Airbnb’s bet on an IRL future

BRIAN CHESKY: Silicon Valley’s gotten more political. People were running towards a certain administration, obviously Trump. There’s a very good chance it’ll be a new administration in three years, maybe not, but let’s say there’s a 50/50 chance of a new administration. I’m kind of curious, do they run the other way and do the worlds swing back and forth?

And I think there’s a lot of swinging. There was all this focus on DEI, and then there was all this focus to roll it all back, and there’s all this focus to go here, and now there’s all this focus to go here. And it’s like I try to imagine what will still be true in 20 years? What do we believe in? Because whatever’s true in 20 years are our principles and our values, and everything else is just a trend. Everything else is just trying to fit in.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco on October 9th. I wanted to talk to Brian about the role of business in building the future at a time of dramatic disruption. Brian shares his candid perspective on business and politics, creativity and AI, how to make decisions in a volatile world, and more. We’ll be releasing additional highlights from Masters of Scale Summit in the days and weeks ahead. Brian’s thought-provoking, instructive ideas have particular urgency. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

Brian, thanks for coming in.

CHESKY: Thank you for having me here.

Copy LinkExpanding Airbnb beyond travel and housing

SAFIAN: Always great to talk with you. Airbnb expanded this year to include experiences and services alongside stays. So in honor of that, I’m going to use some specific experiences that I’ve chosen that are available on the platform to lead us to some questions for Airbnb and for all of us. So is that good? Is that okay?

CHESKY: Yeah, let’s do it. Yeah.

SAFIAN: All right. All right, so let’s bring up the first experience. This is craft noodles with a Ramen legend in Tokyo. I understand this is an experience that you have actually been on.

CHESKY: I’ve done this. It’s really good, yeah.

SAFIAN: Airbnb has always been about belonging and making the world feel smaller, staying with, learning from a guest, a host, someone who can become a new friend. The macro environment we’re in right now has become a little less conducive to that, with more pushback. The world feels a little bit more isolated with global trade and global trust. We all feel a little bit more separated. How do you think about belonging in the environment we’re in right now?

CHESKY: It’s kind of funny. I remember I was in middle school when the internet came out, and the whole idea of the internet was it was going to connect the world, and it made the world immediately feel smaller. And I came to Silicon Valley in 2007, and we started Airbnb. And when I came to Silicon Valley, the iPhone just launched. AWS meant that anyone could start a company without needing servers. The internet was going global. Social media, social networking at the time, was kind of blowing up, and I wasn’t anticipating what would happen.

In 2012, social networking became social media. In fact, I think social networking is the most popular product of all time that was invented, then uninvented, because your friends became your followers and your connections became basically like performing and then performance replaced intimacy. And one day we wake up, and we’re staring at a piece of glass all day. And if you could time travel 20 years into the future, people 20 years ago would walk around the street and say, “The world almost looks exactly the same except now everyone’s staring at a piece of glass all the time and sometimes not even leaving their home.”

I think what’s happening now is this is by some measures the loneliest time in human history. Loneliness is rising throughout the world. If you look at the birth rate, it’s dropping everywhere. Mental health is rising, mental health crises are rising. The loneliest cohort in America I think are teenage girls. I think the second loneliest cohort in America are men without a college education that just feel left out by society.

And so I think something has happened, which is very unfortunate. If we were this lonely a thousand years ago, we would all have been dead. But somehow there’s an app that can deliver something to us, but we can find ourselves feeling more connected than ever, but actually feeling more isolated than ever before. And I think you’ve just got to ask yourself, if you have children, are you happy with the world that they’re growing up in?

And there’s something very bizarre here where it feels like every innovation is a step forward for humanity and yet somehow there’s a larger cost, there’s a larger price that we’re paying. And the price we’re paying is I just think we’re a little more isolated. We’re a little more divided, we’re a little more lonely. When I started Airbnb, I said, “Airbnb is a community.” My mom said, “What? Like a neighborhood?”

I mean, what communities exist today in the physical world? They’re diminishing. There’s not a sense of community, there’s not a sense of belonging. And so why are we doing all this? What are we building this towards? And so I’m not here to say we’re going to fix this. I’d like to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. I want Airbnb to be the company that gets you off your phone, not on your phone. Because I think real connection happens in the real world. And I think a big thing that’s happening is people want to feel like they’re a part of something, they belong.

