Ep. 136: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky
Airbnb Co-Founder & CEO, Brian Chesky, grew up playing hockey and asking Santa for poorly designed toys so he could redesign them. A self-described “peculiar” kid obsessed with art, no one pegged him as a future CEO. He studied industrial design at RISD where he also met his future business partner. After soaring global success, Airbnb, having suffered dramatic losses due to coronavirus, is getting back to its creative values and making meaningful contributions in the modern crisis of connection.
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Read the entire transcript here.
Brian Chesky: When design thinking can run a company, you can actually become one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to designer and CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, Brian Chesky. Brian grew up in Niskayuna, New York, being obsessed with both hockey and Norman Rockwell. A self-described existential and peculiar kid, he said no one, not even he, would have pegged him as a future CEO of a global company, which is a hint at everyone’s hidden potential. At 17, he had a moment of clarity, and made a personal decision to always be happy, giving himself permission to pursue his art and design dreams. That led him to Rhode Island School of Design where he studied industrial design and met Joe Gedia, his future partner in Airbnb. After several years of soaring success in Silicon Valley and the globe, AAirbnb, having suffered dramatic losses due to the coronavirus pandemic, is getting back to its creative values and working toward meaningful and useful contribution in the modern crisis of connection. Brian champions the ideas of design driving business from C suites and board rooms and leading with compassion and curiosity. And clearly taht’ss working out for Airbnb. Just a note, this conversation was recorded in August of 2020, before their recent blockbuster IPO. It’s an inspiring, refreshing, and hopeful talk. Here’s Brian.
BC: My name is Brian Chesky, I am the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. I live in San Francisco and the reason I do this is because I couldn’t afford to pay rent.
AD: Necessity is the mother of invention right?
BC: Yes it is. I did not think this would be the journey we’d be on.
AD: Speaking of mothers, I always like to go all the way back to the very beginning, maybe not the womb, but the formative years [laughter]. I like to understand how you got started on your journey here? Can you talk about your childhood; you were born in Upstate New York, right? Tell me about your home town, your family dynamic and the types of things that captured your young imagination.
BC: Yeah, I was born in Schenectady, New York, I grew up in this small town called Niskayuna, which I believe is the same town as your last guest grew up in. And I kind of had like three or four lives as a kid, different things. Growing up I was very, very interested in art and design, but my very first life was as a hockey player because my dad was very interested in athletics and got me involved in ice hockey.
And that became like a huge part of my life. And I ended up going to this private school for hockey and it completely consumed me. But growing up I had a deeper passion and that deeper passion was art. And I just had this obsessive interest in it. I used to, and design to, I liked illustration. I was a huge fan of Norman Rockwell and the Norman Rockwell had a museum in Stockbridge and so my parents used to take me to the museum and they just kind of literally dropped me off.
I mean they wouldn’t leave me there, but they would be there with me and I’d just be reproducing the paintings and the drawings. And I had this obsessive interest in Norman Rockwell and other artists and designers. When I was a kid I actually asked Santa for poorly designed toys so I could redesign them [laughs]. At the time it seemed totally normal. I would get like a new pair of, I remember the Bo Jackson Crossfit or whatever, and I would basically, or even the ones I didn’t own, and I would try to redesign the shoes.
And I would make hundreds and hundreds of drawing of shoes. I think I was like 11 or 12 years old, I was at a friend’s house, this kid Jeff and his parents were redesigning their backyard. They hired a landscape architect and they were designing a deck and they had all these architectural drawings and they had like a compass and a protractor and a drawing, T-square and all these tools I thought were the coolest things. They looked like surgical tools.
And so I suddenly got into randomly landscape architecture when I was 10 or 11 and I tried to convince my neighbors to redesign their backyards because I thought I can be enterprising. And that didn’t work out so well, no one hired me to redesign the decks in their backyards.
And then my interest grew in all different areas, including, I actually remember, the first time I was in an airplane, I was seven and my parents took me to St Louis. And at the time this didn’t seem peculiar, but in hindsight it was. What I was most interested in, when I was seven, in the city of St Louis, was trying to reimagine the design of the city. And I don’t know why, it just seemed natural at the time. In hindsight it’s a peculiar thing to want to do that at seven, but I remember drawing, trying to understand the city layout and understand how the urban area was interesting.
Later on, not much later, I convinced my dad to buy some Disney stock, we couldn’t buy a lot, but if you became a shareholder at Disney you could get this thing called the Annual Report and the Annual Reports, they used to be these beautiful magazines, with these paintings of theme parks. And I became obsessive about kind of reimagine the design of theme parks.
And I just liked redesigning and reimagining things. So I was really interested in design, really interested in art, but I went to this private school and when I was 16 years old I ended up going to this public school, Niskayuna High School and I met a teacher who kind of, I guess she kind of changed my life. Her name was Miss Williams and I was really interested in art and design and unbeknownst to me, she entered my work into a, I think it was her, into an art competition and I ended up, you know, I ended up having my artwork displayed in the Rotunda Gallery.
But she actually, and a teacher after her, as well, who took over the department, they really inspired me that I could actually go to design school because before that it had never occurred to me that I could be a designer. And I started obsessive work in my portfolio, I got a lot of accolades for it and a thought occurred to me. I remember I was 17 years old and I had this great awakening and the awakening was, I can just choose to be happy the rest of my life. And it was a crazy thing, like you can just choose to be happy.
And the way you could choose to be happy was just decide to do what you love and if you just did that and you focused on it, that maybe you could make money on it. And therefore you’d be happy.
Most children spend their childhood doings against their will, I mean that’s essentially what childhood is, mostly. Children don’t choose to go to school, they don’t choose to be in most subjects, they don’t choose to go through standardized testing. Half the sports you play, you didn’t even choose to play those. So much of what a child does is perfunctory. And then suddenly you know, there’s this moment where if you have that right privilege, you can get off that track and some other track. And that was the moment when I thought, like, I wanna go to design school.
And at the time RISD, Rhode Island School of Design was, you know, really one of the preeminent design schools, and really is still today, in the world. And I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I thought I wanted to be an artist and designer and that was the moment that I applied. I went to RISD and I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to go there. And so that kind of led, that was the first chapter in my journey into RISD.
AD: Well, I want to hear all about your RISD years, but I need to back up a little bit because that’s an astounding awakening for a 17 year old. A lot of kids are just trying to have a good time at that point and aren’t really sure, like that’s an existential question to arrive at for yourself.
BC: I was very existential.
AD: Were you? [Laughter]
BC: I guess I was, yeah, I was very existential, even back then.
