White House to Airbnb | Photon Podcast | Amit Koshal ft. Ron Klain

If you meet a litigator and they've never lost an important case, we aren't taking on risky enough cases.

I got a call one day from someone who had been a client a long time ago. Rich Bear was then the general counsel of Airbnb. He said, 'Brian, I'm going to retire. Should I put you on the list of people to be considered to replace me?' You know, it seems like a long shot. So, yeah, put me on the list. And then a few months later, I got hired. If you don't enter, you can't win.

Success for me is really having time with my family. I now have a grandson here. They kind of had a little bit of celebration for me. I was the first Airbnb senior executive ever to become a grandfather.

Invest in relationships. I learned very painfully when I left the job and people weren't sad to see me go that I was too hard on people.

That's a hard one. I need to think about this.

Thanks for having me.

Well, I think the most important thing is you have to focus on the team and building a good team, mentoring people, developing people, developing lawyers, giving them the appropriate level of responsibility and getting people to work because Airbnb is a very complex company. We run our own payments business. We have obviously privacy legal issues, product legal issues, global legal issues. And so there are a lot of lawyers doing it with a lot of different specialties and making them work together and function as a single legal team. It requires a good way of coordinating the work and good ways of getting the work done together. And so that's why focus on who we're hiring and how we're developing them as lawyers and how they work with the other lawyers on the team.

Well, I think the lessons are you have to really be ready for anything. It's a changing world. That's true obviously in geopolitical global affairs. It's also true in the practice of law. The world is changing quickly. Law practice is changing quickly. Companies are changing quickly. And lawyers have to be ready for that. And you have to find a way to give legal advice that's current and fresh without compromising core principles or key tenets of the law. So, at Airbnb, we're a very innovative tech company. We're constantly developing new products, new offerings. We launched Airbnb services earlier last year in May around the world. And so it's new issues every day at our company and we just have to stay current with them and continue to offer pragmatic, reasonable legal advice.

Well, I think it's very hard. I think what I'd say is you have to always understand that not to decide is to decide. And so you have to take action on often incomplete information. The Ebola outbreak epidemic in 2014 was the first time ever we have seen Ebola in an urban area. Previously, Ebola had just been a kind of a rural disease in Africa and the basic containment strategy was to isolate the rural villages where it was and not let people in or out. But in 2014, we saw Ebola in the capitals of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. You know, not giant urban areas, but cities of about a million people each. Some at least several hundred thousand. And so managing it in that setting, figuring out how being in an urban area made it different, and all those areas were connected obviously to had airports where people could get on planes and fly to European destinations and ultimately onto the US and other places. So that was a whole new turn, a whole new set of challenges of how to try to protect countries from people arriving with Ebola and spreading Ebola in other places. And so we had to make decisions based on limited information, limited historical records and then try to do the best thing by the science and the facts and the evidence as we had them knowing that they were incomplete. But again waiting for complete information meant waiting too long. And so I think one thing I always say about crisis management is as I said at the outset not to decide is to decide. And you have to get comfortable deciding on incomplete information.

It can be either way. It can be fast, it can be slow. At its best it should be fast but or just fast enough. I think you don't want to decide prematurely but you do want to make sure that you don't as I said make a decision by not deciding. And so I think it really depends on who the decision makers are but ideally it should be relatively fast-paced.

Our decision making at Airbnb is quite fast. I think it's a very large company but it's got a very entrepreneurial startup kind of spirit to it. We're functionally organized not organized by business unit but organized by functions. And so that adds to the accelerated decision-making. The senior executives of the company meet once a week every week. And so it's a forum for escalating decisions and getting high level decision makers in a room together to make decisions. And so our pace of action is fast. We're in a fast-paced world where things are changing every day and our competitors are growing and we're growing and we face a lot of challenges and as I said we're launching new offerings on a regular basis at Airbnb now and so you have to move quickly to stay abreast with the competition, stay abreast with the challenges.