And you might wonder, well how the heck is Airbnb, a company where you stay in homes, no one else is in the home, making you feel like you belong? And it’s a good point because Airbnb started with me renting my house to three guests and I hung out with them, I became friends with them. We walked around the city together and we became friends. And our business was like booking air beds. We were called Air Bed and Breakfast. That Air Bed and Breakfast was air mattresses. I inflated three air beds one weekend. Air beds. And then it was air beds for conferences and it was a way to connect with other people at conferences.

And then it was staying in a bedroom. In fact, one time someone said, “I want to put my bedroom on Airbnb.” And I said, “Great. Just get an air mattress, inflate it, put it on your mattress.” And then suddenly we realized, “Okay, you can put your bedroom in Airbnb.” And then somebody said, so we were a network of bedrooms, and then one person said, “I want to put my whole home in Airbnb.” And I said, “How can you put your whole home in Airbnb and not be there? Who’s going to make breakfast for them?” Because we’re Air Bed and Breakfast. So pretty soon the name made no sense. We shortened it to Airbnb and then we have mostly empty homes.

I love what we do. It’s been used almost three billion times. I do think it helps bring people together. But I don’t think we do enough. And I think experiences and services and many of the features we’re coming out with is about this idea that we want to make the world feel smaller. I want to build not an app, but a community. You’ll use the app to get the community. We’re going to invest in AI, but it’s not about that. It’s a means to building a community because the only thing you can belong to is a community or a tribe or a family. We want to build a global community where you can travel anywhere, live anywhere, and belong anywhere, because I think that’s what the world needs.

SAFIAN: And when you went on this particular experience in Tokyo, it’s not a lot of people. It’s a pretty intimate—

CHESKY: No, this was a really small one. This is an Airbnb original experience. It’s like one of the really vetted ones. And 40% of the Airbnb original experiences are booked by people in their own city. So there’s something really interesting here, which is, Airbnb, people think of as a travel app, and it is, but I think in the future it’s going to be much more than just travel. If we are successful, and I don’t know if we will be, we’ve got to be humble here, but it would be, if it is successful, it’d be a new form of entertainment.

What do you do on a Friday night? You go to a restaurant, you get food, you maybe stay home, watch Netflix. People used to go to theaters. Bars and lounges aren’t as common anymore. I want to be a third category of entertainment, not just for travelers but for locals. I think with services, there’s no Amazon for services. Like hit a button, get a service. It’s crazy. You can get a car, you can get food delivered. But what about the 80 other services? There’s no site to do that.

So we’re starting with travel, but we think we can branch out to be much more than housing. I mean, basically I spent 17 years with our team trying to do one thing. Amazon expanded from books to everything within two or three years. We spent 17 years doing one thing and it got pretty big.

SAFIAN: But now you want to be the everything app, you want to do everything?

CHESKY: Not everything.

SAFIAN: You can’t.

CHESKY: Can’t do everything. So we’re going to try to do anything related to traveling and living that’s really about community and making the world feel smaller.

Copy LinkIntegrating AI while doubling down on human experience

SAFIAN: Yeah. All right, let’s go to the next experience. This is Chicago’s Engineering Marvels. I picked this because—

CHESKY: I haven’t done this one.

SAFIAN: Yeah, because Chicago sort of invented the skyscraper, and it was the hub of innovation in its time. And it made me think of the hub of innovation this time, which is AI, which we’ve talked about a lot at this Summit. You’ve talked about doubling down on real-life human experiences, but also that Airbnb will always be a safe haven for humans to work in. But you’re not ignoring AI in Airbnb’s operations, the way you work and your products. So how do you think about this framework of using this new technology but not having it use us?

CHESKY: Okay, ChatGPT launched three years ago. I think everyone in tech thought AI would be the thing, but we all thought it’d be like in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years. And then on November 30th of 2022, I think it was, Sam did a little tweet and all of a sudden the world completely changed forever. And yet how much of daily life has changed three years later? I’d say almost nothing has changed because of AI. Almost nothing.

So what’s changed? People still stare at their phone. Instead of sometimes going to Google, they go to ChatGPT. And ChatGPT is really big. It’s got about 800 million users, I think weekly active users. So that’s changed. Now as of a week ago, Sora, that’s really kind of replacing TikTok and Instagram and it’s pretty obvious what Instagram’s going to do to follow them. Because the Sora app, the Sora videos are showing up in Instagram. So Mark is going to make all the content AI generated and then that’s going to get boosted over influencers. They’re going to have a freak out and this is going to be a big problem. So that’s going to happen and that’s happening in weeks, not months, unfortunately.

