Deborahears, my wife and i have traveled across the country, especially across the towns, to learn about those parts of the american story. For conversation about future travel, i am glad to welcome the. Eo of airbnb, brian thank you so much for joining us. I have questions about your business in the olden times, in the future times. I want to start with one big picture question about all the enterprises that have an affected by the enterprise, yours has to be most affected. You are about mobility, and people have not been mobile. What is the main lesson, surprise, or discovery that you personally have taken from the experience in the last eight months or so. Ourn we lost about 80 of business in eight weeks, that we had spent about a decade building. That was quite surprising. What may have been even more surprising what is what happened next. What happens next is people, no matter the circumstances, in the midst of the pandemic, still had the desire to travel. They did not want to get on planes, they were not necessarily traveling for business, they did not want to go to a hotel or crowded tourist district, but they did want to get in a car with a tank of gas and go to a community, and often some of them were getting homes with airbnb. So i think there is just a fundamental desire that people have to travel, to connect, the see the world, and i dont think that anything can stop it, let alone a pandemic. Obviously, people have to do it responsibly, but there is still a very strongwilled to see the world. It just has to be done in a much narrower context right now because of the health ramifications. James something that is fascinating about airbnb is it is a new way of doing something people have done for a very long time travel, lodging, seeing different parts of the world. Because it has been done for such a long time, theres a large structure of regulations and tax arrangements and other ways in which the lodging industry has been historically regulated. The fact that you are doing that in a new way has led to some tensions with, especially, city governments. I understand airbnb has a new way of approaching your relationship with city governments in particular. Can you tell me about your relationship with that . Brian one of our Guiding Principles is we want to strengthen the communities we serve. I started this company with my two friends when i was 26 years old. I had one job before this, and, you know, when i came to silicon wasey, the Culture Technology might be a cinema for the word good, and if you were in the technology industry, you felt like you are making the world a better place and what happened is our company got so big and something occurred to the industry and all of us that greater responsibility, that the culture of the web 1. 0, that the internet is an immune system, that if you give it to many tools to regulate itself, it probably is not enough, and you have to take more responsibility for the activity happening on your platform. So that is one of the things we started doing a number of years ago, antedate, and to date, we have partnerships with more than 400 cities, and we pay more than 200 billion in hotel tax. The problem is, we are in 100,000 cities, and every city is a relationship. It can be difficult to have these relationships on a total oneoff basis. In the pandemic, people are not just traveling to 20 or 30 cities anymore, because they are getting in cars, and they are going to small communities nearby. What we want to do is we want to scale these relationships and allow thousands of cities to know the activity happening on airbnb, get the information they need, be able to contact us, and have the compliance tools. Thehat we are trading is city portal. The city portal is basically a onestop shop for a city, a small town, or even a Rural Community to be able to partner with airbnb. So you get three things data and information about the nature of the airbnb activity in your city. They would know how to contact us and who to contact for which problem. And the third thing is we are building some compliance tools so that they can essentially help administer the activity happening in the city. James and what stage is that at . Is it being rolled out . Brian we are now launching that, and we are launching that now in, i think, about 15 cities. We partnered with about 15 cities to work, and we want to design it with these cities. We do not want to just drop it on the city. But our vision is to roll this out and thousands of cities and communities, anyone who wants to partner up. James theres one other longstanding challenge of the United States through the centuries of its history and especially america of this year, of reckoning with Racial Justice and racial injustice. Because you are dealing with millions of people, some of the people you are exposed to are being discriminatory, whether they are guests or hosts. How is airbnb dealing with this part of the american challenge . Brian certainly. The whole idea of airbnb was a people to people platform. The ideas give people the power, and they can do great things, and so that is mostly true. The unfortunate thing is so long as discrimination exists in the world, it also exists on our platform. A number of years ago, in 2016, this was brought to our attention that there was some systemic racism happening on our platform. And so we worked really closely with civil Rights Groups. We have done a lot of work. We make every Single Person who joins airbnb assigned the Airbnb Community commitment, which essentially means you will pledge not to discriminate against others. Believe it or not, 1. 