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Airbnb CEO on Why AI Will Create a New Era of Consumer Products
Brian Chesky argues AI’s next consumer breakthrough will come from immersive, visual interfaces, not text-first chatbots.
TBPN · John Coogan & Jordi Hays
- Brian Chesky is CEO of Airbnb.
The best minutes
- 3:26Founder mode starts by fixing one corner of the companyPro pick 3 min
- 7:04Travel needs a richer interface than a text chatbot2 min
- 18:00Consumer AI needs product thinkers, not just AI researchersPro pick 3 min
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Also worth watching
- 29:19Hotels, services and longer stays are Airbnb's next growth bets3 min
- 9:23Airbnb's operations are larger than its guest app3 min
- 22:54AI lets designers take on product and engineering work3 min
- 14:08AI could change travel discovery and flight search first2 min
Skip the roughly 3-minute marketing discussion and the closing conversation about a TBPN–Airbnb blimp partnership.
Full analysis · 7 min read
Real Alpha · Nov 11
Brian Chesky says AI solves 40% of support problems
- Chesky said AI solves the problem for 40% of people contacting Airbnb for help.
- Airbnb reports lower support costs, but gives no measurement details.
- That supports operational adoption, not yet his case for visual AI shopping.
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Airbnb reports AI resolves 40% of support problems
Chesky offered three operating measures, beyond the AI slogan. He said AI writes 60% of Airbnb's code and resolves the problem for 40% of people contacting support.
He also said support cost per customer service ticket fell 10%. Chesky said revenue growth was 10% last year and 18% this quarter.
But he did not attribute that acceleration to AI. The figures describe internal deployment and service triage, not a new consumer interface.
Chesky is Airbnb's CEO presenting company progress, and the episode supplies no measurement window, baseline, or definition of resolution. Those missing details limit what the numbers establish.
He called the coding share twice the benchmark of competitors and peers, without naming the comparison. That makes it a company-reported benchmark, not an apples-to-apples industry score.
Our read
Airbnb offers evidence of adoption inside support and engineering, but not proof that AI caused its growth acceleration. Buyers should ask for task-level quality and cost, not code share alone.
Chesky rebuilt intensity one corner at a time
Chesky described a five-year effort that began with one small team focused on conversion and the guest journey. Rather than reorganize Airbnb wholesale, he used that group to demonstrate pace and customer focus.
He said he kept the existing team, selected some people, reviewed work weekly or daily, and cleared obstacles. Some employees left because they disliked the approach, while most stayed.
That is more specific than founder mode as a slogan. The mechanism was direct feedback, repeated practice, and then a gradual step back.
Still, intensive CEO involvement can carry a bottleneck risk. Chesky said he eventually stepped back as teams developed muscle memory. He gave no measure of how quickly that transition worked.
Dmitri Dolgov said on Minus One in October 2026 that small teams could build simple products much faster with AI. His example supports a speed case. Chesky instead describes a management routine, without measuring its productivity.
“Don't try to change the whole company. Try to change a corner of the company.”
Our read
The episode presents leadership as a way to teach operating habits, not simply impose a new org chart. The tradeoff is executive time, which must eventually return to the teams.
Travel shopping needs more than a text chatbot
Chesky's critique is narrower than the claim that agents cannot serve travel. He said text-only chat makes images secondary, comparison difficult, and repeated filtering awkward.
He also wants direct manipulation and collaborative planning. For a trip, that means comparing stays visually, rather than asking a model to guess one best option.
The host proposed a shared chat comparing hotels, dates, photos, and tradeoffs. Chesky agreed that outcome is plausible, then distinguished it from today's chat window.
That exchange matters because his target is the interface, not conversation itself. He expects agents to use richer visual controls while still allowing people to talk with them.
Bernardo Aceituno said on MTS in October 2026 that he would rather provide agent-friendly commands than a visual interface. His point was bot access and verification, not how travelers compare stays.
Sundar Pichai said on Sources in October 2026 that protocols could scale across services while browsers and protocols coexist. That points to a service-access problem beneath whichever screen a traveler sees.