Well, I'll start with just one which is a real sense of mission at Airbnb. I think you know obviously we're a for-profit company. We're quite successful financially and you know I'm not going to deny that we're well compensated but I'd say most people are at Airbnb because of our mission of bringing people together connecting people around the world allowing people to travel with people they care about and also to meet new people wherever they go and to build new connections. And look it's a very splintered world belonging is a hard thing in the world people feel lonely and I think travel through Airbnb is one big way of counterbalancing that. So I believe passionately in our mission. I believe that what we do every day makes the world a better place. You know, I worked in the White House. We spent a lot of time working on trying to reconcile Japan and South Korea. Two critical allies to the US, two critical market economies in Northern Asia, two innovative economies. There were a lot of historical resentments because of what happened during World War II. But it's very important I think for the global economy and for democracy for these two countries to get reconciled. And it was a thing we spent a lot of time on diplomacy at the White House. I'll say at Airbnb every day we send thousands of Koreans to stay in Japanese homes, thousands of Japanese to stay in Korean homes. I can't think of a better way for the people of the two countries to get to know each other and to put historical issues behind them and to see what they have in common and how they can respect each other's cultures and ways of living and work together more effectively. So that's our mission. We do that every day all around the world and I'm proud of that. And we also have an affiliated charity arm, Airbnb.org. We're the largest provider of crisis housing in the world. When there's a disaster, we step in and house people in homes that our hosts provide and that we pay for. And so I think that's obviously something I'm very proud of too. But I think our core mission even in the business itself is fighting against the worst development of modern life which is atomization, isolation and polarization by bringing people together and introducing people to each other.

Well, obviously, you know, as I said, when I worked in the Biden administration, we worked hard on diplomacy, on trying to bring leaders together, on trying to connect like-minded nations, bring them together in various gatherings and discuss issues of common concern and things we could do to solve shared problems like climate change and environmental degradation around the world and things like that. And so I think that's an important thing, but I do think that the person-to-person work on Airbnb is also important too. And you know I just think that you learn when you travel and stay in other people's homes. You learn a lot about the world, you learn how they live, you meet hosts, you feel like you now know somebody in another country. And I think it's a powerful antidote to kind of division and polarization we see in the world today.

Well, I think the mission I just discussed is central and then obviously we're also trying to grow the business and trying to expand our reach to parts of the world where we're less penetrated particularly Asia. We're pretty well penetrated in most of North America but trying to grow there too. And Europe of course Latin America is a giant market for us but Asia's a little bit newer for us. We're trying to get there. So, we focus on our growth. We focus on, as I said, new offerings. We just launched Airbnb services last year and have an expanded hotel offering on our platform now and are looking at other things we could provide for travelers. So, you know, I just think it's trying to grow what we do, trying to grow where we do it, and trying to offer the kinds of connection we provide to more and more people.

Well, you know, I'd say the most difficult legal issue I was ever involved in was my work as the general counsel of Vice President Gore's recount in 2000. It was obviously unsuccessful and you know it taught me that you have to learn from defeat and that you have to figure out how to do better next time. And you know I think that if you meet a litigator and they've never lost an important case, we aren't taking on risky enough cases and taking on cutting edge enough legal issues. And so, you know, I lost the most important case of my life as a litigator and Gore and I'm proud of what we did and definitely it was painful to lose, but you know, I think...

Yeah. So, as people may or may not know because it was a long time ago in 2000, in Florida the election was very close. 12 million ballots were cast. The initial tally had the two candidates apart by about 500 votes out of 12 million cast. And there were a number of irregularities in various counties. In Palm Beach County, the authorities had used a strange kind of ballot that confused voters and led to some voters voting for candidates they didn't intend to vote for. And in Volusia County, which is where Daytona Beach is, it's a very heavily populated county in Florida, they had a different kind of ballot that had confused voters. And so, and then, the initial tally of the machine showed that of those 12 million votes, there were hundreds of thousands of people who hadn't cast a vote for president at all, which seemed unlikely. It seemed unlikely you would take the time to go to the polls and vote for your county judges and your county commissioners and not vote for president of the United States. So we wanted to figure out why the machine said the person hadn't voted for either for president. And so we went to court and the Florida Supreme Court ordered a re-examination of all the ballots to see what they showed and that was appealed to the US Supreme Court which halted that re-examination and declared the election over on December 12th, 2000.