AD: Did your parents support this wholeheartedly.
BC: Well, considering my mom is probably going to listen to this podcast, I’ve got to think about what I’m going to say. So here’s what I say and I think they would agree with this. I think my parents wanted to be supportive and they found a way to be supportive but let me put it to you this way. My mom and dad were social workers, so I kind of came from a fairly normal typical American background. My parents were social workers and my mom, I remember her as a kid telling me, I chose a job for the love and I made no money, you should choose a job that pays you a lot of money.
And so one day I tell my mom, I said, “Mom, I’m going to go to art school.” And she said, “Oh my god, you actually managed to pick the only job that will pay you less than a social worker! In fact you’re gonna find a way to make no money.” And I said, “No mom, I’m going to make money.” And she says, “If you go to art school you need to make me a promise.” And I said, “What’s that promise,” and she said, “Promise me,” this is her and my dad, “That one day you will graduate college, that you will get a job.”
And I said, “I promise, I’ll get a job.” She said, “You also have to promise you’re not going to live in our basement,” and I said, “I’m not going to live in your basement.” And they said, finally, “The job has to be a real job with health insurance.” And I said, “Fine, I’m going to graduate RISD, I’m not going to live in your basement and I’m going to get a job with health insurance,” which is kind of weirdly all full-circle because here I am, 38 years old, more than 20 years later and because of random circumstances, like Covid, I am back to living with my mom.
But I think I’ve made some progress but that’s the weird part. They were like, cautiously supportive I guess, but I don’t think it was the default path, right? Being an artist wasn’t the default path growing up. Being a designer wasn’t the default path and being an entrepreneur, not only being an entrepreneur not the default path, but it was inconceivable that was even an available option. The only entrepreneur I knew was Bob from Bob’s Pizza and I didn’t want a pizza shop.
So these things didn’t seem like available options and unfortunately the arts are kind of more, they’re not as valued as the sciences, just generally in most cultures. And so I think it’s very easy to overlook and maybe the last thing I’ll just say is, what an irony my life has been because the major fear that parents have of kids going to art and design school is they won’t make any money.
AD: Hmm-mm.
BC: What a weird turn of events for me and I think there’s a lesson there and the problem is I think people have a lot of trepidation of people going to art and design school cause they don’t know how it’s going to be valuable. But the most important thing that I learned at RISD and I’m sure you did too, wasn’t how to make something, was how to think about something and that thinking could transcend to anything. It could transcend to running a global organization.
AD: Oh, absolutely, a 100%.
BC: I remember at RISD one of the things, there was, you may remember this, there was this whole thing at RISD, getting design in the boardroom. Like how to have a voice in the boardroom and how to get design at the table and design in the boardroom and I think that my cofounder and I thought this ourselves. Why should design be in the boardroom, why doesn’t design just run the boardroom?
AD: Right, design is not a voice in the boardroom; design is the framework from which you operate the whole business.
BC: I think we unfortunately lost a lesson in the lesson of Apple because if you think about a company that is incredibly design driven, it’s Apple. And the unfortunate thing is we lost this lesson and the reason we lost the lesson, here is the lesson. Steve Jobs was one of the most iconic founders in the last 50 years and we use words to describe him and the words are words like ‘visionary’ and that is true, that he was a visionary, but we tend to use these labels for things for which we don’t understand.
If I could just describe Steve, he came from a school of thought and that school of thought was design. He was an artist and designer at heart, I think, as much as anything and I think that what happens at the ultimate, when design thinking can run a company, you can actually become one of the most valuable companies in the world. And I think that’s one of the great lessons, but of course we don’t call him a designer or think of what Apple did as design thinking. At least we call it ‘visionary’ and we use these other words for which, when you can’t follow in the footsteps of the visionary.
But of course there’s a method, there’s a process and so I think it is actually something that other companies can adopt.
AD: No, I agree with you wholeheartedly, I had a great conversation with Eric Quint, the Chief Design Officer of 3M about this -
BC: Oh interesting.
AD: We could talk for hours about this, but I’ve got a lot more questions for you. I do agree with you, when I went to RISD I learned a lot about making furniture, but what I really learned was how to think about anything and take something from zero to this.
I learned to build anything and that means a platform, that means anything that doesn’t exist yet, I can work it out. And that creative thinking is so valuable and it’s exactly what we need more of in the world right now in terms of all of these really complex challenges that we’re being confronted with. But I want to go back to RISD, as you’re learning how to think, what else are you learning, like how is your personal development, what’s the course of that trajectory?
BC: Oh man! RISD was such a crazy period of time for me because I didn’t really fit in high school and I feel like RISD was -
AD: Were you too existential -
BC: Probably, yeah, too existential, exactly and I got to RISD where I think people who didn’t fit in could go and collectively kind of fit in and I didn’t even feel like I quite fit in there. I just, I had all these varied interests. I ended up playing on the RISD hockey team and ended up kind of running it and that was probably the most important things to happen at RISD, is I played on the hockey team and I ran this hockey team, which was this club hockey program.
And that’s actually how I met my cofounder at RISD because I was running the hockey program and he was running the basketball program, he had created the basketball program and we had the biggest marketing challenge of anyone probably in the history universe has ever had, how do you get an art student to come to a sports game? Basically it’s an almost impossible thing to do and so that was our first foray. But that was really important because I’d never run anything in my life and this was like a little club and it was really cool. The other, but, the other thing at RISD, when I went into industrial design they had an exchange program, or a product development program with MIT and so I ended up spending a semester doing a product development program that the design department had with MIT and suddenly that exposed me to a whole new world of engineering.
And we started working with mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and eventually a little after, I started working with software engineers and that became really, really important because in fact I think it turns out a designer can run a very large company but it’s extremely hard for a designer to run a large company that does not work with technology. In fact, think to yourself, what are designers who run big companies, most people you can name are fashion designers, right?
And that’s because fashion is not at the intersection of as high technology, so you’re not working with electrical, chemical, mechanical engineers and then Silicon Valley is almost entirely dominated by engineers. But our experience working with engineers helped. And it started just occurring to me, here’s the thing, I generally don’t think design is very respected in the business world, still. And when I went to RISD I felt like design was getting a resurgence.
I don’t know if you remember the late 90s, before Apple was probably Target, right, remember Target was bringing design to the middle class and all these people and Michael Graves and then when we got to RISD, I think, the iMac had just come out and then the iPod was there and design has had this amazing wave. But I got to tell you, looking at major companies in the world, take every Fortune 500 company and ask how many of the CEOs have a design background or creative.
