Airbnb’s bet on an IRL future, with Brian Chesky

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/62c85b16337ce188

The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems.
They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet
When it comes to their own wealth.
Most are running a disconnected stack.
A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.
Creative planning was built to fix exactly that.
One integrated team of tax professionals, state planners, investment specialists, all coordinated by a dedicated wealth manager who sees your full financial picture and keeps every piece working together.
Proactive tax efficiency, state strategy, investments all under one roof.
Creative planning where wealth works together.
Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.
Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit.
This may be our biggest stage yet.
Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more.
Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great,
We want you there with us too.
Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six.
That's mastersofscom slash apply.
Twenty six.
Silicon Valley's gotten more political.
People are like 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 fifty-fifty chance of new administration. I'm kinda curious, do they run the other way and do the world swing back and forth?
And I think I think there's a lot of like swinging. There was like
All this focus on like
GEI and then there was all this focus to like
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 twenty years.
Like what do we believe in?
Because whatever is true in twenty years are our principles and our values.
And everything else is just a trend. Everything else is just trying to fit in.
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 the volatile world, and more. We'll be releasing additional highlights from the 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 Sathien, and this
is rapid response

Brent, thanks for coming in. Thank you for having me here. Always great to talk with you.
Airbnb expanded this year to include experiences and and services alongside stay. So in honor of that.
I'm gonna use some specific experiences that I've I've chosen that are available on the platform to lead us to some questions uh for for Airbnb and for all of us. So is that good? Is that okay? Yeah all right. All right, so um so let's uh let's uh bring up the first experience.
Uh this is uh craft noodles with a ramen legend in Tokyo. I understand this is uh this is an experience that you have actually been on.
Um Airbnbs always been about uh belonging and making the world
Feel smaller, you know, staying with, learning from a guest, a host, uh someone who can become a new a new friend.
The macro environment we're in right now has become a little less conducive to that with sort of 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.
It's kinda funny when the I remember I was like in middle school when the internet came out and it that whole idea of the internet was just gonna connect the world and it made the world immediately feel smaller. And I came to Silicon Valley in two thousand seven.
And we started Airbnb and when I came to Silicon Valley, the iPhone just launched. AWS meant that anyone can start a company without needing servers. The internet was going global. Um social media was social networking at the time.
Well is
Kind of
Blowing up.
And I wasn't anticipating what would happen.
In two thousand twelve social me networking became social media. In fact, I think social networking is the most popular product of all time that was invented and 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 twenty years into the future
People twenty 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 by some measures the loneliest time in human history. I mean loneliness is rising throughout the world. Um if you look at the birth rate, it's dropping everywhere.
Um mental health is rising, mental health crisis are rising. Um the loneliest cohort in America, I think, are teenage girls. I think the second loneliest cohort in America are men without a college education, um 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 like there's an app to like 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 just gotta ask yourself, like, if you have children, like are you happy with the world that they're growing up in? And so 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 like
A little more isolated, we're a little more divided, we're a little more lonely. There's not as much when I started Airbnb, I said Airbnb is a community. My mom said what, like a neighborhood?
Mm-hmm.
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? Like what are we building this towards? And so
I'm not here to say like we're gonna fix this.
I just 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 you know, 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. You might wonder, well how the heck is Airbnb a company that 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 there'll be started
With me renting my house to three guests, and I hung out with them, I became friends with them, we walk around the city together, and we became friends.
And our business was like booking airbeds. We were called
Airbn and breakfast. That airbed and breakfast was air mattresses.
I I had flighted three airbeds one weekend, airbeds.
And then it was airbeds for conferences. And we like it was a way to connect other people 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 realise
Okay, you can put your bedroom there, be me.
So we we're a network of bedrooms.