Bernardo Aceituno · MTS · Oct 17The internet still makes basic tasks difficult for AI agents
Sundar Pichai · Sources · Oct 21Pichai sees protocols as a more scalable path for agents
Our read
Chesky makes a credible usability case for visual comparison, but the episode offers no user test of his alternative. The interface and the underlying agent access may need to improve together.
Airbnb's operating layer outlasts its guest app
Chesky said the guest app represents about 20% of Airbnb. He described payments, host tools, customer service, property protection, and the work of managing stays across more than 100 countries.
He said typically four or five million people stay in Airbnb listings each night. He also said Airbnb has five and a half million hosts. Those operations make the company larger than the screen a traveler opens.
The distinction supports his view that a competing team could copy the app more easily than the service around it. But scale alone does not show that Airbnb will keep the customer relationship if agents redirect bookings.
A richer interface could help Airbnb present its own supply. But a third-party agent could become the place customers compare options. Chesky wants Airbnb to become agentic, but the episode does not explain how it will preserve that role.
He also named boutique hotels, services, and stays longer than 30 days as growth areas. He did not connect those bets to AI, so they broaden Airbnb's ambitions without proving his interface thesis.
Our read
Airbnb's operating complexity is a stronger defense than an attractive app, in Chesky's account. Whether that advantage survives agent-led discovery depends on who owns comparison, booking, and support.
Chesky expects AI to change discovery first
Chesky broke travel into six stages, from destination discovery and flights through lodging, activities, logistics, and spontaneous plans. He expects AI to affect destination discovery and flight search earliest.
His reasoning differs by stage. Destination suggestions suit requests like finding a more affordable place like Paris. Flights, he said, are easier to build because three global distribution systems exist.
Chesky also said chatbot referrals already convert better than Google. He gave no conversion rate, volume, time period, or attribution method. So the comparison cannot show whether referrals add bookings or replace other channels.
So higher referral conversion is not the same as an agent completing the whole journey. Chesky said deeper disintermediation would require a richer experience that changes more of travel planning.
Parag Agrawal said on Knuckle Up with Nakul in November 2026 that agents use richer search queries. He also said agents have different latency needs. That supports changing search infrastructure, but does not establish which travel interface will win.
Our read
The near-term evidence Chesky offers is about discovery and referral quality, not end-to-end booking replacement. Product teams should separate search, referral, and completed transaction metrics.
Chesky says designers can build across product and code
Chesky said he is worried designers, artists, and creative people will sit out AI. Separately, he said AI teams are neglecting consumer product work.
He predicts a consumer shift as image and video models support more visual products. His web-design analogy says designers arrived late to the web, leaving product managers to fill gaps between design and engineering.
That history is suggestive, but it does not prove prompting will produce reliable production software. Chesky told designers to think beyond wireframes and get hands-on with code.
He framed AI as a chance to work across product, design, and front-end engineering. That could keep design decisions with builders rather than ceding them elsewhere.
Tulsee Doshi said on Lenny's Podcast in November 2026 that teams can divide effort among current, near-ready, and ambitious capabilities. That staged approach offers a practical counterweight to waiting for a consumer breakthrough.
Stefano Corazza said on The TWIML AI Podcast in November 2026 that design editing needs benchmarks beyond single-shot images. A compelling generated screen is not yet an editable, usable booking flow.
Tulsee Doshi · Lenny's Podcast · Nov 8Build for what models can do now and next- SCStefano Corazza · The TWIML AI Podcast · Nov 10Design editing needs benchmarks beyond single-shot generation
Our read
The opportunity is not simply that designers can produce screens faster. Teams still need to test whether generated interfaces are editable, accessible, and effective in real tasks.
Distinctive products still need new distribution
Chesky said consumer distribution has matured, even as new apps can still reach the top of the App Store. His prescription is a breakthrough product plus tactics that do not feel stale.
For example, he said Airbnb's Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse campaign delivered better return on investment than any ad the company had run. He gave no calculation, so the example shows attention, not a repeatable acquisition cost.