Okay fine, now look at their board of directors, how many people on the board of directors of any of these companies have anyone with a creative background? Okay, now look at the direct reports of the CEO; of the top 500 companies in the world, how many of them have a designer or creative person on the senior management team? In fact, if you can take the Fortune 500 and you can find five or 10 companies that follow any of those characteristics, you’d probably surprise me.
And so what ends up happening is there’s two types of people that never take over the CEO job, or at least they never used to in a company. The head of design and the head of HR. CFOs become CEOs, COOs become CEOs, engineers become CEOs, all these things and it always felt like, wait a second, some of the most successful companies ever have had people that embrace design. And so I’ve kind of felt like, whatever we can do, I’m not here to advance necessarily thinking around design.
I mean there’s a lot of designers you could bring on, but what I want to do is be a champion for it. To get designers into the board room, to get designers in the executive team, to really get them at the table because I think it’s such an underutilized skill and I think some of the greatest challenge that humanity is thinking, it’s going to require imagination. In fact, Albert Einstein himself says, ‘logic can take you from A to Z, but imagination can take you anywhere.’ And I think there’ something about the creative process. Corporations utilize the scientific method and I think they need to start utilizing more of the creative process and realize that these two things can co-exist.
And so this is kind of one of the things I’ve been increasingly obsessive about, like beyond just what Airbnb is doing, is how do we make sure that large corporations and governments and other areas really utilize design thinking at a time when schools and others are probably investing even less in educating kids about design and art.
AD: Hear, hear, I agree with you wholeheartedly, that’s one of the reasons I started this podcast, is to just kind of help expand our cultural definition of what design is and the value that it brings. And I also think that when the world is so topsy-turvy, as it is right now, and nothing is predictable and there’s all this uncertainty, the only method of value is the creative process. It’s the only agile, fluid way you’re gonna be able to work with things that aren’t known, the scientific process, the mathematic process, the engineering process all require some knowns -
BC: Yes.
AD: And creativity is adept and comfortable working with unknowns.
BC: I love that, that’s a great description of it.
AD: I think you sort of told me, but I’d like to know, in the early years of Airbnb, and you grew into your role as CEO, did you always have a gift for leadership and as you’re scaling, I’m really interested, the child of two social workers who went to design school, where did you get your entrepreneurial gifts from, and your management style and what was that feeling like for you? Was your nervous system exploding [laughs] or were you just surfing it gracefully?
BC: Yeah, I think that if you would ask my high school teachers and you said one of these people is going to run a very, very large company, which one is it? I don’t think I’d be the top of the list, in fact I don’t even know if I’d be on the list. I think if you said the same thing in college, I don’t even know if I’d be on that list. I don’t know where it all came from. But one of the things I’ve learned is that if you had met me, I think, when I was 14/15/16, I don’t think you would have seen it, maybe people would have, I don’t think you would have. And so maybe there’s a lesson here, which is that we all have, or many of us have unknown potential.
And I often tell kids, do not listen to your parents, it’s one of the most important advice I can ever give a kid, is not to listen to their parents. I don’t mean about ethics and principles and how to live your life, but I mean for job/career advice. I think your parents love you, they want to protect you, but of course sometimes they can’t even see beyond their own image and limitations of what is possible for you.
And I think that we can, and I think parents’ proxy for anyone, I think that we all have so much more potential to be leaders than we give ourselves credit for. And I was always afraid, I didn’t think I had the leadership capabilities, I didn’t think I could be assertive enough or creative enough and I wasn’t like the popular kid at school. I was kind of the peculiar kid or something. I don’t know, I certainly was, I don’t know what I was.
AD: You were hockey philosopher.
BC: Yeah, exactly, exactly, I don’t know what I was and what I had was conviction, even back then and I think so much of leadership is conviction. It’s so much of leadership is conviction. I’ll give you a metaphor. Imagine we’re in a car, you and I and two more people and we’re trying to get to Lake Tahoe and we don’t have a map on us. And then I say a suggestion, like I don’t know, maybe it’s like here on the left and you’re like, turn left and we go on this highway. But what if I were to tell you, I’m so certain that it’s this way, I feel it, I can tell you.
Suddenly you might take a leap. Now I might be wrong and so you’ve got to be careful when you have conviction that you can actually lead people astray, but when you truly believe something, I think a lot of people they’re too shy and they’re not shameless enough about actually pursuing something. And I think conviction is quite important for leadership and having clear principles. And working backwards from a real problem, that’s kind of maybe one thing.
Another thing is I just had a divergent interest, I liked art, I was interested in science, interested in athletics, in just all these different areas and you know, one of the things that design school and RISD did is they tried to, I did feel like RISD tried to narrow you into a specialization and maybe there’s a good reason for that because they want you to become employable. But to actually be a leader you need to be the opposite in many ways, of a specialist. Like you need to be a generalist because you need to be able to balance so many different functions, whether it’s design or operations or marketing or software engineering or policy and kind of just human nature with leadership.
And there’s so many things you have to do but the most important thing that I, leadership can be learned. And I think the most important thing I learned at RISD was how to learn and I think how you learn is you have to be deeply, deeply curious. What’s Pablo Picasso saying, like all children are born artists, the challenge is to remain an artist as one grows up and the older you get the stronger the wind gets and it’s always in your face.
So, I think the key is to continue to have that voracious curiosity and here I was, somebody who knew nothing about technology, nothing about Silicon Valley, nothing about business and nothing about leadership. And how do you go from that, without any resources and actually end up running a company that you know, has hundreds of millions of customers. Every single thing can be learned and you don’t have to learn how to become something. You only have to learn what you have to do to get to tomorrow, that’s all you’ve got to do.
What do I need to learn to get to tomorrow and you take everything one day at a time, whether it’s a crisis or it’s just a long journey. We tend to, obviously, overestimate what we can do in a year, but we always underestimate what we can do in 10 years. And that’s what it’s been for me and I was basically shameless. The way I was shameless was like, you know, it was like cofounder, we realized that the way to learn something was to go to the source. And the source might be material or it might be meeting somebody.
And instead of spending time trying to read every subject, you’d spend time trying to go to the definitive source of something. This is the kind of thing designers try to do and you try to interview them, you observe, you see, you distil something to its underlying principles and from that you can almost do anything. And I think that so many people are limited by dogma and they’re limited by thinking via analogy. Something is the way it is, and so therefore it must be.
