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59. Joe Gebbia - Design We Deserve

·Founder, Designer
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Description

Joe Gebbia (Website, X, LinkedIn, Wikipedia) is the first U.S. Chief Design Officer, leading the National Design Studio. He is also the co-founder of Airbnb and Samara.

The NDS and this role were created by executive order of President Trump in August 2025. I met Joe Washington, D.C, to reflect on the past year and talk about bringing the care and ambition of great product design to the digital services that every American uses. Joe & NDS just launched America.gov, their flagship project of the last year: the central entry point for how Americans get what they need from the government.

Joe believes that design is how you respect and value the people who use a product or service. At Airbnb, that meant helping strangers feel comfortable in each other’s homes. In government, it means refusing to accept a low bar for the websites and processes that Americans use to interact with the government.

We begin with CritBuns, Joe’s RISD project that taught him that design is as much about storytelling as it is about product. Then, we discuss what he learned about designing for trust at Airbnb and his initial work at DOGE, streamlining and digitizing the federal retirement process. Joe walks me through America.gov, a single, AI-powered front door to government services. We discuss the challenges of scale and designing for people who are skeptical of both government and AI, including what it means to pass the “grandma test.” We wrap up with why ambitious technologists should aspire to work in government and his collaboration with Airbnb co-founders Brian Chesky and Nathan Blecharczyk.

I hope this conversation raises your expectations for the things we’ve learned to tolerate, and inspires you to think about how you might serve your community or your country.

Dialectic is presented by Notion. As new models and agents arrive constantly, Notion acts as a context and consolidation layer for all the ways you and your team work with AI: a command center or simply a resilience layer, so your context comes with you even if you switch models or agents. You can also work with agents right inside Notion and share skills with your team through the Skills API. Learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

Timestamps

  • 0:00 Opening Highlights
  • 1:26 Intro: Joe Gebbia
  • 4:12 CritBuns & Why Design is Half Story
  • 15:24 Airbnb, The Feeling of Belonging, & Designing for Trust
  • 28:29 Public Service & Fixing Federal Retirement
  • 42:16 Speed, Craft, and Respect
  • 48:43 ND Studio Projects: TrumpRx, Trump Accounts, and Realfood.gov
  • 56:18 America.gov: A New Front Door to Government
  • 1:05:35 Trust, Privacy, and Government AI
  • 1:15:30 America.gov’s Roadmap
  • 1:19:54 Recruiting for ND Studio and Public Service
  • 1:23:41 Reflecting on Year One & Passing the Grandma Test
  • 1:31:05 A Ticking Clock Toward 2028 & Building Beyond One Administration
  • 1:35:44 AI & Product Development
  • 1:38:36 Closing Questions: Charles & Ray Eames, Airbnb Co-Founders, & Trust in People

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Transcript

4:12 Start: CritBuns & Why Design is Half Story

Jackson: (4:12) Joe Gebbia, thank you for joining me.

Joe: (4:14) Jackson, thanks for having me.

Jackson: (4:16) This is an honor. We're here in D.C. and I feel like we're not quite in the middle, but we're close to the middle of this crazy new endeavor of yours. So I'm excited to talk about it.

Joe: (4:24) We're very much in the middle.

Jackson: (4:29) I guess we'll get into that. I want to start maybe going a little farther back with a quote that is exemplary of one thing I want to talk about, which is the storytelling side of your work and your design and your career. This is a quote, I think, from a conversation with Tim Ferriss in 2018. This is you: "Design is more than just a product. It's more than just a digital experience. That cushion is 50% foam and 50% story." What do you mean?

Joe: (4:57) Well, it was a great lesson early on in my design entrepreneur career. I studied design at Rhode Island School of Design. And look, in design school, it's pretty theoretical. You work on an assignment, you make a prototype, and then you move on to the next assignment. I was always curious, what happens next? What's the gap between that prototype you make and the shelf of a store? What is that mysterious black box? When I graduated RISD, I decided to demystify it and decode it. A lot of my friends went off to get design jobs and they moved to LA or Brooklyn. I sat in my apartment and spent the next year bringing a product to market so that I could decode this mysterious gap. I used a design that I had created during my senior year for a seat cushion to sit on during art critiques. They also called them crits, where you put your art up on the wall, pin it up, and you spend all day in the art studio going piece by piece critiquing the art. You have to defend yourself as the artist. Your classmates and the teacher are all saying, "Well, why'd you do that? Why does it look that way? I'm confused about that." You have to really stand in front of your art and defend it, which is a good skill for later in life. In these critiques, they're really long and uncomfortable. Early on in my art school career, I was sitting on the hardwood floors and it's just so uncomfortable. By hour six, your butt really hurts. By the end of the day, everyone stood up and walked out of the classroom. I remember seeing the charcoal dust and the ink that's on the hardwood floors had rubbed off on people's pants, and it left a bun print. I was seeing everyone walk out with a bun print. I looked at my own pants and sure enough, I had one too. I was walking back to my dorm room thinking, "I've got four more years of these crits. There's got to be a better way to participate in these that's comfortable and keeps you clean." I got back to my dorm room and I sketched that bun print shape on the back of people's pants. I called it CritBuns. It would be this foam cushion with a handle that would be affordable for college students and something to sit on during these crits. That was the product. I'd prototyped it in school, and then by the time I graduated, it had won a competition to be given out to the entire graduating class of mine as a gift from the school. I had to figure out how to make 800 of these cushions in a very short amount of time. It was almost impossible in about four weeks. The day after graduation, the school gave me the metal mold from the project, which is like $5,000. So I figured my biggest capital expense is out of the way. Let's bring this product to market and figure out how you get a product on the shelf of a store. I learned so much from this. It was kind of like my own grad school in a way where I was doing everything: the manufacturing, the partnership, the website, the promotion, the sales, the web design, the graphic design, the branding, the packaging. It was all of these things — customer service — all from my bedroom in Providence. What I learned is, after that summer, I went back to RISD and said, "Hey, that was great for the graduating class. What if we did this for the incoming freshman class?" 400 fresh students that would love a seat cushion. The school loved the idea and placed my first order. I tacked on my own inventory on top of that, and they were distributed to all 400 freshmen. People loved it. Everyone was running around campus with these brightly colored, strangely shaped seat cushions. And everybody was like, "What is that?"

Jackson: (8:57) I should say, there really are a bun — I don't know what I was envisioning — maybe those typical cushions you see at baseball games — but they are bun-shaped. I'll link a picture, but it's amazing.

Joe: (9:06) Anatomically correct. Yes. That was an exciting fall—this is going back to the year 2005. I tacked on a few hundred cushions and did the order for myself. I remember they were in my basement in Providence. One day I went down to the basement and I’m looking at these boxes of these seat cushions, and I realize nobody’s coming to this basement to buy them. I have to go out into the world and actually sell these things. That was an incredible learning experience of walking cold into stores, finding the store manager, and figuring out what is the right line. How do you frame this the right way to get people excited about it? The first store I walked into was the Brown University bookstore. I met with the buyer, sat down, had a sales sheet that I designed, my best shoes, finest dress shirt. And in about 20 seconds of my pitch, she goes, "I'm not interested," and got up and walked out of the room. I was like, "Oh, shit, this is going to be a lot harder than I thought." But I remember walking back to my house just a few blocks away, and there was this equation that I was reciting in my head that I had heard the previous weekend at an entrepreneurship gathering, also at Brown University. I snuck into it as a RISD guy, and the person talking was about the sales process. He was sharing how rejection is a normal part of sales. Some will buy your products, some won't—who cares? Move on. So the equation was SW squared + WC = MO: Some will, some won't, who cares? Move on. I was walking back to my apartment and thinking, "All right, some are going to love it, some aren't. Who cares? I’ve got to move on." The next store I went to, they didn't buy it. Next store, they didn't buy it. But the fourth store, they did buy the cushion, and it made it to the shelf of the store. I went back later that night after they bought it, I dropped it off, and there through the window I could see this cushion on the shelf of the store. I thought, "Okay, now what's the next biggest store I can get?" And the whole adventure continued from there. Another big lesson from that was that I would sell this cushion at these fairs for designers where you’d get a small table. Like in New York City at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair. Every May, it's like Design Week in New York. This website called Design Boom would host these tables for young, upcoming designers to sell whatever they create. I had a table full of CritBuns, and I got to interact with people and learn how they thought about the decision-making process. I literally — over the course of a couple years, did a few of these — I saw thousands of people. I observed them, how they came into the product and made a decision about it. The most fascinating thing I was able to break into five steps. There's the "what the hell is that?" phase, especially for this product. People would see it from across the room and you’d see the face; they go, "What is that?" The design was cool enough to draw them in. They had to know what it was. So they come up to the product. Next is the touch and feel phase. They squeeze it and they see that it’s soft. That's when the first smile comes on their face. They go, "Oh." The third is the story. They flip it over, and on the back of the label, it tells the story of how the product came to be. You see there, they get this very discerning look as they’re reading. And then they go, "Oh!" and the second smile comes up as the dots connect about the origin of this product. Fourth step is the demo phase. They’ve got to see if it actually delivers. So I always had a demo chair ready to go.

Jackson: (12:59) Oh, we should have had some ready. Dang.