Um 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 gonna make breakfast for them?
And because we're Airbnb 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 gonna invest in AI, but it's not about that.
It's a means to building a community. Cause 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, cause I think that's what the world needs.
And and when you when you went on this uh this particular experience uh uh in in Tokyo, I mean
It's it's not a lot of people. I mean it's a pretty intimate. This was a really small one. This is Airbnb original experience. It's like one of the really vetted ones, and forty percent of 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 gonna be much more than just travel.
I think this is an I mean if we are successful, and I don't know if we will be, I mean we ought to be humble here.
But it would be a 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 lounge 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 like
the eighty 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 seventeen years with our team trying to do one thing. Amazon expanded from books to everything within two or three years. We spent seventeen years doing one thing.
And it got pretty big. But now you want to be the everything app? Like you want to do everything? 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.
Yeah.
All right. Let's um let's go to the the next experience. Yep this is uh this is Chicago's engineering marvels. Uh I I picked this cause sh uh I haven't done this one. Yeah, because Chic Chicago sort of invented the skyscraper and it it it made me
Think it was the h hub of innovation in its time, and it made me think of the hub of innovation in this time, which is which is AI, which we've talked about a a lot uh at this summit. You've talked about
Doubling down on real life.
human experiences.
Um and but also that a that Airbnb will always be a safe haven for humans to work in. But y you're not ignoring AI in Airbnb's
operations and the way you work and your products. So how do you how do you think about this framework of like using this new technology, but not having it
You know us.
Okay.
Chat GPT launched three years ago.
I I think everyone in tech thought AI would be the thing, but we all thought it'd be like in ten years or twenty years or thirty years and then on November thirtieth of twenty twenty two, I think it was
You know, Sam did a little tweet.
And all of a sudden the world completely changed forever.
And yet.
how much a daily life has changed three years later, I'd say almost nothing has changed because of AI. Almost nothing. So what's change?
People still stare at their phone, instead of sometimes going to Google, they go to ChatGBT. And ChatGPT is really big. It's got about eight hundred million users, I think weekly active users. So that's changed. Now as of a week ago, Sora, m what that's really kind of replacing TikTok and Instagram, and I it's pretty obvious what Instagram's gonna do to follow them. They're gonna
They're gonna'cause a Sora app are showing the Sora videos are showing on Instagram, so
Mark is gonna make it.
All the
content AI generated and then that's gonna get boosted over influencers, they're gonna have a freak out, and this is gonna be a big problem.
So that's gonna happen and that's happening like in weeks, not months, um unfortunately. But like I think we just need to ask ourselves, like, yes, if you go to the t the app store and you rank the top fifty apps in the app store, the first uh I think the first app is SOR, the second app is ChatGBT, the third app is Gemini.
And apps four through fifty are not AI apps.
They're just apps that were like ours, the same as they were before AI. So here's my my my my belief.
My belief is the real change society happens.
When
Apps change.
Think of this as like a gold brush. We're here in San Francisco.
Intelligence is the goal.
There's a whole bunch of startups that are enterprise startups. Those are like the picks and shovels company. I am on the board of Y Combinator. There's tons of companies that are not a company.
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, I think that's a very important thing.
We're gonna have to do something with the gold.
We're gonna 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 develop applications. And so I want us to help build like AI native applications.
And the other other thing I'll say about AI is
The term
AI.

Is artificial.
We're now living in a world as of last week.
With the video content.
We're
You cannot know for certain. I mean there could be digital