And what if we just assume that every single thing is the way it is because somebody made a decision before you and you can change that decision because maybe the circumstances are different. That if you truly understand, you have technology, we have tools no one else had and because of that almost anything can be rethought, almost anything can be changed. And just start with the very basic first principles of like, what something could be and you could work backwards from a real vision.
I think almost anything could be rethought. Now, we don’t all have the canvas, but theoretically anything could be redesigned, anything in the world.
AD: Everything in the world is designed, every single thing -
BC: That’s true.
AD: That is not like nature, everything that’s man-made has been designed, either intentionally or unintentionally and -
BC: And I think mostly unintentionally. I think one of the things I’ve noticed is that people tend not to have a great understanding of design because they think it’s aesthetics and patina and it’s beauty and it’s ornamentation. And they kind of put it on like, like a secondary level of importance. And then they describe what’s really important and they’re basically describing design [laughs].
AD: Right.
BC: But they don’t know they’re describing design, design how it works and how it fits together and what it’s meant to be and it’s like, okay. So that in many ways is design.
AD: Yes, so I’m going to fast forward here to 2015 when Time Magazine names you one of the one hundred most influential people in the world and I mean, hot damn [laughter]. I guess -
BC: That was weird!
AD: [Laughs] What does that do to somebody’s psyche?
BC: It depends on who you are.
AD: I’m really glad you have social worker parents because I feel like -
BC: Yeah, they kinda, they don’t let me get too, I remember around 2011 someone said, just be careful who your friends are because you could lose your shit on this ride. And I’ve seen a lot of people go on a journey like mine and basically lose their shit, just like kind of lose their mind, especially when you’re a tech founder and you can make something and then hundreds of millions of people use it. It can get really disorienting.
You could start to basically lose your mind. It was, what’s a good metaphor. Okay, here’s one thing I’ve learned, I guess there’s a lot of things I’ve learned. When you see somebody incredibly successful, incredibly powerful, I’ve had the great fortune to get to know President Obama is somebody I talk to every couple of weeks and he became like an informal advisor, or Warren Buffett, and all these people.
When I was a kid, if you told me about these people I would have imagine to get to that level or to think at that level, it’s like, it would be like climbing a hundred stories and it’s such a long road. And then the more successful you get and I’m nowhere near that, but you start to realize, you spend all these years, you make all this ground and then you suddenly look down and you’re only three feet off the ground, you’re not a hundred feet off the ground, you’re not 10 stories off the ground.
I guess what I mean by that is, I think that one of the things I noticed, and the reason you bring up Fortune, the TIME 100 is, here’s what I’ve learned about people and this is, I think, a non-obvious statement. People are 99% the same, every single person, and by the way, that is genetically true. And we spend so much time, focusing on the 1% that makes us different. And yeah, those 1% differences are really important and we need to understand those 1% differences and accept those 1% differences.
And whether these 1% differences are background or heritage or culture or even success, it’s really important to remember that if we are 99% the same, then suddenly how could you be anything more than 1% different than you used to be? And if you kind of have that thinking, that you know, that kind of stuff, like helps you not really lose your mind. And that you know, you could be a hundred times more famous than somebody, or 10,000 times wealthier, but you’re still 99% the same as them.
The thing that’s changed is society and it’s the thing that changes the people around you and the orientation around you, but you’re mostly still the same person. And that is, I think, true, whether I meet just anyone, whether they’re well-known or not well-known. I think can be disorientating when you go to those kinds of things. But people are really 99% the same and I think it’s kind of weird that sometimes you have to go on the ride I’ve gone through to be reminded of that. And also, I’ve travelled around the world, right, like 100 cities or whatever, just on Airbnb and I’m consistently reminded of that simple truth, that people are 99% the same.
AD: Well, that common humanity is, it’s a core aspect of the business that idea of connection and belonging and uniting in this common humanity for the sake of yourself and for the sake of others.
BC: Yeah and I think we’re kind of tribal by nature, that’s the other thing about humans. And so on the one hand that’s good but the problem with being super tribal is you tend to think people in another tribe are so different from you and you tend to put up walls between you and other people. And I think if we could kind of, yeah, I think if we can help people walk in each other’s shoes, that would be the ultimate form of unity and reconciliation, is to walk in each other’s shoes.
People think, you have to be convinced of something and then you join the community, you have to join the community to be convinced of something. It actually goes the other way around. You have to walk in someone’s shoes first. You can’t be convinced of something and then walk in their shoes. It’s hard to do, I mean that’s a metaphor.
AD: Well, the other thing that came to mind as you were describing that 100 story climb was that we also think of that the wrong way. It’s not climbing up to this flagpole perch where you don’t really have anywhere to go and it’s really precarious. It’s more like building the ground underneath you so you just -
BC: Oh, I like that!
AD: It’s not just you and it’s you and everybody that’s working together, is building this higher land mass -
BC: Yeah, I love that.
AD: Yeah and it’s stable and it’s not tippy, it’s not precarious, but I do think some people -
BC: I love that!
AD: See that kind of success because they’re hoping they’ll be a different person when they achieve that.
BC: And by the way, I think success generally, oftentimes makes people unhappy and the reason I think success makes you unhappy is cause the model of success is this idea of climbing. When you climb and you grow, what ends up actually happening is you actually get disconnected. And I think that, not to try to presume what happiness is, but I think so much of happiness is connection. It’s about being a part of something and that everything is connected, everyone is connected, we’re part of that connection and the problem with a lot of classical ideas of success is like, it’s not about arrogance or narcissism when you’re trying to climb and think you’re better than somebody.
It’s actually just disconnection and it’s like, you’re the one that’s going to make yourself unhappy and that’s, by the way, that’s even a lesson I’ve even had to learn a little bit cause like one of the lessons I learned with success is that, or classical success because you can define it however you want, but however, is that there’s a major risk of disconnection and loneliness. That you find out as you get more successful that you can become more isolated. And I think this is the problem, this is why I think people can kind of, with success, get disoriented. Is if you’re not careful, you get disconnected, you get isolated and then that actually can cause some really, really big problems. And I think so much of what we need to do is just keep people connected and you need to be connected to yourself, to your friends, to your family and to something bigger than yourself.
And I think today, it’s harder than ever right? We’re probably living in the loneliest time in human history and probably only going to get worse. But there’s hope. We can fight against that.
AD: Yes, there is hope, thank you! And this pandemic has really hit that point home really hard for me. I value connection more than almost anything, you know?
BC: Yeah. So what’s it done for you, what’s this last couple of months been for you?