I was the general counsel for the recount and so you know I led our efforts to put together the legal team and oversaw the drafting of our submissions to the US Supreme Court and so as a litigator you know I felt like I was responsible for the outcome or litigators are responsible for you know we put in our briefs and we lost. You know it was a very very important case for us.

Well, I'm very lucky at Airbnb. I inherited a situation where the chief legal officer served on the executive committee and was in the room when all the big decisions are made. And that's the situation I walk into and I've been able to maintain. And so when our business leaders get together every week to decide about the strategic direction of the company, I'm in the room and am able to offer my views. You know, from the start and I hope that all general counsels have that opportunity. I think legal advice earlier is better. It's less disruptive to the business because there are legal considerations that can be built in from the start and risks can be assessed and dealt with from the start. And a lot of places they bring in the lawyers at the very end and then legal advice is disruptive or ignored and at Airbnb we bring in lawyers from the start as we work on projects and it makes legal advice I think easier to absorb and makes it easier for our business leaders to stay in sync with the legal team.

Well, you have a number of responsibilities. One of them is to be a principal adviser to the president, a person who makes sure that the president is meeting with the people he should meet with and hearing a broad array of opinions and facilitating the decision-making process. Then you supervise the several hundred people who work at the White House and make sure they're doing their jobs appropriately and figure out how to organize them and how to hire them and build them into teams and how they should be organized. And then you also play a bit of a role in cabinet and helping convey what the president wishes to the leaders from the various agencies of the federal government. So it's a multifaceted role and you know all of them are critical I guess.

Well I think you have to be I think one I think diversity is very important. It's always been important to me. But I think you aren't hiring the best people if you aren't hiring diverse people because there are great people from all backgrounds and all places and all walks of life. And the more you're inclusive in your hiring, like you are to find the very best people. That's always been my experience. Both in the private and in public sector. Secondly, I think you have to be unafraid to hire people who know more than you know. If you're a leader of a team, you're not going to be the best informed on everything that the team does. Like at Airbnb, for example, I have a team of amazing payments lawyers. I'm not a payments lawyer myself, but payment regulation and how we do payments around the world is a very important part of our business. And so I have people who know a lot more about payments than I do working for me. And so when they come and say, 'Hey, these are the key issues on payments on this, this, this, and this.' You know, I have to accept the fact they're going to know more than I do. And you have to be comfortable with that. And even though I'm a litigator, I will say even my litigators are better litigators than I am. And I learn from them every day. And you know that you just have to get comfortable with that. And so I think that's also critical. I see sometimes I see leaders who are scared to have people who know more than they know and that I think makes you a weaker leader. I think having really smart teams who have domain expertise makes for stronger teams and so that's critical. And then I think you have to be open-minded about people's credentials and look for people who have all kinds of different credentials. At Airbnb I'm one of the oldest people at the company and in fact last year they kind of had a little bit of celebration for me I was the first Airbnb senior executive ever to become a grandfather. So, you know, I work with a lot of young people every day. And my boss is 20 years younger than me and, you know, is a 43-year-old genius who founded Airbnb and has led the company since inception and a brilliant founder and CEO, Brian Chesky. And, you know, I think as you get older in life, you have to get more comfortable with the facts. You're going to work with younger people and sometimes younger people are going to be your boss. And I you know it's to me it's rewarding every day it's challenging every day and I feel grateful to have this opportunity.

