What if we just make the government as delightful and satisfying to use as the Apple store? President Nixon in the 1970s created a presidential initiative to improve society through better design. And what they left behind were literal icons, the national parks brand, the NASA logo.
You're now the chief design officer of the United States. How did that come about?
President Trump has done a phenomenal job. He knows that aesthetics matter, not just one agency, not just one website. All of the digital touch points between the US government and the American people. This is a shot on goal that we've never had before to actually upgrade the way we present ourselves to the nation and to the world.
My friend Joe Gebbia is the founder of Airbnb and have maybe what I'd call typical Silicon Valley views. He's since come around. He's friends with Elon Musk and others and he decided to back President Trump and fight for his values. Now he's in government. Let's hear from what he thinks about what's going on in DC. A lot of us are really inspired by what he's doing right now. Not only has he fixed a bunch of things, but he's put together some of the very best designers in our country, and he's going to fix websites that get tens of millions of visits per year, make our government beautiful and functional again in a lot of areas. Excited for you to meet Joe. Welcome to American Optimist. Excited to have my friend Joe Gebbia here with us today. Joe, thanks for joining again.
Joe, it's great to be back. Thanks for having me.
I think of 134 episodes or so, I think you're our first repeat guest. So honored.
I appreciate it. I appreciate it.
You're a busy man right now. You are currently the chief design officer for the country. We love seeing you in Austin, of course, for basketball and otherwise. We miss you when you're out here, but you're doing really important work. Like what's been interesting or what have you learned or uncovered about how DC works? This is probably it's your first time doing this, right?
I first of all, anytime I come to DC, I couldn't wait to get out of DC. I'd always come through and be like, "Yeah, you know, it's a place of very important decisions and very important people. It's the kind of the bedrock of where democracy takes place in the United States." But I remember thinking just the speed with which it moves never spoke to me. And I used to think, "Wow, like I'm so glad I don't have to spend time there." Beyond the occasional, you know, meet a senator, meet a congressman.
As a founder of Airbnb, you were here for policy purposes.
You drop in for a day and take some meetings and so it is a great twist of irony that I'm spending a lot of time here.
Your politics have evolved over the last decade. I think you if I may say so I think you had what were more mainstream Silicon Valley viewpoints and you've always been like reasonable moderate and you ended up along with your friend Elon and other friends supporting Trump and changing your mind like how like why'd your politics evolve?
The funny thing about this question is that I actually don't think my politics evolved that much. What happens is I think after being a lifelong Democrat going back to Al Gore in 2000 when I could first vote in college, it was hard for me to identify with the things that they stood for, the things that I remember from previous presidents and previous policy makers on the Democratic spectrum. It kind of went so far left that I couldn't identify myself with the party in the same way.
Were there certain things that particularly offended you or certain battles that were really important?
Yeah, look, I think there's a couple things. I've spoken about the border before. I think having a border that was really just wide open where as I dug more and more into it I started asking questions back in 2021, 2022 seeing these headlines of tens of thousands of people every week coming into our country unvetted. We put more effort into having people pass through customs at the airport we do with multiple times that amount coming across our border. I thought, "This is odd. What's going on here?" I should look into this more. And that led me down a path of talking to people on the left, talking to people on the right. And I felt like I got a lot more direct answers from people on the right, who were just much more forthcoming about what the issues were, why they were happening. And lo and behold, we heard a lot of excuses in the last administration about why the problem couldn't get solved. Oh, you got to wait on this, that, and the other. And in the first couple months of the Trump administration, it became very clear that the power to solve this problem was entirely in the hands of the president. All the excuses that were rolled out over the last administration were false as proven by this president, as proven by President Trump.
Yeah. Suggest they might be doing it for other reasons.
Unfortunately, I think President Trump has done a phenomenal job securing our country, making sure that people who immigrate here are following the legal paths, which are great. I'm all for legal immigration. I don't think that dissolving our border is a policy that I can get behind. And so, that's one of the initial straws on the camel's back that tipped me. But other things too, like living in San Francisco and going through a whole DA situation there where they just didn't prosecute criminals.
My parents' home had three break-in attempts in a very short amount of time. I remember biking around the city, you'd see these sparkles as you're biking on the bike lanes and you catch your eye and like every two blocks there's another set of sparkles and it turns out it's smash and grab. You know, window gets broken on the car and it's just so pervasive. Like I remember had to change so many bike tires because you're always riding over glass in San Francisco.
Because there was never any consequences to it.
I've had so many friends and people I work with have had stuff stolen from them in San Francisco. It's embarrassing.
Yeah, it's like a rite of passage, you know. I avoided it for so many years there and then one day come out to my Volkswagen GTI and it's like gone. But I learned early on like never leave a valuable in your car at all. In fact, on my block, people used to leave their windows down and their doors unlocked.
And there was a note in the window that people would literally put on their car that just said, "Nothing of value here." You know, like that's how bad it got. We still own a house in California and during the Biden administration, the cartels in the very nice area hit five of the houses right around it. We had a ton of security and cameras and stuff. So, I think they avoided ours, but I heard they did this thing where they go in and they take the safe and they leave and it was people coming across the border. So the safety was a big issue for all of us.
