January 2, 2023 • 35 mins
'In November, I sat down in New York to talk to Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. Now, I've never stayed in an Airbnb, but then again, Brian has never been to the River Cafe. But I've experienced the impact Airbnb has had on so many lives. My children have explored the world knowing they need never stay in a hotel.
On today's episode we talk about travel and how food is the entry point to culture wherever you go.'
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home.
On Ruthie’s Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers.
Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks.
Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation.
For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/ruthiestable4
Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iheartradio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favourite shows.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Ruthie's Table for a production of I Heart
Radio and Adami's Studios. Often when a friend prepares you
to meet their friend, it feels anxious. Will he like me?
Will I like him? Do I need to pretend I
(00:20):
do if I don't. When Johnny I've told me his
closest friend, Brian Chesky was joining us in southern Italy,
I felt anxious about all of the above, and then
he arrived. We sat together at lunch, started talking and
didn't stop really for the next five days. Now. I've
(00:41):
never stayed in an airbnb, but then again, Brian has
never been to the River Cafe. But I've experienced the
impact airbnb has had on so many lives. My children
have explored the world knowing they need never stay in
a hotel, and my friends in New Mexico are able
to rent a house in Paris only because they host
(01:02):
air b and beers in There's Brian lives in San Francisco.
I live in London. The next time he visits London,
he's promised to deviate, not stay in an airbnb and
stay with us instead. I'll cook for him, walk in
Hyde Park and if they're lucky, we'll introduce him to
my friends. No anxiety. They will love him as much
(01:25):
as I do. Oh my god, thank you for saying
no that. Okay, will you read a recipe absolutely, Ruthie. Um.
This recipe is whole roasted sea bass with potatoes. So
it starts with one sea bass weighing two kilograms. Take
a half a bottle of white wine. Eight large waxy potatoes,
(01:50):
peeled and quartered. By the way, what's a waxy potato?
Waxy potos? Waxy? You know how they're potatoes that all
flowery that you might have for baked potatoes. Makes a
potato waxy though? Is it like a certain type of potatoes? Okay,
so waxy potatoes. Everyone to garlic clothes peeled. Two lemons
pieces with skin. Now, these are not waxy lemons. These
(02:11):
are not waxy because you know lemon lemons. I could
have even said Amalfi lemons particularly good, and are those
different types of lemons. Malfie lemons have a very much
thicker skin, and so they're really they're really protects the juice.
There's less juice, but it's better because it's got the
amazing a handful of fresh oregano. So once you have this.
(02:33):
Preheat the of into two fift degrees celsius, and then
you boil the potatoes until cooked. Then drain them, add
your lemon and herbs, pour over alive oil and mix well.
And once you do this, you put it in a
roasting tray. You stuff the fish with the lemons, and
(02:54):
then you season. You season it with salt and pepper.
Salt and pepper everywhere inside out. You just just the
more salt and pepper the better. No, no no, that's probably
not true, but kind of everywhere. Don't don't be shy
like pepper in the inside, the outside, all the nooks
and crannies. And you place the fish on top of
your potatoes, your waxy potatoes, right, and then then you
(03:19):
drizzle some olive oil and you roast in the oven
for twenty minutes. Now you take your half a bottle
of wine, you add it, you save the other half
to drink. Then you roast for another fifteen minutes. So
I'm cooking for twenty then I put a bunch of
wine on it, and then I do another fifteen minutes.
(03:39):
Why do I do that? Because when you first do it,
if you put it in the very beginning of the
wine will kind of disappear, so if you put it
in for the last ten minutes, you'll still get the juice.
What does the wine? I mean, the alcohol burns right,
but it gives it a flavor. It doesn't, Yeah, it
just gives it another fruity, interesting, dryer flavor that flavors
and some people should be like. It has to be
(04:01):
nice wine. The idea that you can use cheap wine
for cooking is really not the right thing to do.
It's better to use a little bit less wine. Doesn't
have to be expensive expensive wine, but you want to
be able to, you know, drink the wine that you
would put in cooking. You don't like cooking wines, so
we so I think really important everyone to use nice wine.
Unless you're drinking by yourself and your sat on a Friday.
(04:23):
You stick to nice wine. And then when it's ready,
filet the fish and you serve with the potatoes and
the juices from the pan. It's a very Italian way
of cooking. That mean, well, I think that you go
for the ingredient. If you have a great sea best,
you don't have to do much to it. If you
have a mediocre fish or a mediocre piece of meat
(04:44):
or a mediocredgetable, then you have to think of adding
more things to it, cooking it longer, of doing this
and doing that. But if you have a fantastic sea bass,
then really what you want is a sea bass with lemon,
with some herbs and a bit of wine and you're done,
you know. So it's very simple, and everybody thinks, you know,
Americans myself included, growing up, your thought Italian food was
(05:05):
spaghetti and meat balls and very heavy food. And in fact,
what we know is that as you and I spent
some time together in Amalfi, and that's why we thought
this would be a good recipe for you to read,
because it does bring back memories and food is about memory,
isn't it. I think it's really great. You're right. I mean,
I think you're right. Food is like I mean, when
(05:25):
I think of food, I think of a couple of things.
It's one of the only things in life that we
consume that we need to survive number one. Number two,
I think food is rooted in culture, and I also
think you're right. Food is something you share. Maybe it's
a primorial thing from fifty years ago and people were
around the campfire eating and talking, and there's something about
food connection, family conversation that all go together. So just
(05:49):
tell me your early days of growing up in your home.
Who cooked? What did you remember about being in a
chesky household and food? I think for me, I kind
of had a foot in two different worlds of food
growing up. On the one hand, you know, my parents
are sourci workers. We were on the go. We were
(06:10):
middle class, and we had a lot of like just
quick to go things that probably in hindsight, weren't that healthy,
you know, going to like fast food and like kind
of packaged foods. And then my mom would cook my
Mom's Italian and she would make very simple things, you know,
pasta's and um, you know, really basic meats with like
(06:31):
mashed potatoes and vegetables. You know, we try to make
sure we have dinner every night together as a family.
And then I have a lot of memories of like
kind of holiday gatherings. It's really interesting, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter.
The centerpiece of every one of those memories that I
had was food. There's something premortal in us that makes
(06:54):
sense that you know, there's we want. I think we
want to have a connection to things. I think One
of the challenge of modern life is that we get
abstracted from the things, and one of the things to
get abstracted from is our food. I mean, fast food
was like an amazing innovation at the time, but I
think that, like a lot of innovations, many years later,
you look back and say, well, there's probably a price
(07:14):
that we paid. But yeah, those were those are your grandmother?
Did you say you had an Italian grandmother and a
Polish grandmother? I had Italian grandmother and a Polish grandmother
and grandfather. Did did they cook and did they cook
her food at their homes? My grandmother on my mom's
side cooked and I think she was pretty good. My
grandmother was Polish, my dad's mother, and she actually lived
(07:36):
with us and she would help cooking, Like I remember
peeling the potatoes with her and stuff like that. But
I'm still trying to understand. I think they were waxy.
They didn't crumple right, like you know those flaky potatoes. Yeah,
they were kind of flower and this they were kind
of wet. Yeah, wet is waxy? What well, what is more?
(07:59):
What be more to once a waxy because of the
pot But if you're going to waxy potatoes sound better
than wet potatoes. I want to open a restaurant and
I'll call it wet Potato. Ladies and gentle Welcome to
Wet Potato. We're just down the street from River Cafe.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to stage Wet Potato. I
(08:21):
love wet Potato. I've been following them on tour all week.
Um so, yeah, so I had my waxy wet potato.
My grandmother made it, and um, well, here's the story.
