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I'm Kara Swisher, and you're listening to Sway, the last 12 months have been a roller coaster for Airbnb. First, the pandemic decimated the travel industry and cut the home rental companies revenues by 80 percent. By May, Airbnb had to lay off a quarter of its staff. But by December, after much rejiggering of its business, the company managed to come out on top. Its IPO that month put Airbnb is worth at over 100 billion dollars. That's more than the value of Expedia and Marriott International combined.

And then January 6th happen. Airbnb has certainly not been in the midst of the firestorm surrounding the attack on the Capitol, the way Facebook or Twitter or YouTube have been. But a number of people who are alleged to have participated in the insurrection used Airbnb to book stays in D.C. This quickly turned into a dilemma for the company, which has a long history of struggling with trust and safety issues. So I wanted to talk to Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky about how his company is navigating the aftermath.

Welcome to Sway, Brian, thank you, Carol. So we have talked many times, Brian and I, we just were recounting I actually met Brian when he was just starting his company with his other founders at a coffee place in San Francisco about 12 years ago. You've done pretty well since then, I think.

Yeah, I was just starting out, and I think you were on those, like, flip cameras interviewing me before. Like I said, good resolution. Indeed I did.

So a lot has happened since we last spoke to. And I wanted to start this conversation by talking about the recent decisions Airbnb has made to cancel reservations in D.C., specifically after the attack on the Capitol. You canceled all D.C. reservations for inauguration week. Walk me through how you made those decisions, starting with January 6th.

Yeah, well, I can just get background on where this all came from. In 2016, we updated our community standards policy to not allow members of hate groups to use Airbnb. And so we had a major problem of discrimination on our platform. A hashtag Airbnb back was trending. This is people who would not rent to people of color, correct?

Yep. So people call we're trying to book Airbnb and we're experiencing discrimination. So in the wake of that, we created a community commitment policy where every single user on Airbnb had to attest that they will not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, orientation, a variety of other circumstances. More than one million people decided not to comply with that. So we removed more than a million members from this. And thousands and thousands of angry people also said, you know, how dare you, et cetera, et cetera.

So how dare you? What what was that? How dare you? A lot of the accusations were, how dare you kind of side with the left. People thought these were political decisions that I said, no, you know, it's a very low bar to not allow neo-Nazis on our platform. That is not a political decision. So in twenty seventeen the summer, we started hearing that on forums, neo-Nazi forums, neo-Nazis, we're talking about booking Airbnb based in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Unite the right rally.

So we went to law enforcement and we banned anyone that we could find that was involved in this. That was a neo-Nazi. And ever since then, we've been banning people. So the first point I just want to make is we didn't just make a new policy or new decision on January six in the wake of the capital insurrection. We've been doing this actually for five years.

So how do you determine who's in a hate group? How do you know just because they're on it? I'm going to the rally is enough to warrant that? Oh, no, no.

They have to be an active member of a hate group. And so we're not the ones to decide. We work with the Anti Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. I'm not sure there's one universal hate group list, but they each have a list and we cross-reference those lists. And historically, what we've done is if we get any information from a community member or anyone else that somebody may be a member of a hate group, we will investigate.

We have an investigation team called the User Knowledge Operations Team.

It's kind of a mouthful, but it's a team, very user knowledge operations team. Yeah. It's comprised of former law enforcement officials, people and cybersecurity people from the US government and around the world. Basically what happens is when people post information publicly that they're intending to join a hate group rally or something, they have an intention that we think is nefarious. We will investigate. So we're not like sleuthing people's personal backgrounds. People can post whatever they want in social media within reason.

We don't care. But that's our bar.

How do you investigate them? And if you're not sleuthing them, does the government or ADL give you names, specific names of people or.

Yes, they give us names of members of hate groups. There's also hate group forums and we don't monitor most forums, but there are a few that are places where neo-Nazis congregate online and we do monitor those forums.

So for the cancellations that were made ahead of January six, did you know that these people are traveling from the rally specifically?