Well, I will say you know in 2023 Brian decided we decided as a team under Brian's leadership to reinvent Airbnb experiences and bring back Airbnb services. And what was interesting about that decision was the company had launched experiences about a decade before and it had not been a successful line of business. So the decision to bring it back, invest in it again was not necessarily an obvious decision. And a lot of people were like, 'Well, it failed. Why are you doing it again?' And Brian had a very strong view. What we needed to offer to Airbnb was the complete trip, not just a place to stay, but what you do when you get there and the kinds of services people need while they're on vacation or traveling. And I was impressed by his determination and his vision, his creativity. You know and to help develop these experiences creative experiences that you couldn't do any place else. So we have an experience in Paris where you can tour the Eiffel Tower with a descendant of Gustave Eiffel himself who has one of the original drawings and things from his family. And it's a unique experience. People will go to Paris to tour the Eiffel Tower, but it's hard to tour the Eiffel Tower with a descendant of Eiffel. And so, you know, Brian's background as a designer and an artist brings a very creative mention to our work. And he brings that creativity to work with him every day and it's inspiring to see it and we have a lot of other great creative people at the company who work with him. And I just learn something new every day.

I would say his superpower is he is a designer by background. He went to Rhode Island School of Design and worked as an industrial designer before co-founding Airbnb. And so he thinks about problems as design problems. How we design our HR system, how we design our customer service and that idea of design at the center makes our product unique. You see it in our ads which are unique. You see it in our marketing which is unique and in our app and everything and we're a design focused company and he's one of the few tech company CEOs who are a designer by training and passion and you know that is a powerful form of leadership. And I'd say his other superpower is looking forward. I work with a lot of tech CEOs and very often they look back they say oh I wish just the old days when there were just eight of us in a garage and those were the good old days. That's not Brian's perspective. Brian's perspective is that, you know, we're moving forward at Airbnb and the team is getting better and stronger and the company's getting better and stronger and he's excited about the future and the things we can offer that he couldn't offer before when the company was smaller and it was just him and Nate and Joe in an apartment in San Francisco. So I think that future orientation is also a superpower and he is just a phenomenal leader. He is great with people. We do twice a year we do a roadmap review where we review the company's product roadmap with about 100 people in the room. It always impresses me that Brian knows all 100 of them, knows them by name, knows what they do at the company, knows what projects they've worked on previously. That kind of hands-on leadership is really inspiring and you know really touches all aspects of what we do at Airbnb.

I think they would be first of all one the importance of team when you're under pressure because the pressure at the White House is intense and if people don't have each other's backs it can just descend into finger-pointing and infighting and so you have to build a team where people trust each other where they're looking out for one another and where they have each other's backs and so that would be where I would start with that one first and foremost. Second, I would also add I think you need a diverse team as I said to have the very best people and have all perspectives in the room.

I think in every respect I think you need people with different professional skills, different educational backgrounds, from different parts of the world, from different parts of our country, different aspects of society, different races, different genders, different whatever.

Because I think it again, I think if you're not looking everywhere for the best people, you're not going to find the best people. And there's no one group of people or part of the country or part of the world that has all the best people. They're everywhere. And so you have to look everywhere if you're going to get the best people. And diverse perspectives and diverse points of view get the best decisions. And the third thing I'd say is I think it's you know really building a team of trust, building a team that's diverse and talented. And then I think you have to get comfortable with making decisions based on incomplete information. I think this is a challenge for lawyers. Lawyers are like, 'Oh, I need more facts. I always need more facts.' And that is what we're trained to do. But in high pressure situations and fast-moving situations, you have to sometimes make decisions without all the facts and without complete information. And that's a skill I think you develop over time. And you know I think that's a skill every lawyer needs to develop is look I want to know all the facts. I want to make an informed decision but if I can't know all the facts what are the facts I need to know and what can I do to decide without all the facts and you know I think that's really absolutely critical.