AD: It’s been difficult. I don’t have a partner or anything like that, so I haven’t had hugs and normal things that just soothe your nervous system and make you feel connected to something. And so I’ve done a lot of, I’ve sort of ramped up this digital media thing I do here into other areas of content that I feel like is really meaningful. I’ve sort of leaned into the meaningful part of my work and I’ve answered a call. I was offered a job to teach at RISD and I feel really -
BC: That’s awesome!
AD: Really like that is a calling that I need to go and pursue and so I’m leaving everything and moving across country in a pandemic to go be part of that community because I want that connection.
BC: You’ve hit on something really important. Right now, especially, I think this is a particularly hard time for everyone. This is an incredibly isolating time and the thing about loneliness is when I hear the word ‘loneliness’ I would think of someone who is much older, maybe their significant other died and they’re living alone. The thing about loneliness is this actually is a part of the human condition. That every one of us has feelings of loneliness, but we generally don’t call it loneliness.
We just, we feel this thing and we don’t know what to label it, but what we’re really describing is disconnection. That we’re feeling a lack of some kind of connection and the thing about loneliness and disconnection is, the more disconnected and lonely you get, often the less you desire connection, you tend to push things away. You don’t even realize it’s happening. So it kind of like compounds itself.
And in this time, like now, it’s even harder to meet new people. How does one meet somebody right now? If you can’t even physically meet them and so people’s bubbles are getting smaller. Their worlds are getting smaller and many of the institutions that connected people are going away. And I think the problem with modern life, and maybe here is the challenge of a designer, is did you ever see the movie, the Pixar movie, Wall E?
AD: No, I never saw it, sorry.
BC: Well, it’s a really interesting movie where, the basic premise is, it extrapolates many years from now humans have basically destroyed the earth, so they had move into the orbit, they live in these self-driving pods, glued to screens, but disconnected from one another. And it’s just this ultimate industrialization, if you were to take that to it’s kind of natural evolution, that’s who you’d end up with.
And so I think what’s happened is, we’ve made all these tools and we’ve had all this progress, but one of the things about progress is progress often makes things efficient. And one of the things that’s inefficient is human connection. So one way to make something efficient is to design human connection out of it, not realizing we’re doing that, right? So maybe it’s you used to go see the Bank tellee, now you’re doing it online and that seems like a step forward. We’re not going to go shop, it’s gonna come to our front door.
And every one of these very small decisions where we’re like, we’re not going to do this, we’re going to do that and it’s just a thousand small design choices and one day we wake up and we live in a world that we’re just not as happy with the world we’re living in. So I think the challenge of a designer is not just to design an object, but for us to, I think, think more broadly about what kind of world do we want to live in.
And so just for example, if you look at how humans evolved, the modern human is about, what, just to give you some weird sense, about 300,000 years old, homosapians. We’ve been farming for 10,000 years and so that means for most of our existence we were hunter gatherers and we lived in tribes of 100/150 people. There’s an old saying, ‘it takes a village to raise somebody’ well it’s because it used to, actually take a village to raise somebody.
There wasn’t, 50,000 years ago, Blue Cross Blue Shield and all this stuff. And I think the challenge is, we talk about essential business right now in this crisis, there are actually things that are really essential, like love and connection and I think that these are things that are having trouble fitting into the society that we’ve designed. And therein lies one of the challenges for designers.
Obviously, when I was at RISD one of the things we talked a lot about was green design and the challenges of production on our planet. And that was, you consider that environmental. But I also think there’s major challenges economically and socially and I think we, ideally, we as designers can help think through all of these challenges, but the ultimate challenge for us as designers is that we also have to get into the boardrooms. We can’t just sit on the periphery of the boardroom to be able to make that change; otherwise we’re trying to change the world on the margins. And I think we have to get into the heart of the machine and help redesign it.
AD: You got infiltrate and get in, yeah, on the inside and actually redesign it, unscrew a few of those bolts and move them.
BC: Yeah.
AD: I do think that we need to approach all aspects of the economy and society from a position of harmony and empathy and compassion and I wanted to ask you about, you’ve already talked really eloquently about walking in other people’s shoes and designing for connection. It’s so true that in the name of efficiency and productivity we’ve optimized things, so that humans don’t really get to enjoy them anymore [laughs], we just get to -
BC: Yeah.
AD: Work harder, but connection is sort of like creativity, connection takes time and repetition and unfettered, unpressured ability to you know, get to know people or go through experiences together. And you can’t really design that, but you can design to allow for that.
BC: Yeah.
AD: And you’ve done a lot of work doing that, both with Airbnb and the way that you run the company and I know this pandemic has done a number on a lot of people and you had to lay off 25% of the workforce and that must have been really hard, but you also garnered a bunch of respect for the way in which you handled it. And I think empathic and compassionate leadership is so important if we’re gonna build or rebuild or make a better, new normal.
BC: I totally agree and I think people are empathic and compassionate at their root, right? You say, oh, they’re not, and then suddenly, like so and so is not compassionate, but then suddenly a tragedy happens in their family and they have to tend to it and you see a different side of that. Like we always see other sides to people. Of course, they’re not what they are. I think the problem is dogma.
It’s much of the roots of how corporation is run is the industrial revolution, a factory owner managing a factory, and you know, that was like, that’s kind of a lot of the roots of where the modern corporation comes from. And I think there really fundamentally is and has to be a better, a different way to run a company. I think that the leaders, it’s not that they’re not compassionate, it’s just that they have defaulted towards, sometimes a different orientation that you have to push against.
For example, take a layoff, I’m not sure there’s a way to do a layoff well, but there’s a way to try to do your very best and to do your very best you’ve got to try to not take something out of the box. One of the things they say with a layoff, I mean I’ll give you a couple of examples of things that we tried to push against. The first thing is leaders, when they know they’re having to make a hard decision, they try to avoid their employees and they try to be careful about what they say.
I said to myself, and our team, we’re going to basically, like every single week tell the employees just how bad it is, they’re free to give us ideas, we’ll look in the camera every week, it was on Zoom, because you couldn’t physically be with them, we’re going to answer every single question they have, we’re going to tell them how bad it is. When we had to make the decision, we went through the actual principles and the decision making we actually uncovered.
And we made a decision to do absolutely as much as we could for every person, at least as far as we could go. And we did a couple of things that companies haven’t done too much before. I’ll just give you two examples. The first thing we said is, a lot of people focus on severance when you have to lay people off. We certainly, we did a lot there, we tried to. But the other thing we said is, people need more than that, they need another job.