3 Million People chose not to sign that commitment, and they left our platform, thankfully they have left our platform, given they are not committed to the values we are committed to. More recently, we took a bigger step. We worked with rishaad robertson and color of change, the largest civilrights product in the United States, and we created something called project lighthouse. The idea of project lighthouses to measure how much discriminate is actually happening on airbnb and to work with color of change, privacy Rights Groups, to create a first of its Kind Partnership and technology. The idea is this we are basically going to collect, you know, anonymized perceived race information, and we have worked with civil Rights Groups and other groups to do this in a responsible way, and we are doing this to measure how much systemic discrimination people are expressing in airbnb, and once we can measure it, we can improve and design our product to reduce the amount of bias happening in our platform. I think this will be a long come along challenge. This is not something i am expecting to change overnight. As long as there is determination and the world, it will affect airbnb. But our challenge is to make airbnb more inclusive and you have a more sense of belonging than places outside of airbnb, and hopefully we can lead the way forward, and if we learn something and make improvements, maybe we can open source some of those learnings to other companies. That is essentially the idea. James one followup. You mentioned earlier the change in consciousness of your peers in the Tech Industry, that there were downsides of your ways of doing things, in addition to pluses. Do you have a sense that most of your peers to share your awareness, that they have to think about the racial effects of their tools among the literally divisive brian well, the Tech Industry is thousands and thousands of companies, so it would be hard for me to generalize too much, but i will say that i think there has been a broad reckoning and awakening in the Tech Industry, and i do think that i cant speak for everyone i cannot say where they all are, but i think the general mindset of the culture is totally different than it was more than a decade ago when i came here. I think it is a very serious topic that comes up in numerous conversations, and i do see leaders taking it seriously. I say we are not doing enough. I often ask myself, years from now, when we look back on ourselves today, will we say we did enough, or will we feel like we should have done more sooner . Ableery rarely will you be to look yourself in the mirror and you are not going to say, or i wastoo bold doing just enough. I think we can do more, and i think history is watching. James thank you for that. Back to the travel question, you mentioned people want to travel, or they are doing it in different ways. They are drying as opposed to flying. They are traveling domestically. When deb and i were traveling, we were going to allentown, pa, duluth, minnesota, or bend, oregon, that people would sooner or later recognize the virtuous of operating from smaller, less expensive areas as opposed to the big areas new york city or l. A. Are you seeing analog to that in travel to rural areas, small towns. . Do you think it will be a lasting change . Brian yeah. Inare seeing two big trends travel. The first is what i would call travel redistribution. It used to be that hundreds of millions of people would go to just a few big cities. In the united state, that would be los angeles, new york city, las vegas, miami, chicago. And they would go to the tourist district and visit really popular landmarks. What you had is something people would label overt tourism, a lot of people concentrated in a small area. Because people do not want to be flying and crowded and lines, mostly for health reasons, they are dispersing. They are not going to any one community, so what is happening is they are being much more spread out. Now 50 of our business on airbnb eight are people who used to be mostly urban it used to be 80 urban any years ago, is now 60 nonurban. So even most of airbnb is not are livinguse people in less defined areas. The other trend we are seeing is traveling and labeling starting living starting to blur together. It used to be for many people, they would live one place, and they would travel a couple nights here and there for business if they were so fortunate and if they were privilegednoug an enough to take a vacation, they would take a one week or two week vacation. But for many people, it is blurring. They are leaving their area and they want to get a house somewhere else. Maybe they are in the city, and they want to get to the country. Maybe they are college kids, and they dont want to live at home with mom and dad, so they get an airbnb. Maybe they want to get closer the family, so they dont want to live with her family, so they get a home nearby. Stay isgth of increasing to a week, a month, a gear at a time. That is something that did not exist in a big way before the pandemic like it does today. James of course none of us can tell which things are phenomenon and which are longterm trends, but what is airbnbs business bet about what the new normal is going to be like a couple of years from now . Brian great question. You know, nobody knows, so you are asking me to try to predict the future, so that is always a fuzzy, precarious proposition. Let me tell you what seems to might play out clearly what we are living in today is not the rest of history. That is clear. But we also know that the world is not going back to the way it was. I know travel is not going back to the way it was in january. Change goes forward. Change does not go backward. Just because the world and travel is not going back to the way it was in january does not mean the travel industry is doomed or the people participating in it are doomed. I think what will happen is the genie is out of the bottle on a small communities, small destinations, on people visiting national parks. The average american is a take away from a national and has never visited one. Theres a whole new part of the world people are discovering. Rural america, smalltown america, national parks. And it is not like people did not know these places exist, they just did not travel there. In fact, there are often not hotels in these areas. I think there will be a bit of a democratization of travel, and people will go back to cities. They will go back to tourist districts, its just that when they go back, it would be more of a concentrated balance. They are not going to just go back to urban areas. They are not going to just go back to resorts. I think that is probably almost all communities. James here is a final, quick question. Airbnb has been in the news about a possible ipo. It was going to happen this year. It was going to happen before or after the election. How