Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta on Leadership, Culture, and 18 Years of Growth

According to new research from Amazon ads and skipped, 97% of travelers will take a leisure trip in the next year. These customers are looking for more than a deal. They're looking for a new experience. Travelers discover destinations through entertainment, recommendations and everyday moments, with one in four finding their next destination while streaming shows and movies. That's where Amazon ads comes in. Amazon ads solutions and powers advertisers to engage travelers across Prime Video, Twitch and shopping channels with personalized messaging, then spires and converts. Ready to transform your travel marketing? Visit advertising.amazon.com to learn more. All right, hey folks, welcome to another episode of the Skip Travel Podcast. I am delighted and honored to have an icon of the travel industry. We're going to have a wide-arranging chat, Chris Nassada, CEO and president of Hilton Hotels. He's been CEO now for 18 years now. I don't know if he likes considering himself as an institution, but in our eyes he is. And we've had Chris on our stage many, many times. We talked to him all the time, but we figured we'll get him on the Skip Podcast because we always run short of time on these on-stage conversations and podcasts is a long form. And we can dive into different, different topics, and be more of a big-picture leadership, personal, etc. conversation. Welcome, Chris. Reva, thank you for having me. Love doing it. You're right. We always do run short in part because those that know me know I can be a bit loquacious, so when we're on stage with limited time, I don't really get to say everything that I want to say. So I'm thrilled to be here with you. And thank you for what I would describe as an overly generous introduction. I don't have an institution. You could take institution a bunch of different ways. These days, I think, are institutions in America. No, many of them, not particularly well thought of, so hopefully I'm doing better than some of our other institutions. Well, let me say thank you for the, thank you for the kinds of remarks. Let me say this way. The industry, the travel industry certainly needs leadership, not just individual companies. And when people think about who to ask the state of the US travel, for instance, and US travel industry, and how is it doing from a policy perspective, from a visitation perspective, people are usually termed to you and, you know, a couple of other names in general. I think that's the way that I think of it. Yeah, well, thank you. Yeah, I've been doing it a long time. So it turns out if you hang around long enough, I mean, I've been running Hilton for 18 years, but if you add up my years in the industry running host hotels and other various things, I'm embarrassed to say it's coming up on 40 years. So yeah, you started young, that's all, you know, you started young. I'm a very, I know people don't see a picture. This isn't video, it's audio, but if they did, they'd see a young guy. Maybe a little bit more gray hair. Well, more hair than you have generally, but yes, definitely, definitely a little bit more gray. And that's in part because you have one daughter, and that is I think eight or 10 months, and I have six daughters ages 22 to 32. So in addition to running Hilton, and I'd love my girls, but, you know, having six kids, six daughters, you know, that can accelerate the graying process. Well, you are very dedicated father from everything I've read and also like to keep beyond your immediate family, the rest of the family quite close from what I read. Indeed, indeed, I am, and I do. And you call, it was, I read some anecdotes like you call everybody on the phone and invite them to the house, and I forget what the occasion is, but is that, is that correct? What do you, yeah, well, what, I mean, it's funny. All my kids are 22 to 32. So they're, most of them out, you know, they're all out of their house. Most of them out of the city. I only have one that, that lives in the, I live in the Washington DC or in North Virginia. Only one is there, but when they were growing up, I love to cook. I mean, that's one of my, one of my things that, you know, that's a release. It's fun. I'm, you know, I'm not a gourmet chef, but as I tell everybody, but I'm pretty good cook than people like to food, you know. It isn't, you know, you're not going to read about it in magazines. People aren't necessarily taking pictures of it and posting it on Instagram, but when they eat it, they generally like it. And I've enjoyed doing it and sort of been expanding my horizons on different types of food. And when the kids are growing up, you know, I traveled my whole career, you know, or most of most of my career, I've traveled a lot, particularly in the last 25 years. I mean, I'm on the road. We measure my time, which I think is kind of creepy, but true. And so I'm on the road 75 or 80% of the time. And that's been true for a long time, even when my children were small and growing up. And so, you know, trying to be a good husband and good father, you know, I had limitations in the sense that I was gone a lot during the week. But I, you know, I did whatever I had to do to make sure that I was home on the weekends. That I was, you know, was home generally like for pizza night, Friday night, soccer games, because a lot of my kids