Well, and I think wrapping that up into a headline, it's caring more for the criminal than the victim.
And something I just can't agree with, you know? It's like there's just so much more thought and care and energy put into, I think, the wrong side of the equation.
So you started to see a bunch of these things, investigate it more and you realized you agreed overall a lot more with...
By the way these were not necessarily like these are some of the many things that had shifted. There was a drift, I'll call it a drift, like the democratic drift. Like Gore wasn't necessarily for all these things in 2000. I mean go back to there's clips floating around the internet of pretty much every major policy maker on the left going back to Bill Clinton espousing how important our border is talking about how we have to tamper down illegal immigration. There's Schumer talking about this, Bill Clinton talking about this, Hillary talking about that. That was the Democrats that I grew up with. That was my association with them and my idea of what they stood for and how they represented my ideas, my values. And so something happened in the last administration where things just really drifted and now we have socialists and communists.
But why did you decide to step up and serve in DC? Like what led... So this is one thing to get involved in the election. That's a civic duty. I did that as well. I'm really impressed though because you've done a lot more. You've actually come here and you're serving in DC. How did that happen?
This was not in my cards whatsoever. And so, I as a supporter of Bobby Kennedy, Secretary Kennedy, just super excited about what he has been doing for our nation. And before he even got to office was excited about the prospect of what he could do which is here you have a guy who has big bold ideas about how to improve the health of our country and right now the health of our nation's in the gutter. You know, 70% of people have chronic disease. It's kind of insane, you know, all age ranges. And it's like we spend the most on health care yet we have the most disease and there's something that's very wrong with that.
There's a lot of stuff that's broken. I know you spent a lot of your own money. We talked about cleaning up our oceans with plastic is a big thing you've been working on. There's all these things that are just messy and broken. Their government's not taken care of, huh?
Yeah. And here comes somebody who spent his life fighting for folks and has big ideas and is not, you know, captured by industry. He doesn't come from the industry.
You thought you could trust him based on that?
Well, yeah. And I felt like, you know, if you just keep repeating what you've been doing, how are you going to get any different results? So if it's just a revolving door of industry coming in out of that position, I think he comes really from the outside and has said really bold policies. And so I came to DC back in January for his swearing in.
His confirmation hearings in the Senate which were incredible. Like I felt like it's a part of history. You know, you're in those beautiful old rooms and there's also all the decoration and it's like the media and it was standing room only. It was like you could feel like history was unfolding in front of you and I got a text from Elon around that time of the day said hey I heard you're in DC want to come hang out with the Doge team. I thought well I got a flight tomorrow back to Austin but why not? And end up spending the day with that team and saw some of the things they were working on, saw the speed with which they were moving. They go, "Wait a second. This is not the DC that I remember. This is moving at tech speed. This is moving at Silicon Valley speed." And they're actually getting stuff done. They're actually shipping things.
And that after my time with them, they asked me if I would come help with a pretty unusual problem to solve. They lovingly called it the mine problem.
The mine. This is a giant underground mine that all retirement papers go into.
Yes. So I was like, "What the heck is the mine problem?" And it turns out there is a mine in Pennsylvania that is a service that is offered to companies that have physical media that they need to store securely and safely.
And what better place to put physical materials in inside of a mountain?
You really need them to be safe.
Yes. It's like Gringotts.
Yes. The company is actually called Iron Mountain. Great name.
And so, it's an interesting place. You know, they house a lot of the media companies, Disney, MGM, like some of the original Bond films are there. Some of Michael Jackson's original recordings are there. Some of the tech companies house physical media there.
King Arthur's Sword. Yeah.
There is a lake under the mine, believe it or not, it actually helps cool the whole place.
There you go. That makes sense.
So it's also the place since the 1960s the government's been storing paper there specifically for retirement.
Which in the 1960s made sense because you had a lot of paper and it all had to go somewhere.
But skip ahead, you know, half a century. And why on earth are people using paper to retire from the government when it takes six months to process?
Yikes. It's riddled with frustration and errors, all these problems that I think are an injustice to...
It's just like a classic stupid old-fashioned government. It's old fashioned like archaic artifact of the past and they said can you come please make this an online only digital experience that can be a lot faster than 6 months because 100,000 workers retire every year from the federal government. This is a big issue. It's a big issue and you know if you've given the best years of your life to the government it should be enjoyable on the way out not an obstacle course which it is today, which it was.
So how did you attack this problem? I think we can learn from this maybe because you've been successful at this one. You're now doing bigger things like how did this work? What do you have to do? You have to rip up certain things that were there. You had to post certain interest like how did it work?
Well it started with my very first meeting on my very first day. I'm in a conference room with myself, a team member of mine, and a couple of the career folks who work in retirement services, and we start with this giant whiteboard, and map out, okay, here's Bob. Bob's been with us for 45 years. He's ready to retire. Walk us through what Bob has to go through to exit the government and receive his much-deserved annuity payment. And so we spent at least two hours boxing and arrowing.
It's like a saga for Bob.