And so we took a portion of our recruiting team and we dedicated it and we said, let’s dedicate a portion of recruiting team for the rest of the year, this is an idea my cofounder Joe had, towards creating an internal placement firm to help them find jobs elsewhere. And then we did something else that was even easier to do and even more profound, we allowed everyone who was being laid off to post their profile on a public directory and we created this thing called ‘The Alumni Directory’ and we said anyone who is being laid off, you can opt into it and we’ll share your LinkedIn, we’ll post it publicly.
And we created this Alumni Directory, a thousand people opted into Alumni Directory, so we ended up just publishing all the profiles saying these are the people that have been laid off, if you’re interested in contacting them. Five hundred thousand people visited their profiles, 500,000 and I don’t know how many people found jobs, but you would hope that that would have yielded some opportunities that wouldn’t have otherwise happened.
That was free. Now, why don’t business leaders do stuff like that? It’s probably a couple of reasons. The main reason is they haven’t thought about it and they don’t really think, how could we help them, let’s actually, the designer would say, let’s walk through their shoes, step-by-step, how would this happen, what would they need. And the other reason is sometimes business leaders, I’m afraid to publish all the profiles because I don’t want people to reverse engineer my organizational chart, this or that.
And it’s just like, that’s not really what’s most important. So I think so much is just like, don’t take convention, rethink it. And I think that’s what design has, design is all about heart. It’s coming from a place of heart and I think that especially now people want to know leaders have compassion. Because when you feel like you’re at the mercy of leaders, especially in a crisis, you want to know that those people have compassion. And I think compassionate leadership is not even, it’s not a trend, it’s what we’re going to need to get through this century.
Because companies and the challenges are, I mean the challenges today are global, global warming, right, a pandemic, a pandemic does not know national borders, it unfortunately does not know borders. And so so many of our challenges are global, some of them are huge and they’re going to have a rapacious effect on people. And so I think that we’re going to need to really lead, not just with our heads, but with our hearts.
And I think what happened is, if you imagine having a head and a heart and your head has two sides, the left brain and the right brain, what’s happened in business is the heart was ripped out and half the head was ripped out. And so we have the analytical part of the head, we don’t have the creative part of the head and we don’t have the heart, but everyone has all these. And so you kind of have to put the heart back into business, you have to put the creative part in business and you just need to tolerate it. And if you do that, then suddenly it’s like a wonderful marriage.
AD: It’s not even just a wonderful marriage, it’s like a fully functioning system, without the creativity and the heart, you have a robot. You just have metrics and decision making by consensus and things like that and I think you’re right, I see the industrial roots of that way of thinking, of the factory, but then I also just recently did a deep dive looking into the success of how New Zealand responded to the pandemic and so much of that was Jacinda Ardern’s compassionate leadership. Clear communication, very transparent and also with, I mean her tagline was ‘stay home, stay safe, be kind,’ and at the center of everything she was doing was an actual care for people’s wellbeing. And you felt it and so everybody sort of felt organically able to go along and be on board and coalesce into a group effort.
I don’t want to get too esoteric, but I do think when you’re leading with conviction, when you have that energetic drive and then you have this curiosity which naturally makes you open to hearing other people’s perspectives, to learning about who they are, to connecting with them, to learning new stuff, I think you’re able to create this sort of current that people are able to flow in more easily because they’re not having to resist their own natural humanity.
BC: Exactly and I think this is where people are gonna be gravitating towards. You know, I think hate and totalitarianism could be contagious, but so can love and so can compassion and so can community and so can connection. And I think ultimately it will prevail because it is a fundamental need that everyone has.
AD: Well, I want to ask you a personal question - you already describe how you kept your shit together on a warp speed?
BC: Tried to.
AD: Or tried to, and I appreciate you sharing that because I do think that’s something that’s not, it’s not commonly talked about and it’s hard to understand, so I appreciate you sharing that. But you also talked about the danger of loneliness and isolation and if you’re not careful you know, fame, success, wealth, all of that can kind of contribute to having to be really protective, having to put up walls. How have you been able to maintain you know, your needs, your connection and belonging and all of that while also becoming probably, I don’t know, an object of interest for a lot of people and maybe even a target in a way.
BC: I have to tell you that I’ve not, I’ve certainly not mastered that and I, like many people, experience threads of loneliness that kind of move throughout my life. I had this perception that the more success you get the more things you accumulate, the more people are around you. Actually all that is true, but it’s possible to have so many people around you and still feel lonely. Loneliness is totally different than proximity, right? You can be surrounded by people and you actually have to try, really, really hard to stay connected, to maintain relationships.
And to be vulnerable and to still put yourself out there and on the journey I’ve had now, I can now say with personal experience, that having a certain amount of success and a certain amount of money, having been 26, been broke, with living with just one friend in San Francisco, Joe, I can say that having more friends and more proximity, to a point, makes you happier. But then it’s kind of like a Bell curve. It kind of becomes asymptotic, it kind of stops.
And then if you keep becoming more successful or you keep accumulating or become all these things, and again, I say ‘success’ in quotes because who is to say what success is, but this is what society says success is. It has a way of isolating you and I had a point, and I started realizing it a few years ago, like I would describe my own crisis of connection where I started realizing, I was really lonely and disconnected and I didn’t even realize it, right?
I didn’t say at the time what it was, I was just feeling anxiety and pressure and all of this stuff happening and it wasn’t, like people like, it wasn’t the pressure that was hard. It wasn’t the stress that was hard, it was the isolation and the disconnection and the living a life, you feel like, like your friends don’t maybe understand what you’re going through, but the people who do, there’s not many of them and they don’t seem like regular people either.
And so I got to tell you, it’s a constant battle. And you’ve got to push and work for it and you know, so what I try to, I try to gravitate towards anything that’s normal, but normal to me is like, I just call it connection. I think it’s just, I think this is, this crisis of connection is, I think it’s one of the crises of our age. And I think there are other crisis we all talk about, like global warming, like income inequality, there’s a lot of ones that… and I’m not suggesting this is more important or anything.
This is just a subtler one. I’ll just give you an example. The former surgeon general in the United States, under Barack Obama was a guy named Dr Vivek Murthy and he became the surgeon general of the United States and they asked him what his signature issue was going to be and he thought a signature issue was going to either be obesity or opioid addiction, these are obviously huge killers in America, right?
And he started, before I pick an issue, I’m going to tour around the country and do listening sessions. So he basically met with Americans all over the country, Americans that had opioid addiction or depression or anxiety or heart disease, or diabetes, all sort of crisis. And something occurred to him. He noticed that there were many things in common with all of these people, there was something else underlying them and it was this idea of loneliness and disconnection.