We had no idea what was like. Most people, I presume, what was going to happen on January six. We had absolutely no idea. But what we did know is that we had members of the Proud Boys organization, which is deemed a hate group by numerous groups. I think pretty much everyone deemed them a hate group. We're using Airbnb, as you know. It's brought to our attention by community members host who said this account seems suspicious. You know, you can kind of tell someone's profile photo or the way they communicate.

So we looked into it as we started looking into it, we started noticing a number of bad boys are trying to use Airbnb. We were able to stop, we believe, quite a few boys and other members of hate groups from using Airbnb on January six. But there's no question that some of the people involved in the capital insurrection were staying in Airbnb.

We don't know how many how many did you remove before pre January six for that day? I don't know. Off the top of my head, it was more than just a few. It was enough that, like, the team brought this to me as a major issue. And of course, we called the mayor of D.C., Mayor Bouser, the governors of Virginia and Maryland. We retain the former police chief, a DC as an advisor. And we created this whole protocol to try to elevate and go from reactive proactive.

So we asked the user knowledge operations team to start proactively investing. Brigading we are neo-Nazis are congregating and other members of hate groups, and to actually be more proactive as part of that, we had a debate about what do we do about the inauguration? And we decided it was frankly going to be an easy decision to ban all reservation D.C. We just thought the city was on lockdown. I had members of Congress and senators asking what we were doing and could we stop reservations.

And it became a pretty easy decision that we did not want to be involved in anything that was going to destabilize our democracy.

And you just said shut down because why should we even be part of a possible attack, second attack?

Yeah, because the burden for us to confirm exactly who was a member of a group when we heard floods of thousands of people and as many people might not been officially in a member of a hate group. In other words, you can't ban something from a hate group until you have evidence throwing a hate group. And that means you have to find evidence of them posting on a hate crime forum they might not have been. And so we felt like there could be thousands of people come D.C. and we don't want to be involved in this.

So we should not be part of that.

Is there anything else that you're doing in the aftermath of the Capitol attack to prevent bad actors from using what is now your new policy? Absolutely.

Post January six, we've now worked with the FBI, the U.S. attorney's, and one of the things we did is we got a list of people that have warrants out for them or have been arrested because of the insurrection. It turns out one hundred and thirty of them were members on Airbnb. So we've now banned all of them and we are now taking this framework and we're going to bring it to two hundred and twenty countries. And that is a policy we're doing going forward.

We're not going to stop everyone because you can imagine 220 countries, just the context to track people down. So we've started the United States. We're now going to Europe and any major congregation. So political congregations, you know, I mean, Fourth of July would be something we would just generally be monitoring because we think there's an opportunity for a lot of people gather. So groups is probably the primary, but we are absolutely looking at major congregations and events.

All right. So these people have been arrested. They haven't been convicted yet. So how are you tracking these cases as more information comes in?

What if they make a mistake or if they make a mistake? We want to make sure people understand there is due process and we want people to know, like we're going to do the right thing. So if there's a warrant out, we're going to ban them from the platform. If they're exhausted and proven not to be a member of a group, of course, they will be reinstated. They have an appeals process. I take appeals very seriously because I also don't want this to be like this or.

Well, I think there's a dark side to taking more responsibility. If you're not careful, you know, you could just start to feel very scared because the bigger tech companies become, the more if you're banned. It's like you lose a major right in society. Imagine being banned for a major platform. So we really do have an appeals process. We look at it very carefully. And if people think we've done the wrong thing, we'll take a look at it again.

Have you gotten any appeals from January 6th arrests yet? I'm not aware of that, but the arrest at the capital is enough for you to ban them, correct?

Yes, we believe that's enough. So is it owners or renters or both or is it both?

Both mostly guest just because like for every host, there's like ten guests or even more. Right.

And is there a specific team assigned to a hate group? So individual teams.

Yeah, they're all different teams. So that kind of long name I told you is an investigation team that specifically focuses on a lot of dangerous organizations we call danger organizations or hate groups. They are part of a broader multi hundred person trust and safety team comprised of cybersecurity experts and former law enforcement officials that also look into party houses, human trafficking, attempted terrorism, people harboring terrorists. There's a variety of things you could use a home for.