Joe: (13:03) And it's like clockwork. People look around like, "Oh, demo chair." They sit the cushion down, they sit on it, and the third smile would come on their face. Then I’d be sitting there next to them, and I learned the most important question you could possibly ask in that moment, which is simply: how do you see this product fitting into your life? People would go through: "Oh, my gosh. Well, at my kids' soccer games, this would be great on the bleachers," or "I go camping all the time. I'd love to take this with me." "Oh, this would be great for my pregnant wife." "Oh, my uncle has sciatica. This would take pressure off the tailbone." I heard dozens of things I never even imagined it could be used for. And here people are selling it to themselves. They convinced themselves why they needed this cushion. The next question they'd ask is, "How much is it?" $19.99. And they go, "Oh, that's it?" I get a sale. Now, the sixth step is the answer to your question. I would see people sit up from the demo chair. They've got the cushion in their hand. The next person in line would go, "What's that?" I would literally just sit there and I'd watch the person tell the story to a stranger that I had just talked to them about, or that they read on the back. The stranger would go, "Oh, that's cool," and they'd grab one and they'd sit down, and the whole cycle would repeat.

Jackson: (14:24) Wow.

Joe: (14:24) It was in this moment I realized that a product is 50% foam—those CritBuns—and 50% story. People walked away owning the physical object, but they also owned the story. It was such an illuminating experience to see that any object you have is just foam. It's just a glass. It's just a pair of shoes. It's just a phone. It's just pixels. The other half of that product is the story that you wrap around it. The more humorous or enlightening or memorable it is, I think it's as equally as important as the battery life of something or the technical features of something. The story has to match the product: the look and feel and the materials and the capabilities of it. They're not different.

Jackson: (15:19) Yeah.

Joe: (15:20) And to me, the best products in the world find a way to marry those two things.

15:24 Airbnb, The Feeling of Belonging, & Designing for Trust

Jackson: (15:24) What an opening answer. I have a couple of observations. One is you have spent your career since then, since CritBuns, working on things with a little bit more scale—both a little company called Airbnb and now the U.S. government. Or I shouldn't say the U.S. government, but products that probably something to the order of most to every American will use. And so what that introduces to me is two kind of interesting wrinkles on this idea. One is your ability to give that first person the story right up close, like to hear it from you, is obviously a lot more difficult. And two, the idea that some will like it, some won't, changes a lot. Certainly, yeah, there are people who don’t like Airbnb and prefer hotels, and especially your job now. I would also add that Silicon Valley in general tends to have a view that—maybe it's changing, but historically—storytelling doesn't matter that much. Products, great products sell themselves. I don't think Airbnb is necessarily that. It sort of became that, but it was definitely not obvious. So I’m curious how, given that initial story, you think about storytelling, particularly at the scale of products that hundreds of millions of people will use?

Joe: (16:43) In Airbnb’s case, storytelling was essential. There’s certainly the origin story, which helps people understand: why does this thing exist? How should I orient to this? What I’ve seen over the years is everybody loves a good origin story. They all want to know what was the genesis. Where did this come from? Why does this exist in the world? They want to know the why.

Jackson: (17:09) Yeah.

Joe: (17:09) And I think any great company has a great "why" story—Nike, eBay, Apple. Right.

Jackson: (17:16) And it’s kind of personal, too, even despite the scale.

Joe: (17:20) Sure. In my experience, some of those best stories are somebody solving their own problem, which is a great way to start a company, by the way. It’s what I used to say: you’re married to the problem. Whatever the personal problem is, you face the frustration every day and you can’t stand it anymore. You’re going to do something about it. You’re not going to wait around anymore for somebody else to fix it.

Jackson: (17:41) Mm.

Joe: (17:43) You’re going to go be proactive and take this problem head-on. You know it firsthand. It’s personal to you, which gives you insights on how to approach it and how to solve it. It also gives founders very personal connections, because when it gets really hard and you may want to stop working on it, the people who are personally attached to the problem are the ones that continue through all the ups and downs and reasons to quit. With Airbnb, the story was obviously the founding story of Brian and I in the apartment with the airbeds. Even to this day, I’ll be on social media and there’ll be some animation that pops up around the founding of Airbnb, and somebody’s retelling our story with some AI animation where they’ve interpreted it in some way and they’re now promoting it on their own. I think it does have one of those qualities of being repeatable. Most people have had to pay rent at some point in their life, and that’s a relatable thing. In some cases, the rent’s gone up and people have to figure out, "Well, how are we going to make that rent check work?" Also a relatable thing. And then the ingenuity was, "Well, what if we rent out this extra space on these temporary airbed mattresses during this conference?" And the idea was born. Now the story of Airbnb has evolved beyond the origin. I remember one of our early taglines was "Travel like a human." And that became our story.

Jackson: (19:18) Yeah.

Joe: (19:18) It was this idea that instead of the generic mass tourism way of traveling—where you’re going to wake up in a hotel room that looks very similar to the last one you stayed in, in a city where you couldn’t tell exactly what part of the world you’re in, potentially alone if you’re traveling by yourself—versus staying in a home that has character and life to it and, in most cases, feels like the place that you’re staying in. It’s this idea of giving people humanness back. They’re not just a number moving through a cattle line at the airport to get to some generic hotel that’s in a box, so lifeless and lacks personality. We used to have business travelers tell us that they specifically use Airbnb because they’d be on the road 200-plus days a year. When you wake up in those rooms night after night, you lose a bit of yourself.

Jackson: (20:18) Yes.

Joe: (20:20) Yeah. You’re nodding your head as if you’ve experienced this.

Jackson: (20:22) I have. I’ve done the commuting hotel thing. That is a little tough.

Joe: (20:26) Yeah, it can wear you down. And they stay specifically in Airbnbs—and specifically not even entire Airbnbs. They stay in private rooms, which means the host is there, because it gives them a sense of dignity back. They can wake up and there’s a kitchen where they can make a coffee and put a bagel in the toaster and maybe have a conversation with the host before they head out to the reason they’re traveling. That was very unexpected. I remember that research came in: business travelers love staying in private rooms. Wow, this is really interesting. You’d think that they want just the most efficient "get me in, get me out quickly" experience. But the ability—I remember—to do laundry in a laundry machine gave them some semblance of home.

Jackson: (21:13) Totally.

Joe: (21:13) Right. It’s like enough of those little things added up where they’re going to pay for our experience versus a hotel. So there’s these different stories that would emerge. In that case, "Travel like a human." Over the years, then it became "Belong anywhere"—that you could travel anywhere in the world and there was a host waiting for you with a home to welcome you in so that you could go from feeling like an outsider to a foreign city to an insider. I had this experience. I remember the very first time. It was in Copenhagen many years ago. I got into the Airbnb pretty late at night. It was for a work trip for the company; we were opening our Copenhagen office. I got in really late, had the whole place to myself. The host left a welcome note on the table and said, "You have to try this coffee place in the morning. If you’re jet-lagged, this is the place you’ve got to go." They drew a little map. It’s just around the corner. Sure enough, I woke up at like 4:30 in the morning, still on East Coast time or West Coast time, and got the key, put on my jacket. It was the dead of winter. It was freezing outside. I step outside, I lock the door. The neighbor—it was like a townhouse—the neighbor next to me was also leaving at that exact same time, early in the morning, and looks at me and waves. I was like, "Well, that’s such a cool feeling to have. I’m not from here. There’s somebody who lives in this building waving to me." I waved back. It was like, "Oh, that’s a nice feeling."

Jackson: (22:52) I kind of belong here a little.

Joe: (22:55) Yeah. Then I get on the street, get to the corner cafe shop, go down some stairs. There’s a woman with her child and somebody at the counter serving coffee. I walk in and I feel like, "Oh, man, I stand out like a sore thumb. I’m not a regular here. I’m American, not Danish." And I opened the door and they just gave me the warmest smiles. The woman at the counter was so friendly and so nice. It was these little touches. I’m walking back throughout the course of the day, I’ve got this metal house key in my pocket. You could feel it. It’s a different feeling walking around a city with a house key in your pocket than a plastic card. It’s a very different experience.

Jackson: (23:41) You would never think about it until you felt that, though. It’s like so subtle.

Joe: (23:45) So subtle. I remember another time I was staying in New York. I come out of the Airbnb and somebody approaches me on the sidewalk and goes, "Hey, do you know how I get to the L train? I’m trying to find the entrance to the subway." I was like, "I don’t know. I’m not from here." But they thought I was.

Jackson: (24:02) Yeah.

Joe: (24:02) And that was like, “ah.” Versus walking out of a hotel in the middle of a tourist zone—some downtown city where you stand like a sore thumb. There's an experience of staying in a home where you get to feel like you belong there. You don't have to feel like an outsider to a foreign place. And so we say, "Belong anywhere." That's what we're getting at—feel like an insider instead of an outsider. Why would you use Airbnb over a hotel? It's for that.

Jackson: (24:34) It's funny, both of those stories have experience. You're not really talking that much about the product; it's almost all about the experience. There's one other input that I think frames a lot of the other stuff I want to talk about, which is you gave a great TED Talk years ago on designing for trust. Trust continued to come up over and over again in my preparation as I was thinking about this. And I think there's something interesting: when you're designing for trust at scale, there's an old quote you said: "Design can overcome our most deeply rooted stranger danger bias." It's a fascinating thing that a story of a story of a story, told so many times about the founding of Airbnb, can get somebody to let a stranger live in their house. I was thinking about this in terms of the current work. People might disagree on to what degree, but I think there's a common narrative that a lot of Americans don't trust each other, and certainly a lot of Americans don't trust the government. You are now tasked with designing services that every American either gets to use or has to use, depending on how they see it. And they need to trust you in order to have an experience that hopefully is frictionless or positive. I'm curious how you think about when you can design for trust and when it actually has to be earned over time. Ideally you're doing both of those. But Airbnb to me seems like an amazing story of that, where at first it was like, "What levers can we pull?" and over time it's like, "Oh yeah, obviously you'd use an Airbnb." But I assume that wasn't instant or obvious.