And there was a study that showed that if you’re lonely, it’s equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day as far as what it can do to your life expectancy. And this was profound to him and so he basically proclaimed that the number one killer in America is loneliness, and this is before the pandemic. He ended up writing a book about this and I became interested in this subject, just because of what we do. I was like, well, at the end of the day what we’re trying to do is help connect people.
Whether we do it or not successfully, that’s the ultimate goal of what we’re trying to do and we’re not here to solve the problem. We just want to be useful to this problem. And I think, this is before the pandemic, and so I think before the pandemic, I think if you told people this is a huge problem in the world, I don’t think they would have maybe, it would have resonated. I think we all now can just consciously relate to it and I think the challenges now with the pandemic, so many things are getting digitized and they’re going to be accelerated right?
So many restaurants aren’t coming back and so our food is going to just show up on our front door and we’re going to end up potentially, there’s a risk that we could live in this isolated existence. But again, I’m an optimist and I’m an optimist because I know that the world we’re living in is one we designed. And I know that therefore if we don’t like it, we can just change it.
AD: Yes!
BC: If you don’t like a design, just change it.
AD: Yes!
BC: And so we can actually design the world that we want to live in and why the hell can’t we? Someone else design the world we’re in now, so why wouldn’t we just design a different world?
AD: Sing it!
BC: I mean I don’t mean to say that like any one of us but like, if just people collectively, that’s what’s going to happen, so either the world, we can design the world we want to live in or it will design it for us. And you know what, there’s millions of designers and they’re not all going to do it individually, but every one of these things has got to be part of a broader conscious design. And I really do hope that we design with this in mind, among other things. And I think we can.
AD: I know we can, I know we can. I think one of the huge barriers is changing cultural opinion and helping people see that everything around them is designed and therefore we, these, making these conscious design choices about the world that we want to live in, is the way forward.
BC: Totally. Well, I remember we were talking about loneliness and something kind of significant happened in my life is, I’ll just kind of describe the last four/five months. We spent a decade building Airbnb and you know, this is an idea, Airbnb, I mean I think my cofounder Joe was on this episode, so I won’t tell the founding story, but just to give you the whole story of Airbnb in like one minute, I was living with Joe in San Francisco, we couldn’t afford to pay rent.
An international design conference was coming to San Francisco, all the hotels were sold out and that’s when we had an idea one weekend. We said, what if we just turned our house into a bed and breakfast for the design conference? Unfortunately Joe didn’t have any beds, but we had three air beds. We pulled the air beds out of the closet, we inflated them and we called it the Air Bed and Breakfast dot com. We ended up hosting three people that weekend, three designers, Michael, Catherine and Mo and something remarkable happened.
Beyond making money, we actually got to meet really cool people and ended up becoming friends with some of them. And so we ended up starting this company, Airbnb and I remember telling somebody about the idea and he looks at me and he says, Brian, and I said, yes, and he said, “I hope that’s not the only idea you’re working on.”
Airbnb was, people said the idea was crazy, it will never work. Strangers will never stay with other strangers in their homes. And so Airbnb you know, Silicon Valley has really got laws of physics, not as good as the laws of human nature and I felt like this was a fundamental law of human nature that actually contact between strangers is one of the things that’s defined humanity and that it doesn’t have to end badly.
And so we ended up building Airbnb and against all odds, it kind of, obviously took off; it became a noun and verb in pop culture. We had 750 million guest arrivals, we had customer sales, the amount of money people spent in Airbnb was greater than they spent at Starbucks, so it was like a huge thing. And then all of a sudden we’re preparing to go public, this is 10 years later, I feel like we’re a very iconic Silicon Valley success and all of a sudden, boom! Pandemic hits!
It was like you’re on a ship and there’s a torpedo hits it. We spent 12 years building Airbnb and then we lost 80% of our business in six weeks, 80%. In that moment it was just, it was, I’m trying to think of the word to describe it. When you rise fast you’re going to fall even faster and it was really hard. But something else happened. People started reaching out to us saying that they, you know, they were supporting us, people were rooting for us. That they still wanted Airbnb to exist and this is when all they wrote all these articles, like will Airbnb exist and you know, can it survive.
It was only a couple of months ago, by the way, and I started getting a lot of incredibly wonderful people reaching out to me, old friends and employees and I started turning to the relationships that I had. Like my cofounders, Joe and Nate and over the course of 10 or 12 years you kind of like, you all work on your things and we all get really busy and we do all these things and sometimes you get so occupied that you don’t have time for the very basics.
And something about a crisis, I think, it brought us back together and we started talking so much more deeply about so many subjects and I started getting much closer to other people, just out of pure survival. Like you have to cause you need each other to get through something. You learn a lot about yourself in a crisis and when we lost so much, I learned a few things.
The first thing is, sometimes you have to almost lose something to learn how much you love it. The second is that you learn a lot about other people and yourself in a crisis and you realize what’s truly important and what your purpose is. You get, sometimes, not all the time, total clarity. And for us, our total clarity was like; we had to get Airbnb back to the roots of connection and bringing in the human connection of belonging. It wasn’t even about real estate or travel, it was about this more fundamental thing.
Out of necessity, out of just ability to get to the next day, relations became even more important than ever cause that’s kind of, at the end of the day, was almost the only things you have left. And then kind of like day by day we started, I think kind of building Airbnb back up, from the foundation, from the relationships, from this core idea.
I’m still in this, like I’m still working out of my apartment, or my house, staring into an iMac every day, working 18 hours a day, just trying to keep the company through this. If millions of people are depending on us, and it’s been the most defining period of my life, probably since we started Airbnb and even starting Airbnb, it would be hard to rival this period.
I also know that we all can get through this, so long as we get through it together. And I think no matter how isolating and lonely it feels, our perception that we’re alone is mostly a perception. That we are actually much more connected than we perceive and there are so many more people that love us than we realize in that very moment. And sometimes it takes a crisis to realize how much love and support you have around you.
But you don’t need that crisis if you can just open your eyes and see what you have and just reach out. Think about all the people around you that love you and are you talking to them and now is a really good time, and you’re like, I don’t need to do that, so if you did, you’d probably feel a lot better. And that might be the antidote to what we’re feeling right now. Our bubbles are getting smaller, but we can push against that. And I think that’s really important.
AD: I think that’s the most important thing. I think that’s what this crisis is trying to teach us, as a global society.