When I was a kid, I was very small physically
growing up. I'm like average person sized personnel. I'm like
a hundred and eighties something pounds. But my parents were worried,
like there's maybe something developed me wrong and we want
(08:42):
to enter Chnoledge. He said no, he's just like his
growth is development is behind about two years. But I
was really skinny growing up. I was probably when I
entered high school, maybe a hundred pounds, right, yeah, fourteen maybe.
And I went to a school like I basically Sports
Acconomy to play ice hockey, and then I ended up
breaking my leg. I had a spiral fracture on my leg,
(09:05):
and I end up going to like physical therapy, and
I decide at that moment, and by the way, you'll
learn as we go that I'm a bit of an
extreme personality. You know, any entrepreneur is extreme, especially people
like us that run these big companies on forty one.
So it's a kind of extreme. And so at this point,
I'm going through physical therapy and you know, you have
(09:27):
to do like kind of weight training, and I really
start picking up weight training. And at this point the context,
and you understand, is my body had controlled my life
because I was small, I was skinny. I was kind
of like felt like my body was limiting my options
in life. And I kind of knew at this point
I'm sixteen, that I'm not getting a professional athlete. But
I just I had this thought. It was really interesting.
I said, if I can control my body, I can
(09:47):
control my life. I'm sure I didn't say it so
eloquently or simply. That was a thought. So I decided
when I was sixteen, I said, I'm going to become
one of the most muscular teenagers in the country by
the time I'm nineteen, and I picked up bodybuilding and
that began a unique relationship for food, a relationship that
was about health, but certainly more utilitarian than enjoyment. And
(10:11):
in two and a half years I went from a
hundred probably twenty five pounds to maybe a pounds. I
end up competing in what we would now call yeah,
was like probably decent muscle, and then I cut back
down and I competed in what you know, it was
basically the the teenage Mr America. It was called NPC
(10:32):
Teenage Nationals and Collegiate Nationals and bodybuilding. And so I
had this very weird duality where I went to like
a private school a junior year, kind of a military
bend school. So it was a private school where I
had to like dressing cadet gear and do drill with
rifles and all weight training. Then I go to public
school the next year. It was all clicks, public typical
(10:56):
hippolic high school. And then the following year to go
to RISD the art school. And by the time we
get to art school, I am now competing at a
natural level in body building. And I would walk around
campus with half a dozen hard boiled eggs that I
would open the plastic and the eggs would stink up
the entire room, and I would eat these hard boiled
eggs one at a time, and everyone the class was
(11:16):
like staring at me. I would probably there, I would
have as many as like eighteen egg whites a day.
I would even drink the egg whites. I was going
to ask you eating egg whites because and I would
just drink them. It sounds kind of gross, unappetizing, but
it really had profound effected me because I started to
realize what I ate affected how I felt. And that's
(11:37):
when I really started appreciating food in a very deconstructed way.
Of these building blocks delicious, no, no, no, they I
mean there was there was a saying growing up, if
it taste coad, it's bad for you. If it tastes bad,
it's good for you. And that was the motto I
had growing up. Probably again this is like super countercultural
to your podcast, because I don't believe that anymore, but
(11:58):
that was certainly how I grew leaving home and leaving family.
There you were in Rhode Island at the Rhode Island
School Design, which is great school. And do you remember
(12:19):
cooking and eating with your friends. I had a meal
Planet's risty, but I consume so many calories that the
way the school worked is your parents had to prepay,
like I'll make a number of like five thousand hours
a year for food, right, And every kid had a
pre filled card like a meal card, but it was
use it or lose it meal card, right, So you
like you have to put on your card each semester,
(12:42):
and if you ate only two thousand hours of food,
you wouldn't get the money back. You would just you
use it or lose it. And if you ate more
than that, you have to call up your parents to
put more money in the card, which is something I
didn't want to do. So I would find um, other
students whose meal plans they weren't going to eat, and
I would basically bump food off them because I would
basically tap out my meal plan because I would get
(13:04):
like three four chicken breasts at a time, and you know,
and when you get a dozen eggs and three four
chicken breast at the time, you're gonna your meal plan.
So I would basically kind of loiter around the cash
register befriending people. Yeah, smelling of hard boiled eggs found
Rizdy at our school. So I'm at art school carrying
(13:25):
containers hard boiled eggs, loitering around cash registers trying to
get people mostly like um. I had a whole bunch
of friends, these girls that were Korean. Rizzdy was very
popular in Korea, and so a lot of kids came
from Korea, and they were very thin, and none of
them maxed out their meal plan. And so I kind
(13:48):
of realized this and I became friends of them. I'm
not saying I used the relationship for hard boiled eggs.
I'm not saying I didn't either, so we'll let the
audience understand. And so I would basically loiter around and
at one point I ended up offering to train the
kids for free if they would give me their card
to get hard boiled eggs. And I thought everyone one.
I got muscles, they lost weight, and we everyone was
(14:09):
really happy. But this is not like a typical food thing, right,
And I had no But food is different than food
is so for me at that time, food was a
utilitarian building block for me to create the body I wanted,
the life I wanted to have, and I thought about
it as a fuel, as a utility. And I think,
by the way, here's another theory I have, because like
(14:30):
why what I do this weird stuff? Growing up? I
was a bit of a rebel, and I kind of
did not want to fit in. So when I was
in high school, I wanted to be the artist, and
when I got to art school, I wanted to be
the bodybuilder. And then I got out into the real world,
I wanted to be like an entrepreneur because you once
told me that many of our conversations over food, that
(14:51):
you saw Airbnb as an industrial designer rather as an entrepreneur,
as a business person, that you saw the kind of canvas.
You saw airbnba as a canvas rather than a business plan.
I never thought I was a business person. I remember.
I remember the first week and I started Airbnb, somebody
(15:11):
reminding me. I said, I'm not a business person. I'm
a designer. Business People make money. Designers solve problems. I'm
a designer and my problem isn't to make money. My
problem is to solve a problem for somebody, and that's
what designers do. The funny thing is that an artist
or mostly entrepreneurs, without realizing it, right, because most artists
of sell proprietors right, and europe An artist, you have
to sell your art and you don't work for somebody
(15:33):
because most people don't employ artists. So there's something about
art school which is pretty entrepreneurial and the risky education
is an inadvertent entrepreneurship education. And oddly enough, like most
entrepreneurship programs are anti entrepreneurship. The structure is unrealistic. Entrepreneurship
has no structure. Entrepreneuris requires resiliency, Entrepreneurship requires self motivation,
(15:56):
and like there are best practices I've done, Like I
went to White Combinator, but like Risdy, like one of
our assignments was you get a piece of cardboard and
you say, you have to build a bridge, like a
three foot bridge with this piece of cardboard, and whosever
bridge can hold up the most amount of bricks across
the tables wind Or here's a piece of cardboard. You
have to make a violin with no glue out of cardboard.
(16:18):
And you're like, you have three hours. I think that's
kind of entrepreneurship, Like you have these challenges to solved.
Can I just say that you also in your entrepreneurship
and design, because going you know, into Airbnb and the
culture of Airbnb in terms of not just being a
place where you sleep, but what you've done. And as
I said in my introduction is you've taken the world
(16:40):
of being an entrepreneur, of being a place to stay
into culture. Because people stay in a neighborhood, they shop
for food. I always say that when you you know,
when you visit a city, the first thing you should
do is go to the market, because you know that
because the market tells you about the people who live there,
the food that's in season, the ingredients they have. And
you know, market in London will be different from an
(17:02):
our market in Fairness, which will be different from one
in Singapore and one in Tokyo, and that tells you
about the culture. And I think what you've been talking about,
you know that you are combining entrepreneurship with culture, aren't you?