Well, I'll go back to the Ebola response we were discussing earlier. We had to make a decision about whether or not we would fly back to this country for treatment people who were infected with Ebola. Particularly Americans who were infected with Ebola. And those were almost always healthcare workers who had gone to fight the disease in West Africa and gotten sick in the course of fighting the disease. And we had of course better treatments and better medical facilities here in the US, highly specialized facilities.

that treat highly infectious diseases. And so we had to decide why don't we bring those people back to the US. And look, could you say there was a 0% chance they would infect others? No, you couldn't say there was a 0% chance. There's always risk involved. But we made a decision that based on the kind of technology and training our healthcare workers in these advanced facilities had, we could reduce the risk to a very, very low risk of these patients infecting others. And that if you didn't tell healthcare workers that if you got sick, we'd bring you back here and give you the best treatment, people wouldn't volunteer to go. If people didn't volunteer to go, the disease would spread and eventually it would get to America anyway because it would just spread so widely. Because these three relatively small countries where the disease was raging were adjacent to Nigeria, which is a large country with a lot of travel back and forth to the West. And so if you let the disease spread and spread over to Nigeria and get into places like Lagos, it would be all over the world. So we made a decision to fly back Dr. Kent Brantly and fly back others who were infected with the disease and who couldn't be successfully treated in West Africa, but who we could treat successfully here in the United States. And that saved lives and it incentivized healthcare workers to go knowing that they had a safety net back here if something bad happened to them.

Well, I think that the early response to the epidemic was not particularly effective. I think that it appears the data seems to show that the disease started in China, but that it came to the United States not from Asia, but from Europe. It got from China to Europe, and that it was travelers from Europe who brought it into the United States. So, I think we were focused at first on the wrong threat vectors and had a confusing response at first. But I think we developed vaccines very quickly and then we distributed those vaccines very effectively and got people vaccinated very quickly in 2021 and brought down the number of severe cases dramatically and the death rate dramatically. And you know, got our society reopened and our economy going again and kids back in school and so on and so forth. So, you know, I think that it was a rough start but better response as it went on and, you know, a lot of lessons to be learned about the need to develop vaccines quickly and also try to overcome vaccine resistance, which was a big problem for us.

Yeah, I'd say one mistake I made was I wound up being a manager at a very young age. And as a young manager, I was way too hard on the people who worked for me. And you know, when there's pressure on me, I push the pressure downward. And I see that in a lot of young managers that, you know, the boss says, 'Hey, why did this go wrong?' And then the manager yells at the team, 'Why did this go wrong?' And they learned very painfully when I left a job and people weren't sad to see me go that I was too hard on people. And so in the past couple decades as I've had other positions of responsibility, I've focused more on being a more inclusive and caring manager. I've lived by the principle that credit should go down and blame should go up. It's very important to give credit to the people who are doing the work on the ground. Very important if things go wrong for the senior leaders to accept responsibility for what goes wrong and not to push it downward. So credit goes down, blame comes up. I think that's a very important principle and a lesson I learned along the way. And it's something I believe in very much and, you know, I think that managing requires maturity and I wasn't mature enough when I first got that responsibility and I'm definitely older and more mature now.

The best advice I got... well, I think I was very lucky to be mentored by Secretary Warren Christopher first in the government and then at my law firm, O'Melveny & Myers, where he was the chairman of the firm. And Chris was always big on the idea that your integrity as a lawyer is your most important asset. And that you have to... you want to win, of course, you're a litigator, you want to win, but you need to always follow the rules and act with integrity and your word has to be good. And you tell the other side that you're going to do X, Y, or Z, you have to do X, Y, or Z. And, you know, so I think that his focus on integrity and principled law practice was the best advice I got as a young lawyer and something I carry with me.