For instance, he described collectible cereal boxes, social media, and pursuing newspaper coverage as early Airbnb tactics. He said those 2008 tactics are no longer relevant, so new ones are needed.
Alli Pope said on MTS in October 2026 that marketing and community can distinguish products as offerings converge. That reinforces Chesky's point, but neither account supplies a test for when a novel tactic pays back.
But an unusual campaign cannot make an undifferentiated product durable. Teams need to measure whether attention becomes qualified visits, completed actions, and repeat use.
Our read
Treat stunts as experiments, not a distribution plan. Product differentiation, discovery, and repeatable conversion need separate budgets and measures.
What it means for you
- Audit support resolution. Break the reported 40% into issue types, human escalations, and repeat contacts. Track cost per resolved issue alongside customer outcomes.
- Measure booking handoffs. Separate chatbot referral conversion from completed bookings. Track where travelers leave the journey and which channel brought them there.
- Prototype visual comparison. Test maps, photos, filters, and shared shortlists against a text-only flow. Measure decision time and completed choices.
- Give designers build time. Let designers use AI to create working product prototypes with engineering review. Track usability and maintenance needs, not just prototype speed.
What to watch
- Whether Airbnb's reported support resolution and 10% ticket-cost reduction persist, and how the company defines resolution.
- Whether visual, interactive interfaces arrive within Chesky's next-year-or-two window for real-time generated interfaces.
- Whether chatbot referrals remain additive or begin displacing direct travel discovery and booking.
Send this to product and operations leaders deciding where AI belongs in customer journeys.
Watch the minute where Chesky gives Airbnb's AI support figure.
Written by Real Alpha from the episode's transcript and the other moments it links, then checked against the transcript. Quotes are the speaker's exact words.
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Read it with Pro, 7 days free- 0:11Small teams helped restore growth
Chesky says Airbnb's revenue growth moved from 10% last year to 18% this quarter, the company's first acceleration since the pandemic. He credits a small Project Hawaii team that focused on guest conversion and the customer journey, then spread its working methods to other teams. He says Airbnb handles around $100,000,000,000 in annual gross bookings, making the turnaround difficult.
- 3:26Chesky advocates hands-on leadership
Chesky says leaders should improve one corner of a company at a time, review work closely and remove obstacles rather than replace the team. He argues that leaders should work alongside employees instead of managing from a distance, and that AI makes hands-on work more important. He says AI now writes 60% of Airbnb's code, resolves 40% of customer contacts and has lowered customer-service cost per ticket by 10%.
- 7:04Travel requires visual interfaces
Chesky says travel and e-commerce need more than a text-first chatbot because users need photos, direct controls, comparisons and collaboration. He agrees an agent could collect options and explain trade-offs, but argues the stronger product would be immersive, visual and conversational rather than a conventional chat window.
- 12:13AI could reshape travel discovery
Chesky says almost all AI companies focus on enterprise, noting that one YC batch he cited had 16 consumer companies out of 175. He sees language models as especially useful for destination discovery and flights, and says richer maps, photos or video could help people compare places. He says chatbot referrals convert better than Google but currently add traffic rather than disintermediate travel companies.
- 18:00Consumer AI needs product thinkers
Chesky says many new AI teams are staffed mainly by AI researchers and lack product or design talent, while founders follow trends into enterprise. He expects image and video generation to enable richer interfaces and predicts a consumer AI wave in the next two years. He says companies need a point of view about consumers.
- 21:19Entrepreneurs should claim new spaces
Chesky cautions entrepreneurs against entering crowded markets unless they can be decisively better. He says startups should find a space of their own, recalling that Airbnb emerged from an air-bed idea when many founders were pursuing social networking.
- 22:54Designers should build with AI
Chesky worries that designers, artists and other creative people will sit out AI. He says designers were late to web design, leaving a gap that product managers filled, and argues that AI lets designers take on product and front-end engineering work. He urges them to get hands-on and start coding.
- 27:04Consumer marketing needs new tactics
Chesky says marketing channels become less effective once everyone adopts them, and that consumer distribution has matured as internet growth slows. He argues companies need new tactics and a breakthrough product: standard approaches can go stale, but people will still find something genuinely new.