It was a saga for Bob. Look at every database and every system that had to talk to the next one that stalled out here and had to flip over here and you had to wait on some other agency. And anyway, the whole thing was...
Like Thelma in accounting who's 72 and she has to like do something to make the next step happen. It's just been crazy stuff.
It was I mean my eyes hurt at the end of this session looking at this whole thing going how does this how's thing even working it's so convoluted. And my partner I was working with on this his name is Anthony we asked the team in front of us we said you know if we took the there was one tiny use case where you could have a digital retirement. Let's take that one use case and let's push one through the system. How fast could we do that? And so we asked the folks in the room and they go, "Well, four months." The person said, "6 months." The guy on the video call said, "Wow, definitely would take 12 months to figure that out." And we go, "Well, what if we did it in a week?"
And there was a hush in the room. You could see terror on people's faces. A week to do an all digital retirement. That's never happened before. And so we said, well, if you had the support of leadership, if you had access to all the resources that you needed, and if we just handheld one, meaning at every step along this way that you just we've just mapped out here together, if we get stuck somewhere, if there's a speed bump, we will go to that person's desk and talk to them and say, "Hey, we're in the middle of a sprint right now. Can you unblock this for us?"
We'll call them. We'll physically go to their desk and talk to them. Isn't that against union rules? Sorry. Sorry. Go on.
It's all in the building. It's fine. And so that's exactly what happened. Actually, that's not exactly what happened. We went off, the careers took this assignment on and they didn't do it in seven days. They did it in 4 days.
They did it faster than we all thought.
It was possible. You know, again, it was a proof of concept prototype.
Yeah. This was very much like Paul Graham's YC advice to us which going back to Airbnb land.
We were trying to figure out how to make our marketplace work and he said pick one city and make that city successful. Figure out supply and demand in one market.
Yeah. Hack it. Hack it and make that work and then scale that model to the rest of your markets. And this is very much that like we picked one city, we picked one use case and we just made it work from that. Of course, everyone was blown away. Oh my god. And it gave people a proof point that it actually is possible.
That's extraordinary. And I want to ask because you mentioned Paul Graham, who's obviously an amazing mentor to you guys in the Airbnb. A lot of people in Silicon Valley have been giving you a lot of crap who you used to work with. I know he's not a fan of the president. I don't know if he said anything or not to you, but like in general, like what has the experience been like talking to people back in Silicon Valley? Have you tried to show them what you're doing good things and they appreciated it? Have a lot of them cut you out like how they react to you doing this?
Around this time where I got involved in this work, it was a mixed bag. You know, certain people reached out and said, you know, I'm excited that you're doing this and I could never really speak up in my company. You know, I kind of always stayed a little bit quiet because I couldn't promote my support for this administration. And so a lot of people reached out to me directly and said, "Thank you so much for doing this. You represent me. Like you've gone out in front and you've been public about this and it takes a lot of courage to do." They couldn't. And then I think that there's a whole other group of people who kind of went off the deep end.
So they send you lots of notes.
Yeah. I would notes is being very kind. I would call them like hate mail. It's probably the right way to put it. And so I don't know like hey guys I'm fixing retirement in the government to make it better for federal employees. Do you really have an issue with that? Like come on. Like if you have a problem with that I can't help you.
And you know we probably shouldn't dwell on those kind people in our life who the connection is so surface level that just by association to an administration trying to fix something for the greater good you know they want to end the relationship with you.
Good there were some positive ones. It's sad there were negative ones but it sounds like hasn't affected you.
What was the end result for the retirement program? Is it now working for everyone?
Absolutely. So I pulled in Silicon Valley engineers, a couple ex Airbnb guys, pulled in some amazing designers and we got to work. You know, we did a design process which usually starts by deeply understanding the problem and the best way to understand the problem is by talking to the people who are living it every day. And so we spoke to a whole range of retirees both upcoming and those who had just retired and gone through the existing process. We talked to people in HR. We talked to people in payroll. And we really started to understand this ecosystem around what does it mean to retire in the federal government. And through these conversations, you'd hear repeating patterns. You'd hear simple things like people had no idea what the next step was or what setting expectations would go a really long way to help people along the...
I love that principle of government. Show them what the expectation should be. Show them about how long things should take. They have some frameworks for them.
People just having transparency and insight to like what are they actually going to be earning with their annuity payment? The way it worked previously is you didn't find out how much you're going to make every month for the rest of your life until your first check arrived months later.
How can you plan your life? Big surprise how much money you get or not?
Exactly. It's a huge surprise.
And so just imagine that like you've already been retired. You're not earning any income. You've got bills to pay, rent checks perhaps, you're trying to plan your life with your grandkids, or the vacation you always wanted to take, and you have no idea what your income's going to be.
It's a fun surprise, but that's crazy if it's higher than what you think it's going to be.
That's true. It's not a fun surprise if it's lower. So, we did things like we tapped into databases that have been around this whole time to instantly get a snapshot of somebody's work history and their payroll history.
And feed it into a calculator to give somebody an instant estimate of what they're going to earn.
Yeah. Get an estimate. It might not be perfect, but it's close.