should we think what should we watch for in the news . Brian well, you know, we fire f1our filed our paperwork with the administration, and i cannot say much about it, but we were planning to go public before the pandemic, then suddenly, obviously covid19 hit. Butut the f1 on the shelf, recently we dusted it off, we filed it, and when the markets are ready, we will be ready. James great. Brian chesky, thank you so much for being here. Brian thank you very much. Here is atlantic live contributor and the host of all of it, allison stewart. Will debutnth, hbo the story that showtime will debut the good lord bird, based on a book of the same name. The idea was to end slavery. Brown, playedjohn by ethan hawke, is fired up and ready to take on his opponent with this ragtag group, a person named onion, who john thanks is a girl but he who is not. Captain, this is john brown, here on behalf of the emancipation of all gods creations. Stop it. , your salvation is in doubt lest you surrender my sign. My son. Go to hell, you loon. You and your man are lying in the heart of slavery. Him. Ap them up and take you take your men left them i will take my men right. You stay here and guard the horse. Happy to guard the horse. Happy he gave away our position. By actors am joined author jamesnd mcbride. Thanks for being with us. Thanks for having us. Allison james them i know you were a big fan of this novel. When you wrote it, how do you apply it to your portrayal of john brown . I think there was something about the good lord bird that let me into history. Onion is so lovable as a character. The idea of choosing to tell the story from a point of view of a young man pretending to be a have any does not political agenda but to stay alive somehow lets in humor and light and love and it makes you see all of these painful things in a way that you can look at. Making it about gender and making it about race, it stops being about either one and it starts being about humanity. Why. Hard to say i just wanted everyone in the world to read it. I wanted to give it to every friend. Online tovery section have a book there. It is such a difficult time to talk about race and talking about our past. It is so hurtful and so scary. And this book is like a bazooka of love and it lets you talk about it. It lets you go man, this stuff happens. I just wanted to share it. Saidon james, when you thinking about slavery in this country, we need to think about it as a web and the interconnectedness of it all. How so . I like the bazooka metaphor better, actually. Allison [laughter] james we are all connected. History connects us. Slavery was part of American Life that was part of the economic engine of life. Similar to the way where we drive cars now, we are committing to kind of ecological genocide. It simply has to stop. Slavery had to end. John brown was the agent that had an enormous amount to do with it. Telling the story through the eyes of a kid a boy who had to act like he was a girl in order to stay alive adds a certain sense of innocence to it and innocence in terms of this young mans ability to see the web of relationships that existed and how intertwined they were. Thesehard to unravel racial stereotypes and relationships that we have all been privy to an been victim of. All of us. Usand been victim of, all of for centuries. Joshua, john brown this , assumes onion is a girl. Onion goes with it as a choice. Throughout the entire series, your character has to make a lot of choices. When you think about the motivates onion in his or her churches . Choices . Joshua onions motivation throughout most of the series is to survive. That is why he goes with what john brown says. He does not know what would happen if he tells john brown his true nature and that he is a boy. I think later on in the series, he is motivated about doing what is right by the captain. Feels almost a sense of responsibility and accountable to what happens to them. He makes his choices according to that. Brown doesnt have choices. He has to do it, it is god telling him he has to do it. It is why he is put on this earth. It can make him seem a little unhinged at times even if he is right about big picture things. That, the ideay that he is unhinged but he is correct . I dont know about you are other people but i have met a few dogooders in my life. I have had a few people in my life that, if you really want to do well for people, you have to not think like society thinks. You have to have the courage of your own convictions. That makes you seem crazy. You know, society wants us all to live in a box and eat anythings and not ask and buys much as possible. The real radical wants to break. He box people call john brown crazy all the time because he killed people. Slavery has killed hundreds of thousands of people and children. The society says me doing something about that is insane. Then i want to be insane. I dont believe in that as a definition of sanity. It takes a strong person. Whether we are talking just or unjust laws, these are big, complicated ideas. We are talking about rewriting what the parameters are. It takes real courage to do that. It, you have to be a little bit crazy. If you are normal, you want other people to like you. Most of us want to eat and have other people like us. Allison how did you want to use humor in this story . James i want to eat and have most people like me. Allison [laughter] just laid it out. These stories are hard to tell. This kind of history is difficult to relate to a viewer or reader. We do funny things. Humor allows a lot of room for someone to say i made a mistake or im stupid or i did something wrong. Hook. Mor takes us off the and it also lets us see the that givesreal way us room to say maybe im not bright here. Even if we agree to disagree, at least humor allows reason and discourse into the room. That is why i think humor is effective and i try very hard to put as much in this book and in very series is funny. People will find a lot of humor in it. Allison you have a unique take on Frederick Douglass. He is a dandy. Didnt have to take any libe life because the truth is he was married to a black woman and he had a map white mistress living with him. That doesnt work now. David said it very well and his portrayal of F