Yeah. So does that mean an expansion of this? Yes.

And our general goal is we I mean, I would like us to be a role model. Doesn't mean we're going to do everything right. But I like us. I'm kind of tired of hearing tech companies getting dragged in the future and people thinking they're not responsible, their hands off. They're not acting like good actors and we don't want to be part of that narrative.

Are you going to try to remove people ahead of time or just after arrests?

It's pretty difficult to prevent somebody from signing up. I think eventually we could probably do that right now. You know, we kind of have to stop you after you sign up because it's hard in the sign up fellow to just real time detect that so many innocent people could be stopped. So we don't stop them from signing up. We let them sign up. And then once they sign up, then we do an investigation if we have information. But we don't wait for people to be arrested.

Like if there's any evidence you a member of a hate group, then we remove your account, your band.

OK, so when Facebook or Twitter bans users, it's been a huge backlash who say it's censorship or political bias when they even put a label on it? For the most part, you managed to fly under the radar of these claims. So this is going to give people a lot of attention towards you. We don't want your business, you neo-Nazis.

Well, first of all, I'm prepared to get shit from neo-Nazis. And I have been since Charlottesville. I mean, they don't like us, number one. Number two, I do think we're a little different than Facebook and Twitter in the sense that I think with Facebook and Twitter, you know, there's a lot of topic around free speech and censorship. With Airbnb, I think it's about personal safety is kind of the top issue for most users. And so I think there's just a different expectation of the public that we will take more responsibility, because when Airbnb goes wrong, you can be physically harmed in a more direct way.

Do you see Silicon Valley following suit with this kind of behavior?

One hundred percent. But there's no question, Kyra, that one of two things is going to happen. Either tech companies are going to say enough is enough, we're stepping up and we're going to take more responsible what happens in our platform or they won't. And if they won't, then there will be probably government intervention. And I think that, you know, ultimately society is going to win.

So when you say this to your compatriots there, because you're friends with Mark Zuckerberg, your friends, what do they say when you say this?

I won't talk about anything specific, but I will say that most people generally agree, actually, and maybe people will be surprised to hear that two or three years ago, I think we were in the minority on this. I think there is a reckoning that has occurred. And I think people are coming around to the idea that the path we've been on is unsustainable. And so having talked to most tech leaders, I think most of are coming around, but I'd say some at different speeds than others.

And I do think some are way ahead of the curve and some are kind of, in my mind, maybe dragging their feet and it's not to anyone's benefit.

All right. So when we spoke this past May there just a few months into the pandemic and you had just laid off twenty five percent of your workforce. Nineteen hundred employees, your valuation was 18 billion dollars or almost half of what it had been valued at the start of the pandemic. You had to borrow a billion dollar loan on top of a billion dollar bond deal. You weren't sure when you would go public that year, but things were not looking good.

Yeah, it seemed as soon as the summer it was inconceivable to almost everyone that we would be public. That year is so inconceivable that we put the IPO process on hold. We put this one on hold and our bankers went on to other IPOs.

Talk about that that interim period. You had a lot of great ideas and you put them all in a drawer and then you didn't go public and you had to sort of clean up your business. Now, you saw a little bit of a turnaround during the pandemic as people are renting more houses and just shifting their behaviors. Correct.

The whole thing was shocking to me. I mean, the first thing was I never thought our business would drop 80 percent in eight weeks. And it was a lot of fallout fallout, including laying off twenty five percent of employees, plus another 10 percent of the employee base that were contractors and fixed term employees. And so at that point, we're like, OK, this is a long road and we're probably not going to be public this year because it seems like our revenue is going to be half of what we forecasting.

Then something remarkable happened after having been locked in their homes, quarantining for months, many people, especially United States, that I have to get out of the house. People got in their cars and they were traveling two to three hundred miles.

So they were renting nearby. Yup.