But I think we just need to ask ourselves, yes, if you go to the app store and you rank the top 50 apps in the app store, I think the first app is Sora, the second app is ChatGPT, the third app is Gemini. And apps four through 50 are not AI apps. They’re just apps that were, like ours, the same as they were before AI.

So here’s my belief. My belief is the real change in society happens when apps change. Think of this as like a gold rush. We’re here in San Francisco. Intelligence is the gold. There’s a whole bunch of start-ups that are enterprise start-ups. Those are like the picks and shovels company. I am on the board of Y Combinator.

There’s tons of companies that are starting AI companies. They’re almost all enterprise companies. They’re all new ways to do work with AI. There’s not a lot of popular consumer companies other than the aforementioned three apps. In the next three years, we’re going to have to do something with the gold and we’re going to have to build apps. It’s like we invented the jet engine, we put it behind a car. We have to invent the airplane, we have to build applications. And so I want us to help build AI native applications.

And the other thing I’ll say about AI is the term AI, the important term is artificial. We are now living in a world as of last week, with the video content, where you cannot know for certain, I mean there could be digital fingerprints that this is real, but we’re going to live in a world where it’s not clear that what you’re seeing is real. In other words, now anything-

SAFIAN: You can’t tell.

CHESKY: You won’t be able to tell. And I think that’s maybe the point of it, that in the future if it’s on a screen, it will be artificial, or it could be artificial. And so you want to ride a trend or you ride the opposite of a trend, and the opposite of artificial is real. The opposite of screen is the real world. And so I think that the real world will not change that much in the next three years.

I think we’re going to basically create this digital world, staring at a screen that’s highly artificial. It’s going to get more and more immersive. And there’s going to be a physical world. You’re going to have robotics, but other than robotics, people are going to still drink wine the same way. All that stuff’s going to be very, very similar. Now, a lot of robotics can replace a lot of jobs. People aren’t going to be driving cars in the future. They’re not going to be working in warehouses in the future. They’re not going to be checking people out or doing certain things.

So what are they going to do? I don’t know all the things they’re going to do, but I think hosting is a real opportunity. I don’t think you want a robot to give you a massage anytime soon. And so I don’t think you want an AI to do this experience. You want a human connection. And again, people want real connections in the real world. Why are people feeling so lonely right now? Because they’re connecting with, before, until recently they were connecting with people they don’t know, arguing with people on the internet, and your Instagram followers aren’t coming to your funeral. No one changed someone else’s mind in the YouTube comment section.

And now pretty soon we’re going to have a situation where your friends are going to be AIs. So there has to be this movement to real. So we want to be an AI native app. We want to be one of the largest workforces in the world, and we’re really doubling down on real people, real world, real connection. We want to be an AI native application to get you off your phone, into the world that will be somewhat unadulterated by AI.

Copy LinkThe power of design in shaping business and technology

SAFIAN: All right. All right, let’s go to the next experience. It’s about design and it’s Get Styled like a Celebrity with Jamie Mizrahi. When you talk design, you’re talking about more than style and looks. You’re talking about systems, you’re talking about structures. You’re among a handful of CEO designers that are out there.

And I guess I’m curious both what people in this room maybe misunderstand about design. And I was thinking when you were talking about AI, how we’re going to design businesses in the future in this. Because I’ve heard people out here say, “Oh, we should be an AI first company.” And it’s like, what does that mean? We don’t even know what that means.

CHESKY: Well, okay, you said a lot of things. Number one, I don’t know if it’s in three years or five years, but okay, let’s talk about, let’s just take OpenAI for example. OpenAI is an AI company. Clearly.

Let’s just as a thought experiment, just replace the term AI or intelligence with electricity. Imagine there was a company and they helped harness electricity and they use electricity. And now there’s like three companies. There’s a company called Google, they use electricity. OpenAI uses electricity. And no one else uses electricity yet.

We are in this very unique period of time in human history where there’s these companies that are harnessing this electricity. They are electrified and no one else is yet electrified. We are soon going to live in a world where everyone uses electricity. Just like today, every business uses electricity unless they have some principle against it. And so I think all technology companies will be AI companies. There’ll be no such thing as a company that’s not an AI company.

SAFIAN: And so you don’t need to design yourself differently because—

CHESKY: Oh, you will. Everything is going to change. But I guess my first point is I don’t know what a technology company is and is not AI company. And I don’t think people will call OpenAI an AI company in the future. I mean, they’re going to call it an AI company, it’s a technology company and I think every company’s going to be an AI company. So that’s the first thing.

