In Partnership With Chris Nassetta, Hilton CEO | American Express

I'm ready. You know I don't do anything rapid, but let's do it. We'll try.

Moonshot by Albert Bourla. He sent it to me and, you know, it's a great story. I'm not done with it. I've been getting through it, but it's just an amazing story of innovation, how they totally reinvented the process of how they make a vaccine from a process that could take 5 or 10 years to a matter of months. That's really inspiring.

Bahamas. We have a place there and I have a lot of good memories there and I think it's one of the most beautiful places on earth. If you like water, sand, all the sun, all those fun things, which my family does and I do. It's a beautiful place.

Oh, since I was a little kid. My father loved to fish. When I was a kid, the fishing in the Bahamas is some of the best in the world. So, he would take my brothers and I down to fish. Probably been going since I was five, but I'm not going to tell you how many years that is because then they could calculate how old I am.

The Hyatt Regency in Nice. I know that's a surprising answer.

In the Mediterranean for a family holiday to celebrate the graduation from high school of my youngest of six daughters. So, we did a big trip all of us together with my mother and father-in-law. The trip started in Nice and we have a great hotel under development, but it is not open. So we stayed at the Hyatt Regency, which was nice.

Yeah, we like to check the competition and I'm quite good friends with Mark Obermeier as you know on the side too.

Absolutely.

I don't normally binge, but I did binge Ted Lasso.

Oh, yes. I think there's going to be another season.

And I think there's going to be another season.

My first job was as an auditor for Arthur Andersen in Houston, Texas auditing oil and gas companies.

Exactly. Me neither.

That I should focus more time doing the things I love.

Mixed nuts. It's my go-to. It's a nice snack.

Yeah, it's a nice snack.

I think so. Nothing against Pringles so anybody's watching.

I did. I grew up in Arlington, Virginia right outside of Washington, D.C. I was born and raised here. I was a very industrious person. When I was a kid I had paper routes and lawn mowing businesses, snow plowing business, painting business. I always had something going on. My parents are fabulous. They're both still alive and they instilled in me what their parents instilled in them, which is hard work. You get what you work for and they were very disciplined about having us understand that we needed to be out there and doing things. So, I was always active and always had an interest in business generally and those were little entrepreneurial micro businesses. As I grew up my father was in the real estate development business. So, I went to University of Virginia, got a degree in finance, got out, got into the real estate development business working for a very large local company, Oliver Carr. Then I got in the private equity business with a partner during the S&L crisis, which was an amazing five-year jaunt in my career of learning and opportunity given all the dislocation that came out of the S&L crisis. Then my partner and I got recruited during that to go to a company called Host Marriott, now Host Hotels, the largest public owner of hotels in the world. We thought, we have this great thing going, why would we do that? But it was a really interesting time to get into the hotel business. I had had some history in it when we were in our private equity business. We had done work in the hotel area. I had worked in the back of house in summers as a kid in the hotel business and we both said, why not? This is a really interesting time given the dislocation and we went to Host and took what was then part of the breaking apart of the Marriott company, sort of good co bad co. We were the bad co part, but we thought this will be a real opportunity, a challenge and an opportunity. I was there ultimately with him as CEO, then myself as CEO after he retired after 4 years. We built that company with a lot of help, with a lot of hearts and souls. Fabulous company, Fortune 500, S&P 500 company, real leader in that segment of the industry then and to this day. Throughout my career I worked in and did lots of different ways. When I was in private equity, my own private equity shop, I did some work with Blackstone. When I was at Host, we bought and sold and did a big merger deal with them where they ended up as our largest shareholder and were involved in the board. When they bought Hilton, they knocked on my door and said, 'Hey, we think you've been training your whole life to do this. You've got experience on the branding and the real estate and finance, you should do this.' I said, 'That's an interesting idea. I don't know. I've got a wife, six little kids, they weren't all in school and the idea of moving to LA and pulling them all out of a very comfortable ecosystem seemed a little bit crazy.' But the more I thought about it, the more I talked to my wife, the more I realized this is an opportunity of a lifetime. So we took it and here we are. My roots in hospitality, I cared a lot. I started in the toilet because if you go way back, when I was working summers in high school and college, I worked in the back of house of hotels. I say my career started in the toilet because when I first started out, like most jobs, I was basically the lowest person on the totem pole in the engineering department. That meant you got all the worst jobs in the beginning. So I got a lot of plunging of toilet jobs. But it was a fabulous way for a young person that was interested in the business, didn't really understand it or the whole ecosystem of what goes on in a hotel. As a customer, you see a hotel and hopefully we make it really lovely and a great experience. I know we're not perfect. We do a pretty darn good job. But there's a lot of stuff going on behind those walls. There's a village of people, a family back there that are together morning, noon, and night and weekends and holidays. Until you've been back behind the walls and lived it and breathed it with people, you don't understand it. So it was a fabulous way as a young person interested in the industry to get a real sense of what makes it work. It was unbelievably eye-opening. When I started I was 16 or 17 years old, very impressionable. There's a lot of stuff that goes on behind those walls. As a young person it was eye-opening, but it really opened my eyes to the opportunity of just how complex and interesting and intellectually stimulating making all this come together really was. If I hadn't done that, I'd never truly have appreciated coming at it from a finance and development perspective.

We did. Yeah. So I'll let you ask the question.

You're an empty nester.