BC: We talk about essentials right, essential business, as if it’s something that comes in a cardboard box to our front door. Well, yeah, that’s also essential, there are some essential things, but there are some, even more fundamental essentials that I think it’s important to remember.
AD: Yeah, it’s that hierarchy of needs -
BC: Yeah.
AD: As your doctor said, fundamental lack of connection is the highest cause of death.
BC: Yeah it’s like the root cause of so many other preventable diseases, addiction, depression, anxiety, obesity, it’s not, it’s not a cause of all of that, but if you reverse engineer many of those causes, it has roots in these other problems and then you ask how do we even get there? Well, because we inadvertently, collectively designed a world that disconnected us and we all did it together. And if we did it together, we can fix it together and we just need to be, first of all, conscious that even happened and then we’ve got to try to design something different.
AD: You talked about zooming out, design the room, design the neighborhood that the room lives in, have you done this with your own life? Have you zoomed out and thought about the life you want to be living in 10 years, in 40 years?
BC: Oh man, that’s a very good question.
AD: Like you made a choice when you were 17, to be happy.
BC: I chose that, yes and I love the work, but you know what? That’s something I’m still trying to, I guess the thing has been like, everything has changed so quickly that the personal part of it has been more disorienting than the professional part because you’re making something and the thing you made just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and you see it grow. But I think, I don’t know, up until this point so much of my focus has been on Airbnb. You know, when you start a company, I guess you probably feel like this, like you’re almost like a parent and the company is like your child and so it’s normal to focus so much of your energy on the thing you’re creating. And that’s kind of where a lot of my attention has been and I think that’s a story a lot of people share when they make something and especially when it gets a lot of momentum.
AD: Yeah, but I mean kids grow up and go away to college -
BC: [Laughs] Yes.
AD: And eventually parents become empty nesters -
BC: Yes I think that’s maybe, you know, I think that’s maybe what some of this has been for many of us has just been a moment of reflection, right? What kind of life do you want to live and who do you want to be. Yeah, I don’t know, I’m sure like many people, I do certainly think about that kind of stuff. And one thing that’s super clear to me is, again, just keeping back to, is the value of the people in your life. That is so important and you know, like we are the accumulation of our relationships and our experiences, probably as much as anything, right? And I think it’s very easy to say, well, the accumulation of all the stuff we have in life, but we’re probably more the the accumulation of our experiences and our relationships, probably more than anything.
AD: Well, I think our relationships are mirrors and we ultimately evolve and grow through our relationships but our stuff is just stuff, it’s baggage.
BC: Yeah, I think we’ve kind of, it is kind of interesting, we came from a society that had a lot of relationships and not a lot of stuff and so that way basically you created this industrial, like the industrial world that allowed us to create so much more stuff and now it’s kind of tipped, we have so much stuff and so many tools and you know, what we need, you know, aren’t just more tools and more stuff. But we need to kind of get back some of the stuff that we traded it in for a little bit and just do our time, our energy. And maybe this crisis is in some way a great awakening on some of the stuff.
AD: I think so.
BC: Yeah, well, hopefully that was [laughs], even more existential, jeez, I keep falling for the existential trap. I don’t talk that way, let’s just talk about, let’s just talk about movies, well, film, what does it really mean [laughs] and I’m like crap, I keep doing that.
AD: [Laughs] Well, before I let you go and we do a thank you, is there anything that you want to talk about, anything, any project that’s in the pipeline or anything for our listeners to keep an eye on, that they might want to check out?
BC: One of the things we’ve wanted to do is when we said we wanted to get back to the roots of Airbnb and we talked about getting back to the roots of community and all that, the other thing that Joe and I talked about is getting back to the roots of design.
Because Airbnb was started by three people and two of them were designers. And I really want to use design to bring the creative spirit to our product. And so I think one of the things I’m super excited about our experiences product. We have these, I mean most people know Airbnb for homes and you can get a home anywhere in the world. But we also realized the biggest asset in people’s life really is not their home, it’s their time and many people have time, they have passions, they want to share them with other people.
And so what if you could allow somebody to book an experience, having, with another person or a group of people. And so we have chefs who do cooking classes and we have art history professors doing education experiences. We have 200 Olympians that right now on Airbnb are offering experiences online where you can basically, like I did an experience last week, this past week with 1988 Gold Medallist, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, she was heptathlete and Sports Illustrated, I think, named her the best female athlete of the 20th century or something.
And you can actually have these really cool experiences with people. So you know, so much of what we’re trying to do is not just find a ways to provide housing for people, although that’s very important, talk about the pyramid of needs, but also kind of work our way up the pyramid and find some other ways to connect with people and help people get a glimpse into other people’s worlds.
And maybe inspire more curiosity about, a little bit more curiosity about people and cultures, through common interests right. And so that’s one of the things you’re trying to do. So we have experiences, we have online experiences and I think that’ll be one of the really important things that we’re going to be offering in the future. Yeah, if you ever want to learn any kind of passion, the difference between our experiences and others is they’re just really interactive.
They’re small, you participate, it’s 6-8 people, so hopefully it’s a way to actually connect, not just passively view something, like on YouTube or Instagram. That’s kind of the core theory there, that there’s many influencers on Instagram, there’s many people doing videos on YouTube, you don’t interact with them, you don’t meet them, they don’t know you exist.
And you can’t meet other people on them, and so what if you could actually interact with people and connect and so that’s one of the things we’re trying to do. We’re going to also come up with other ways for people to find connection as well. So we have these homes, obviously, a lot of people know them, experiences, not as many people know them, but we want to come up with some other ways.
And I think over the next year, hopefully you’ll see some new things that we’ll offer and hopefully people can stay tuned. Because I think we can launch some really cool stuff and yeah, so that’s kind of what we’re focused on now.
AD: I love it, thank you so much, this has been -
BC: Thank you.
AD: This has been so gratifying,
BC: By the way, to end where we started, I’m being interviewed by somebody I went to college with, following, you interviewing, somebody I went to high school with, just like, if there was ever, if there was ever the universe telling you something [laughs], it would be this.
AD: Yeah, no, it was meant to be, it was totally meant to be. Hey, thanks for listening. To view photos of Brian or read the show notes, click the link in the details of this episode on your podcast app, or go to Cleverpodcast.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe to Clever on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you would please do us a favor if you like Clever, rate and review, it really does help people find us. We also love chatting with you on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you can find us at Clever Podcast and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is produced by 2VDE Media with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Laura Jaramillo and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.
Malene Barnett portrait by Alaric Campbell Photography
Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.
Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Music in this episode courtesy of El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.
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