Then let’s just talk about, well, what is design? I remember, so I was an artist growing up and I was actually, I liked to draw and I go to art school. My mom was a social worker and I remember my mom said, “I chose a job for the love. I didn’t get paid any money. So you should choose a job that pays you a lot of money.” And one day I told my mom, “I’m going to be an artist.”

And she said, “You chose the only job in America that’ll pay you less than a social worker. You’re going to get paid literally nothing. You’re going to live in my basement.” I said, “I’m not going to live in your basement.” She said, “You better get a real job one day.” And I said, “What’s a real job?” She says, “A job with health insurance.”

I go to Rhode Island School of Design and I go into this field called industrial design. And then it was like the design of everything, a toothbrush, a spaceship, and everything in between. And there was this whole thing in RISD about how do we get design in the boardroom? It’s kind of like, be in the room where it happens. Have a seat at the table. And I noticed that the Fortune 500, how many CEOs of the Fortune 500 were designers? Actually today, how many designers, how many CEOs of Fortune 500 are designers?

SAFIAN: You actually are a unicorn.

CHESKY: Yeah, I think there’s one. And they’re sitting here I think.

SAFIAN: Yeah.

CHESKY: I think so. I don’t know if there’s a second one. There might be, but that’s crazy. Okay, so let’s say there’s 500 companies in the Fortune 500 and they have an average of 10 board members. So there’s 5,000. How many of those people are creative people or designers? There’s very few.

I remember when I started B&B, I pitched an investor. The investor said, “We love everything but you and your idea.” And I said to Joe, Nate, “Good news. He loves everything else.” They’re like, “What is everything else?” And he basically said, “Strangers won’t live together and designers don’t start companies.”

Now, at that time, Steve Jobs was alive, had just launched the iPhone, and no one said Steve Jobs was a designer. They said he was like a visionary, which is almost like calling someone God. We say that when we don’t understand what they are. I thought of Steve Jobs as an artist and when he died, he looked back on his work as a body of work, like an artist or a designer.

I thought Walt Disney was a designer. And I felt like design is a really important thing. Design isn’t just how something looks. In fact, that’s Steve’s word. Steve said, “Design is the fundamental soul of a manmade creation that reveals itself through subsequent layers. It’s not just how something looks. It’s how it fundamentally works.” And I think that we need more design in America. We need more design in companies. I think we have, we’re living through the AB test algorithmification of society. And I think AI is an opportunity for us to either go more mindlessly into just following the data or really harness the idea that design is about understanding.

And people think designers just do things and it’s intuition. I’m like, well, what is intuition? Intuition is this deep understanding of something. And to do great design, you have to do something that’s simple. And to do something that’s simple, you have to not just remove something, you have to distill it to its essence. You have to deeply understand it.

And so for me, I think design is not just how this app looks. I tried to redesign our company, hence founder mode, which was this idea that there was a different way to run a company. And so I think we need more design in the world, and design is just a different way to assemble something, do a job better. In the age of AI where more and more coding can be done by the AI because software is a language, I think increasingly we’re all going to become designers, including engineers. We’ll be essentially designing.

SAFIAN: And the best engineers have always been designers.

CHESKY: They’ve always been designers. Steve Jobs used to say, “The best engineers are also poets and artists.” And I think one of the most impressive people in human history was Leonardo da Vinci. And he was an artist and a scientist. And I don’t proclaim to be both, but I do think some of the very best people can have a breadth between the two.

And if you took Silicon Valley, a lot of people are like a body and you cut in… Most companies, you cut off the company at the head. There’s not a lot of heart and one side of the brain. And I think we need the right side of the brain and the heart to permeate every single company. Otherwise, what kind of world are we going to live in? We’re going to live in a world devoid of creativity and devoid of heart, and therefore devoid of humanism and the human spirit. And I don’t think we want to live in that kind of world.

SAFIAN: Amen. Amen.