Wow. The worst advice I've received. Well, I've been fortunate. I haven't gotten a lot of bad advice. But the worst advice I received, for example, I was advised to work harder to succeed. It's not always work hard. Work hard is very important, but it's not always work hard. You have to choose a direction and then work hard in that direction. So I make sacrifices. One piece of advice I got was to make a lot of sacrifices, like sacrifice your family time or this or that. I wasn't very comfortable sacrificing my health or family time. That is wrong advice to succeed in life.

That's a hard one. I need to think about that a bit.

Well, what I'd say is for me it kind of happened organically. I'll get back to that in a second. But I think if someone wants to be a CLO at a big company, what I'd say is get as many different experiences as you can as you are a lawyer. If you are just great at one kind of law, you're probably not going to be a great general counsel because as a general counsel, you have to understand all the different things that all your teams are doing. And so diverse experiences, some corporate experience, some litigation experience, some experience with big companies, some experience with small companies, public, private, all these things. The more experiences you have, the better prepared you are for this kind of job. In my case, it was very happenstance, which was I was a partner at O'Melveny & Myers. I got a call one day from someone who had been a client a long time ago, Rich Baer, who had been the general counsel of Quest when I was at O'Melveny previously and had been a client there and was then the general counsel of Airbnb. He said, 'Ron, I'm going to retire. You know, you did a great job for me when I was your client. Should I put you on the list of people to be considered to replace me?' I said, 'Well, wow. You know, I've never been the general counsel of a public company before. I would love to do it, and I love Airbnb. I love what they're about. You know, it seems like a long shot, but if you don't enter, you can't win. So, yeah, put me on the list.' And then a few months later, I got hired. So, you know, Rich was very generous and I was very fortunate to have that connection. And, you know, again it was more luck than anything else, but good luck. And it's worked out great for me and I feel very, very fortunate and very blessed to have this opportunity.

Look, I think that luck has a lot to do with it. But, you know, I think the elements of that story are that Rich was very generous and he was at a particular place where he could help me at a particular time. But hopefully it was more than luck that made him remember the kind of legal advice I'd given him as a lawyer and made him think that I was a good lawyer. He was a client. Though, you know, what I tell people is you always have to be on your A-game because you don't know when someone you're giving advice to is going to turn out to be important later in the future. And, you know, I hadn't really thought about my work for Quest for many, many years, but then all of a sudden there was Rich Baer on the phone saying, 'Hey, would you want to be considered for this job?' That was a dream job. And so, you know, I think that all these things have some elements of chance and some elements of your own drive and desire and determination.

I agree with that. I think, you know, chance and fortuity is a big part of life and you can't plan for that. But if you work hard, persevere, have character, and treat people well, then those opportunities tend to come along.

Well, success for me is really having time with my family. As I mentioned earlier, I now have a grandson. We're expecting a granddaughter very soon. Three grown children, all married. Two of them are going to have children very soon. And so, you know, time with them is really success for me. And we travel a lot together as a family, and that really is the thing I enjoy the very most.

Well, I think that you only get one chance to be a parent of young children and if you sacrifice that and aren't as present as you want to be, you never get that back. And so, you know, I just think that I see too many young lawyers not being the kind of parents they want to be or having the family time they want to have. And I think that's a mistake. And in the end, people don't remember that extra hour you worked or whatever. But, you know, I always tell lawyers to focus on not the quantity of their work but the quality of their work because what more senior lawyers are looking for is excellence. You know, they can always find more grinders, but what you need is really someone who is really thoughtful about their writing and thoughtful about their legal analysis, pragmatic, risk-based, and creative. And so I think it's more about quality than quantity. And too often, I think for whatever reason, people just focus on the quantity and that takes them away from their family and the things that are important to them, and that's unfortunate.