- 29:19Airbnb sees growth beyond rentals
Chesky says Airbnb's gross booking value could double one day and sees expansion beyond its core business as the larger opportunity. He says hotels are eight or nine times Airbnb's size, with independent and boutique properties offering a multibillion-dollar distribution opportunity. He also points to services across 80 verticals and stays longer than 30 days as potential growth areas.
- 32:21Distinctive campaigns stand out
Chesky says advertising influences people more than they admit, but distinctive campaigns can outperform standard ads. He cites Airbnb's Barbie Dreamhouse in Malibu as its most popular marketing effort and says its return was better than any ad. He and the hosts agree to explore an Airbnb-TBPN blimp partnership for a broadcast.
Published May 8, 2026.
Transcript · 32 min read
TBPN, hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, with Brian Chesky.
From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.
Brian, how are you doing? Good. How are guys doing? We're doing fantastic. Welcome back to the long. Yeah. I know. Why don't we kick it off with just, you know, an update on how 2026 is going, how the business is going, what's new in your world?
Yeah. Mean, things are really good. We've accelerated growth for the first time since the pandemic. We grew 10% last year in revenue. And this quarter, we announced that revenue was 18%, so from 10 to 18%, which is a pretty big acceleration. Yeah. Thank you. And and marketplaces are really really hard. Right? Like it's kind of like gravity. Once a marketplace at our size doing around a $100,000,000,000 in gross bookings a year Yep. Started to come down, it's really hard to tip that curve. So this has been a pretty big feat for the team to be able to do it. So how'd you do it? You know, it's kind of funny. A number of years ago, we so I noticed that, you know, as we got bigger, we started losing a little bit of startup intensity, that startup energy. And I asked myself, like, how can we get that energy back? Mhmm. And we basically took a very small team.
We we named the team Project Hawaii. The name doesn't really matter. But it basically, I took a very small team of people and we said we're gonna focus on a very, very small service area. And we decided to focus on conversion rate, the guest journey. And I basically tried to work with a team like as if we're at Rouse Street. Rouse Street was the apartment that Jonah and I started. I said we're gonna act like a startup. And the team just grinded really, really hard. We weren't working like a big company. We're a very small team grinding really hard, focusing on obsessing over the customer experience, really looking at the data, and we really got a lot of points in the board.
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And then we really started taking these pods and we really started working with the teams trying to coach them how we worked in the early days. And I just think the pace increased, the intensity increased. We really like tried to bring in like world class people onto the team. They got very, very focused. We tried to get all the management and bureaucracy out of their way. And it's been a couple years. Yeah. And in fact, we're doing this last year, but one of the things is as you know, financial results are lagging indicators, especially when you're a big company. So it takes sometimes a while to get the the the financial numbers to reflect what's happening inside the company. But I feel like we're a start up again, like, more than ever.
Yeah. Before, like, where we feel much younger and smaller than earlier. And I think with AI, that would be other thing is 60% of our code is now written by AI, which is twice our benchmark of our competitors and peers. Yeah. And it's really, really helping us. AI, I think, is a huge boon to us. I don't know if it's helped the OTAs, but it's helped us with customer service. The cost per customer service tickets down 10%. 40% people who contact Airbnb, the AI solves the problem for them. And we brought it through the entire journey. So everything is really accelerating.
On the on the the the the the special team that went into optimized conversion rate, I imagine you have folks internally whose job it was basically the customer journey already. Then you bring in your special team. And is there some sort of culture clash there? Like, how do you set people up for success to, you know, not get too political in that environment, actually see it as an opportunity for a win, some fresh eyes, some fresh ideas, like what what is required to actually have success? Because I think a lot of big companies that bring in McKinsey and they put together a big deck and everyone freaks out and thinks they're getting fired and maybe some of the good ideas are surfaced, but it never really goes through.
So what like, what what what what do you have to communicate to the team that is receiving information from this new this new quad team?
“they realized, wow, actually, when the CEO is involved, it's actually easier. There's less bureaucracy. I try to make the work better and I try to clear all obstacles.”