Brian’s design sensibility helps him to see the big picture at a time when intense change can make our vision of the future blurry. So how is he thinking about the rising political pressures facing businesses in the US and what kind of responsibility do business leaders have in shaping the future of AI? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, we heard Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, live at the Masters of Scale Summit, talk about the need for belonging and the impact of AI. Now we talk about his perspective on the U.S. White House, the challenge of navigating swings in policy, and what it takes to center your decision making, plus the one question every business should ask itself. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkNavigating political pressures and policy swings

All right, I’m going to take you to experience number four here. It’s a different kind of harder question. This is the National Mall architecture, and I chose this one because it’s in the heart of DC. Your co-founder, Joe Gebbia, now works at the White House as the chief design officer, although you were not among the cohort of tech CEOs who had dinner with Donald Trump there. What’s the state of the conversation between you and your peers about how to navigate with this new administration, this new environment? I mean, it’s incredibly tricky to know what to do. And I don’t even know how you’re going to answer this question.

CHESKY: I don’t know either, actually. So let’s see. Silicon Valley’s gotten more political, and when I came to Silicon Valley, maybe it was more left, but it kind of felt more moderate and it didn’t feel as much like it was as political. I do think that another thing that I am noticing is people are running towards a certain administration, obviously Trump. There’s a very good chance there’ll be a new administration in three years, maybe not, but let’s say there’s a 50/50 chance of a new administration, and I’m kind of curious, do they run the other way and do the worlds swing back and forth?

And I think there’s a lot of swinging. There was all this focus on DEI and then there was all this focus to roll it all back. And there’s all this focus to go here and now there’s all this focus to go here. And it’s like back and forth and back and forth. I think I try to imagine what will still be true in 20 years. What do we believe in? Because whatever’s true in 20 years are our principles and our values and everything else is just a trend. Everything else is just trying to fit in. Everyone else is just rushing to whatever is popular at that current time.

And so I think every company just has to ask themselves what do they stand for? What are their values? And I think I try to be pretty clear about what we stand for. And so I try to not wade into too many political topics unless I feel like I have something to add to the conversation and it’s something that is connected to our vision or our values. I mean, the other thing about politics is we’re trying to bring the world together. That’s what I’d like to do. The problem with politics, I don’t have a better system, but it’s 50 plus one. You have to divide them and get plus one. And it is inherently a divisive thing and Airbnb’s mission is inherently unifying.

Do you know the number of Trump supporters who stayed in a house of a Kamala Harris supporter over the course of the election? Millions. Do you know the number of Democrats, Republicans that live together and don’t even know they’re Democrats and Republicans? When you travel, it’s one of the one times in your life that you’re truly open-minded. Even prejudice, people with prejudice, don’t have prejudice when they travel because they’re in someone else’s land and they’re now open-minded. You don’t talk to the Uber driver in your own city, but you do in another city. You have a completely different orientation. Travel brings out the best in you.

And there’s this ancient hospitality. It started with ancient Egyptians, started with the Greeks, that the guest is God and we’re going to serve them. And so I try to zoom out, I try to focus a little less on divisive issues and say the best way to change someone else’s mind about other people in a time that’s really divided is to walk in their shoes, to live in their home, and to bring people together and remind people that basically I’ve learned two lessons after having started Airbnb. People are fundamentally good and we’re 99% the same. And you read the newspaper and you engage in political discourse and you can forget that we’re basically all the same. And if that wasn’t true, we would have been out of business a long time ago. And so that’s why I’m very careful about falling and treading into politics. We will, but very selectively.

SAFIAN: And these swings that you talk about, where it swings from one way to the other, how do you keep yourself from getting caught up in those? Because there’s a lot of pressure sometimes behind those.

CHESKY: Well, I stay off Twitter a little or X a little bit. And I mean there’s this temptation to want to participate in every conversation and to feel like you have to have an opinion and wade into everything. And actually I try not to have opinions about things that I don’t know a lot about until I learn about it.

I think there was a period of time where people in tech felt like we had to have a statement about every single issue. That was quite a burden, though, because either you learn about the issue or you’re just jumping on a bandwagon. You don’t really know and you’re not really informed. So I just try to make sure I tell the company, “We are going to be thoughtful as a company. We’re not going to swing back and forth. We’re going to do whatever we think is the right thing to do.”

SAFIAN: Yeah. You talked to me before about the difference between a business decision and a principle decision.

CHESKY: A business decision is like trying to gamify the outcome to win. A principle decision is I don’t know how it’s going to end, so how do I want to be remembered irrespective of the outcome? And if you do that, it’s another way of doing whatever you think the right thing to do is, whatever you think is true. And maybe you lose in the short run, but you lose the battle, but you win the war because ultimately you’re rarely going to get out of business because you stick to your principles and your values. And people want to work for a company like that and we want to buy products from people who lead in that way.