played, played all of them, played soccer to them, competitively, and division one athletics. And, you know, and I did all that. But the other thing is that, you know, I'm like literally my next door, two next door neighbors are sort of connected to us are my two little sisters. And my brother's lawn, all the, you know, my nieces and nephews and so between us, I think we had 14,000 that lived in this little, I know it sounds strange, but this little, you know, this little ecosystem. And so, and a lot of them really, like, I live where I grew up. I live a mile from where my parents, my mother's still alive. My mother still lives there where I grew up. And so, you know, I would, I would sort of combine some of my interests, some of the needs and desires of my friends and children into one by looking for everybody. And so, like, it would not be unusual, you know, if I were in town, which was very frequently on the weekend, where I would text. I wouldn't call, I would just send like a text out. It was like a running text to like the family that was in the area, which was most of them. And then some of my closest friends. And I would just say, I'm cooking tonight. I wouldn't even tell them what, how many? That would literally be to say, I'm cooking tonight, how many? And the response would just be a number. It'd be like my sister, you know, kids had events and people had said, they had things to do. And they would give me like, we're eight, we're six, whatever. So, and then the kids would say, we're 15, because we have friends that we want to bring. And there would be occasions where it would be probably at the smallest, like 17 to 20 and sometimes to be 40 people. And so my ritual would be that I would say, all right, what is the menu? Again, I had to think I'm cooking generally by myself. My brother and I was a fabulous friend would periodically help me. So I'd have some, I'd have a bit of a sous chef. But I'd say, all right, what's the menu? What are we going to do? What is everybody want? What can I do in bulk? Because I got 30 or 40 people, you know, I'd go shopping. I'd buy everything. I'd come and, you know, you know, tuck it. But then, you know, every, you know, all the doors would open up. You know, generally at 6.30 was sort of the appointed time. Didn't even have to tell them. And like all of a sudden, the house would just full of people, full of friends and my siblings and their spouses and, you know, 15 or 20 kids. And it was just a blast. And so now it's, you know, if I just set that same text out, it would be a meager, you know, all of the cousins they're off. And, you know, I'm grown up. And so we did, we do it. We still do it periodically. It's sort of, I have to admit a little bit depressing to be. And the ends up being like, you know, six or seven hours. Sort of hanging around like, what happened to us? You know, like, oh, I get weird. You know, all the kids, the kids flew the nest. Yeah, but it was, it was a lot of fun. It was a great joy of mine. And it was a great, the truth is, you know, hopefully the food was pretty good. I was told it was eight at all. So I think, what type of food do you like cooking? I like to cook, I do American. I do a lot of Italian. A little bit, everything. But I'd say when I had to cook for really large crowds, some of the Italian dishes were easiest, because you could do, I can do like my grandmother's pot, whatever I could cook for 15 easily, right? You know, sometimes we, you know, we grill, but it tended to be probably, you know, American, you know, and Italian, yeah, more than anything. He said, as they said, I am not a gourmet chef. So it had to be things that were easy. I could do relatively quickly, relatively by myself. And that people would, you know, finish and be satisfied. Yeah, yeah. And that ended up leading to those, those sort of cozines. You talked about cousins and I, I did a post on LinkedIn. I was in India until the last week. It was there to see family for a couple of weeks. And my cousin, the one that I grew up with closest was visiting from Saudi, he lives in Saudi now. And I did a post on, um, said at the last art of growing up with cousins around you, with for this, for this current century. I know. I know. It's sort of, we lived like we were in on. It was, you know, it was funny. When I would tell people, you know, sort of what my existence was, they would sort of like get tilt their head and look at me like, wow, I mean, that, you know, that happens in other parts of the world and it's a fairly standard way. Yeah, it really doesn't happen in America. Like literally the way my house might, they're, you know, my, I have sisters on either side of me. And like the, our backyards are connected and you can open up a gate and everybody floods in like literally. And like, people would say like, yeah, that's a little like the you, you hang out with your family. I was like, I love my family. Like I love, you know, and my, my, my kids growing up with their cousins was hugely beneficial. They're even though they've all flown the coop. They're all, I mean, a bunch of them are in New York now. There's probably half of them are in New York and they, you know, they're, they're still close and, you know, the fact that they had that kind of relationship with their grandparents. It wasn't just cousins. It was grandparents because my parents were nearby. They were a mile away. It was their aunts and