Is that what you what I mean? Ivy was saying,
go on, I have you tell him that staying in
an airbnb and you go to the kitchen, don't you?
(17:23):
You go and see what the kitchens are going to be.
Like we're talking about. The thing that I like with
A B and B is that you can use the
locals guides, the host guides, And so I think it's
saying it was reinventing how you're a tourist. Right, because
rather than going to the tourist spots, you can be like, Okay,
where are people actually eating and how how can I
imagine myself living here? And what would my life be like?
(17:46):
And that's why I think young people like MBNB especially. Yeah,
I think it's exactly right. And I also say that
just to bring to bring a little bit of story
to kind of more present day. Until I started and
at in travel very much, and I did not have
a passion for traveling when I started BnB. And actually,
here's the other thing I did not. I did not
(18:07):
start me as a traveler. I started as a host.
So airbingb has guest and host travelers and people hosting
those travelers, and I wasn't a traveler. I was a host.
Airbanb started because my room and I couldn't afford to
pay rent. We turned our house into a bed and
Breakfast wouldn't have any beds. We waited through your beds.
We called the air bed and Breakfast dot com. So
I started as a host, and I didn't really have
(18:29):
a big desire for traveling growing up, but I will
because I did it wasn't exposed to a lot of it.
Now I love traveling by the time. I remember once
a year we would travel. My mom was a soar
shirker and there was an annual conference that she had
to go to, and so should get a flight in
a hotel room. And my family realized, this is a
really good racket. We can basically freeload off her and
(18:52):
get a free vacation every year. And would that be
in the United States abroad? Always in the United States.
So my first time I was an airplane was seven.
We went to St. Us because she had a conference there.
Do you remember the food when you traveled? I have
more memories of eating while traveling than not traveling. Funny enough,
I have more memories just traveling in general. I remember
(19:12):
somebody once a few years ago came up to me said, Brian,
I use because I wanted my life to seem longer.
And I said, what does that mean? He said, The
thing I noticed about my life and I realized about
myself is we generally don't remember our routines. To give
an example, I probably rode the school bus. I don't know,
twelve years from five to seventeen, and I can't remember
two thousand times the memory of me being a school bus.
(19:34):
I maybe six seventy eight, faint memories, but I remember
every trip I took. I remember the trip to St. Louis,
the trip to Dallas, the trip to Seattle, the trip
to Chicago. And so what I learned and when he
told me, is that when you travel and you have
distinct memories, and when people say time go by quickly,
I think one of the reasons they're saying that is
(19:54):
because they're falling into routine. Summertine is really good, but
you have to be careful about your routine being so
much that your memories collapse. And then one day you
wake up in your life has kind of passed you by.
And there's so much of the world, and so I
think a great way to remember the world is through travel.
I hope to live in a world where the the
word travel and the idea traveled almost dissolves into our
(20:17):
idea and it blurs with living. We talked about like,
you know, going to supermarket and living like a local.
There was a guy in Paris, he's no longer alive.
(20:38):
His name is I think his name was Jim Hyman.
Have you heard of this person? Jim Hyman said, I
believe in this book of world record for hosting more
people at dinner parties than anyone ever. He hosted a
hundred thousand people in his house in Paris for dinner parties.
And you could ask how yeah, yeah, maybe you challenge that,
but he apparently was up there and he had a
(20:58):
secret for traveling. He said the secret to good traveling
instead of participate in the daily life of locals. And
I thought that was profound because what happens is most
a lot of travel like Conrad like modern travel. Probably
one of the major pioneers of modern travel travel with
Conrad Hilton. Conrad Hilton started Hilton Hotels in Texas, and
(21:22):
he was very Christian and made it a point. I
think maybe someone Hilton we listening correct me to have
a Bible next to the bed. It doesn't matter what
was that you were in. I believe so, and maybe
I'm wrong, but I think I think that's and I
think he's famously wanted to export an American travel experience anywhere.
There was a famous like like episode of mad Men,
(21:42):
I think is representatively correct, like how do you say
blah blah blah in Tokyo Hilton? How do you say hello?
And Germany Hilton? So it was really about an American
travel experience. It's about mass tourism. It's about bringing your
culture with you to this environment. We lived in Paris
for years and I used to see a tour bus
that went around the plastic version where we lived, and
(22:04):
people never got off the bus. And I thought, you know,
there is a sense that people really hate traveling because
it takes the effort it takes, you know, fear, it's
it's fearful, you have to understand the language, all the
reasons we want to travel. There's a group of people
that would rather stay in Hilton and eat American food
and being a bus because complained to because they can
(22:25):
say they've been to Paris around or Florence or Venice
and yet never have to experience any discomfort or I
think that's a very typical way to be introduced to travel,
that you want to go to a farm environment, but
you want to be comfortable, so you're more like a
stand hotel, going a double decker bus, get a selfie
in front of them. Change that you're saying uncomfortable for yourself.
(22:47):
Be in a neighborhood, in the daily life of locals,
you know. Joseph Campbell the late mythologists. He wrote a book,
I think in like the nineteen forties called Hero of
Thousand Faces, and his book bas sickly surmised that every
character of every movie, whether it's Star Wars or Wizard
of Oz or Grapes Wrath, whomever, they're really the same character.
(23:09):
A hero is an ordinary world and there's something like
dis satisfied about their life incomplete, and they get this
called the adventure, to cross this threshold, to go this
new magical world where they're at their comfort zone. They
have the slave dragons, they have this ultimate challenge, and
the person they are dies, maybe metaphorically or in some
movies actually physically like snow white, and then they're born.
(23:32):
They're reborn a better version themselves, and they have atonement
where they go back to the world they came from.
And I always thought that travel great travels like the
Hero's journey, you just want to be a little out
of your comfort zone to learn something. And I think
that's what we try to do to get people a
little out of their cultural comfort zone, to go to
the market, to participate daily life of locals, to understand people.
(23:55):
Travel can bring the world together, but you're not going
to understand another culture in a double decker bus, staying
in a hotel with other tourists. You know, I'll give
you a funny story. People sometimes come to San Francisco
and describe what San Franciscans are like, and I'll ask him,
what are San Franciscan's like, And the first thing they
say is, well, they dressed like this, and they're this,
and they're that, and they all like bread bull soup.
(24:17):
And what I'm realizing is they're not describing San Franciscans.
They think they're describing San Franciscans, But they went to
Fisher's Wharf, which is like going to Times Square. It's
like going to Time Score in New York and describing
New Yorkers, except that no one in Time Scores in
New York except for those working in Times Square, because
regular New Yorkers don't go to Times Square. And so
I think, if you want to understand travel, look at
how people travel in their own in your own city,
(24:38):
and ask would you do that? And most people in
New York don't go to Times Square. But Time Square was,
until the pandemic, the most instagrammed landmark in the world,
clearly very popular, but most of us who spent a
lot of time in New York don't want to go
to Time Square. When I was eight years old, I
did want to go to Time Square. I thought it
was cool. And so I think there's landmark travel and
(25:00):
then there's people driven travel, and people driven travel is culture.
But how do you meet other people if you're in
a hotel on your double ducker bus. That's the premise
of Airbnb. We have a lot more to talk about.
What are things I would like to talk about. Is Obama,
President Obama and Michelle first Lady Obama, who really brought
She particularly brought a sense of food and the importance
(25:21):
of feeding our children and the investment that society makes,
you know, in children. And so your engagement with the
Obamas has been massive and at a very very basic level.
I would like to ask you what food was like
in the White House? Did you eat in the White House?