Joe: (26:19) That was not the norm when we started. In fact, I remember I told my dad about the first three guests that stayed on the airbeds and that they were coming, and he goes, "Oh, Joe, I just don't think that's a good idea." People would have a knee-jerk reaction when it came to hearing about Airbnb in the early days. They'd be like, "Wow, what a cool idea. I went to Italy once and I stayed in the home of somebody who picked me up at the train station because I didn't have a place to stay, and I had a local experience." And other people would be like, "Are you crazy? How could you stay in the house with a stranger?"

Jackson: (26:52) Stranger danger, literally. Like Internet stranger, by the way.

Joe: (26:55) Yeah. What's interesting is that Airbnb could not have launched years earlier. The internet had to grow up to prepare for Airbnb. We didn't know this at the time, of course, but I could look back and I could see that you needed e-commerce to work, starting in the late '90s, where people could trust putting their credit card into the internet—which took some time, by the way. My mom didn't trust e-commerce for a pretty long time, like into the mid-2000s. You needed people being comfortable sharing their location. So Foursquare—that was a big deal when it came out. People were like, "Whoa, you're sharing your location? Are you crazy?" People needed to be comfortable sharing their photos online. If you remember Flickr and Facebook in the early days, they were like, "Whoa, you posted your picture online?"

Jackson: (27:41) Even real names, by the way. Ahead of all those things, I distinctly remember thinking you never use your real name, and then Facebook kind of changed it.

Joe: (27:48) Facebook changed it. And then the dating sites—the early ones like Match.com and OkCupid and the others—where you're going to meet a stranger in person somewhere. We needed all of these things to stack on each other so that by the time 2008 came around, it was a stretch, but it wasn't a giant stretch to say, "Okay, you're going to transact online, share your location with someone’s picture, and go see them in person, and it's their home." That was the "whoa" moment.

Jackson: (28:21) Right.

Joe: (28:23) And so the timing really worked out.

28:29 Public Service & Fixing Federal Retirement

Jackson: (28:29) All right, first of all, you are now in public service. And that's a word that, to go back to our experience idea, feels resonant—feels resonant with being a designer. As far as I understand, you were sort of initially engaged to help out a little bit with DOGE when they first got started. But I'm curious, first of all, what went into that decision? And two, what your relationship to that idea or that word is, particularly at a national scale.

Joe: (29:02) I've been designing websites since I was 14 on my dad's computer in his home office. And I remember the magic of the first time I published my first website. It was on GeoCities. This idea that the thing that I just cobbled together in HTML was now available to the entire world, not just my small town in Georgia where I grew up—there was something about that where I was deeply hooked. I was like, wow, this is so powerful that you can have this vehicle of ideas and creativity that anybody in the world with a web browser can participate in or view or interact with. It's incredible, from that moment to where I am today, to think what an amazing responsibility to get to bring everything I've learned about building great internet products to a part of society that historically hasn't had a lot of investment into really high standards with regards to user experience. And that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. I feel very strongly that the United States deserves better. Don't we deserve the best? Why are we okay with subpar, frustrating, aggravating, annoying web experiences when people try to get things done in the government? I'm not okay with this. I don't think others should be okay with this. It's similar to how I remember growing up as a kid in Atlanta. We'd be driving around the city, going to a Braves game or something, and it became known to me that we passed a really dull, gray building, and it was a government building. It just somehow became known. No one ever said, "Hey, look at that," it just became known. And so I think I've certainly grown up with such a low expectation of government websites. They never really are held to the same standard of the private sector, and I think there's something wrong with that. I think it's an injustice to Americans. Why should the American public deserve anything less than the best? And that's why I'm here doing this work with National Design Studio.

Jackson: (31:38) What did you learn in the — I don't know exactly how long it was, in the initial engagement and a lot of the work with the retirement process — but I’m curious: DOGE was complicated. I think there were successes, there were things that didn't work. I'm curious what, if anything, you took from DOGE and what, if anything, you're doing distinctly differently as you went into properly forming out the NDS and the new role.

Joe: (32:05) When I came into this experience, it was only supposed to be six months.

Jackson: (32:09) Right, right.

Joe: (32:10) To fix...

Jackson: (32:11) Gotcha (laughs).

Joe: (32:11) Yeah, no kidding. I look at it, I’m like, 18 months later, here we are. I have to give a special thanks to Elon. I wouldn't be where I am today doing this kind of work if he didn't lead the way and attract and bring in people like me into the government. I think he really put his neck out there and made us all take a second look at this idea of working in the government. I'm here thanks to him. The reason I came in was to fix a very specific broken part of the federal employee experience, which is that every year 100,000 federal workers retire. It's one of the great perks and benefits of being a federal employee. And the process with which they go through to retire is stuck in the 1960s and really hasn't changed since the 1970s. That was the last time there was a major improvement made to the retirement experience. It was all based on paper. It took upwards of six months at times. I also think this is an example of an injustice. It's so complicated that federal employees had to go through two required training programs just to learn how to retire from the government—hours long. It's such a headache. I think the injustice is that these civil servants give us the best years of their working life, and then they go to retire to get their benefit and they have to go through a freaking obstacle course.

Jackson: (33:45) Might as well not retire.

Joe: (33:46) Some don't, I learned. Some put it off because they're like, "I don't want to deal with that." So they stay another year. I joked it's a retention program because it is so frustrating. So I had a chance to dive into this, build a small team around it—some ex-Airbnb engineers and designers—and brought in Silicon Valley experience. This problem, by the way, they've been trying to solve since the Bush administration in 2002. They've had 20 years of contractors trying to crack this code. They spent over $100 million over those 20 years to no avail. And so I show up and I'm working inside of OPM, the Office of Personnel Management. It's basically the HR and benefits department of the government. Suddenly I have to become a quick expert on retirement. And so, just like what we learned at RISD with design, and just like what we employed at Airbnb, to truly solve a problem at its deepest level, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the people you're designing for. Which is what I did: We spent time talking to recent retirees, upcoming retirees, the HR teams that process them, and the payroll teams that process them. We could really holistically understand the landscape of the problem at a very personal level. This is the old Airbnb playbook. We used to go talk to our hosts, talk to our guests, and hold meetups to invite them in so that we could learn about their experience. We'd hear from them face-to-face: "What are the problems that you're facing with our service? What would make it better for you? What do you wish we did that we don't do today?" Through honing that research approach at Airbnb over 14 years, I brought the same spirit into retirement. And we learned a lot. People were left in the dark when they went to retire. There was so much confusion about how to calculate their retirement in the first place. Nobody really knew exactly what the number was going to be. Like, what is the amount of the check that I'm going to get for the rest of my life so I can plan my life? So I can plan that vacation with my grandkids I've always wanted to do, or get the bed and breakfast I always wanted to buy, or whatever the thing is.

Jackson: (36:03) And you guys are just interviewing these people?

Joe: (36:06) Yeah. It's the process that I learned at RISD and brought to Airbnb, and now we're doing it inside the government. You can call it user-centered design, or there's a thousand ways to define it. So we take those learnings and we look at the product and the user flow and say, "Okay, let's simplify this. What's actually required? What's truly a law that needs to be adhered to?" And let's create an amazing user experience here and let's do it all online. Why are we using paper in 2025? How is it possible that this process is largely still paper-based? The reason it took many months is the paper moves by mail. One department would get it, fill it out, and they'd mail it to some other part of the country so they could fill it out. It would bounce around the country.

Jackson: (37:01) Why was it so hard? Had they tried to digitize stages of this and there were restrictions around it?

Joe: (37:07) It was so antiquated. They would get it in the mail, they would scan it, put it on a computer, fill it out on the computer, and then print it back out and mail the paper out again.

Jackson: (37:19) Gosh.

Joe: (37:21) It is so...

Jackson: (37:21) And you guys presumably had to go down this rabbit trail—like, see every single step.

Joe: (37:27) I remember on my second week, we had a couple of career folks who've been in the government for a long time in the room, and we mapped out on a whiteboard each of these steps. It looked like some crazy calculus equation.

Jackson: (37:45) The meme with all the strings.

Joe: (37:48) It was that, but the retirement process. I remember thinking, "Holy smokes, this is crazy." There's just so many outdated databases and antiquated processes that no one ever really looked at from a high level. People just over the years had been solving little tiny pieces, but they never ended up cobbled together. So we had a couple of the career folks around the table and one of the other guys on the project, and we asked the question, "How long do you think it would take for us to take one retirement—just one, the most basic one—and move it through the system completely digitally?" Meaning that we never had to print out paper. It would be manual in that we'll email…

Jackson: (38:36) We're watching it.

Joe: (38:38) Yeah, we'll hand-hold it digitally. How long do you think it would take for that to work? Everyone in the room had a guess. One person said four months. Another person said six months. Somebody on the video call said it would probably be a year to figure that out. My partner on this and I said, "Well, what if we did it in a week?" There was an audible gasp in the room. And then they realized we were serious. They started to think, "Well, what if we were to do it in a week?" Everybody got incredibly excited about it. And the remarkable thing about this is that they didn't do it in a week; they did it in four days. And we had, for the first time ever, a proof point of an entirely digital retirement that involved no printed paper whatsoever. Of course, it was a one-off and, of course, it was not scalable in that form.

Jackson: (39:35) You have a seed.

Joe: (39:36) Yeah, you have a seed, and something you could point to as a reference. Like, "Guys, we did that one. What if we did 10 more like that?" This is the startup process.

Jackson: (39:44) Yes.

Joe: (39:45) This was Airbnb in the early days. This is pretty much any company that you see today if you trace it back to its origin.

