One of the most effective. You are about mobility of people and not been mobile. Whats the main lesson or surprise or discovery that you personally have taken from the experience and the last eight months or so . We lost about 80 of our business and eight weeks. We its been about a decade building. That was quiten surprising but the thing that may been more surprising is what happenedis next. What happened next is that people, no matter the circumstances, in the midst of the pandemic still had the desire to travel. They didnt want to get on planes, they were not necessary traveling for business. They didnt want to go to my hotel or they did want to get in the car and go to another community and live in that community and often some of them were getting homes with airbnb. Theres just this fundamental desire that people have to travel, to connect, to see the world and i dont think that anything could stop it let alone a pandemic. People have to do it responsibly but there is still a very strong will to see the world picky just have to be done in a much more narrower context right now because the health and safety ramifications. Something assassin about airbnb is its a new way of doing something that people have done for a long time of travel, lodging, sing different parts of the world. Because its been done for such a long time theres a large structure of regulations and tax arrangements and the other ways in which the lodging industry has historically been regulated. The fact youre doing that in a new way has led to some tensions with the spacious city governments. I understand airbnb has new way of approaching your relationship with city governments in particular. That. S about one of our Guiding Principles is that we want to strengthen the communities that we serve. I will say i started this company with my two friends when i was 26. I had one job before this and when i came to Silicon Valley the culture of Silicon Valley was Technology May well have been a dictionary definition, synonym for the word good. If you in the Technology Industry you felt like youre le making the world a better place. One of the things that happen is our company causa big that i think something that is occurred in industry and all of us is that with a greater responsibility of activity happening on a platforms, that the kind of culture of the web 1. 0 that the internet immune system is to give the committee tools to regulate themselves, its probably not enough and you have to take more responsibility for the activity happening in your platform. Thats one of the things we started doing a number of years ago, and to date we have more than 400 partnerships with cities. Just give you an example, these costs within 2. 5 windows and hotel tax. The problem is were in 100,000 cities, and the receipt is relationship. They can bele very difficult to have these relationships on a total oneoff basis. The other thing happening is inu the pandemic people are not just traveling to 2030 cities anymore. Theyre getting in cars and going to smaller communities nearby. What we want to do is now be able to scaleo the relationships and about thousands of cities to know the activity happening on airbnb, if the information they need, be able to contact us and have basic compliance tools. The city portal is basically a onestop shop for a city, a small town or even a Rural Community to build a partnership with airbnb. You would get three things, data and information about the nature of the activity in the city. They would be able to contact us and who toth contact for which problem. The third thing is were building some compliance tools so they can essentially help administer the activity happening in the city. What stage is that at. Was were launching that and launching that now and i think around 15 cities. We partner with about 15 cities to work and we want to design it with the citys. Wede dont want to just drop itn hundreds of cities. Our vision is we roll this out to thousands of cities and communities, anyone who wants to partner up. Theres one other longstanding challenge of the United States through the centuries of its itchy and especially american of this year of reckoning with Racial Justice and Racial Injustice. Because you are dealing with millions of people, some of the who are exposed to are being discriminatory, whether they are guests or hosts. How is airbnb deal with this part of the american challenge . The whole ideall of airbnb ws a people to people platform. The idea of give people the power and they can do great things, and so that is mostly true. The unfortunate thing is so long as this condition exists in the world, it also exist 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. We worked really closely with Civil Rights Groups. Weve done a lot of work if we make every Single Person who joins airbnb sign the Airbnb Committee commitment which essentially means you will pledge not toes discriminate against others. Believe it or not 1. 39 people chose not to sign that commitment and a left our platform, or thankfully they have left our platform given their not committed to the values were committed to. More recently took a biggest effort we work with Sean Robertson and color of change which is the Largest OnlineCivil Rights Group and the United States, and we created a project called project white house. They idea project white house was to be able to measure how muchct discrimination is happeng on airbnb, and so we work with color of change and privacy Rights Groups to createge a firt of its Kind Partnership in technology. The idea is this peer were going to basically collect, anonymize perceived, race information and we had to work with Civil Rights Groups to do this in a very responsible way and were using this to try to measure how much systemic discrimination people are experiencing in airbnb. Once we can measure it we can approve and designan a product o reduce the amount of bias happening on a platform. This is