Because I've eaten the White House once at a state dinner,
(25:42):
and I had a meal with President Obama the residents
of the American ambassador in London, and he seemed to
be someone who did like his food and was interested
in food. I met President Obama late in his Presidency
and so um the reason I at him it was
because there was a thing called Global Entrepreneurship Summit where
(26:04):
they had this like honorary Ambassador program where you're an
ambassador for entrepreneurship. But the reason I really got to
know him was because he worked with Treasury Department to
lift embargo with Cuba. And then Airbnb opened in Cuba,
and President Obama went to Cuba with a bunch of
business leaders and myself and other people. We were actually
the only Companyhanny Business Cuba. So I got to know
(26:26):
Obama a little bit. And before he left office, probably
July of two thousand and sixteen, I get a thirty
minute lunch at the White House in the Presidential Dining Room,
and so I ate basically I think the same thing
he did. So I think it would have been fish.
I think I had like a white fish a. I
(26:49):
think I had all roasted sea bass with probably a
waxy potato tugarla and amalfi lemons. I feel like maybe
that's what I would have had, And no, it was
it was probably like a fish like this, but it
was like steam vegetables or a salad. I recall that,
and I remember I'm leaving the White House. So here's
(27:11):
a cool funny story because this is the other time
I ate at the White House and um, okay. So
so we're in the Oval Office now, because you have
to walk through the Oval Office when you leave, the
President's the dining room, which is kind of this like
nondescript room. So when you get your photo and Peza
sus as a photographer, he takes his photo of me
and before I leave, goes, I go, yeah, He goes,
do you like dancing? And it's my bad impression and
(27:34):
I go, I'm like, what do you say to a
president Nited States and the offs? And they say, do
you like dancing? So I said yeah. He goes, well,
I have a birthday party at the White House. It
was fiftieth birthday party. It was like in a month, right,
so this is like July or something in his birthdays
in August, and so he invites me like to his
(27:54):
birthday party at the White House, which is crazy, and
I'm like, and I'd been the West Wing, but I
hadn't been the main residents, which is what most people
think of the White House of the residents. It was
a it was kind of like a very fancy buffet,
you know, but man, not really a buffet, but like
it help yourself family style, but you would win to
like these kind of lines where you get food. Was
(28:14):
very like nice, fancy. I don't remember what I ate then,
and those are my two experienced the White House, but
there was oh yeah, so it was good and I
got to know him, and obviously we've built a relationship
ever since. He became a bit of a mentor to me.
Once he left office. We kind of had a standing
phone call for a while, you know, where you mentor me,
(28:36):
and then you know, I think the story kind of
turned into him going from him mentoring me to also
me wanted to help him with his efforts in particular philanthropy,
and so I created with him a hundred million dollar
scholarship for rising juniors in college to help them pay
(28:56):
for their college education for those who want to go
to public service. So the basic ideas, like Obama said
that when he was going into public so he graduated
Harvard Law and he had a lot of offers to
become like a corporate attorney, which is totally cool. We
have a lot of corporatriits Airbnb, but we also need
people to go in to public service. The problem is
college is getting so expensive that some people feel like
(29:16):
they can't afford to go and comoke service because they
all his college debt, and he said like it was
a hard decision for him to be a community organizer,
and he took him a long time to pay off
his bills. He didn't actually fully pay off his bills
to I think the book Odacity Hope came out so
like he was like maybe my age before he was
able to pay off his college loans. And I thought
we should be able to pay off people's college debt
(29:38):
so they can afford to go into public service. But
I had one other thought with him. I thought, I
would shamelessly want my public service leaders, whatever the fields are,
to have traveled the world and taken all the best
ideas from every country and bring him back to the
United States, And we bring food from all the other countries.
Don't we like to shamelessly appropriate food from other cultures
(29:59):
bring it here. Shouldn't we appropriate the best ideas of
governing and connection and other things. And so we had
a travel component where it would be a ten year
travel scholarships will pay off your college loans and will
pay for ten years to travel, including between your junior
and senior year, two thousand dollars a year for ten years,
twenty dollars, and then I think ten thousand dollars for
(30:21):
one summer, like in a little like summer voyage between
junior senior year where you do kind of like a
work trip. And that was what we did. So we
still work together, and I'm sure food is going to
be a big part of it for a lot of
these students because I think food is a way to
understand culture, and culture is a way to understand our
shared history and our shared connection. You said about food
(30:41):
is you know, political, it's cultural, it's love, and it's comfort.
For my last question, what if food is all that,
what would be your comfort for? It was my comfort food?
Not hard boiled eggs anymore? Okay, I don't think it
was then, wasn't No. I the whole point back then
(31:02):
was never be comfortable? Um. Probably chocolate cookies? Yea chocolate
How do you like them? Do you like them thick
and doughey or do you like them thin and crispy?
Can I tell you my recipe before we go? Because
the only there's there's only one that doesn't have a
waxy lemon in it. It does not have a waxy lemon.
Is the only recipe I know, or I think I
(31:22):
could tell you at the top of my head, and
I know that's how little I know about cooking. I
can you put a gun in my head. I can
tell you one recipe and one Yeah, it's prietary recipe
that I got off of Google. Google, So not that proprietary.
I like to say, it's been the family for a
long time, in three months, not the one on the
backs of the chocolate chip. You have the chips. Those
(31:44):
those are wrong because they don't use enough brown sugar
and they don't use enough in all extract. So what
I would do is step one, okay, step one flour.
I would do two and three quarters or two and
two thirds cups flour, So a little two thirds, let's
do two and three quarters cups flour. Then I think
it's a cup of flour. Yeah, go on. These are
(32:05):
the dry ingredients. Dry ingredients would be one teaspoon baking
soda in a teaspoon of salt. Okay, Then you've got
your sugar, which you mix your wet So here's the key.
This is where it gets interesting. So one in a
quarter cup of light brown sugar. What about the dark brown?
And no dark brown, just light brown? And then white sugar.
I use three quarters of a cup. Oh interesting, Then
(32:27):
two large eggs, and then you take a stick of butter,
the butter and the sugar. The butter and sugar. You
what's it called when you cream? You cream the Then
you add two eggs, two eggs, and then finally the
single most important thing, can I guess vanilla? Yes? But
(32:48):
what's the secret more vanilla? Yes? So most people yes,
very good. So most people would say one teaspoon, I
say tooth teaspoons to tasts. So the okay, So here
the core innovations, the core innovations you like, how like
I'm a tech founder. I use innovation by googling it in.
But there's a difference between innovation and the core innovation.
(33:09):
That's yeah, that's the difference between a waxy potato and
if you if we have thirty minutes more minutes, because
that's how about a lot the difference in cornovations. And
then I use not many chips, so you know, the
whole bag of the whole bag chips. I only use
one third of a bag of chips. Oh interesting, And
(33:29):
then I heat up into three seventy five fahrenheit for
about twenty minutes, and then I go to it's golden
brown core innovations. More of an only extract more brown sugar,
slightly more flower. That means that everything else, it's like
fewer chips. Okay, Vanilla's gentle. It's a very gentle idea.
(33:52):
You take anything vanilla. You had a flavor, and the
flavor starch power that vanilla. So people are overpowering vanilla
across this country, and I have a mission to create.
Is that why the Democrats did so well? Exactly? Yes,
people take advantage of more of vanilla. If you elect me,
I will give you more of vanilla. You got my vote, yes, Okay,
(34:18):
well let's do it. I'll be your host and we'll
make chocolate chip cookie. Let's do it. Let's do it. Thanks,
thank you, nic I've never I've done a lot of
interviews in my life, and never one on food. And
I never talked about hard bowled eggs interview. Like almost
everything we talked about Ted never said before because no
one ever asked me. Everyone asked me all the same questions.