Jackson: (39:52) Old Y-Combinator, Paul Graham stuff.

Joe: (39:53) Exactly. This is go meet your host in New York City in Airbnb days, take pictures of their place—do the things that don't scale in order to learn what you're going to need to eventually build out the right technology and software to support an all-digital process. And so that's exactly what happened. Over the next couple months we built the software from the learnings. The career teams that we partnered with were initially very skeptical about our presence, and fairly quickly realized, "Wow, these guys are here to really help us. They're here to help accelerate what we've always wanted to try to accomplish," which is create a better experience for retirees by making this process way less painful. They very quickly became our closest partners. We did it as one team. And I'm really proud to say that by that June, we had issued a memo out to the government which stated that all new retirements could only use our software.

Jackson: (40:52) Wow. And this was all within DOGE?

Joe: (40:57) This is all within.

Jackson: (40:59) Wow.

Joe: (41:00) And so then a year after that, this past June, OPM issued a memo that said there will be no new paper accepted...

Jackson: (41:10) Wow.

Joe: (41:10) ...to the storage facility.

Jackson: (41:13) Oh my gosh.

Joe: (41:13) Which is a mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania you may have heard about. They store all this paper. It has to go somewhere. There's a mine in Pennsylvania where they store paper.

Jackson: (41:20) Oh, we’re going to have so much room for activities in the mine now.

Joe: (41:23) I know. Well…

Jackson: (41:23) I guess they have backups, but, wow.

Joe: (41:26) Yeah. And so we've really—and now the process through our software, if you have a basic retirement, it can take you a couple minutes to retire. So I say from six months to six minutes in some cases.

Jackson: (41:39) That's cool.

Joe: (41:41) So it was a real success story of what happens when you take government experience and you overlay it with a private sector tech mindset with highly experienced engineers and designers. You can dive in, do the research, understand the needs and the problem set of the actual customer, look at it holistically, and prototype in ways that inform what eventually became—we call it ORA, the Online Retirement Application. And it's a huge success story of that process.

42:16 Speed, Craft, and Respect

Jackson: (42:16) That's cool. There's a thread here that is inside a lot of that answer, which is Silicon Valley, broadly—not the only place, but Silicon Valley especially—is like, "Yes, what is possible? We can do it." And D.C., at least from the outside looking in—and I think a lot of people would agree—kind of defaults to "no." Big committee. I heard from somebody that you guys at somebody's birthday party had hats that said "No Fake Blockers," which maybe exemplifies that. On one hand, that is like the classic what people have heard about DOGE—crudely, it's bulldozing through things. On the other hand, you are someone who cares deeply about experience and about craft and care and design. And so I would love to hear you talk about the tension between that sort of speed, scrappiness, "how do we just get stuff done?" which is clearly—even if some of the DOGE stuff was left behind—is tremendously valuable in the example you just gave, and understanding that it isn't a startup, it is the government, and certain things are going to take longer and you can't break certain things. You can break some things. Does that tension make sense?

Joe: (43:29) It certainly does. I'm reminded of Steve Jobs' quote: "Real artists ship."

Jackson: (43:34) Fair enough, fair enough.

Joe: (43:36) There's a ton of tension. As a designer, you want to perfect things and make them just so elegant—every pixel and every detail. If you spent your whole time making things perfect, they would never ship. In the context of a startup, there's always some outside pressure, whether it's just your funding running out or competition or other, that you have to move at lightning speed. In this context, there's a different pressure, which is that there's a countdown clock every day. This administration will end, and with it, things cycle through. So there's an incredible amount of pressure to move quickly and make smart decisions. We're not cutting corners, obviously, and find that balance between the refinement and the "we have to ship, get this in the hands of people." You'll learn a lot, of course, when something's out there in the world and people give you feedback. And so I think, to me, the line is around: what are you proud of? What can you stand behind and say, "I'm proud of that. I'm not embarrassed by that"?

Jackson: (44:56) I was going to say, you seem to have a very high bar in basically all aspects of how you think about things. You certainly don't have a mediocre bar. That default isn't conducive to moving incredibly fast. And clearly…

Joe: (45:12) I don't think people deserve mediocre. Why would you put something mediocre into the world, especially at the nation level? Is that how we respect Americans? I mean, is that how we show respect? Is that how we say what we value? To me, design is value. And the level of design that a company or a government puts into the world communicates its level of value and of respect to the people receiving that design. So why wouldn't the United States communicate the highest level of respect to the American people when it comes to the products that they have to use, not that they choose to use? It's a captive audience.

Jackson: (45:56) Yes.

Joe: (45:56) There's not a lot of places to enroll for Medicare and to get your Social Security. These are fundamental things that I think the United States can increase its level of design to increase the level of respect that an American feels when they're using these products.

Jackson: (46:17) Yeah. You have this metaphor that I think is really beautiful, where you talk about giving an Apple Store-like experience to all of these services. And while I think it's a great metaphor, it's also—I have to admit—the Apple Store on some level gets to choose who they serve. The DMV does not. And so in some sense, I'm curious what it's like to go from effectively directly serving customers to the American people who are almost less your customer and more like your ultimate boss. But they're also kind of a captive audience. How does that change the approach, how you think about feedback? And maybe I should add the most important point, which is you are serving the widest possible demographic. You're not serving the whole world, but it wouldn't shock me that on some level, even if Airbnb has more touch points, the US population is a wider demographic.

Joe: (47:18) It's the widest. And I have said when I started this group, my vision was: what if the government was like an Apple Store-like experience? And what I mean by that—it's a metaphor. What does the Apple Store stand for? It stands for good usability, great design, running on modern software. What if our government had those three qualities? What would that look like? How respected would people feel when they entered a .gov domain into their browser and, instead of being met with a confusing interface where they don't know where to start, they were greeted with something that: “ah…” was easy on the eyes?

Jackson: (47:56) Yeah, the exhale.

Joe: (47:58) That communicated it clearly, and was presented in a way that they actually wanted to engage with it, that they could find the thing that they were looking for quickly and easily. Versus today's world where it's like a maze. And I think it's incredibly disrespectful that we currently have people who have to try to navigate a maze to find what they're looking for. The burden is on the American to figure out the org chart of the government. "Which agency do I go to? What's their website?" I'm on their website—how do I find the link across the sea of links and buttons to get to the form, to get to the submit button, to get something done in the government? I don't think that's fair. And so we're fixing that.

48:43 ND Studio Projects: TrumpRx, Trump Accounts, and Realfood.gov

Jackson: (48:43) As I understand it, there are two shapes to the type of work you guys do. One is things that, maybe not to a complete degree, but you seem to be relatively owning yourselves. Then the other is the broad range of partnership across various organizations inside of the government. I would imagine the first one has some perks, which is you own the ship date, you can move super quickly, and it's relatively vertically integrated. The second one has a totally different set of constraints. Maybe we can talk about some specifics, but I'm curious what those two modes of working are and how you think about optimizing for success in both of them.

Joe: (49:26) National Design Studio includes software engineers, designers, a few operations folks, and research. There are two tracks of work that we do. The first track I call the policy work, where a new policy is created and there needs to be a bridge to the public.

Jackson: (49:43) Cool.

Joe: (49:45) So, how do people touch and feel what this policy is?

Jackson: (49:49) What's the interface?

Joe: (49:49) Yeah, what's the interface? Literally, how do I access the benefits of that policy? A couple examples: One would be the new food pyramid and dietary guidelines. USDA had a 200-page PDF and they came to us and said, "How can you help us communicate these new guidelines to the nation?" So we got to work, worked with them, and came up with the new food pyramid. Then the website realfood.gov tells the story and educates people about what these new guidelines are. Then there's Trump Accounts. This is an incredible policy where every newborn gets $1,000 into a bank account, and it's in that account until the child turns 18. They can take it out or keep it in at that time, but it grows interest alongside the stock market. So a kid grows up with the ability to learn about finances, about investing, about compound interest, about the stock market, and about capitalism. So, what's the way that a parent and child can interface with this cool policy and this gift from the Treasury? Well, we made the app and the website and did the storytelling around it. People have it on their phone, they can see their child's account growing over time, they can see the balance, and they can see the stocks that the fund is invested in on behalf of the child. TrumpRx is another amazing policy. For decades, Americans have been overpaying for prescription drugs and basically subsidizing drug prices for the rest of the first-world countries. In Canada, you could buy the same drug as in the United States, but you'd pay 10 times more in the US than you would in Canada. Exact same drug. Every president has tried to battle the pharmaceutical companies to level the playing field—what they call "most favored nation" pricing. President Trump, in this term, was the first one to successfully bring drug prices down for the first time, I think, in many, many decades. How do people experience this policy? Well, trumprx.gov is that. We built the website. It's incredibly intelligent. It connects to hundreds of pharmaceutical companies to bring in real-time drug pricing. It allows people to find the drug they're looking for and have access to the coupon to show the pharmacist at the counter where they get the TrumpRx price. To date—this launched in February, so this is a couple months—Americans have already saved $700 million. That's insane. That’s crazy. If you were a startup building an app and within seven months of launching you had transactions or booking value of $700 million? Can you… that never happens. The same is true with Trump Accounts. We've had over 7 million accounts created for kids and over a billion dollars of contributions separate from the $1,000 per child. That's a billion extra dollars put into this by parents, family members, and companies. That launched January 6th. We're barely six (months) from the launch. What other app has a startup built that, in such a short period of time, can achieve that kind of scale? It's profound.