going to be a long, long challenge. This is that something im expecting us to change overnight. So long as theres their ciscon the world will probably exist in airbnb but our challenge is the gatess inside of airbnb or more inclusive and jeff greater sense of belonging andnd the gates outside of airbnb and hopefully we can be the way forward and if we learn something and we make improvements a good week and open source somepr of this mornings to other companies. That is essentially the idea. One followup about that. You mentioned earlier the sort of change in consciousness of your peers in the industry of recognizing their downsides to new ways of doing things in addition to plusses. Do you have sent most of your peers share your awareness, you haveve to think about the racial effects of their tools among the politically divisive miss . The Tech Industry as thousands and thousands of companies so would be hard for me to generalize too much but i will say ize think there has ben a broad reckoning and awakening in the Tech Industry, and i do think that i cant speak for everyone, i cant 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. Its a very serious topic that comes up in numerous conversations at a d. C. Leaders taking it seriously. That doesnt mean were doing enough. I often ask myself, years from now when we look back on ourselves today, when we say we did enough or will we feel like we should have donee more soone . Very rarely will you be able to look us up in the near the on and say that youre not going to say, wow, i was too bold, or i was doing just enough. That is a constant reminder we could be doing more, and to think history is watching. Thank you for that. Back to the travel question. You mentioned that people want to travel by day doing it in different ways, driving as opposed to fly, traveling domestically as opposed to internationally. When deb andli i were travelinge often heard in place like fresno or allentown pennsylvania or or greenvilleota, South Carolina r bend oregon that people would sooner oren later recognize the virtues of operating and smaller, less expensive places as opposed to the aviary or new city or l. A. Are you seeing some analog to that in travel to rural areas to smaller towns and was happening now and you think will be a lasting change tranthree were seeing two big trends in travel. The first trend in travel is what i would call essentially travel redistribution. It used to be the hundreds of names w of people would go to jt a fewse big cities in the United States, those who beat new york city, los angeles, las vegas miami, chicago and go to the tourist districts and visible to popular landmarks. What you end up having is something that was labeled over terrorism. A lot of people concert and a small area. Because people not like they dont want to be in crowds and line, mostly for health reasons, they are dispersing. The travel is being redistributed to small communities. Inis not going to any one community and whats happening is they are much more spread out. Now 60 of our business on airbnb a business they just be mostly urban, 80 urban many years ago is now 60 nonurban. Even most of airbnb is not urban because people are living in less defined areas. The other trend we are saying is traveling and living starting to blur together. It used to be you live, for many people fail in one place and do a travel a a couple nights are and, therefore, business, if there are so fortunate and if they were fortunate opposed enough to take a vacation, they would take a one or two week vacation. We arere seeing billions of peoe for whom traveling and living learning. They are leaving their area and want to get a house somewhere else. Maybe theyre in a city and they want to get out in the country. Maybe they are a bunch of college kids and adult to live at home with mom and dad so getting an airbnb with a bunch of friends in some other city. Maybe if you want to be closer to the family. They dont want to live with the family but getting elder by. Theres all these cases were traveling and flooring is traveling and living is boring. That didnt exist in a really, really big way before the pandemic like a custody. Of course none of us can tell which things are phenomenon in which a longterm trends, but what is airbnb is business met about what the new normal is going to be like a couple of years from now and whether these trends will nobody knows. Youre asking me to try to predict the future and thats always precarious proposition i may tell you what i think, what seems to might flip through the world living today is not the rest of history. Thats clear. We also know the world is never going back to the way it was. I know travel is never going to back to the way it was in january. Change goess forward. Change does not go backward. Just because the world of travel is never going back to what was in january does meet the travel industry is doomed people participating in our due. Whats going to happen is the genie is out of the bottle a little bit on smoking or days, small destinations, people visiting National Parks. The average american is a take away from a National Park and has never visited one. Theres a whole or part of the world people are discovering, rural america, smalltown america, nationall parks. Its not like people didnt know these places exist. They just didnt really travel to. Theres often not hotels in these areas, but i think theres going to be a little bit of a democratization of travel. People will come back to cities. Back to tourist districts. Its just that when they go back its going to go of a concentrated balance. They are not just critical back to urban areas or resource. That ultimately probably to the best of all communities. Heres a final quick question. S airbnb has frequently been in news about the possible ipo papers would what happened thi, have not this year, happen before or after the election. What should we watch for in the news . Refiled our