Going up every day. I think in all aspects. First of all, you know, at Airbnb our brand is a vital thing. There are a lot of places where you can find a place to stay, but why do people come to Airbnb? Because we represent something in terms of our values and our brand and our brand identity. And so protecting that brand is very important to us. That's something we spend a lot of time working on. And so that's critical. And then as I said before, our unique experiences, our unique services, that's part of our intellectual property that we work on very hard at Airbnb. It's very important to me. And on the legal team, you know, we have ways of doing things that are very important and very built into our culture and developing and enhancing those things is part of it. And in terms of innovation, I would say like all corporate legal departments, working hard on technology adoption in the Airbnb legal department, the use of AI as a tool for law practice. Every general counsel I speak to at a big company is focused on this issue right now. What can AI do that increases productivity, increases efficiency with a flat headcount, and how can you do it without sacrificing the idea of privilege or sacrificing the quality of the work? And I think those are big challenges for our place right now and challenges we're working through every day.

Well, I'd say we work with outside counsel, but we have lawyers in-house who focus on this every day. And, you know, it's very important to us because Airbnb is a famous brand now. We see people trying to copy the brand and say, 'Oh, I'm Air This or Air That or I'm this kind of B&B or that kind of B&B.' And so we're constantly looking around the web for these kinds of things and getting reports and working to protect our brand and, you know, also the look and feel and trade dress of our site and our app and things like that. So, you know, it's part of our duties as an in-house legal department and obviously we get great help from outside counsel on it too.

Well, I'd say there are kind of two answers to that question. One is how we use AI as a tool in-house and how it becomes part of our product for our customers. In-house, as I said, with the department, we're using it for litigation support, for contract lifecycle management, for research, and for information management and document management. So we're using it to make our law practice more efficient, more effective. But of course, the more important issue is how we're using it as a company to serve our customers. We've started to use it to support customer support, customer service. We are working on other AI-powered products. We know that a lot of travelers now are planning their trips by using chat and, you know, other AI tools to decide where they should go and so on and so forth. So we're building some of our own tools too. And, you know, I think it is important for us to stay abreast of technology. We've always been a tech company. We are a tech company. We recently hired a new CTO who is a leader in AI to help bring these technologies to Airbnb and accelerate our development of them. And so I think that we offer the very best planning tools for our customers and the very best way of people finding our listings. And so finding the right one for you is hard. And, you know, obviously we want to use whatever tools we can to make it easier for you to find the listing that's best for you and your family.

Well, I would say we don't necessarily isolate the patents for ROI. Some of our patents are developed by our tech team after hours on their own time and we protect them as a way of thanking our tech team for their work. The patents in our work, you know, are again part of our overall offering to consumers. And so, you know, in the end, the ROI comes from the idea that people all over the world love and use Airbnb. They find great trips on Airbnb. They find the experiences and services they're looking for. And we continue to grow as a company around the world.

What keeps me up at night is the unreliability of it in some respects, hallucination, things like that. Because if we're going to use it as lawyers, it has to be accurate. We can't file briefs that have non-existent cases in them. We can't tell our clients that law says X, Y, or Z if it doesn't. And so I do worry about the kinds of hallucination and, you know, just wildly wrong things you find in AI. And so I think that keeps me up about AI as a lawyer and as a corporate general counsel. Obviously, I'm worried as a person about the social consequences and its impact on our political system. So I worry about other things in a broader context. That's what I worry about.

Well, I think, look, I think the AI to create highly persuasive fakes have negative consequences in our political system. People say, 'Oh, I just saw candidate X say Y.' Candidate X never said that. It's just a deep fake. And, you know, that will distort our political system a great deal. And, you know, TV ads that are based on that have AI-generated images in them can impact campaigns in a very unfortunate way. And, look, I think that all technologies have that, but AI seems to have that potential impact even more than most. And so, you know, something we have to keep an eye on.