(34:44):
The river Cafe Look Book is now available in bookshops
and online. It has over one hundred recipes beautifully illustrated
with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book
has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes include doing
a host of River Cafe classics that have been specially
adapted for new cooks. The River Cafe Lookbook Recipes for
(35:08):
Cooks of all ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production
of I Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Ruthie's Table for a production of I Heart
Radio and Adami's Studios. Often when a friend prepares you
to meet their friend, it feels anxious. Will he like me?
Will I like him? Do I need to pretend I
(00:20):
do if I don't. When Johnny I've told me his
closest friend, Brian Chesky was joining us in southern Italy,
I felt anxious about all of the above, and then
he arrived. We sat together at lunch, started talking and
didn't stop really for the next five days. Now. I've
(00:41):
never stayed in an airbnb, but then again, Brian has
never been to the River Cafe. But I've experienced the
impact airbnb has had on so many lives. My children
have explored the world knowing they need never stay in
a hotel, and my friends in New Mexico are able
to rent a house in Paris only because they host
(01:02):
air b and beers in There's Brian lives in San Francisco.
I live in London. The next time he visits London,
he's promised to deviate, not stay in an airbnb and
stay with us instead. I'll cook for him, walk in
Hyde Park and if they're lucky, we'll introduce him to
my friends. No anxiety. They will love him as much
(01:25):
as I do. Oh my god, thank you for saying
no that. Okay, will you read a recipe absolutely, Ruthie. Um.
This recipe is whole roasted sea bass with potatoes. So
it starts with one sea bass weighing two kilograms. Take
a half a bottle of white wine. Eight large waxy potatoes,
(01:50):
peeled and quartered. By the way, what's a waxy potato?
Waxy potos? Waxy? You know how they're potatoes that all
flowery that you might have for baked potatoes. Makes a
potato waxy though? Is it like a certain type of potatoes? Okay,
so waxy potatoes. Everyone to garlic clothes peeled. Two lemons
pieces with skin. Now, these are not waxy lemons. These
(02:11):
are not waxy because you know lemon lemons. I could
have even said Amalfi lemons particularly good, and are those
different types of lemons. Malfie lemons have a very much
thicker skin, and so they're really they're really protects the juice.
There's less juice, but it's better because it's got the
amazing a handful of fresh oregano. So once you have this.
(02:33):
Preheat the of into two fift degrees celsius, and then
you boil the potatoes until cooked. Then drain them, add
your lemon and herbs, pour over alive oil and mix well.
And once you do this, you put it in a
roasting tray. You stuff the fish with the lemons, and
(02:54):
then you season. You season it with salt and pepper.
Salt and pepper everywhere inside out. You just just the
more salt and pepper the better. No, no no, that's probably
not true, but kind of everywhere. Don't don't be shy
like pepper in the inside, the outside, all the nooks
and crannies. And you place the fish on top of
your potatoes, your waxy potatoes, right, and then then you
(03:19):
drizzle some olive oil and you roast in the oven
for twenty minutes. Now you take your half a bottle
of wine, you add it, you save the other half
to drink. Then you roast for another fifteen minutes. So
I'm cooking for twenty then I put a bunch of
wine on it, and then I do another fifteen minutes.
(03:39):
Why do I do that? Because when you first do it,
if you put it in the very beginning of the
wine will kind of disappear, so if you put it
in for the last ten minutes, you'll still get the juice.
What does the wine? I mean, the alcohol burns right,
but it gives it a flavor. It doesn't, Yeah, it
just gives it another fruity, interesting, dryer flavor that flavors
and some people should be like. It has to be
(04:01):
nice wine. The idea that you can use cheap wine
for cooking is really not the right thing to do.
It's better to use a little bit less wine. Doesn't
have to be expensive expensive wine, but you want to
be able to, you know, drink the wine that you
would put in cooking. You don't like cooking wines, so
we so I think really important everyone to use nice wine.
Unless you're drinking by yourself and your sat on a Friday.
(04:23):
You stick to nice wine. And then when it's ready,
filet the fish and you serve with the potatoes and
the juices from the pan. It's a very Italian way
of cooking. That mean, well, I think that you go
for the ingredient. If you have a great sea best,
you don't have to do much to it. If you
have a mediocre fish or a mediocre piece of meat
(04:44):
or a mediocredgetable, then you have to think of adding
more things to it, cooking it longer, of doing this
and doing that. But if you have a fantastic sea bass,
then really what you want is a sea bass with lemon,
with some herbs and a bit of wine and you're done,
you know. So it's very simple, and everybody thinks, you know,
Americans myself included, growing up, your thought Italian food was
(05:05):
spaghetti and meat balls and very heavy food. And in fact,
what we know is that as you and I spent
some time together in Amalfi, and that's why we thought
this would be a good recipe for you to read,
because it does bring back memories and food is about memory,
isn't it. I think it's really great. You're right. I mean,
I think you're right. Food is like I mean, when
(05:25):
I think of food, I think of a couple of things.
It's one of the only things in life that we
consume that we need to survive number one. Number two,
I think food is rooted in culture, and I also
think you're right. Food is something you share. Maybe it's
a primorial thing from fifty years ago and people were
around the campfire eating and talking, and there's something about
food connection, family conversation that all go together. So just
(05:49):
tell me your early days of growing up in your home.
Who cooked? What did you remember about being in a
chesky household and food? I think for me, I kind
of had a foot in two different worlds of food
growing up. On the one hand, you know, my parents
are sourci workers. We were on the go. We were
(06:10):
middle class, and we had a lot of like just
quick to go things that probably in hindsight, weren't that healthy,
you know, going to like fast food and like kind
of packaged foods. And then my mom would cook my
Mom's Italian and she would make very simple things, you know,
pasta's and um, you know, really basic meats with like
(06:31):
mashed potatoes and vegetables. You know, we try to make
sure we have dinner every night together as a family.
And then I have a lot of memories of like
kind of holiday gatherings. It's really interesting, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter.
The centerpiece of every one of those memories that I
had was food. There's something premortal in us that makes
(06:54):
sense that you know, there's we want. I think we
want to have a connection to things. I think One
of the challenge of modern life is that we get
abstracted from the things, and one of the things to
get abstracted from is our food. I mean, fast food
was like an amazing innovation at the time, but I
think that, like a lot of innovations, many years later,
you look back and say, well, there's probably a price
(07:14):
that we paid. But yeah, those were those are your grandmother?
Did you say you had an Italian grandmother and a
Polish grandmother? I had Italian grandmother and a Polish grandmother
and grandfather. Did did they cook and did they cook
her food at their homes? My grandmother on my mom's
side cooked and I think she was pretty good. My
grandmother was Polish, my dad's mother, and she actually lived
(07:36):
with us and she would help cooking, Like I remember
peeling the potatoes with her and stuff like that. But
I'm still trying to understand. I think they were waxy.
They didn't crumple right, like you know those flaky potatoes. Yeah,
they were kind of flower and this they were kind
of wet. Yeah, wet is waxy? What well, what is more?
(07:59):
What be more to once a waxy because of the
pot But if you're going to waxy potatoes sound better
than wet potatoes. I want to open a restaurant and
I'll call it wet Potato. Ladies and gentle Welcome to
Wet Potato. We're just down the street from River Cafe.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to stage Wet Potato. I
(08:21):
love wet Potato. I've been following them on tour all week.
Um so, yeah, so I had my waxy wet potato.
My grandmother made it, and um, well, here's the story.
When I was a kid, I was very small physically
growing up. I'm like average person sized personnel. I'm like
a hundred and eighties something pounds. But my parents were worried,
like there's maybe something developed me wrong and we want
(08:42):
to enter Chnoledge. He said no, he's just like his
growth is development is behind about two years. But I
was really skinny growing up. I was probably when I
entered high school, maybe a hundred pounds, right, yeah, fourteen maybe.