s1 registration paperwork which puts me in a quiet area. What i can see is what i said pray to succumb which as we were planning to go public before the pandemic and insulate covid19 had it with with the f1 on the shelf but recently we dusted off, filed it in with the market ready for airbnbe public we wil be ready. D great. Brian chesky, thank you so much for being your. Thank you very much. Heres atlantic life contributor and bows of wnyc all of it, alison stewart. Next month showtime will debut this series the good lord bird based on National Book award novel of the same name. Its a store of abolitionists john brown the lead a small group to rate a federal primary at Harpers Ferry. The idea was to arm in place people and in slavery. In this clipas john brown played by ethan hawkeli is fired up and ready to take on his opponent with hiske ragtag group which includes the in person named onion for john thinks is a girl but who isnt. Captain, this is john brown, here on behalf of the emancipation of all gods creation. Stop it, brown. Your salvation is in doubt. Last you surrender my son. Road to hell, you loon. Go to hell. You and your men are lying in the heart of slavery. Lets soften them up and then take them. You take your men left, i will take my right. Robert, onion. You stay here and guard the horses. Happy to guard the horses. Happy gave away our position. Im joined by actors ethan hawke, joshua cable johnson and all the ginseng right. Thanks of being with us. Great to be here. I know youre a big fan of gestapo. When you read the novel good lord byrd how did it make you think about our countrys history differently and how did you apply that to your portrayal of john brown . Well, what a fun question. I think there was something about the good lord bird that letd me in history. The novel is so funny and onion assault level as a character, the idea of choosing to tell this story from the point of view of the young man pretending to be a woman who doesnt really have any political agenda but stay alive, somehow lets in humor and lets in light and in love, and that makes you see all these really painful things in a way that you can look at. Because you just, by making it about gender and making it about race, it stops being about either one it starts being about community. Its hard to say why. I just wanted to do in the world to read it. You had that feeling, i wanted to give to every friend. I wanted every checkout line at 711 12 thed book there. This country is such a difficult time talking about race and has such a difficult time talking about our past. Its so hurtful and it is so scary, and this book just its like a bazooka of love and it lets you talk about it. Let you go man, this stuff happened. It sees it to this human point of view so i i just wanted to share. James, you said in think of a slave in this we need to think about as a web and the interconnectedness of us all. How so . Well, i like the bazooka metaphor better actually. We are all connected. History connects us. Slavery was a part of American Life that was part of the economic engine of life, similar to the way when we drive in cars now. We are committing to kind of ecological genocide that just simply has tono stop. Slavery had to end. John brown was t the agent realy that had an enormous amount to do with it. So telling this story through the eyes of a kid who had, a boy, who and act like he was a girl in order to stay alive adds a certain sense of innocence to it and also an innocence in terms of this young mans ability to see the web of relationships that existed and how intertwined they were kicked because its hard to unravel these racial stereotypes and relationships that we have all been privy to and been victim of. All of us, for centuries. Thats kind of the professorial look of the matter. So joshua, john brown assumes onion is a girl. Onion goes with it as a choice, and throughout the entire series on your character has to make a lot of choices. When you think about the motivation, what motivates onion in his or her choices . Onions motivation it comes to the choices throughout, most of the beginning of the series isis purely to survive, thats why goes with john brown because he to happenats going if he tells john brown his quoteunquote true nature that is actually a boy and john brown killing which really going to happen. But anything clear on thehe new series his choices are motivated about whats doing right and doing right eye the captain i think because once he grows that bond with john brown and the bond with all the boys he feels almost a sense of responsibility and he feels accountable to what happens to the swing makes choices according to that. John brown doesnt have choices. In his mind he doesnt. He have to do this. Its god telling him this is his mission. Thats why he is put on this earth. It can make him seem a little unhinged sometimes even if he is right about big picture things. How did you play that, that idea that hes a little unhinged but hes alsonh correct . I dont know about you or of the people, but i met a few dogooders in my life. Ive had a few people in my life that come 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, and that makes you seem crazy. I mean, society wants us all to live in a box and eat hamburgers and not Pay Attention and watch dumb tv and not ask anything and by as much as possible, right . The real radical wants to break the box, and its a great people called john brown crazy alll the time because he killed people. Slavery is killing hundreds of thousands of people, torturing children. Society says that thing and be doing something about it is insane . Well then, i want to be insane. I dont believe in that as a definition of standing. It takes a strong person, whether were talking just or unjust laws, these are big complicated ideas because its about rewriting what the parameters are. It takes real courage to do that, you think to do it you have to be a little bit crazy