| Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: |
| • The Big Read: The AI euphoria—and peril—driving ServiceNow’s Bill McDermott |
| • The Top 5: Silicon Valley’s most exotic fitness goals |
| • Plus, our Recommendations: A wager to save a dad; “Fargo” in Maine; and a band of brothers from Down Under |
| |
| Lately, I’ve lived exactly as Brian Chesky might want. Yet the experience has been deeply imperfect and a reflection of what could derail his megagrowth plans. |
| While visiting Mexico City last weekend, I filled a hole in a morning’s itinerary with a cooking class available on Airbnb’s Experiences feature. It was tremendous fun, with Vanessa, a chef in the megalopolis’ Roma neighborhood, dispensing age-old wisdom about tortillas (less masa is more), guacamole (add tomatillo) and dried-chile salsa (never spiced to the point of suffering, she insists). |
| I studied at Vanessa’s elbow just a couple days before Chesky unveiled a major revamp to Airbnb that hopes to turn it into a giant marketplace of bookings—a place to secure a massage, a photo shoot or a guided hike. The move greatly expands on Experiences, which since its 2016 launch has not lived up to Chesky’s expectations, and pushes Airbnb into micromarkets across the world. Thousands and thousands and thousands of Vanessas! And other small business owners like her who are eager to supplement their incomes. |
| But I have some doubts about the plan (as does Ben Thompson), and the experience I’ve had with Airbnb since arriving in Los Angeles from Mexico City underscores a chief concern: I’m writing this from a West Hollywood apartment that sure looked nice from the pictures and cost nearly as much as a four-star hotel. Sitting here, though, I can only conclude those images benefited from some substantial amount of special effects magic. In reality, it is an aging, grimly appointed place; I picture some Raymond Chandler villain storming through the front door at any moment. |
| More than a decade into Airbnb’s existence, a booking on the app is still a total roll of the dice for the most part, and any frequent Airbnb user knows it. Sometimes it’s as advertised, but often it’s not. The inconsistency undoubtedly puts a limit on the customer base, a partial explanation as to why Airbnb hasn’t grown as much as Chesky has wanted recently. |
| If Airbnb hasn’t managed to solve the flaw in its core business, surely those new micromarkets will have the same problem—possibly in an exacerbated form since Airbnb wants to substantially broaden itself in unfamiliar settings and economies. How many people will pay for all these new services? I’m not saying the concept will be a total flop, but I can’t picture Airbnb making it work on a gigantic scale, which is what Chesky needs to goose the company’s stubbornly disappointing stock price. |
| And another thing—but, oh, my god, what is that stain on the wall, and why is it moving? |
| What WBD’s Retreat Really Means |
| A couple days ago, David Zaslav, the Warner Bros. Discovery chief, had to do what no one surely likes to do: publicly admit a mistake. But he did, and the company will re-rebrand (or is it a re-re-rebrand?) its streaming service, returning its name to HBO Max. |
| The decision was mostly interpreted through a lens of what it reflects about WBD. That’s an amusingly narrow view, because if you pull back the camera, it also represents a pretty concrete final moment in the Streaming Wars. So yes, let’s just say it explicitly: Netflix has won. No other streamer—not Peacock, not HBO Max, not even Amazon—is going to come close to matching its enormous catalog. There’s Netflix, and then there’s everyone else, who I suspect would be best served by figuring out what makes them bespoke—or letting the end credits roll. |
| Apple’s New Partner, Musk’s Old Rival |
| The most interesting development at Apple isn’t a new iPhone or an update to its virtual reality headset: It’s the brain-computer interface Apple is reportedly developing with Synchron, a competitor to Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Our Akash Pasricha had a Big Read on Synchron a couple months ago, and the revelation about its partnership with Apple adds a substantial amount of legitimacy to Synchron’s efforts. At the same time, Apple’s decision to partner with Synchron rather than Neuralink puts another puncture in the perception of Musk as an unmatchable genius. Which, really, is happening more and more these days!—Abram Brown |
| |
|
|
 |
|
| Bill McDermott, ServiceNow’s CEO, is someone who drafts off mile-high dreams, ones that at times seem to defy reality. Or as the company’s vice chair, Nick Tzitzon, put it: “Bill will never be constrained by what other people’s version of a situation is.” |