How did Jordy, please.
Do you think a lot about what you would do if you were you from ten or fifteen years ago and you were trying to disrupt Airbnb? Like, is that Yes. A helpful exercise? And Yeah.
And it's slightly and it's slightly scary because I think that I've told I had a meeting with our team recently. I said that 26 year old me and Joe and Nate could could f us up if we wanted to. And so I told them this is what that's because but that's because you understand this market better than anyone else. You know you know the key drivers. Like, I don't think off the street.
Hey, I'm paranoid. I think that if everybody sits still, I think a different group of 20 or 30 year olds could also disrupt us. Mhmm. Yeah. And I think that's true of every one of us. And maybe by the way, maybe that's not true. Mhmm. And maybe that's not reassuring because we do have a brand that's a noun and a verb. We've got a network Yeah. I I think it's actually hard to build a network that may not be possible. But the software and the app, I told our team, like, we can't sit still. Like, our app is beautiful. It's really nice. Yeah.
“I think the future are not apps. The future are agents. But I don't think they're going be text forward. I think they're going to be really rich user interface.”
“We have typically four or 5,000,000 people staying in an Airbnb every night in more than 100 countries around the world.”
But it is a long road. Question for Yeah.
Well, before you say it, one of things is the last time I was on, I did make a comment and I'll I'll make it again. Almost every AI company is enterprise company. And the last stat I think I said on TBPN was Yeah. Like three months ago and stats haven't changed. I think it was a 175 companies in a YC batch and I think 16 were consumer. That trend hasn't changed. Almost everyone is going into coding. Almost everyone is going to enterprise. I think that's great. My whole point though is that the consumer experience hasn't fundamentally changed that much beyond a chatbot. And I think the consumer is a massive opportunity for AI. I think it's going to need to be a richer user interface. I think people that want to do more things, they want it to be I mean, the modern AI today is text, photos and buttons Yep. Mostly, in some videos. And I think there's a more breakthrough visual paradigm that could be much more immersive.
And with the new image and video generation models, you could do something so much more immersive. So the exact example you gave of trying to book hotel, yes, you can do it on a chatbot, but there's probably some more breakthrough way to imagine that to visualize it, to see the neighborhood, to see the map, to be able to talk to it, to understand where it is, to be able to compare photos, different hotels. There's something I think richer on the horizon.
Yeah. That was I was I was surprised at the push into browsers last year from some Yeah. Some different AI companies. Specifically because I always I already felt like an LLM, like the chat the chatbots were helping me browse around the Internet. It was like just double down on that and helping me find information all over the Internet. But I like that it's brought together in a standardized way. Right? If I like the example, you know, of of comparing like different hotels. Right? It's nice to have it just like formatted the same way. So I'm looking at it. I'm not being like I wanna be influenced by the images and like Yes. The the property but not necessarily the design of the website. Right? Because that they they can be disconnected.
“And so I think the LMs are really, really good at destination discovery.”
Yeah. I I feel like did you remember that company Hipmunk? I think it was founded Yeah. Really founders. Cool. Right? And Yeah. And actually the CEO of Reddit. That's right. Steve Huffman. Right?
Wait. Yeah. Steve you're you're talking about Hipcamp? No. Hipmonk. Hipmonk was a Hipmonk was a really cool flight booking.
It was a really cool flight booking dashboard. It would it would rank the flights by pain, like a pain index. So Yeah. It would say, well, you're not gonna face financial pain because it's a really cheap flight, but you do have a stopover. Or you do have to get to the the the airport super early. And so it would blend all these things together, and it's something that it feels like could be vibe coded over a weekend now. Totally. And yet, it is weird that when I open up the App Store charts, I see ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and then it's just AI chat apps. And we haven't had that breakout moment. Demis was on stage at YC actually talking about the fact that it feels weird that we have this super intelligence in the enterprise and vibe coding and your 60% of Airbnb's code is written by AI now, and yet we don't have, like, a new triple a game or a new video game that everyone's playing.