Copy LinkBrian Chesky’s favorite question to ask entrepreneurs

SAFIAN: Awesome. All right, so we’re down to our last experience here, Explore Notre Dame with its Restoration Architect. I picked this because as we’re wrapping up this idea of the future we build, and I was looking at this, there’s this sort of balance for all of us between how much are we restoring what’s been broken and how much are we building something totally new, totally different?

So what do you think Airbnb’s role is in building the future? And as a follow-on, for the folks who are sitting in this room, what’s the role that they should be taking in building the future?

CHESKY: I like to ask entrepreneurs, I like to ask an entrepreneur a question, “Why does your company deserve to exist?” And the best kind of generic answer I’ve ever heard is, “Because if I don’t do it, no one else will.” And I like to ask that question to myself, what could we uniquely do that if we don’t do it, anyone else will? And I think that we’re just this particular company and we were naive to believe that people are basically good and it was a good idea to have a stranger in your home.

And ultimately, I think that what we’re trying to build, again, is this global community because I think communities are eroding all over the world. I think we have a place in this world to do something unique. I think that design is a hugely underlevered superpower. I think it’s going to be really important in the age of AI. I think for every business leader, I think that you should ask, “If you never existed, what would be different about the world? What is your unique imprint to do?”

I say this because I think a lot of people like to chase trends. And by the way, by the time it’s a trend, sometimes it’s late. Once it has a name, it’s late. Although AI will go on forever, so that one might be different. So then what in AI? What in AI, because everything’s AI at some point? What is not AI?

So I think business leaders should focus on a unique contribution they can make. I think we are in building mode. I think it’s going to be so revolutionary. You ask, is it a new house or renovation? I think it’s a new house. I think that’s exciting. I think it’s slightly scary.

I do not think, first of all, I love engineers, I love technology people, but I don’t think anyone thinks the only engineers should be building the future because only engineers or a certain type of people didn’t build this world. This world was built by humanities people and artists and scientists and creative people and all different people. And so use this physical architecture. It’s been studied for thousands of years. We’re now about to use this technology to build a new world.

My concern with AI is that only a few people are going to be building the future. I think the best case scenario is that everyone’s building the future together. Everyone here should participate. And if you are one of the people building the future, you should enlist as many different types of people to build the future because we want to live in a world that is completely multidisciplinary.

And I also think it behooves us to be conscientious as business leaders because we’re going to have so much power that the question society’s going to ask is, do we deserve this power? So I think it’s really important for us to be conscientious, to take responsibility, to regulate ourselves, and to enlist as many people as possible, not to rebuild or renovate the future, but to absolutely build the future. Because this is the greatest technological revolution, I don’t know, since the Industrial Revolution. But as people pointed out, the Industrial Revolution was amazing. It also led to numerous world wars.

SAFIAN: We were talking backstage about, are you optimistic about the future or are you nervous about the future? And my answer is kind of yes.

CHESKY: It’s like nuclear energy.

SAFIAN: And I’m curious how—

CHESKY: Well, nuclear energy, is it good or bad? Well, it can light up a city or destroy a city. These are just tools. This is the most powerful tool ever invented. What do we do with it? And I think, like I see with AI some amazing things, and I see with AI some not so amazing things. It doesn’t make AI good or bad. It’s a tool.

SAFIAN: It’s about us.

CHESKY: It’s what we do. It’s always been about us. It’s not about the technology. You see, we create our tools and our tools shape us. And I think we need to be careful about the ways the tools are shaping us, and we need to keep being the one to shape our tools. And we need to work backwards from not how do we grow, how do we build this new world? We should not be asking, those are not the right questions. The right question is, if you have children, what kind of world do you want them to live in? And start with that and say, “Well, then build that kind of world.”

SAFIAN: Amen, Brian.

CHESKY: Thank you.

SAFIAN: Thank you so much.

CHESKY: Thank you.

SAFIAN: I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Brian many times, and I always learn something new. His analysis of how AI is and isn’t changing our world, and his emphasis on our cultural and political swings from one pole to the other are critical reminders of our need for both agility in our action and steadiness in our principles. I’m particularly struck by his plea for multidisciplinary input in AI development, which is poised to have such wide-ranging impact.

Brian was one of many multidisciplinary speakers at this year’s Masters of Scale Summit, from the CEO of the New York Times to the Commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League, to retired U.S. General Stanley McChrystal. We’ll be bringing you those conversations and more in the Rapid Response episodes ahead.

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.