And I went to a school like I basically Sports
Acconomy to play ice hockey, and then I ended up
breaking my leg. I had a spiral fracture on my leg,
(09:05):
and I end up going to like physical therapy, and
I decide at that moment, and by the way, you'll
learn as we go that I'm a bit of an
extreme personality. You know, any entrepreneur is extreme, especially people
like us that run these big companies on forty one.
So it's a kind of extreme. And so at this point,
I'm going through physical therapy and you know, you have
(09:27):
to do like kind of weight training, and I really
start picking up weight training. And at this point the context,
and you understand, is my body had controlled my life
because I was small, I was skinny. I was kind
of like felt like my body was limiting my options
in life. And I kind of knew at this point
I'm sixteen, that I'm not getting a professional athlete. But
I just I had this thought. It was really interesting.
I said, if I can control my body, I can
(09:47):
control my life. I'm sure I didn't say it so
eloquently or simply. That was a thought. So I decided
when I was sixteen, I said, I'm going to become
one of the most muscular teenagers in the country by
the time I'm nineteen, and I picked up bodybuilding and
that began a unique relationship for food, a relationship that
was about health, but certainly more utilitarian than enjoyment. And
(10:11):
in two and a half years I went from a
hundred probably twenty five pounds to maybe a pounds. I
end up competing in what we would now call yeah,
was like probably decent muscle, and then I cut back
down and I competed in what you know, it was
basically the the teenage Mr America. It was called NPC
(10:32):
Teenage Nationals and Collegiate Nationals and bodybuilding. And so I
had this very weird duality where I went to like
a private school a junior year, kind of a military
bend school. So it was a private school where I
had to like dressing cadet gear and do drill with
rifles and all weight training. Then I go to public
school the next year. It was all clicks, public typical
(10:56):
hippolic high school. And then the following year to go
to RISD the art school. And by the time we
get to art school, I am now competing at a
natural level in body building. And I would walk around
campus with half a dozen hard boiled eggs that I
would open the plastic and the eggs would stink up
the entire room, and I would eat these hard boiled
eggs one at a time, and everyone the class was
(11:16):
like staring at me. I would probably there, I would
have as many as like eighteen egg whites a day.
I would even drink the egg whites. I was going
to ask you eating egg whites because and I would
just drink them. It sounds kind of gross, unappetizing, but
it really had profound effected me because I started to
realize what I ate affected how I felt. And that's
(11:37):
when I really started appreciating food in a very deconstructed way.
Of these building blocks delicious, no, no, no, they I
mean there was there was a saying growing up, if
it taste coad, it's bad for you. If it tastes bad,
it's good for you. And that was the motto I
had growing up. Probably again this is like super countercultural
to your podcast, because I don't believe that anymore, but
(11:58):
that was certainly how I grew leaving home and leaving family.
There you were in Rhode Island at the Rhode Island
School Design, which is great school. And do you remember
(12:19):
cooking and eating with your friends. I had a meal
Planet's risty, but I consume so many calories that the
way the school worked is your parents had to prepay,
like I'll make a number of like five thousand hours
a year for food, right, And every kid had a
pre filled card like a meal card, but it was
use it or lose it meal card, right, So you
like you have to put on your card each semester,
(12:42):
and if you ate only two thousand hours of food,
you wouldn't get the money back. You would just you
use it or lose it. And if you ate more
than that, you have to call up your parents to
put more money in the card, which is something I
didn't want to do. So I would find um, other
students whose meal plans they weren't going to eat, and
I would basically bump food off them because I would
basically tap out my meal plan because I would get
(13:04):
like three four chicken breasts at a time, and you know,
and when you get a dozen eggs and three four
chicken breast at the time, you're gonna your meal plan.
So I would basically kind of loiter around the cash
register befriending people. Yeah, smelling of hard boiled eggs found
Rizdy at our school. So I'm at art school carrying
(13:25):
containers hard boiled eggs, loitering around cash registers trying to
get people mostly like um. I had a whole bunch
of friends, these girls that were Korean. Rizzdy was very
popular in Korea, and so a lot of kids came
from Korea, and they were very thin, and none of
them maxed out their meal plan. And so I kind
(13:48):
of realized this and I became friends of them. I'm
not saying I used the relationship for hard boiled eggs.
I'm not saying I didn't either, so we'll let the
audience understand. And so I would basically loiter around and
at one point I ended up offering to train the
kids for free if they would give me their card
to get hard boiled eggs. And I thought everyone one.
I got muscles, they lost weight, and we everyone was
(14:09):
really happy. But this is not like a typical food thing, right,
And I had no But food is different than food
is so for me at that time, food was a
utilitarian building block for me to create the body I wanted,
the life I wanted to have, and I thought about
it as a fuel, as a utility. And I think,
by the way, here's another theory I have, because like
(14:30):
why what I do this weird stuff? Growing up? I
was a bit of a rebel, and I kind of
did not want to fit in. So when I was
in high school, I wanted to be the artist, and
when I got to art school, I wanted to be
the bodybuilder. And then I got out into the real world,
I wanted to be like an entrepreneur because you once
told me that many of our conversations over food, that
(14:51):
you saw Airbnb as an industrial designer rather as an entrepreneur,
as a business person, that you saw the kind of canvas.
You saw airbnba as a canvas rather than a business plan.
I never thought I was a business person. I remember.
I remember the first week and I started Airbnb, somebody
(15:11):
reminding me. I said, I'm not a business person. I'm
a designer. Business People make money. Designers solve problems. I'm
a designer and my problem isn't to make money. My
problem is to solve a problem for somebody, and that's
what designers do. The funny thing is that an artist
or mostly entrepreneurs, without realizing it, right, because most artists
of sell proprietors right, and europe An artist, you have
to sell your art and you don't work for somebody
(15:33):
because most people don't employ artists. So there's something about
art school which is pretty entrepreneurial and the risky education
is an inadvertent entrepreneurship education. And oddly enough, like most
entrepreneurship programs are anti entrepreneurship. The structure is unrealistic. Entrepreneurship
has no structure. Entrepreneuris requires resiliency, Entrepreneurship requires self motivation,
(15:56):
and like there are best practices I've done, Like I
went to White Combinator, but like Risdy, like one of
our assignments was you get a piece of cardboard and
you say, you have to build a bridge, like a
three foot bridge with this piece of cardboard, and whosever
bridge can hold up the most amount of bricks across
the tables wind Or here's a piece of cardboard. You
have to make a violin with no glue out of cardboard.
(16:18):
And you're like, you have three hours. I think that's
kind of entrepreneurship, Like you have these challenges to solved.
Can I just say that you also in your entrepreneurship
and design, because going you know, into Airbnb and the
culture of Airbnb in terms of not just being a
place where you sleep, but what you've done. And as
I said in my introduction is you've taken the world
(16:40):
of being an entrepreneur, of being a place to stay
into culture. Because people stay in a neighborhood, they shop
for food. I always say that when you you know,
when you visit a city, the first thing you should
do is go to the market, because you know that
because the market tells you about the people who live there,
the food that's in season, the ingredients they have. And
you know, market in London will be different from an
(17:02):
our market in Fairness, which will be different from one
in Singapore and one in Tokyo, and that tells you
about the culture. And I think what you've been talking about,
you know that you are combining entrepreneurship with culture, aren't you?
Is that what you what I mean? Ivy was saying,
go on, I have you tell him that staying in
an airbnb and you go to the kitchen, don't you?
(17:23):
You go and see what the kitchens are going to be.
