Brian Chesky on loneliness:
> > As I became a CEO, I started leading from the front at the top of the mountain, but then, you know, the higher you get to the peak, the fewer the people there are with you. No one ever told me how lonely you would get, and I wasn't prepared for that. I had this guilt about not working because so much of my life was about being successful, probably if I were to dig deep because I thought that would make people love me
> > And the day of our IPO, we reached a hundred billion dollar valuation. I remember after going public, it was like, 'Oh my God, there's this like amazing exaltation.' It was amazing like I'd gone to the mountain and then I wake up the next day, and my life is exactly the same. I'm alone. I wake up, I put on sweatpants, I go onto iMac, and I have like 10-12 hours of Zoom meetings and I just don't really have much of my life outside of work. My work was my life.
> > I didn't know at the time that I was lonely. I knew I was isolated, but I didn't know that that also meant loneliness. And I thought I have all these people around me, how could I possibly feel this way? And there were a couple people that entered my life that gave me some awareness and consciousness, one at the deeply personal level and one more at the professional level.
> > And the other person I met is the now and former Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy. We hired him during the pandemic because a lot of people were afraid to go into Airbnbs and they were worried about germs on surfaces. I remember having a conversation with him, and he said something to me. He said, 'Brian, do you know what the number one killer in America is?' I'm kind of paraphrasing our conversation. And I said, 'I don't know, is it like heart disease? Is it cancer?' And he goes, 'No, the number one killer in America is loneliness.'