Jackson: (53:25) For either of those two examples, are you guys also acting like a startup that's in charge of growth and ramping up those numbers? Or are those handed off to another organization within the government? Typically, a Silicon Valley company would have all these dashboards on how many kids are signed up and how to get from 60% to 80%, or whatever. It would be totally reasonable if that's outside of your jurisdiction, but I'm curious how that works.

Joe: (53:47) Well, there are agencies that handle it. We're doing this on behalf of those agencies. For TrumpRx, it's HHS, in that domain under Dr. Oz.

Jackson: (53:58) Got it. Maybe there might even be a product team there that’s eventually maintaining it.

Joe: (54:01) Oh yeah, there already are. Trump Accounts is in the Treasury. So, we're this complement to these agencies.

Jackson: (54:10) But you are also kind of the ignition in some of these cases.

Joe: (54:14) Yeah, we're the initial lift. We help give these things shape and set them up on a trajectory that the teams in those agencies run with. We still help out with things, of course, as they come up.

Jackson: (54:22) You're way more 0 to 1. Success in the NDS, in many ways, is about 0 to 1—at least on the new initiative side of things. How can we get them going?

Joe: (54:32) Yeah, that's where we seem to be needed the most. That's where we were asked to step in. We're happy to do that. I think it's been really interesting to see how building these kind of products inside the government—least likely place—can get scale so quickly. It's actually become my number one recruiting line when I'm talking to designers and engineers.

Jackson: (54:57) You've got a lot of users baked in, or potential users.

Joe: (54:59) Yeah. They're like, "Why would I join the government? I'm not thinking about the government." I go, "Well, first of all, I wasn't either." Nobody on our team was thinking about the government at all. It wasn't on anybody's career plans whatsoever. They'll tell me about other options they're thinking about, and those are cool—that startup would be fine, and you'll get an experience and get to scale eventually if you're lucky. But what if, on day one, you started here, you shipped an update to fix a product, and you had an installed user base of 340 million people? They go, "I never thought about it like that."

Jackson: (55:33) Yeah, it's almost not a burden, but it’s heavy when you think about it that way. The potential energy there is high.

Joe: (55:42) Of course. I tell people: come here if you want responsibility for that. Come here if you're excited by that scale and you're excited to ship at the highest standards to exceed the expectations of what the nation has received so far. The other thing I tell really talented software engineers and designers is that those 340 million people include your parents, your aunts and uncles, your grandparents, your siblings, your friends, and your coworkers. You literally get to design for everybody in your life, because that's who we get to design for.

56:18 America.gov: A New Front Door to Government

Jackson: (56:18) That’s cool. You started talking about the policy side. Was there a second component, or maybe to follow up on the other side of my question—which is, as I understand, a huge part of the work too—is just helping other existing government services and organizations modernize, even if it isn't a new product?

Joe: (56:38) The U.S. has changed a lot since our founding 250 years ago. We've gone from the quill to the microchip, from the cannon to the drone, from President Washington to President Trump. And despite 250 years of extraordinary progress, the greatest unrealized opportunity of our nation is the citizen experience. And how do people experience the government today? It's through 29,000 .gov websites.

Jackson: (57:12) Yeah, they try not to, basically.

Joe: (57:16) When I started this role, it was somewhere in the magnitude of 25,000 or 26,000. It just keeps going up. It keeps going up. At some point in history, people used to walk into government buildings to access the government. And when they did, the lobbies were beautifully designed. The investment from the government to have an incredible citizen experience is still visible because the lobbies are still around. You can walk into them around D.C.—beautiful marble floors, brass inlay, fresco ceilings, great lighting. The reality is the lobby of the government today is 29,000 websites through a browser or a phone. That's how people touch the government. The number of people that walk into that lobby every day would blow your mind. It's 40 million people daily.

Jackson: (58:09) Daily. What are the most common versions of that? Like, what are the sites—one through, maybe you can't share exactly—but as a ballpark, 40 million a day?

Joe: (58:21) 40 million people a day. I looked up the viewership to the World Cup finals last month, Spain versus Argentina, and the number of Americans that tuned in to watch the finals match was 38.9 million.

Jackson: (58:34) Wow. That’s a lot.

Joe: (58:37) Every day, the government has a World Cup finals audience walking into its lobby. And what are they met with? Red card after red card of bad experience, poor design, slow page load time, frustration, and unnecessary suffering. Luckily, we know the only guy in history to reverse a red card.

Jackson: (58:59) Oh, gosh.

Joe: (59:03) President Trump set up this team and gave us the mandate to effectively make sure no American gets a red card again. And so the National Design Studio has been working to reimagine the relationship with Americans. A year since our executive order, we've come up with not another website, not another way of bureaucracy, but an entirely new front door to the United States. It's called America.gov.

Jackson: (59:35) Whoa.

Joe: (59:37) Taking 29,000 entry points and saying, "Let’s just make one."

Jackson: (59:43) Whoa. I thought you were going to say Login.gov. Wow, that’s crazy.

Joe: (59:47) One place where you can get things done, like enrolling for Medicare, managing Social Security, your student loans, getting a new passport, or changing your name. All the way down the list.

Jackson: (1:00:00) I was going to say, I don't even know what the main American website would be (laughs). Wow.

Joe: (1:00:05) This is what we've been working on. It'll launch by the time this comes out. This will be one of the biggest digital product developments in the history of the country.

Jackson: (1:00:19) Was this part of the original mandate?

Joe: (1:00:19) The original mandate was to improve the user experience of the nation. This is our answer to President Trump's request of us. It's thanks to President Trump that America.gov exists. This is his mandate. This is his wish: to improve the user experience and to fix the issues that people have when it comes to the citizen experience of the United States. I want to thank him for his vision and his trust in me to help bring his ideas and his wishes to life in the form of America.gov.

Jackson: (1:00:57) Oh, man. I have so many questions. I guess the first one—which might sound uninspired, but I think is relevant—is how is this more than an index of all the websites? You think about those old web pages like Yahoo or something.

Joe: (1:01:13) I'm so glad you asked. There's what I call legacy websites, which follow patterns that go back to the '90s when the internet was developed. They have a homepage and a bunch of links and a search bar that you use to get to the next page to funnel into what you're looking for. You end up going through a user flow to accomplish something, to transact at the end and make a payment or submit a form, whatever it is. These are very linear experiences. What if we flip that all upside down? What if instead of the burden being on the American to try to manage that maze and hunt through it—like an expedition to find the link and the form—what if they could just tell us what they needed?

Jackson: (1:02:03) Right. By the way, if a Silicon Valley company—or really any real company—did this now, the designer would get fired, the company would fail, and the users would churn. It’s funny how in some contexts things can be so intuitive and expected, and to go back to your earlier point, in other contexts we can just tolerate mediocrity. Okay, so it’s like the front door.

Joe: (1:02:26) It’s the front door. You just tell us what you need and we, meaning the government, go get it done for you.

Jackson: (1:02:33) And to take that literally—is it like a Google or ChatGPT-style text box?

Joe: (1:02:38) Yes.

Jackson: (1:02:39) Wow. Wow.

Joe: (1:02:40) Our LLM is the 29,000 .gov websites. Because we're inside the government, that's our LLM, which is source-of-truth data. We've benchmarked our search results against the other frontier models, and we objectively have a better search result. The reason is very simple: we're only pulling from source-of-truth information. We're not scraping the internet.

Jackson: (1:03:04) Yes, yes, yes.

Joe: (1:03:07) We're not going through Reddit forums and other places where there's inaccurate information or things that are out of date.

Jackson: (1:03:13) Wow. So this—it’s in the weeds—but you could totally imagine how something like Rampart plugs into something like this. Wow. Okay. So this is like, "Hey, I don't know, I got this tax thing" or "I got this Social Security thing." You just straight-up tell it. Also, to be frank, I would imagine many Americans are telling that to ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini today in a way that is, at the very minimum, a security nightmare. What is the initial formulation of a product like this? One, how do you figure out if it's possible? Two, how much back-end indexing do you have to do?

Joe: (1:03:50) (Laughs).

Jackson: (1:03:50) We could talk about this for many hours. Maybe a better question is: When did this idea first show up?

Joe: (1:03:58) We talked about this last October. I remember writing something down in my sketchbook related to this, and it was still a bit of a stretch at the time. "How would you pull that off?" The models were still evolving. But this platform is evolving so quickly. At a certain point, not that much later, everything clicked. It was like, "Wait a second. We can embrace these frontier models in a secure way." Safeguarded within the government to deliver an experience that you can't get anywhere else. The reason is this: because we're from within the government, it gives us the ability to tap into databases across the government. So not only can you search for a question to understand something about the government and get a result faster than you can snap your fingers—one that’s higher quality than the frontier models—you can also action it right in the thread.

Jackson: (1:05:06) Right, right.

Joe: (1:05:07) And so if you go on ChatGPT—great product—and you say, "What are some good vacations in Italy?" it'll pull up Airbnb listings and hotels and flights. But to book any of those, it's a link that takes you outside of ChatGPT.

Jackson: (1:05:24) And maybe even it gets more agentic. But that information, my hotel booking information in Italy, is very different than my Social Security number.

Joe: (1:05:33) That's right.

1:05:35 Trust, Privacy, and Government AI

Jackson: (1:05:35) One maybe less sexy, but I think important, question this brings to mind: for a lot of people, it's going to be, as you say, kind of how people use ChatGPT. It's like asking Google a question. "I need to figure out how to get to this," whatever. Assuming the second part of what you're saying, which obviously is where the potential lies—many people don't trust the government. Many people don't trust this specific president and administration; there’s that whole spectrum. But one, people don't trust the government, and two, people don't trust AI. How do you increase the likelihood of people really getting the upside of what you're describing in a way where they have a baseline of trust? Maybe that's storytelling, maybe that's technical. As I understand it, what you're really describing is like an agent—what can become an agent for how people work with everything related to the government, which could be so magical. I suspect most Americans—I'm a tech guy—most Americans are probably going to be like, "I don't want to give the government’s… the government’s AI?” Like, “agh!”