| His vision has come to rest solely on artificial intelligence, as our Akash Pasricha reports in Weekend’s latest Big Read. But McDermott faces something of an uphill climb. His salespeople have to convince customers they need ServiceNow’s AI—while every other company is trying to do the same with their AI—and then teach them how to use its unfamiliar features. McDermott sees the reinvention of the company as a total necessity. As he told Akash: “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.” |
|
 |
|
| When I was traveling over the past week, I felt proud of myself for sticking to my workout routine: a bunch of runs and even some early morning weightlifting at a gym near my dreary Airbnb. And then…I edited this humbling piece by our Nick Wingfield. |
| Nick tracked down a group of techies who’ve taken the same crazy drive that propels them at work and channeled it into some outlandish feats of fitness. They’re people who aren’t just satisfied they made it out for a couple miles: They measure their regimens in dozens of miles, which is exactly what Josh Ip, founder of Ranger, an AI startup, did to prepare for a self-organized 100-mile run around San Francisco last summer. |
| The run took Ip 29 hours to complete, and at different points, some of the investors in his startup ran alongside him. “Investors want you to be maniacal and tolerate any amount of pain. They also want to know you can run through walls,” Ip said. “If anything, me being able to do this was my way of showing, ‘Oh shit, this guy can do what he says he can do. If he can do that, I’m assuming he can build a startup.’” |
| Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, has an unblemished Airbnb rating—in case you were wondering. Reach him at abe@theinformation.com. |
| |
 |
| Listening: “Embedded: Alternate Realities” (NPR) |
| Generally, bets between family members are gentle affairs—wagers over bragging rights. Or a steak dinner at most. But the one NPR reporter Zach Mack made with his father in “Embedded: Alternate Realities” was different: Nominally, it carried a $10,000 prize. In reality, the stakes were even higher: They gambled over nothing less than the family’s ability to stay together. |
| I’m not really reaching for hyperbole. Last year, Mack bet his father that 10 online conspiracy theories wouldn’t come true within a year—with Mack believing the strict timeline would be the only way to definitively prove them false to his father and prevent the family from breaking apart over his dad’s unshakable belief in them. Alas, the tale of a child trying to sober up a parent radicalized by the internet is an increasingly familiar one. Few are documented with such intimacy.—A.B. |
| Reading: “The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne” by Ron Currie |
| Imagine Maine, the state with “Vacationland” printed on license plates, and I promise whatever comes to mind is decidedly not the part of Maine ruthlessly controlled by Babs Dionne, a mother, grandmother and nightstick-wielding mobster. But Babs is losing her grip on her small-town turf, and over the course of the 24 hours presented in “The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne,” it slips fully through her fingers. |
| Mama Dionne has stretched her ambitions too far, enraging a rival outfit. In retaliation, her competitors dispatch a hitman known only as The Man, an Anton Chigurh of the north, who drives a spotless Impala rather than a pickup. To stave off The Man, Babs might hope to count on her military vet daughter, Lorie. But Lorie finds herself preoccupied by the ghostly apparitions of fallen comrades, possibly hallucinations from her spiraling opioid withdrawal. Like everyone around her, she is dogged by death and the deaths she’s caused.—A.B. |
| Watching: “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” (Amazon Prime) |
| Often, the hell of war is shown through gruesome scenes from the battlefield. That’s not really the case in “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” which nonetheless makes war’s dire realities abundantly clear. The five-episode show is a domestic drama and a prisoner-of-war series, skipping between three timelines in the life of a young British doctor, Dorrigo Evans, who joins family in Australia before fighting against Japan in World War II, an experience that curdles him. Jacob Elordi, the tall hunk from “Euphoria” and “Saltburn,” plays Dorrigo in the two earlier periods; a weathered and excellent Ciarán Hinds follows behind him, portraying Dorrigo in the 1980s. Together, they present halves of the same broken person, fitting together remarkably well.—A.B. |
| |
|
| You know—whatever works, folks! |
 |