uncles and so like, they were huge benefits just, you know, having the support system, particularly for a guy like me that was traveling all the time, that I had, you know, not just my wife, but sisters, brothers, and law that were there. But also, we all know with our children like, sometimes we're the last person that they want to get advice from. And so, I mean, where would you rather them turn? A friend that doesn't have, you know, a ton of experience or their aunt or uncle or maybe even their cousin who can be objective. And so I found it was a spectacular way for my kids to have an outlet to express themselves, to learn, to get advice. You know, in a way that maybe they just, you know, don't tend to think of doing with their mom and dad. So it looks, so sort of this village, like community that you've grown up in and you, you, your, your kids have grown up and has that sort of consciously and consciously. And I guess you're the, you, you learned how to host. And I learned how to host from my dad as the tourist. My dad, he was in the hospitality business in a sense. That was the real, he passed away three years ago after 93 after his spectacular life. And I used to describe my father, I marveled at my father. I used to describe him as the mayor of everywhere. I mean, as a little kid, as a big kid, as a full grown adult, even doing this job, everywhere my dad went. He was like a magnet for people. Like he was fun, high energy, thoughtful, caring, and he just, you know, everybody, you know, everybody wanted to, wanted to be around him. And so I grew up in an ecosystem of like, you know, more is better. You know, like, you know, my dad wanted like, if, you know, five people good than 10 or 20, you know, this even better. And like, and, and, and a lot of diversity, like, you know, embracing, you know, not just your direct family, but friends and a broader community. And so, you know, I've had a lot of extraordinary influences in my personal life and professional life, not, not more than my father, just growing up, sort of watching, you know, how he behaved, how he embraced life, how life embraced him, how he embraced people from all walks of life, how they embraced him. My dad, I said he died at 93. I gave his, which was probably the hardest thing I've ever done. And I knew it would be, I think there were, I mean, usually at 93, in fact, the priests were Catholics. So the priest was there. We had three priests there because that's because he had so many friends. And they said they do a lot of this two story. They were saying in, in part of their introduction, the three, one of the three of them, maybe more said like, we do a lot of funerals sadly. This is sort of the business we're in. And we do a lot for, you know, people in their 90s. And, you know, it sometimes comes with great sadness because there's not a lot of people here, a lot of, you know, it's their family, you know, the peers are gone. And they're, you know, the radius has come so far in, just because of lack of mobility. And they're not moving around. I mean, there were six or eight hundred people. My dad said, yeah, I mean, I'm from every walk of life. You know, the, the guys that, you know, mode is long and took his trash out or, you know, the people he did business with, that the people he knew from his gym, the people at all the restaurants that, you know, were his haunts. You know, and so, you know, listen, I hope that, you know, I certainly have some of this DNA. I was brought up, sort of watching in Marmon like that. And, you know, the lessons I learned from that is that's a, you know, that's a very good way to live your life. And, you know, my dad had a long life and, and nobody wants to leave this earth but died a very happy man because of the richness of all those relationships. And so that is sort of how I approach life is, you know, that is a bit. Thankfully, I got some of that DNA from him, but also, you know, just watching it. It's like, you know, it's a, it was joyful to watch. And so, you know, the reality is, I didn't start out as a hospitality person. I, you know, by background, I'm a finance person. I mean, I went to, you know, UVA McIntyre School, finance degree, numbers guy, and got out and was in finance and real estate development. And, you know, had a private equity company. I did a bunch of things. Yeah. And then I sort of like kept like, you know, in various ways, whether it was in the finance side or development side or private equity side, getting involved in hotels. And early in my career, and it wasn't real. I'm not going to say, yeah, I wasn't smart enough. It was not like conscious, but I started to realize like, this is my calling. And I never really, you know, I get to finally I can look back on it and understand it. Like, but in the moment I didn't, but what it was was what we're talking about. It was the people. It was the hospitality. It was the joy you get in like the fabric of life and the diversity of the people that I work with and partner with and, you know, the travels and it was really all of that that brought, you know, sort of got me in the hospitality and that, you know, finally I, you know, realized that this was what I was meant to do. And, you know, obviously I've been doing it now a long time and it will be what I do until I don't do anything. The, you said private equity and obviously, you know, you're, you're famously known from at least