And so that meant a huge rebound in Q3.

So you felt confident you go public when? Probably by August. I mean, we filed it in August, so I spent like the month of July into August.

Working on the S-1 is essentially a document you filed with the Securities Exchange Commission to explaining your business. It's the map of your business. Yeah.

In our case, it was a 400 page document and every single thing has to be kind of verifiably true by the SEC. So the S-1 had to be totally rewritten almost entirely because the S-1 was describing a business that in a sense no longer existed. And we had a new business. It was very much focused on our roots, individuals host and it wasn't about transportation, hotels and a one stop shop for travel.

So in December, you debut the stock market and you surpassed one hundred billion dollar valuation. On the first day of trading, your initial public offering price was sixty eight dollars and you closed at one hundred and forty four dollars and seventy one sense. What was your reaction to those numbers?

Well, I think my reaction was kind of camera to an interview. I was completely speechless. Not only was I not anticipating the stock price to more than double on the day of trading, but a company that was eighteen billion dollars not long earlier today, then closed at one hundred billion, my whole, like, hard drive melted and my head, how could we go from eighteen to one hundred in a year. Yeah, how could you.

So what do you think about that valuation. There's, you know, there's a lot of talk about overvaluation or a bubble with a lot of companies. So why do you think you're getting that?

No, we had a fast rising valuation to thirty one billion, but then we were stagnant for four or five years. So I had felt like our valuation was I kind of stuck it like thirty, thirty one billion for quite a few years. And so I felt, I felt a little bit like this is a bit of a lagging indicator that we've made more progress than we're getting credit for. But that's OK.

OK, but even we were left speechless by the numbers. And it's not because you think they were overvalued, it just you didn't think it would return that fast shift between 18 and whatever it is now.

Yeah, it was just a very dramatic thing. So when your first earnings report since going public came out recently, it showed twenty two percent year over year drop in revenue, which was actually better than what you and others had predicted, and three point eighty nine dollars billion net loss. It seems to me like your company was predicted to lose money, but then was also valued very highly. So explain to people why the valuations are high. When companies have losses, the first thing is no investor invest in a company.

They don't think they'll eventually be profitable. But technology companies sell. There's some speculators. Wall Street bets GameStop is not worth whatever it was worth.

Certainly, I guess I'm speaking for super obviously sophisticated investors.

The idea is that, you know, you can invest ahead of growth to get to massive scale. And when you get to massive scale, of course, then you can get higher margins. And what I think you show is that you have a profitable core. You use that core to invest in new ventures. And that was true of Airbnb as well. I mean, we were taking our profits and we were investing in like nine other divisions and probably were overextended.

But when we pulled everything back, I think we were able to show investors that the inherent business was profitable.

Are you planning to hire more people or where? Where are you going to add costs and grow again?

We're never going to add costs like we did before either. Same scale. So we're not going to add the same amount of marketing or similar people for that size business. We are going to rehire people that were laid off. We have we hired dozens so far. The majority of people laid off were hired elsewhere. But we are intending over the coming years to hire back as many people as possible that want to come back. At this point, we're going to be a much leaner and more focused company.

And that was the problem we had. We were trying to spin too many plates. It didn't work. And so we're never going to lose that focus. So let's talk about the specific things. Content.

Yeah, yes. We had content. We had a magazine. We shut it down. We don't have an intention to restart the magazine. We don't have any near-term plans for content. Never say never, but no near-term plans. We shutdown, don't have near-term plans for airlines. I think that you did, though. We did. We had two flights product. We actually built it. We were testing it and then we closed the whole thing down.

I think the whole transportation industry is going to go through a transformation. So I kind of think it's best for the let that play out. And it's more of a commodity business. There's not much we can do in that business. We pulled back our investment on hotels. We still have hotel tonight. I'm very proud of it, but we're just not investing as much in the grand scheme of things. Business travel. We had a big business travel operation.

I don't think business travel is coming back to pre covid levels because all world assume I mean, I keep listing it, but those are just a few examples.