And I'm wondering, like, is that a lack of creativity? Is it a lack of risk taking that there's just too much money? It's too obvious to be able if you're good in AI, just go into enterprise because you'll just raise a bunch of money, get a bunch of customers, it's really easy to make money and it's more risk on in the consumer? Like, what do you think needs to happen? Or is it just the intelligence isn't quite there and maybe the next model is the one that unlocks it?
“And I think in the next two years, you're going to see a massive revolution in consumer.”
Yeah.
Are you worried that everyone is working on the exact same thing? And when I say exact same thing, I mean agents that can do things on your computer and or, well, you know, look at the iPhone app store chart or look at, look at the early stage startup market. Right? A lot of companies, you know, whether the full spectrum of companies from hyperscalers to labs to neo labs to I I'm not I'm not too worried. I might be a little worried for the entrepreneurs if they're like the tenth company doing something. I mean, like, Peter Thiel was one of our earliest investors and he used to he wrote this book Zero to One that a lot of people listening probably read. He has a saying, Competition is for Losers, and you want to kind of try to do something that no one else is doing. Back in the day, that was enterprise because everyone was making an app.
And now I just I have to be careful about being the tenth company doing something unless you're going to be a lot better decisively. It's just really, really hard in a crowded market. So you want to kind of zig when everyone else is zagging. So I'm not too worried, but maybe a little bit. And I would just encourage entrepreneurs to try to to claim a space for their own. And by the way, Airbnb was that. It was kind of accidental, but like like in 2007, everyone wanted to do like a social networking something. And we were like it was tempting for us to try to be a social networking something something as well. It was accidental that we inflated through air beds one weekend and created air bed and breakfasts and people thought it was the worst idea ever. I guess it became like the worst idea that ever worked.
But we carved our own space as did Uber and we weren't trying to be anything else. And so I kind of and by the way, OpenAI wasn't trying to be anyone else either. Maybe they were a little bit like DeepMind, but AI was not the thing Yeah. When OpenAI and Thropic got started. So I do think there is something about not chasing trends. I think once it's a trend, it can be a little crowded and to try to claim out your own space. And I would say there's so much of The US economy that AI hasn't yet touched.
“I think if designers sit out, what you're going to see is engineers and product managers designing for them.”
Do you think so assuming we solve this problem of not enough creative people working in consumer, we build we as a society build cool new consumer products and experiences and apps. There's something that deserves to be at the top of the app store. Has Yes. Distribution and the acquisition of customers and and and users changed structurally? I you were very good at SEO and Google and there was a referral program. Do those patterns still work? Are they broken? Is there a new playbook that needs to be rolled out for anyone who has something that's great but they need to get it in the hands of consumers broadly?
I think I think we need new patterns. This is a funny saying. I think the highest turnover job of any executive at Silicon Valley might be the CMO. I don't know for sure, but like, you don't see a lot of turnover CFOs. You don't see a lot of turnover of CTOs. Yeah. But like Amazon was famously and I I don't know if part of my theory is that like what works in marketing changes every few years and you have to be adaptable and your old playbook gets outdated. So marketing is unfortunately one of the hardest functions. I have a huge amount of respect for people marketing because once something works, it almost becomes stale because then everyone does it. Yep. And so like influencer marketing was really successful until everyone did it and then people kind of tune it out.
It's this thing called banner blindness. Banner blindness is after you see something over and over, you tend to be blind to it and so you need a new tactic. So I think that a couple of thoughts. Number one, I think that just like we need new interface design, new creative experiential approaches, we also need new types of marketing. I don't know off the top of my head what that is. It's probably something we haven't done before. I mean, Joe and I, we did bizarre things like we sold collectible cereal boxes Mhmm. And we, like when social media was new, we were all over social media. And when when there were newspapers, we would hunt down reporters and, like, try to get them to write about us. But, like people ask me how do we get users?