I think some of both. I think that I would encourage that younger lawyer to get familiar with AI legal tools and figure out how to use AI to advance their law practice. But I would also say to be careful not to be overly reliant on it. You know, I think AI research can be a starting point if you're a lawyer. It can help supplement your research. It isn't the be-all and end-all of your research because if it is, why do we need lawyers? You know, if anyone can pound an inquiry into some AI search box and get legal advice out of that, then why do we need lawyers? So, I think you can't rely on it. So, I tell young lawyers, if you're going to use AI tools to do research, start there and then do your own research, or end there after you've done your own research and see what you've missed. But don't rely on the AI research tool as the be-all and end-all of your legal research. You have to know the law and you have to know the key cases and you have to continue to develop your domain expertise.

I think some jobs in the law profession will go away. No question. But I remember when 20 years ago, knowledge management first got introduced in law practice. And at that time, young associates at big firms, their whole practice was reading documents, figuring out if they were responsive to discovery requests, and that kind of work went away, was replaced by knowledge management. And yet there's still young lawyers that get hired every day to do other things. And so, you know, I just think that law practice will change and some tasks lawyers do will go away, but other tasks lawyers do will become more important. And, you know, I just think that's the way technology has affected the practice before, it's what will always affect the practice.

Well, I would urge them to make hiring people their number one priority because if you hire the right people, it is much easier to do your job well. And if you don't hire the right people, it's much harder to do your job well. So I think hiring is always at the top of the list. And then building a trusted team and focusing on, you know, how the team works together, what the ways of working are. I think it's really critical. I would also say it's important if you're a corporate general counsel to get yourself into the rooms where decisions are made and not be like at the end of the chain. Okay, the decision's been made, now we're going to call the GC and yes or no. And so I think being in early is critical. And, you know, and then to be on top of things. As I said before, my team knows more about certain things than I do, but I make it a point to get information from them, be on top of things. I want to be in a situation where the CEO calls me and says, 'Hey, I heard the legal department raised this issue about that,' and I say, 'Well, I don't know about that, I need to call someone and get back to you.' I need to know that when he asks me. And, you know, I need to know what our concerns are and why we have concerns. So I think if you want to be an effective general counsel, you have to be someone people can turn to in the boardroom or in the C-suite and get answers from and not, 'Oh, let me put you on hold and I'll call someone and get back to you.'

Uh, yes, they could be different things, but most often it's just a fancier name for general counsel.

I suppose you could be the chief legal officer and someone could be the general counsel and there could be other kinds of counsel and you would just be the chief legal officer over all those people.

Well, look, I think everyone needs to be humble about the impacts they've made in the world. It takes a lot of people to impact the world. And, you know, I'm proud. I've worked on things that had impact, but I've just been part of a team on every one of those things. And we've talked about the Ebola response a lot. I'm very proud of what we did. But it was a great team effort. I had amazing people working with me in the White House and in the agencies. And the US-led global response was just part of the global response. We had great support from Great Britain and France and from the nations of West Africa themselves. So, I don't know about my individual contribution, but I was proud to be part of that team. I think it saved a lot of lives and prevented a big disaster that was looming in the world. But again, it was a team effort, part of the team.

Well, I think, you know, you learn as you mature that, you know, like you come from a place, you leave, great work happens after you leave. Maybe I wasn't that important. And so you see that and hopefully you learn from that and you get inspired by the people who work for you and you realize that they are more important than you are or make a bigger contribution than you make. And I think if you're a sensible person, you learn that. And so, you know, I hope that's the kind of experience everyone picks up along the way.

From which experience?

President Clinton had a prodigious knowledge of public policy. And I learned that, you know, those of us who were young and who thought we knew a lot about world policy always knew less than he did. And it was always impressive. And President Clinton was really a people-first kind of person. His best moments were with people and the human connection. And it was great to see that. And, you know, he just was a relentless fighter and, you know, never got down too much and always kept slugging away. I think that was important to see also.

Well, I'm a lot more introverted personally than President Clinton is. So, I find dealing with people I don't know very difficult. But I say my... I hope my leadership style is to be an inclusive leader and a leader who listens and learns and, you know, tries to draw from the people around me every day.

I enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. Really appreciate you.