So these trends you see as the vaccines roll out is increasing. Consumer travel is what you're talking about, right?

Yes. We don't think business travel is going to come back for a while. I don't think it ever fully comes back the way it was, because I think a lot of people are say I don't need to get on a plane to go to that meeting because business travel is not coming back as much. We think that's going to create more leisure travel because the more you're working from home, the more you kind of want to get out of the house.

And so we think there's going to be a mix shift from business, travel, leisure travel. We also think there's going to be a mix shift from mass travel, people kind of staying in big resorts, people going on to like Time Square or double decker bus tours to staying in smaller towns, the communities, many communities that don't even have hotels.

We'll be back in a minute, if you like this interview and want to hear others hit subscribe to be able to catch up on SUANNE episodes you may have missed, like my conversation with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and you'll get new ones delivered directly to you. More with Brian Chesky after the break.

Like it or not, we all have bubbles where we get our information and who we hang out with often just reinforce what we already believe.

But I'm betting you don't like the idea of living in a bubble. Let me help you pop it.

I'm Jane Kostin, the new host of The Argument, a podcast from New York Times opinion. Each week on the show, you'll hear people who don't agree, hashing it out on the big questions, like whether to cancel student debt, if it's possible to reform the police and, yes, whether aliens exist. I have my own opinions on these topics. We should not make contact with the aliens, which you might not agree with. It's going to get awkward.

And that's the point. We'll make sure to highlight a wide range of voices to the debate isn't one sided. My hope is that you leave each episode with a broader and more nuanced view on the topic at hand and a glimpse of the world outside your bubble. You can listen to new episodes of the argument every Wednesday, wherever you're listening to this podcast.

So let's get to host the start of the pandemic, one of the biggest challenges you faced was that hosts were upset by the way Airbnb allowed guests to cancel reservations, get refunds.

Do you wish you had done it differently? Yeah, absolutely.

When the pandemic occurred in the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, we had guests wanting to cancel around one billion dollars with the reservations. And these were reservations that we would have had to override the host cancellation policies to get their money back. And this is a conundrum. Do you refund the guests their money, but then the hosts aren't going to get paid and this is a recession now. So they need the money. And we didn't really want to side with guest host, but we thought we don't want people to feel like they have to travel and put themselves in a moral hazard because they can't get their money back.

So we decided to override host cancellation policy to refund them. That was likely the right decision. I think it was. But we just blindsided the host with it and we didn't consult them. We didn't tell them. We didn't treat them with partners. And there was a very big backlash. It was a huge learning lesson for me. And we started listening sessions of 4000 host and we committed to doing better and we made a lot of changes and committed to doing better as corporate speak.

What does that mean?

OK, we updated our cancellation policies. We improved a number of tools that they were upset about. We started investing a significant amount more in customer service because they told us they wanted us to be more accessible and available. And then the other thing we did is we created an Airbnb host endowment kind of model after college, Dommett and we took nine point two million shares. What is today valued around nearly two billion dollars. We created a host advisory board of 17 host, and we've asked them to advise us on what to do with the endowment.

We also took two hundred and fifty million dollars off our balance sheet, which doesn't maybe sound like a lot for a company like Airbnb today. But at the time when we were having trouble raising money, it certainly felt like a lot of money. We gave that to her. So it didn't make them a whole, but it made them like twenty five percent whole on the cancel reservations.

Yes. Because some of them online so didn't get any money. There are those that they really very little compared to what they lost. Did you distribute all the money in that fund.

Yeah, we distributed all the money was 200 dollars plus I think an incremental more than 10 million dollars of a grant program as well.

Did you want to now, given how high your stock is, make them whole of what they lost, that one billion dollars? Do you see yourselves doing that or not? No.

I mean, I think the endowment is kind of we've we've consulted and the vast majority of host we've consulted with and I'm not saying this is everyone. There's many hosts who feel differently. But having canceled the host advisory board and other community leaders, I think most hosts feel good about where the relationship is now, how we've handled it. And just to be super clear, I've committed to putting in more than one hundred million dollars of my own money into this endowment, and that will be probably the first of numerous gifts I make.