But we're gonna live in a world where it's not clear that you're seeing what you're seeing is real.
In other words, now anything 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.
Mm or it could be artificial.
And so you wanna ride a trend.
Or you might have 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 gonna basically create this digital world, staring at a screen that's highly artificial. It's gonna get more and more immersive, and there's gonna be a physical world.
You're gonna have robotics.
But other than robotics.
People still drink wine the same way. All that stuff's gonna be very, very similar.
Now a lot of robotics can replace a lot of jobs.
People are gonna be driving cars in the future. They're not gonna be working in warehouse in the future. They're not gonna be maybe
checking people out or doing certain things.
So
What are they gonna do?
Um
I don't know all the things we're gonna do, but I think hosting is a real opportunity. I don't think you want a mis a m robot to give you a massage anytime soon.
And so
you know, I don't think you want a r like a AI to do this experience. You want a human connection. And again, like
You know, people want real connections in the real world. Why are people feeling so lonely right now? Because you know, they're connecting with
You know.
before recent 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 YouTube comment section. And now pretty soon we're gonna have a situation where your friends are gonna be AIs and like
Like it it's so
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 workforce 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 to the world that will be somewhat unadultered by AI.
All right.
All right, let's go let's go to uh the next experience. It's it's about um design.
And it's uh get style like a celebrity with uh Jamie Mizrahi. When you talk design
You're talking about
about sort of more than style and looks, you're talking about systems, you're talking about structures, you know, you're among a a handful of of CEO designers.
that that that are out there. And and I guess I'm I'm curious both what
People in this room maybe misunderstand about design. And I was thinking when you were when you were talking about AI, like
how we're going to design
Businesses
In the future.
In this
You know,'cause I'cause I I mean I've heard people out here say oh
You know, we should be an AI first company. And it's like wha what does that mean? We don't even know what that's Well, okay, you said a lot of things.
I don't
I think I don't know if it's in three years or five years, but like
Okay, let's talk about like let's just take open AI for example.
OpenAI is an AI company.
Clearly.
Let's like just as a thought experiment just place the term AI or intelligence of electricity.
Imagine there was a company and they like help
kind of harness electricity.
And they are use electricity.
And now there's like three companies. There's a company called Google that 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 gonna 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 AI company. And so you don't d you don't need to design yourself differently because everything is going to change. But I did that then, I guess my first point is
I don't know what a technology company is and not AI company, and I don't think people will call OpenAI AI company in the future, because that's I mean they're gonna call an AI company as if it's a technology company. And I think every company is gonna be AI company. So that's that's that's the first thing. Then let's just talk about well what is design. I mean I remember I went to so I went to I was an artist growing up.
And um
I was actually like I like to draw and I got 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 gonna be an artist. And she said, You chose the only job in America that will pay you less than a social worker. You're gonna get paid for literally nothing. You're gonna my
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 Red Island School Design.
And I go into this field called industrial design. And then it was like the design of everything with a toothbrush, the spaceship, and everything in between. And there was this whole thing in in in in RISD about how do we get design in the boardroom. Like it's kinda like be in the room where it happens. Have a seat at the table. And I noticed that
Like
The Fortune five hundred, how many CEOs of the Fortune five hundred were designers? Actually, today.
How many designers.
Uh how many
CEOs of Fortune five hundred are designers.
Yeah, I think there's one. I think. Yeah.
It's I think so.
I I don't know if there's a second one. There might be.
But that's crazy. Okay, so let's say there's five hundred companies in the Fortune 500 and they have like an average of ten board members, so there's five thousand. How many of those people are creative people or designers? There's very few.
I remember when I started B and B, I pitched an investor, investor said we love everything but you and your idea.

I said to Joe, Nate, good news, he loves everything else. What is everything else? 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 the 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 m fundamental soul of a man-made creation that reveals itself through subsequent layers. It's not just how something looks, it's how it fundamentally works.
I think that we need more design in America. We need more design in companies. I think we have we're living through
The A B test, algorithmic.
Of
like 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 still it to its essence. You have to deeply understand it.
And so for me, I think design is not just how this

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. And the age of AI,
Where more and more coding can be done by the AI, because software is a language, I think more increasingly we're all gonna become designers, including engineers. We'll be essentially designing.
And the best engineers have always been designers. They've always been designers. I mean Steve Jobs used to say the best engineers are also poets.
An artist а найти
The most one of the most hu 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 breath between the two. And if you took Silicon Valley, a lot of people are like a body and you cut him uh most companies are like a like you cut off the
The company at the head. There's not a lot of heart.