Like we're talking about. The thing that I like with
A B and B is that you can use the
locals guides, the host guides, And so I think it's
saying it was reinventing how you're a tourist. Right, because
rather than going to the tourist spots, you can be like, Okay,
where are people actually eating and how how can I
imagine myself living here? And what would my life be like?
(17:46):
And that's why I think young people like MBNB especially. Yeah,
I think it's exactly right. And I also say that
just to bring to bring a little bit of story
to kind of more present day. Until I started and
at in travel very much, and I did not have
a passion for traveling when I started BnB. And actually,
here's the other thing I did not. I did not
(18:07):
start me as a traveler. I started as a host.
So airbingb has guest and host travelers and people hosting
those travelers, and I wasn't a traveler. I was a host.
Airbanb started because my room and I couldn't afford to
pay rent. We turned our house into a bed and
Breakfast wouldn't have any beds. We waited through your beds.
We called the air bed and Breakfast dot com. So
I started as a host, and I didn't really have
(18:29):
a big desire for traveling growing up, but I will
because I did it wasn't exposed to a lot of it.
Now I love traveling by the time. I remember once
a year we would travel. My mom was a soar
shirker and there was an annual conference that she had
to go to, and so should get a flight in
a hotel room. And my family realized, this is a
really good racket. We can basically freeload off her and
(18:52):
get a free vacation every year. And would that be
in the United States abroad? Always in the United States.
So my first time I was an airplane was seven.
We went to St. Us because she had a conference there.
Do you remember the food when you traveled? I have
more memories of eating while traveling than not traveling. Funny enough,
I have more memories just traveling in general. I remember
(19:12):
somebody once a few years ago came up to me said, Brian,
I use because I wanted my life to seem longer.
And I said, what does that mean? He said, The
thing I noticed about my life and I realized about
myself is we generally don't remember our routines. To give
an example, I probably rode the school bus. I don't know,
twelve years from five to seventeen, and I can't remember
two thousand times the memory of me being a school bus.
(19:34):
I maybe six seventy eight, faint memories, but I remember
every trip I took. I remember the trip to St. Louis,
the trip to Dallas, the trip to Seattle, the trip
to Chicago. And so what I learned and when he
told me, is that when you travel and you have
distinct memories, and when people say time go by quickly,
I think one of the reasons they're saying that is
(19:54):
because they're falling into routine. Summertine is really good, but
you have to be careful about your routine being so
much that your memories collapse. And then one day you
wake up in your life has kind of passed you by.
And there's so much of the world, and so I
think a great way to remember the world is through travel.
I hope to live in a world where the the
word travel and the idea traveled almost dissolves into our
(20:17):
idea and it blurs with living. We talked about like,
you know, going to supermarket and living like a local.
There was a guy in Paris, he's no longer alive.
(20:38):
His name is I think his name was Jim Hyman.
Have you heard of this person? Jim Hyman said, I
believe in this book of world record for hosting more
people at dinner parties than anyone ever. He hosted a
hundred thousand people in his house in Paris for dinner parties.
And you could ask how yeah, yeah, maybe you challenge that,
but he apparently was up there and he had a
(20:58):
secret for traveling. He said the secret to good traveling
instead of participate in the daily life of locals. And
I thought that was profound because what happens is most
a lot of travel like Conrad like modern travel. Probably
one of the major pioneers of modern travel travel with
Conrad Hilton. Conrad Hilton started Hilton Hotels in Texas, and
(21:22):
he was very Christian and made it a point. I
think maybe someone Hilton we listening correct me to have
a Bible next to the bed. It doesn't matter what
was that you were in. I believe so, and maybe
I'm wrong, but I think I think that's and I
think he's famously wanted to export an American travel experience anywhere.
There was a famous like like episode of mad Men,
(21:42):
I think is representatively correct, like how do you say
blah blah blah in Tokyo Hilton? How do you say hello?
And Germany Hilton? So it was really about an American
travel experience. It's about mass tourism. It's about bringing your
culture with you to this environment. We lived in Paris
for years and I used to see a tour bus
that went around the plastic version where we lived, and
(22:04):
people never got off the bus. And I thought, you know,
there is a sense that people really hate traveling because
it takes the effort it takes, you know, fear, it's
it's fearful, you have to understand the language, all the
reasons we want to travel. There's a group of people
that would rather stay in Hilton and eat American food
and being a bus because complained to because they can
(22:25):
say they've been to Paris around or Florence or Venice
and yet never have to experience any discomfort or I
think that's a very typical way to be introduced to travel,
that you want to go to a farm environment, but
you want to be comfortable, so you're more like a
stand hotel, going a double decker bus, get a selfie
in front of them. Change that you're saying uncomfortable for yourself.
(22:47):
Be in a neighborhood, in the daily life of locals,
you know. Joseph Campbell the late mythologists. He wrote a book,
I think in like the nineteen forties called Hero of
Thousand Faces, and his book bas sickly surmised that every
character of every movie, whether it's Star Wars or Wizard
of Oz or Grapes Wrath, whomever, they're really the same character.
(23:09):
A hero is an ordinary world and there's something like
dis satisfied about their life incomplete, and they get this
called the adventure, to cross this threshold, to go this
new magical world where they're at their comfort zone. They
have the slave dragons, they have this ultimate challenge, and
the person they are dies, maybe metaphorically or in some
movies actually physically like snow white, and then they're born.
(23:32):
They're reborn a better version themselves, and they have atonement
where they go back to the world they came from.
And I always thought that travel great travels like the
Hero's journey, you just want to be a little out
of your comfort zone to learn something. And I think
that's what we try to do to get people a
little out of their cultural comfort zone, to go to
the market, to participate daily life of locals, to understand people.
(23:55):
Travel can bring the world together, but you're not going
to understand another culture in a double decker bus, staying
in a hotel with other tourists. You know, I'll give
you a funny story. People sometimes come to San Francisco
and describe what San Franciscans are like, and I'll ask him,
what are San Franciscan's like, And the first thing they
say is, well, they dressed like this, and they're this,
and they're that, and they all like bread bull soup.
(24:17):
And what I'm realizing is they're not describing San Franciscans.
They think they're describing San Franciscans, But they went to
Fisher's Wharf, which is like going to Times Square. It's
like going to Time Score in New York and describing
New Yorkers, except that no one in Time Scores in
New York except for those working in Times Square, because
regular New Yorkers don't go to Times Square. And so
I think, if you want to understand travel, look at
how people travel in their own in your own city,
(24:38):
and ask would you do that? And most people in
New York don't go to Times Square. But Time Square was,
until the pandemic, the most instagrammed landmark in the world,
clearly very popular, but most of us who spent a
lot of time in New York don't want to go
to Time Square. When I was eight years old, I
did want to go to Time Square. I thought it
was cool. And so I think there's landmark travel and
(25:00):
then there's people driven travel, and people driven travel is culture.
But how do you meet other people if you're in
a hotel on your double ducker bus. That's the premise
of Airbnb. We have a lot more to talk about.
What are things I would like to talk about. Is Obama,
President Obama and Michelle first Lady Obama, who really brought
She particularly brought a sense of food and the importance
(25:21):
of feeding our children and the investment that society makes,
you know, in children. And so your engagement with the
Obamas has been massive and at a very very basic level.
I would like to ask you what food was like
in the White House? Did you eat in the White House?