So now one of the things that I can listen to their homes on other services like the Arbo or asking potential guests to go to Craigslist to book their for a cheaper rate. Are you worried about that issue of people going off your platform or finding other ways? How do you combat that?

I'm not too worried about it because we don't think it's happening very frequently. And the way to combat that primarily is to make a service so good that they don't have a reason to take it offline. For example, you take it on Craigslist, your home gets trashed. You may not be insured. You do an Airbnb, you have a million dollars coverage.

Yeah, there is a book, direct hashtag, though, and stuff like that. So you think that the services you provide, like insurance, like payment and stuff like that, I don't think many people are trying to do it.

Just statistically. The four million host, I think you'll find a few examples. You're not going to find thousands. And the people who want to book direct are typically larger enterprises that are trying to build their own brand. So these are large property managers? Not all the time, but usually.

Yeah. That they want to do their own.

Yeah, they want to have their own brand and they don't want intermediaries, which you are. We are in I think our regular people don't think of us as immediately, like they can't conceive of doing it without us because they're not trying to run a business like a big business.

One of the things that you had been involved in was a number of legal disputes with cities over short term rental regulation, as well as tax collection for years.

So what does it look like these days? Because cities have changed, rents in San Francisco are down 20 percent. There's all kinds of activity where there is lots of room suddenly or more room. I guess services will never be total room. But how is that changed?

It's totally changed. I mean, I'd say the pandemic was a reset on our relationship with thousands of cities. So a lot of cities have major budget shortfalls. I mean, a huge amount. And these cities are going through budget crisis. Many hotels are shutting down and not coming back. They're losing all their conference business, all their business travel. And so now we're trying to just work with cities that want tourism.

But you're also seeing some new laws being proposed in San Diego, Vermont, Philadelphia. It's not a total reset.

How do you look at those? Well, San Diego, actually, we think those are generally positive developments in San Diego existed in a kind of back and forth with Joe. Unions, for a long time, there was discussion of banning Airbnb. There was a compromise with the city council. Eight of the nine members voted in favor of amending the ordinance to make sure it was legalized. The hotel unions supported it. There was a compromise around some registration schemes, but we supported it.

So the lack of power of hotels now is good for Airbnb, the leasing power.

Well, I think maybe another way of saying it is I think hotels are realizing they need more guests in their hotels and they realize a lot of guests are on Airbnb. And so hotels are now reaching out to us as well. I think hotels are realizing that we're a part of the future and the best opportunity for most of them is to list on Airbnb.

All right. But speaking of one particular city nation with New York City had been particularly strained and you said a lawsuit against the city's collection of host data last year. Recently, Governor Cuomo, who may or may not be there by the time this airs, proposed that home sharing businesses like Airbnb should collect sales tax. What is your outlook on that? And also, where are you with New York now?

We think that's a great thing. The city in New York had decided since 2013 to not allow us to collect taxes. I think the fear was to do that would be to legitimize the business. And some people didn't want to legitimize what happened is in the pandemic with budget shortfalls. I think the governor in New York and others in the state decided they could use the tax dollars. And so we were like, of course, we want to do that.

If they want to collect our tax dollars, we would surely comply.

And your relationship with the city, I can't say it's great because it's complicated, but it's much better. I mean, we've complied in every way that they've asked us to, as far as I can tell. And we're trying to pay taxes to a city that has a huge shortfall. I think the point is that New York had a perception that maybe they had over tourism problem. There were too many people. They don't need the people. Now, I think the city of New York is saying we've got to under tourism problem, there's not enough visitors is a major problem.

The economy, we need to make this city a little bit more friendly to travelers and maybe working with Airbnb would be part of that solution.

You don't want to go back to those disastrous bus ads where you said you're welcome for the money. I mean, this was an ad where that you essentially said you're welcome for the money, for the sales.