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 gonna live? We're gonna live in a world devoid of creativity and devoid of 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. 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.
Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely.
From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode.
I hope to see you there.
Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies.
Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?
That is human centered.
I'm Rana El Calyubi.
And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.
Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives.
Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.
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.
Yeah.
Let's jump back in.
All right, I'm gonna take you to experience number four here. Uh it's a different kind of harder question. This is this is the National Mall Architecture, and I chose this one because it's in in the heart of DC. Uh
Your co-founder, Joe Gebia, now works at the White House of the Chief Design Officer, although you were not um among the cohort of tech CEOs who had
had dinner with uh 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 it's incredibly
Tricky to know
What to do? And I don't even know how you're gonna answer this question.
I don't know either, actually.
Let's see.
Silicon Valley's gotten more political.
Um
And uh when I came to Silk I mean when I came to Silicon Valley, it maybe it was more left, but it kinda felt more moderate and it didn't feel as much like there it was as political
Um
I
I do think that
Another thing that I I'm noticing is
People are like 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 fifty-fifty chance of a new administration. I'm kinda curious, do they run the other way and do the world swing back and forth?
And I think
I think there's a lot of like swinging. There was like
All this focus on like
D E I and then there was all this focus to like
roll it all back and there's all this focus to go here. Now there's all this focus to go here. And it's like
back and forth and back and forth and I think
I try to imagine what won't be what will still be true in twenty years.
Like what do we believe in?
Because whatever is true in twenty 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 like whatever is popular at that turn time.
And so I think every company just has to ask ourselves what do they stand for?
What are their values?
And
You know, I think I try to be pretty clear about what we stand for, and so I try to like not wade into too much
too many political topics unless I feel like I have something to add to the conversation and it's something that is like connected to our vision or our values.
I mean the other thing about politics is
We're trying to like bring the world together. I mean that's what I'd like to do. The problem with politics, I don't have a better system, but it's fifty plus one.
You have to divide them and get plus one.
And
I mean it is inherently a
Divisive thing.
In Airbnb's mission is inherently unifying. Do you know the number of Trump supporters who stay in a house of a Kamala Harris supporter?
over the course the election
Millions.
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 time in your life that you're truly open minded.
Right.
Even prejudice, people 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 gonna serve them
And so I try to zoom out.
I try to like 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 funneling good.
It were ninety nine percent 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 not 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. And the the swings that you talked about, where it swings from one way to the other. How do you
Like keep yourself from getting caught up in those'cause the there's a lot of pressure sometimes behind those. Stay on Twitter a little or X a little bit. And like I mean there's this temptation to want to participate in every conversation and to like feel like you have to have an opinion and wait into everything. And I 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 like you could either 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.
I just try to like make sure
I tell the company like we are gonna be thoughtful.
As a company, we're not gonna like swing back and forth, we're gonna do whatever we think.
is the right thing to do.
Yeah. You talked to me before about the difference between a business decision and a principal decision. A principal 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
Go 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 gonna get out of business because you're stick to your principles and your values. And people wanna work for a company like that, and buy products from people who lead in that way.
Awesome.
All right, so um
We're we're down to our last experience here.
Uh explore uh Notre Dame with uh f with its restoration architect.
Um
I picked this because as we're wrapping up this idea of you know the future we build.
And I and I was looking at this, it it it there's this sort of balance for all of us between like
How much are we restoring what uh what's been broken, right? And how much are we
Are we building something totally new, totally different? So
W what do you think
Airbnb's role is
In in building
You know the future.
And and as a follow on
You know, for the folks who are sitting in this room, like what's the role that
They should be
uh taking in building the future.
I like to ask entrepreneur like I I I like to ask an entrepreneur's questi 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 naively like naive to believe that like people are basically good and it was a good idea to let's change in your home. And ultimately, um
I think that во'чаin to build again.
is this global community because I think communities are roading all over the world.
I think we have a place in this world to do something unique. I think that design is like a huge like under-leverage superpower. I think it's gonna be really important in the age of AI.
I think for every business leader I I think that you should ask like
If you never existed, what would be different about the world? Like 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, for by the time it's a trend sometimes it's late.
Right. Once it has a name, it's late. Um, although AI will go on forever, but like
So that one might be different.
But that's so then what in AI? What in AI? Because like everything's AI, like at some point, right? Like what is not AI? So I think business leaders
should focus on a unique contribution they can make.
I think
I think we are in building mode.
I think it's gonna 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 I mean first of all, I love engineers. I love
technology people, but I don't think anyone thinks that only engineers should be building the future.
Because only
Engineers or certain type of people didn't build this world. This build was built by like humanities people and like artists and scientists and creative people.
and like all different people. And so use this physical like
Architecture has 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 gonna 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 shouldn't list as many different types of people.
To build the future because we want to live in a world that is completely multi disciplinary, and I also think it behooves us.
To be conscientious as business leaders, because we're gonna have so much power.
that the question society's gonna 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 to 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 the as people pointed out, the industrial revolution was amazing. It also led to like numerous world wars.
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.
You know, like nuclear energy.
Is it good or bad? Well 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. Yeah.
And I see with AI some not so amazing things. It doesn't make AI good or bad. It's a tool. 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 we not we should not be asking any 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.
Amen, Brian. Thank you so much. Thank you.
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.
Ам, Боб Сафін.
Thanks for listening.
Rapid response is a wait what original.
I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Alex Morris. Associate producer is Mashumaku Tonina.
Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastonelli.
Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday.
Our head of podcasts is Le Tal Malad.
For more, visit rapidresponsshow.com.