Because I've eaten the White House once at a state dinner,
(25:42):
and I had a meal with President Obama the residents
of the American ambassador in London, and he seemed to
be someone who did like his food and was interested
in food. I met President Obama late in his Presidency
and so um the reason I at him it was
because there was a thing called Global Entrepreneurship Summit where
(26:04):
they had this like honorary Ambassador program where you're an
ambassador for entrepreneurship. But the reason I really got to
know him was because he worked with Treasury Department to
lift embargo with Cuba. And then Airbnb opened in Cuba,
and President Obama went to Cuba with a bunch of
business leaders and myself and other people. We were actually
the only Companyhanny Business Cuba. So I got to know
(26:26):
Obama a little bit. And before he left office, probably
July of two thousand and sixteen, I get a thirty
minute lunch at the White House in the Presidential Dining Room,
and so I ate basically I think the same thing
he did. So I think it would have been fish.
I think I had like a white fish a. I
(26:49):
think I had all roasted sea bass with probably a
waxy potato tugarla and amalfi lemons. I feel like maybe
that's what I would have had, And no, it was
it was probably like a fish like this, but it
was like steam vegetables or a salad. I recall that,
and I remember I'm leaving the White House. So here's
(27:11):
a cool funny story because this is the other time
I ate at the White House and um, okay. So
so we're in the Oval Office now, because you have
to walk through the Oval Office when you leave, the
President's the dining room, which is kind of this like
nondescript room. So when you get your photo and Peza
sus as a photographer, he takes his photo of me
and before I leave, goes, I go, yeah, He goes,
do you like dancing? And it's my bad impression and
(27:34):
I go, I'm like, what do you say to a
president Nited States and the offs? And they say, do
you like dancing? So I said yeah. He goes, well,
I have a birthday party at the White House. It
was fiftieth birthday party. It was like in a month, right,
so this is like July or something in his birthdays
in August, and so he invites me like to his
(27:54):
birthday party at the White House, which is crazy, and
I'm like, and I'd been the West Wing, but I
hadn't been the main residents, which is what most people
think of the White House of the residents. It was
a it was kind of like a very fancy buffet,
you know, but man, not really a buffet, but like
it help yourself family style, but you would win to
like these kind of lines where you get food. Was
(28:14):
very like nice, fancy. I don't remember what I ate then,
and those are my two experienced the White House, but
there was oh yeah, so it was good and I
got to know him, and obviously we've built a relationship
ever since. He became a bit of a mentor to me.
Once he left office. We kind of had a standing
phone call for a while, you know, where you mentor me,
(28:36):
and then you know, I think the story kind of
turned into him going from him mentoring me to also
me wanted to help him with his efforts in particular philanthropy,
and so I created with him a hundred million dollar
scholarship for rising juniors in college to help them pay
(28:56):
for their college education for those who want to go
to public service. So the basic ideas, like Obama said
that when he was going into public so he graduated
Harvard Law and he had a lot of offers to
become like a corporate attorney, which is totally cool. We
have a lot of corporatriits Airbnb, but we also need
people to go in to public service. The problem is
college is getting so expensive that some people feel like
(29:16):
they can't afford to go and comoke service because they
all his college debt, and he said like it was
a hard decision for him to be a community organizer,
and he took him a long time to pay off
his bills. He didn't actually fully pay off his bills
to I think the book Odacity Hope came out so
like he was like maybe my age before he was
able to pay off his college loans. And I thought
we should be able to pay off people's college debt
(29:38):
so they can afford to go into public service. But
I had one other thought with him. I thought, I
would shamelessly want my public service leaders, whatever the fields are,
to have traveled the world and taken all the best
ideas from every country and bring him back to the
United States, And we bring food from all the other countries.
Don't we like to shamelessly appropriate food from other cultures
(29:59):
bring it here. Shouldn't we appropriate the best ideas of
governing and connection and other things. And so we had
a travel component where it would be a ten year
travel scholarships will pay off your college loans and will
pay for ten years to travel, including between your junior
and senior year, two thousand dollars a year for ten years,
twenty dollars, and then I think ten thousand dollars for
(30:21):
one summer, like in a little like summer voyage between
junior senior year where you do kind of like a
work trip. And that was what we did. So we
still work together, and I'm sure food is going to
be a big part of it for a lot of
these students because I think food is a way to
understand culture, and culture is a way to understand our
shared history and our shared connection. You said about food
(30:41):
is you know, political, it's cultural, it's love, and it's comfort.
For my last question, what if food is all that,
what would be your comfort for? It was my comfort food?
Not hard boiled eggs anymore? Okay, I don't think it
was then, wasn't No. I the whole point back then
(31:02):
was never be comfortable? Um. Probably chocolate cookies? Yea chocolate
How do you like them? Do you like them thick
and doughey or do you like them thin and crispy?
Can I tell you my recipe before we go? Because
the only there's there's only one that doesn't have a
waxy lemon in it. It does not have a waxy lemon.
Is the only recipe I know, or I think I
(31:22):
could tell you at the top of my head, and
I know that's how little I know about cooking. I
can you put a gun in my head. I can
tell you one recipe and one Yeah, it's prietary recipe
that I got off of Google. Google, So not that proprietary.
I like to say, it's been the family for a
long time, in three months, not the one on the
backs of the chocolate chip. You have the chips. Those
(31:44):
those are wrong because they don't use enough brown sugar
and they don't use enough in all extract. So what
I would do is step one, okay, step one flour.
I would do two and three quarters or two and
two thirds cups flour, So a little two thirds, let's
do two and three quarters cups flour. Then I think
it's a cup of flour. Yeah, go on. These are
(32:05):
the dry ingredients. Dry ingredients would be one teaspoon baking
soda in a teaspoon of salt. Okay, Then you've got
your sugar, which you mix your wet So here's the key.
This is where it gets interesting. So one in a
quarter cup of light brown sugar. What about the dark brown?
And no dark brown, just light brown? And then white sugar.
I use three quarters of a cup. Oh interesting, Then
(32:27):
two large eggs, and then you take a stick of butter,
the butter and the sugar. The butter and sugar. You
what's it called when you cream? You cream the Then
you add two eggs, two eggs, and then finally the
single most important thing, can I guess vanilla? Yes? But
(32:48):
what's the secret more vanilla? Yes? So most people yes,
very good. So most people would say one teaspoon, I
say tooth teaspoons to tasts. So the okay, So here
the core innovations, the core innovations you like, how like
I'm a tech founder. I use innovation by googling it in.
But there's a difference between innovation and the core innovation.
(33:09):
That's yeah, that's the difference between a waxy potato and
if you if we have thirty minutes more minutes, because
that's how about a lot the difference in cornovations. And
then I use not many chips, so you know, the
whole bag of the whole bag chips. I only use
one third of a bag of chips. Oh interesting, And
(33:29):
then I heat up into three seventy five fahrenheit for
about twenty minutes, and then I go to it's golden
brown core innovations. More of an only extract more brown sugar,
slightly more flower. That means that everything else, it's like
fewer chips. Okay, Vanilla's gentle. It's a very gentle idea.
(33:52):
You take anything vanilla. You had a flavor, and the
flavor starch power that vanilla. So people are overpowering vanilla
across this country, and I have a mission to create.
Is that why the Democrats did so well? Exactly? Yes,
people take advantage of more of vanilla. If you elect me,
I will give you more of vanilla. You got my vote, yes, Okay,
(34:18):
well let's do it. I'll be your host and we'll
make chocolate chip cookie. Let's do it. Let's do it. Thanks,
thank you, nic I've never I've done a lot of
interviews in my life, and never one on food. And
I never talked about hard bowled eggs interview. Like almost
everything we talked about Ted never said before because no
one ever asked me. Everyone asked me all the same questions.
(34:44):
The river Cafe Look Book is now available in bookshops
and online. It has over one hundred recipes beautifully illustrated
with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book
has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes include doing
a host of River Cafe classics that have been specially
adapted for new cooks. The River Cafe Lookbook Recipes for
(35:08):
Cooks of all ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production
of I Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Ruth Rogers
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