Joe: (1:06:39) The first part of your question sounds very familiar to the early days of Airbnb. “How are we going to trust that? I don't trust that company, Airbnb. I don't trust that host that's advertising their home on their platform." In some ways, there's a parallel of having to navigate through a gap in trust.

Jackson: (1:06:57) Yeah.

Joe: (1:06:59) And if there's any lessons from Airbnb, it's using good design to reassure people that what you're engaging with is trustworthy. It's like when you see—it’s the broken windows theory. If you come across a website and it's kind of slow, it doesn't really load, things aren't really lined up and you can tell—it's like somebody didn't spend a lot of time on this website. It…

Jackson: (1:07:30) It's rickety.

Joe: (1:07:31) It was rickety. Yeah, sure. Janky, rickety. It's wobbly, flimsy. It undermines trust. "Well, what else is flimsy about this website? How they handle my data, what they do with my credit card?" The way something's designed is essential to communicating trust. I've been asked over my career a thousand times, "Joe, what do you think good design is?"

Jackson: (1:07:57) Gonna write that one down.

Joe: (1:07:57) Yeah. I have a new definition based on this experience of developing America.gov. Good design is when a user actively thinks or says out loud, "Wow, somebody really put a lot of care into this to make my experience better."

Jackson: (1:08:19) Yes. Bang on.

Joe: (1:08:20) That is good design. That is what we're delivering with America.gov. I want the nation to have that experience where they feel the 16-hour days we're pulling over in our studio with some of the brightest engineers and some of the most talented designers to craft an experience that gets our nation to a whole new level of user experience. One that respects the American and gives them dignity back, so people don't feel like an idiot when they get lost on a government website. Something that respects people's time, to give them time back in their life. Something that people can take pride in and say, "Wow, my government really did that?” Wow. Yeah. Heck yeah. And the fourth thing is they can feel the sense of, "Wow, somebody really cared enough to put in this effort to save me time, give me dignity, help me feel pride in my country, make my life easier when it comes to getting stuff done in our nation."

Jackson: (1:09:29) It's hard to imagine. I'm very, very excited to see it. But it is so far from the default, right? On some level, it's funny—I love that description of good design, and I also think there's a kind of similar version of good design that is much more commonly stated, which is that it's invisible. I was thinking about this as I was prepping. In some sense, certainly more than the average company or product, you are—it sounds like the wrong way to say it—but you're almost trying to design things that are kind of boring. When I think about a great government tool or website, it's really reliable, easy to use, and also kind of boring. You're not trying to dazzle people necessarily. Or maybe what I really mean by the opposite of boring is that you're not focused on engaging me and keeping me using this product. I want to get what I want, get it done, and get out of there. Dealing with LLMs broadly, LLMs are not deterministic. It's like the feature and the bug. How do you think about broad-based reliability and testing and consistency? You want it to be this super boring, reliable text box that does exactly what I want and nothing more.

Joe: (1:10:55) We work very closely with the agencies that we partner with both to integrate actions so that when it comes to renewing a passport, you can get it done right in America.gov. When it comes to comparing Medicare plans and then picking the one you want to enroll in, you can get it done right in America.gov. You don't have to leave the site to go back into the maze of government websites. So these backend integrations are what makes this so magical. Interestingly enough, it's something that the frontier models haven't had to deal with yet because who are they integrating with? They cover the whole world. We just cover the government, so we're vertically integrated.

Jackson: (1:11:39) Yeah. Maybe there's a passport app that is really reliable and doesn't even use LLMs, it just plugs in. But the job here is that you're the ultimate router.

Joe: (1:11:48) Yes, we're the ultimate front door. We don't store anyone's information. It lives in the databases where it already exists—in the State Department or HHS or Medicare. We're just a front door that allows people to access it, manage it, action it, and we send it back to the agency.

Jackson: (1:12:08) It's certainly in the technical weeds, but can you speak a little bit about Rampart? As I understand it, it was kind of like a side project, but either that specifically or that philosophically. It's easy to say, "Oh, we're just passing through your data," but why is something like that important? And what actually is it?

Joe: (1:12:25) Rampart wasn't a side project. Rampart was preparation for America.gov. Rampart is an open-source model for the mobile web view, because we knew that people would be using an LLM on their device, on their phone. We want to make sure that if people put in personally identifiable information (PII), it's encrypted and trustworthy, and it stays on the device. So if you search "Rampart open source model privacy” on the internet, you’ll come and you can read about how we've programmatically figured out a way to keep people's PII on the device.

Jackson: (1:13:04) In a web browser, mind you, too, right?

Joe: (1:13:06) Correct.

Jackson: (1:13:06) Which is cool.

Joe: (1:13:06) And the size of the file is small enough—I think it's about 12 megabytes—that allows it to be on a device. The other frontier models have something similar, but I think they're in the gigabytes of size, which is completely unrealistic to ever get on somebody's phone. So I think that's why it's trending on Hugging Face right now.

Jackson: (1:13:27) We've been talking a lot about websites. Websites, for a long time—and I think for the average person, especially their experience on a phone, they're not really using websites as much. Everybody has an app; we're past the app era in some sense—What is so powerful about websites?

Joe: (1:13:42) What makes websites amazing is they're so universal. Any device, any screen size, any operating system, you can reach the world.

Jackson: (1:13:53) Yeah. In some sense, it almost feels like, in a non-intuitive way, it's respecting me because it's light enough to do exactly the job. That's why I think it's so cool that you guys can do the private model stuff through a browser. It's pretty amazing. Wow. America.gov. So you're done and this is out?

Joe: (1:14:16) (Laughs). This is just version one. There's many versions ahead. We're just scratching the surface of the capabilities of this platform to really deliver a convenient experience for Americans that I don't think anyone's ever really seen before. When it comes to changing your name, for example—this one comes up all the time. I've met so many women through this project who confide in me very quietly, "By the way, I still haven't changed my last name. I've been married for years." I go, "Why is that?" They go, "It's just too complicated. I can't figure it out on the websites." And they say it with shame, too. The subtext is: "I couldn't figure out a website." Those days are over. We can integrate with the agencies required to change your name in a couple keystrokes with validation of your marriage certificate. We can agentically go change your name for you rather than the burden being on you going door-to-door at each agency, filling out paperwork, mailing it in, waiting months, etc. Those days are over. I really think as America.gov matures and the platform builds out more, there'll be a certain point where people won't go back to the old way.

1:15:30 America.gov’s Roadmap

Jackson: (1:15:30) I was going to say: Between now and then—this is an amazing, huge launch. You've also worked on a bunch of other things and presumably are going to continue to. There are 29,000 different surfaces, I should say. Even if you get amazing at routing, I'm curious how you think about—back to this countdown clock—prioritization across various different things. Maybe someday it gets to the point where I don't even have to go to any of those individual websites. It's all done agentically. In the meantime, you're balancing new launches like the food pyramid or Trump Accounts, big long-term projects. You have two and a half more years. Is there a preference stack? Is it like websites numbered 1 through 150 that we're going to tackle? Will some of that start to get automated using AI tools or otherwise? Is it about setting up design systems?

Joe: (1:16:30) The easy answer is we don't have to redesign any websites. America.gov is the front door to all of them.

Jackson: (1:16:38) So let's take an example: the name change. I go to America.gov, I need to change my name. What happens?

Joe: (1:16:46) You would put in, "Hey, I just got married, how do I change my name?" A response would come back and say, "Congratulations!" Log in through Login.gov, and we'll find all the places in the government where your name already exists. We'll show you, and then you can opt-in to the ones where you want to change your name. You'd click next, the component would update, and it would confirm your existing name. You put in the new name, you put in the reason, and you hit next. If you said marriage, it's going to ask you for your marriage certificate. So you either upload it from your computer or hit the QR code to take a picture of it on your desk, upload it from your phone, and then you hit done.

Jackson: (1:17:31) My jaw isn't on the floor, but okay, that is amazing. I believe that that will be possible in some circumstances. It seems impossible to me that, at least upon launch, that is broadly true across anything I might need to do with the government.

Joe: (1:17:45) Oh, for sure. On launch, a lot of these capabilities won't be available. These require deep integrations, through…

Jackson: (1:17:53) Maybe that's the right way to ask the question. Even when it comes to integrations—passport change, TSA PreCheck, change my name, IRS madness—is the plan of attack to go down the biggest surfaces and do the agentic integration? How do you think about that?

Joe: (1:18:11) Yeah. Well, a lot of what we want to do in America.gov, agencies have been trying to do already.

Jackson: (1:18:16) I see. So you’re building almost like an API that the agencies can tap into.

Joe: (1:18:19) And vice versa. They're building APIs for us, or have existing ones, and we can accelerate a lot of what they're trying to accomplish anyway. And we can do it in a way where the end experience for the American is simplified, easy to understand and manage, and ultimately convenient.

Jackson: (1:18:39) Wow. It's an amazing world to imagine. It can't come soon enough.

Joe: (1:18:45) Yeah. Look, version one of this will have basic functionality. Over the next two years, we're going to keep integrating, and there'll be more and more integrations and more and more actual implementations right in the chat. I imagine two years from now, when a student wants to get a student loan, or somebody really wants to manage every component of their Social Security, or somebody's looking for HUD housing, or somebody wants to really do the end-to-end experience of Medicare—they'll actually be able to do it all in one place. It will be done securely, safely, and in a way that respects their privacy, secures their data, and ultimately gives people respect. Also, none of this would be possible without Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, believing in us and me to lead this work. And the directors and the cabinet members across all the key agencies that have already integrated to America.gov or will be integrating into America.gov. This convenience that's being delivered to the American people is only possible with their partnership and with their help.