I'm like all the tactics from 2008 aren't relevant anymore. So you got to be relevant and you got to find new tactics. The second thing I'd say though is you're right. The distribution is mature. When we started Airbnb, the App Store was young. In fact, the Internet was still young. I mean we could just you could launch a website and just ride the growth of the Internet. And it's hard. The Internet is not growing like it did before. In other words, people were coming on to the Internet in hundreds of millions a year, new users. So I do think distribution for consumers mature. At the same time, the top apps in the App Store are new apps. They're mostly chatbots. So what that tells you if you do something truly breakthrough and revolutionary, consumers will still probably find it. And so that's I think the two principles are do something so revolutionary, consumers will find you.
And number two, you're going have to find your own new tactics and, you know, anything that is standard is probably stale.
“A fun thing is that about half the hotels in the world are independents and boutiques.”
Well, the billboard campaign that were Sell off now. Couple years was just buy so many billboards that people are like, wait. How did this company buy so many billboards? Right?
And so I'm wondering, is your is your thesis on marketing that the the these things go in cycles and, yes, we might be out of the influencer marketing meta right now, but it's gonna come back in five, ten years. Who knows? That's possible. Or or is it rise and fall I think then never again. I think these channels Yeah. Though, they they don't go away. Yeah. They just stop being like, if you do this thing, you're gonna grow like crazy. Yeah. You still need to do that thing, but it's no longer an art. Okay. Yeah. What do you think? You guys Okay. So so one thing I have to acknowledge Yeah. Is I think all of us advertising works better on us than we admit. Yep. I I honestly I I we we spend a lot on like all these ads and I kind of think to myself, does do these really influence people? Yeah. Like and if they do.
If they didn't, we wouldn't be spending like $1,000,000,000 a year in advertising. So I wanna admit that advertising does influence us more than we realize. There's I think last days that show like, oh, that doesn't change my mind. But you see something seven times and it probably even if you don't wanna believe it, you might start believing it. Yep. So clearly, works. Yep. I do think though the ROI of new ideas works a lot better. Just for example, we spend a lot on advertising, but the most popular marketing we've ever done is like when the Barbie movie came out, we took a house in Malibu. We turned to Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse Yeah.
And it was like new and the whole internet talked about it. Yep. And the ROI of that was better than any ad we've ever done. Right? Yep. We've done things like that. So I do think doing kind of crazy, slightly unhinged things that people notice. Like, I mean, you guys are successful because you're different. Right? I think. Yeah. I think being different is the key to marketing. And so if you have a billboard, people are probably influenced. But if you if it looks different than another billboard, it's gonna work. So I think the key to marketing is to be different because you gotta stand out.
Yeah. Yeah. The the the the Red Bull Baumgartner, the the skydive from space is, I think, like a thousand x ROI. I think they spent less than a million dollars on that. And it would it I think it has a billion views or something like that. Space. Great example of that. Space. But it's like 10 people did that. Yeah. That's why they didn't do a sequel and then another one and another one. They went and found something else. Let's put a plane through a tunnel or fly a, you know Yes. A hot air balloon upside down or something.
Get a blimp get a blimp on Airbnb that I can go Oh. On a sky cruise. Sleeping in a blimp.
Yeah. That would be that would be a that would be a very good idea. Maybe we can talk about.
I'd love that. Ship it. Definitely. Yeah. Don't know how long it takes to get to Yeah. LA to San Francisco. If it takes me two days, three days, but I have a beautiful view. Would you guys do that? I would 100% do that. And you. So so so so we say things like this all the time where we're like, oh, yeah. Like, we'll definitely, like, do do something. Oftentimes, it's hard to schedule. But we have been talking about blimps for, an over a year.
We know we can broadcast something. We've been having To happen with a blimp. We've having guests call in from their jets Yes. With Starlink and the connection is perfect. It is. So much so that people in our chat sometimes don't know that the person's on a jet. Okay. You first. Okay.
Airbnb and TBPN That's are gonna work together on a blimp partnership. Yes. You guys are gonna broadcast across the country on a blimp. I love it. And Airbnb's gonna be a part of that. Yeah. I wanna make this work. Let's let's Let's let's figure it out. We'll talk. Cool cooks.
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming Thanks for update. Have a great weekend, and we'll talk to you soon. You're the man. Alright. Bye. Bye, guys.