Yeah, it was a super passive aggressive billboard campaign that was aggressive. Aggressive, Brian, but go ahead. Aggressive, aggressive, aggressive. There was extremely obnoxious billboards and we tried to take them down the moment I saw them on Twitter. And I'm like, what the heck are these? And we try to take them down. They were highly embarrassing.

So you don't have that attitude like cities now, you know, you must know the tune of Airbnb.

That's the kind of technology attitude that people hate. OK, so lastly, I want to talk about where tech is right now. Now, Airbnb usually is very central to conversation, say, about Section 230, which protects companies from being held liable for online content. But you have cited two 30 in your lawsuits. And can you explain how it applies to Airbnb?

Yes. So Section two 30 essentially provides some protection against being liable for the activity in your platform because you don't you're not the creator of the content. So in our case, we do think we are responsible to a point to be super clear, like when the damage occurs, we try to refund guests. We often pay out of pocket for issues. So we don't think we're not responsible. We just don't think we're one hundred responsible in every single incident that you would never be able to have a business like Airbnb that was possible.

They're not our homes. So we think there are limits to our ability to self regulate, but we try to do absolutely as much as possible and it's very expensive. And so we think there have to just be some protections. Otherwise, I think Internet platforms, as they know it, probably can't operate.

What would you like to see? Reform. You're talking about reform of it. What would you support besides leaving it in place? I don't know.

I mean, this is getting fairly technical. This is probably beyond me as far as I want to say. I don't know if Section two 30 is the thing that should be amended. You may have an opinion. I don't have a strong opinion that I do think that technology companies do have to take more responsibility. I think technology companies should cooperate with additional regulation that will likely be passed. I think regulators should be careful about going so far that it has unintended consequences that they don't like in the first place, like we are in a recession, like people still need to make money.

They need to be able to do things. And there's a lot of great things about the Internet being a fairly free place. I think the Internet started as a free place. I think then we all realize not everyone is a good actor. And I think what we don't want the pendulum where it goes so far, the other direction, it kind of stifles everything. So I think we just want, like a sensible middle ground.

OK, so as you know, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will be appearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee to answer questions about misinformation on their platforms related actually to January six to why have you not been called to Congress?

I can't tell you why they have not asked me, but I can tell you that we're in touch with Congress a lot, all the time. I mean, I think we tried to be proactive. I mean, we got Eric Holder involved. Before Uber did, I think we were the first tech company to get Eric Holder and hiring Eric Holder. It became like a power move. We did it, you know, it was like and that was it wasn't like a thing to do when we did it.

OK. And so I do think our reputation, not among all politicians, but in D.C., among the US Congress, is we're more proactive than maybe some other companies. Right.

So how do you deal with misinformation on your platform? I guess it would be limited to comments, right? Is that where it would be?

Yeah. Misinformation in our place would be misrepresentation of two things, either misrepresentation or listing. So that's like that doesn't look like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It says there's no hot tub. It doesn't really fly in the face of democratic issues or reviews. The reviews is probably the biggest one where both sides review each other. Sometimes they don't like it and we have to adjudicate these reviews and that's not easy. And so if we remove every review, when somebody makes a complaint, you want to review system, but we have to look into it.

So those are the kind of things and I think that my guess is maybe people have felt like that's not elevated to the same level of seriousness as some of the matters on social media platforms. I think Airbnb, they're more focused right now on safety, whether it's covid spreaders, violence, you know, things like that.

And, you know, things like privacy cameras. Yes, yes. Yeah.

I would you be surprised to know that I have a very high rating on Airbnb among reviews. I think I would I would I leave. The place is neater than when I get there. Just really neat. Yes. And that doesn't surprise me, although it would shock me to know that you leave positive reviews every time.

Because I do kind of I I've had a pretty good experience already. You're pretty critical. You're saying that you're just starting to circle it. I was going down like you're a jackass character and they are very discerning.

You're one of the more discerning people. Every time you tell me you use Airbnb, 80 percent to be a super excited at 20 percent of yourself, at least as host.

Yeah, you better do a good job. And OK. Brian Chesky, thank you so much. Thank you. Care.

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