1:19:54 Recruiting for ND Studio and Public Service

Jackson: (1:19:54) A lot of people, I would imagine. A lot of people. You spoke a little bit about the opportunity when it comes to people working on this. How have you actually, tactically, brought in the level of talent needed to build something this ambitious when, to be frank, working for the government is not everybody's dream?

Joe: (1:20:19) No one on the team had any plans to be in the government. The scale of what we're doing and the ambition has attracted some of the most experienced designers, engineers, and researchers that I've ever had a chance to work with. It's for somebody who likes to scale and likes the responsibility. They like the high stakes that these systems have to work. Ultimately, I think deep down they like this ability to serve. They like this idea that they can take what they're really experienced at—software engineering, design, research—and actually direct it not towards a for-profit or nonprofit company, but towards the infrastructure that runs our nation. They can actually put their fingers on and stamp their name to one of the most massive transformations that's ever happened in this country from a citizen experience standpoint. This is why people are joining. This is why people are leaving high-paying jobs and great positions and great titles to come contribute to this. In some ways, there's a parallel to the Olympics. Most Olympians lead normal lives, then the Olympics come up. They leave their job and their family, they go train somewhere for a certain period of time away from their home. Then they travel to where the Olympics are and compete, and they have this incredible life experience where they're operating at the best of their talent, their sport, and their competition. At the end of the Olympics, they go back to their normal life. This is that experience for software engineers and designers.

Jackson: (1:22:10) Mm. That’s intense.

Joe: (1:22:12) Yeah. Come work with the best-in-class on the biggest problem. One of the exciting things about getting to do this work like America.gov is it's one of the most apolitical things you could work on. What I've learned here—one of the biggest things that surprises me in the government—is how unifying websites are. Everyone can agree they wish government websites worked better, looked better, and loaded faster. It truly unites the country, unites the left and the right around a single common cause. I think what we're doing—for a designer out there who's watching this, or for a software engineer who's now thinking, "Wow, I never considered working on such a project at this scale inside the government"—it's important to know that this is one of the most apolitical things that anybody could possibly do. It's for every American. North to south, east coast to west coast, young and old, men and women. It doesn't matter who you voted for. This is about improving the citizen experience for every citizen.

Jackson: (1:23:17) Right on. Do you do any work in the category that you would broadly call brand for the US?

Joe: (1:23:25) Not directly, but I remember something Jeff Bezos said once: a brand is defined by what people say about it when you're not in the room. So, are we working on the brand of the United States in that context? Yes, we are.

1:23:41 Reflecting on Year One & Passing the Grandma Test

Jackson: (1:23:41) Yeah. It's a great brand in certain ways, and the websites… are on the up (laughs). I was thinking about how to talk about the challenge of doing this thing on a national scale that everyone has an opinion on. You brought it up at the very beginning. I didn't go to art school, but a huge part of that culture, and particularly RISD, is crit—this idea of putting your work on display and taking the arrows as they come. Obviously, Silicon Valley has a different culture, but certainly very tight feedback loops. You have a big tent of what you would call feedback and criticism today, and that is colored on this extreme level: a lot of it is politically flavored. There are certain people who think everything you do is amazing, and there are certain people who think everything you do is the worst thing ever. Maybe to start, I'm just curious for you to reflect on year one. At the time of filming, your first year and your birthday recently passed. Happy birthday. What do you think went really well in year one? What do you wish you had done better, or are you looking to improve?

Joe: (1:24:48) Year one... recruiting was time-consuming for the first couple of months. It had never existed before, and so, just like a startup, you have to convince people to join your team for which there's no precedent.

Jackson: (1:25:03) And a lot of baggage.

Joe: (1:25:07) Baggage and dynamics. The first couple of months was really figuring out how to recruit for this unproven promise that we would actually have authority and get stuff done, that we were working on some of the biggest things possible, and that really experienced people would be joining this team—which they have. The engine got going in those first couple of months, and eventually, it's been racing down the road ever since. I wish we had come up with america.gov sooner (laughs). That's one thing. It took a little time to match the right technology and the right stack and do all the testing and proof of concepts. Just like we took that one retirement and pushed it through the system digitally in four days, so, too, did we try america.gov out. How do we prove this concept quickly and give ourselves a reference or a new baseline of what's actually possible?

Jackson: (1:26:06) Part of that is even believing it could be possible on this scale at this time. Yeah, that's cool.

Joe: (1:26:13) Yeah. And there's rigorous research that goes into all this. Tons of testing on the back end, tons of security testing like you wouldn't believe—more than I've ever seen before. It's incredible. And doing something that I learned from Airbnb, actually. I remember we were in the apartment when we were 10 employees. We were in the living room, we had one long table. I'm sitting here. Across from me is Nate, my co-founder. Next to him is one of our early engineers. The early engineer gets a phone call, and we're all sitting at the table. We can overhear the call. He goes, "Oh, hey, yeah, yeah. Okay, go to the top right. Yep. Okay, now click over. Yeah, click where it says 'Profile.' No, no, no. Go back a page. Go down. No, no, Mom, Mom, go back." This went on for far too long to the point where he got off the phone and we all looked at each other and we go, "Guys, if our moms can't figure out how to use our website, we're never going to go mainstream. This will never become a mainstream company." As 10 guys sitting in the living room with this big dream, we realized we had an artificial ceiling on our growth if our user interface was not clear enough for moms to figure out without calling their tech-savvy sons.

Jackson: (1:27:36) Yes.

Joe: (1:27:36) So we employed this idea of our site's got to be mom-friendly, and that drove our design. It was a subtext of our design for a very long time. I'm sure it probably still is at the company in some ways, where there's this universal usability where things have to be so clear and so intuitive that a mom can figure it out. In fact, I remember years later in our much bigger office—a much bigger company—we used to celebrate Mother's Day. In our food service area, we had all the moms of any employees in the company come visit, and we actually set up a research station.

Jackson: (1:28:21) Wow. My mom would have gone crazy on that. She's got opinions.

Joe: (1:28:26) We would put our latest designs, prototypes, in front of moms there for brunch. We got actual feedback from moms through different user testing over the years. Now in the government, it's different because it's not just moms. We've actually upgraded, and we operate under the rule that it has to be grandma-friendly, which is true. This is the bar that we hold ourselves to. With things we make—certainly America.gov—we actually have a research cohort of mothers over the age of 55 that we put our work in front of for usability testing.

Jackson: (1:29:14) What does that practically look like? Is it 10 of them in a room at a time and you've got your team in there?

Joe: (1:29:21) We use a service to facilitate it. They recruit and find these mothers over the age of 55 and we do user research beyond that, of course. There's something to be said that if you can have your website working for a non-tech-savvy grandmother or grandfather, you've really reached some high bar of usability and clarity. In fact, accessibility is a very important thing for us. Our sites are as accessible as they need to be. But there's an element of accessibility that's not required that we actually go the distance for, which is accessibility includes a website that's clear and that people can comprehend. You can have an accessible website with really confusing navigation and really confusing language and copy. It's not required by compliance standards to fix that, but that's not enough for us. What we put into the world has to have a level of clarity so people can actually navigate it. To me, that again comes back to respect.

Jackson: (1:30:38) I love that answer. One of my questions was going to be, especially given all the political stuff, how do you seek this sort of classic, truth-grounded feedback? What a cool frame. The default that particularly considers the long tail of Americans from a technology standpoint as technology increasingly is part of our lives, but not always a thing that people love in their lives is important and cool.

1:31:05 A Ticking Clock Toward 2028 & Building Beyond One Administration

Jackson: (1:31:05) You mentioned the clock. You have started many companies. You've built an incredibly successful, scaled one that involved all the classic things: managing money, fundraising, and all that. People who have started companies, especially venture-backed companies, have a relationship with this idea of the time ticking. But it's very different here. There's nothing you can do that is going to have this two-and-a-half-year timeline go away. There might be questions about what happens after, and it's worth talking about. What is the right frame and disposition around that? I guess part of it is just keeping it in mind, but you have two and a half years left. Is it a mad dash to cover as much ground as possible? Is it about investing in something like America.gov and having it stand the test of time? With that timeline in mind, how much are you thinking about endurance and continuity, and the idea of whether it be these products or the NDS itself enduring past your term?

Joe: (1:32:21) I think the answer for America.gov will be people voting with their feet. Let people choose the best product to get done what they're trying to get done.

Jackson: (1:32:36) That's also quite uncommon with government tools and websites, right?

Joe: (1:32:40) Yeah. We're creating a new option for people. It's there for them to use it or not. If they want to use traditional methods, they can. It doesn't replace any website; it's just an additional option to create a more convenient, time-saving, user-friendly way to accomplish what they're trying to accomplish. To find the answer they're trying to find, get the information they're seeking to make a decision, and lead their life in the best possible way.

Jackson: (1:33:11) Also, maybe a pretty strong case—regardless of who wins the presidency and otherwise—to keep something around is that a whole bunch of people use it. Beyond that, which I don't want to trivialize, I think that matters a ton. More broadly, the work, design systems—and very specifically, you're the first Chief Design Officer of the U.S. The National Design Studio is a really ambitious idea. Regardless of nitpicks people have or how much people love it, the idea of something like this existing is pretty remarkable. Do you have any thoughts or pleas or ideas on its future and how you would hope that it could continue, particularly independent of the politics of it all? It's hard to separate.

