperms are supposed to be, they're slower.

Right. They're more robust. And the female sperms are supposed to be speedy but fragile. That sounds like it lines up too perfectly with our gender stereotypes it really does or was it the opposite no it's the boys are slower and more are they yeah okay i feel you got it you got it the other way in your memory yeah i don't remember why sperm are lighter smaller and have round heads female sperm are heavier larger and have and have round heads. Female sperm are heavier, larger, and have oval-shaped heads. They're heavier and larger.

Yeah. So maybe I do have that backwards. X sperm are slower, but they're more resistant. That means sperm that bear a Y chromosome swim faster in viscous liquids. Yeah. Y sperm faster, but survive for less time in the female genital tract. Okay. Okay. Okay, so I had it completely backwards.

The gals are slow. Yeah, which makes sense, though. They're resilient and slow. There's a lot of wives tales about on your back or above that you would somehow be able to help. Yeah, those are just wives tales. Those are just old-fashioned tales. All right, well, that's it. All right.

Will you be inviting anyone to stay in your apartment anytime soon? Will you be joining? It's so funny, because when I see Ashton and Mila, my first thought is, is that something I'm supposed to be doing? Why? Well, exactly. You're right, because this guy's doing it and then Ashton and Mila are doing it.

And then I go, am I missing out on something? Is this something that would be good for me and other people? Like, I have to consider if these people that I think are smart are doing something. I then wonder, should I be doing it? And I concluded I shouldn't be, but I am curious. Do you get that? No. You don't have that? Mm-mm. Okay. I don't be, but I am curious. Do you get that? No. You don't have that?

Mm-mm. Okay. I don't have FOMO. Okay. Yes, you do. No. I don't have fear of missing out. I have FOMB.

NBI. FOMB. I have FOMB. Fear of not being invited? Yeah. Okay. But it's not about missing out. I miss out all the time.

I didn't go to Eric's the other day. I'm fine to not go to things. You just need to be invited. Yeah. Okay. And you're invited to stay at Ash and Amila's. You're just not going to do it. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, perfect. All right, great. All right, love you. I love you.