Joe: (1:34:08) Look, if anything, I hope I've kicked the door open and shown that design can improve society at this scale, if you find the right type of experience level to bring in. We are here on executive order, and those come and go at the whims of whoever's in the office next. I hope that we'll have proven that design has a role in the White House. Design has a role in the government at the highest possible level to help inform and introduce new policies to the public, and improve things like access to government services through something like america.gov. Just make it simple, make it user-friendly, and remove these stigmas. People just automatically know that government websites suck; let's just get rid of that. I don't think any administration going forward has to accept that anymore, and I hope we've proven that.

Jackson: (1:35:14) What do you think would be most surprising to people about working in government?

Joe: (1:35:18) I'll speak for myself. The most surprising thing is how much fun I'm having. I never would have imagined that the people I get to work with — the cabinet secretaries, Susie Wiles, the president, directors of agencies — would be so receptive to our services and to coming to understand the value of good design as it relates to what they're trying to accomplish.

1:35:44 AI & Product Development

Jackson: (1:35:44) AI and design — it's probably not that relevant for normal people, but back in San Francisco, people are talking about it. I'm just curious if you have any reactions based on what you've seen so far or what you think is going to happen. In some sense, it feels like it goes back to the idea that somebody really cared. That's not mutually exclusive with using amazing tools to go faster and do more.

Joe: (1:36:09) Product development as I had known it in my previous life is over.

Jackson: (1:36:13) Whoa.

Joe: (1:36:14) It's done. Gone are the days where you have this waterfall process. Designers sweat through every pixel, you finish the mockup, you hand it to engineering, and it goes to front-end devs that whittle away at it for days or weeks. Maybe you build a prototype in there somewhere and test it out, then back-end devs connect it to databases and other things. I've been in meetings where we're discussing an idea and, in the meeting, it's already built. It's done. Not "done" done, but it's brought to life in a way where the meeting has shifted. Now we're talking about the thing we were talking about 10 minutes ago, but looking at a screen and clicking through it. The speed with which engineers can build changes everything.

Jackson: (1:37:12) Yeah.

Joe: (1:37:14) Not to mention the speed at which designers can bring ideas to life through similar tools. But the cost of software development has plummeted. Plummeted. We're never going back. Everyone's using the AI tools. The speed with which they can code is phenomenal. Those old days are a distant memory.

Jackson: (1:37:43) Where do you think the care comes in?

Joe: (1:37:45) I think in the polish. "Vibe coding" is one way to move very quickly; it's not a way to ship a rigid product. And so the care comes in... sometimes you gotta go back and hard-code it. Sometimes you end up going back to the old days of how you would create something. The benefit is you got to realize it sooner with lower cost investment. You bring it to life and realize, "Okay, that actually wasn't as good as we thought. Let's evolve it." In the same span of time that you would have built one thing in the old days, you can now build 15 versions of it. You've already iterated to a point where you're ready to really double down and invest in it. Then you can really make it rigid, really clean up the code, get it ready for production.

Jackson: (1:38:31) Sweat the extra details.

Joe: (1:38:33) Yeah, exactly.

1:38:36 Closing Questions: Charles & Ray Eames, AirBnB Co-Founders, & Trust in People

Jackson: (1:38:36) This is open-ended, but any thoughts on why the Eames were so inspiring to you as a designer?

Joe: (1:38:44) The Eames were inspiring to me on many levels. One is that one of their quotes from Charles Eames is that the details aren't the details, they are the product. They cared so deeply about a holistic design that does have quality and does have that level of perfection. I think the coolest proof point about them is that their designs are still relevant today. The things they made 50 or 60 years ago are still as treasured, still as relevant, and still as robust. I have Eames chairs from the 1960s in our office here. Our engineers who are in their 30s or their 20s can't believe it. They're like, "How are these chairs from 1968?"

Jackson: (1:39:39) Things don’t last.

Joe: (1:39:39) It's the Eames Leather Management Chair. I like to point it out to everybody as an example that good design lasts. I think the best design — if you want to talk about the most sustainable design — is the thing that becomes an heirloom that you both treasure and value and you want to pass on to somebody. It's also built in such a way that it can endure and it can last over time. It's not flimsy, it's not cheap. There is a quality to it that allows a chair that we're sitting in today, in 2026, to have been made in 1968.

Jackson: (1:40:21) It's inspiring for how we think about digital stuff. Certainly digital maintenance and digital durability is not held to the same standard. Just a few final things. I was just curious, if you look back, is there anything that you particularly learned from or were inspired by from Brian and Nathan over all those years building Airbnb?

Joe: (1:40:42) I got incredibly lucky with my co-founders. There are a lot of stories in Silicon Valley of founding teams that don't exist anymore — some drama, some quarrel, some disagreement, and things imploded. Brian, Nate, and I still, to this day, have a friendship and a brotherhood that hasn't changed. Throughout the company, we would refer to the three legs of a stool, and that if you removed any one of those legs, the stool would fall over. When I look at the success of Airbnb and how we endured those early days — which were really difficult, with a lot of forces against us — there was this notion that we had a triangle. It's one of the most robust pieces of geometry. In fact, we did a personality test one time where some consultant came in and did the whole leadership team. They would plot your results in these concentric circles. Each section of the circle had leadership, creativity, and self-awareness. They plotted ours on the circles, all three of us, and we made an equilateral triangle. The facilitator was shocked. She'd never seen anything like this before.

Jackson: (1:42:09) She planned it! I'm just kidding. That's awesome.

Joe: (1:42:12) So there's something really special about the two of them. Of course, we didn't always agree on everything. But because of the respect that we had for each other and the friendship, whatever we were trying to make a decision on, we'd net out somewhere in the middle of the triangle. That was typically a very balanced and well-honed decision about where we were taking the company. Brian's done a phenomenal job as CEO. Nathan's done a phenomenal job as our founding technical partner, seeing the company through growth, and now running strategy and supporting the executive team and a lot of different initiatives through the company. It really could not have happened — and I think all three of us agree — with only two of us. It took the three of us to bring this unusual concept into the mainstream. It’s a heavy lift; it took three guys.

Jackson: (1:43:07) Outside of luck, do you have any advice or thoughts on finding great collaborators like that?

Joe: (1:43:19) I remember when I was at RISD, during orientation, the orientation leader looked out to the auditorium to all of us freshmen and said, "Look to your left, look to your right. These are your future collaborators, your future employees, maybe your future spouses." The message was to spend the next four years getting to know people and creating relationships. I remember thinking in that moment, "Oh, wow, they're right." During the course of my time there, I had a sense that I wanted to start a company one day. I'd known that since I was a kid. So my radar was always on in the background of meeting people, starting friendships, and building relationships: "Is this somebody I'd ever want to start something with?" By the end of my time there, it was a very short list, and Brian was at the top because we had experiences with each other where I saw how we complemented one another. We have different personalities, different styles, but ultimately we both care about design and creativity. We had this quality where we were on a project together. We got paired on an assignment to redesign products for this company called Conair, which makes things like hair dryers and curling irons. Your mom probably has Conair. For the summer assignment, he and I went off and we went so far outside the bounds of the brief. We went so far beyond designing consumer products; we were designing Conair the company. We were coming up with a new framing for the company. I remember we went to their headquarters in Connecticut to present to the head of marketing and a bunch of directors. We get up there and the look on their faces was like, "Who the hell are these two kids?" But there was something in that experience specifically. Brian and I could come up with big ideas together. You put us in the same room and we'd bounce off each other and we would end up at a place that neither of us might have gotten to on our own. This also manifested in our epic ping-pong matches, which became a metaphor for us — we ping-pong ideas back and forth. We make each other better.

Jackson: (1:45:36) Yeah.

Joe: (1:45:36) Both of us got really good at ping-pong by playing each other. There's this healthy competition, and within that story, there are qualities of what people should look for: someone you want to spend time with, someone who you complement. They can't be exactly like you. They have to cover your bases. Your strengths are here and your weaknesses are there — how are they complementing you? Ultimately, you need a deep respect for each other’s strengths and weaknesses. That's what Nate, Brian, and I all had together. We all brought something to the table that the others didn't have as much of, and the others filled the gaps where we had deficiencies.

Jackson: (1:46:19) Ping-pong! One last thing from your Airbnb farewell letter. You wrote: "The data proves that the golden rule is actually human nature. In other words, people are good.” How has working at this scale affected that view, if at all?

Joe: (1:46:42) I wrote that because the numbers of Airbnb proved it. The sheer scale of people who've stayed in strangers' homes over the last 17 or 18 years...

Jackson: (1:46:56) Wow. It's been that long?

Joe: (1:46:57) It's been that long. Of course, there are incidents and trust and safety things, but they're a fraction of the bigger picture. You look at the numbers and you go, "Well, it's objectively clear here that, by and large, people can trust each other if you create the right vehicle and platform to exchange that trust with other people."

Jackson: (1:47:27) All right. What are you going to do in 2029? What's next?

Joe: (1:47:29) Great question.

Jackson: (1:47:30) You have a few things to do before then.

Joe: (1:47:33) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:47:33) Joe Gebbia, thank you very much. This was an honor. It's a little bit outside of my normal wheelhouse and very cool to hear about the thinking. I think there's a broad bucket of politics, and outside of that, what government reminds me of—and you talked about some of it—is a reminder and an inspiration to think about how we can serve. Think about how we can serve the people right next to us, who we know really well, or people like us and the grandmas. I admire it a lot. Thank you.

Joe: (1:48:09) It was an honor. Thank you.

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