a business career as somebody who turned around hintal, hinted on hotels at a pretty dire moment. The now seven, 18 years in how much of you is the, is the private equity guy and how much of you is the hospitality guy and like what are the moments that one comes out in the other and the other comes out? Well, I mean, different circumstances require different applications and skill sets. So I'd say, you know, I, you know, I have been, you know, I have been building my sort of skill set, you know, you know, in some cases, you know, by getting hit in the head with a two by four over the years and, you know, some, you know, very purposely around being able to, you know, be well-rounded and do a number of different things reasonably well. So if I think about all of my career, obviously finance background, but understanding the development business, understanding, you know, the people side of the business, you know, there's a leader of, you know, at a very young age of reasonably large groups of people trying to figure out, you know, the, the organizational things, being a person that can fix things. And so you talked about, you know, the great recession, I think you mentioned it and then COVID, whatever. Those were big fix-it jobs when I was running host 9/11 and the dot com bumble burst. And, you know, you got to have, you know, you got to have the dexterity or the agility to be able to, like, when things are going wrong, and if all you can do is when things are good and grow something, but you can't deal with the other side of it, it's really hard, you know, to sustainably deliver performance and be, be a good leader, but also recognizing, you know, that part of it can be at times fixing things, but it also, all businesses are a function of growth. And so you can't just be sort of a great fix-it guy. You also have to be, you know, somebody that can really take something growing. I'll, you know, help him as a big company when I got here, or two and a half, three times larger than we were when I got here. So, and we lived through some existential threats, you know, with, you know, with the great recession, with COVID, et cetera. And so I, you know, a long-winded way of saying, like, to me, it's not, it's all of it. It's not like, you know, a host, what I re-enhost, you know, the host was, you know, Mirat's split into two pieces. It was a good code bad code, by the way, the words that I'm not going to use in your podcast to describe that, that are different than that, but that's the gist of it. And we took a host from bad code of Fortune 500, S&P 500, one of the America's great places to work, yada yada yada, you know, we really, you know, we did a fix-it job, but we also grew up from a very small company to being the biggest, most dominant player in that space, you know, similarly at Hilton. And so I would say, like, all those fix-it jobs made me a better leader. All the growth opportunities, both at host and, of course, in Hilton, you know, made me, made me a better leader. Being a PE guy gave me a difference the way to filter things that helped me be both better at growth and fixing things. And being owned by private equity, you know, which we were, before the, you know, the first part, you know, for six, really eight years of my, you know, my 18 here at Hilton by Blackstone, you know, that made me a better executive. So, you know, a long way to wave saying, like, it's all of it, it's like I view, like, as we all develop ourselves, it's sort of like you're weaving a web of all of, you know, trying to get, you know, and then being able to be very agile and, you know, meet the market in terms of what's going on and what the needs in the moment are. And I'd say, you know, from a leadership point of view, like, to be really successful again, you can be successful as a leader in short sprints, you know, I think a lot of people can. But how do, you know, like I think about it, I've been running the company 18 years. I think the average S and P 500 is maybe six, so I'm 3X, I'm 3X, the average already. I think it was six when I looked, don't fact check me, but it's low, lower than you would think. And I think, and again, I'm not trying to say I'm so special, I'm not, I'm a regular guy. It's not like E or when I was a development guy, it's all of the above have given me, you know, a skill set and a filtration system and agility to be able to like pivot and lean in and I've always sort of had the desire to want to do it. You have to be able to adapt like as a leader, particularly if you want to do it for a long period of time. The world changes. Think about what's going on in the world now like with AI and everything like how you go it, like, you know, how do you, you know, how do you think about cost structures in an AI world? How do you think about your marketing strategy, sales strategies, your broader distribution and go to market strategies, how do you think about the customer experience in a genticate AI world that's, you know, that's evolving at the speed of light. You have to be willing to and able to reinvent yourself. And so that's sort of like how I've trained myself is like no matter how much success, like we've had incredible success. I spoke, I spoke at an event for one of our largest shareholders to who was, and I won't name it because I didn't tell them I would, but, and a couple nights ago, downtown DC, and they were hosting their most important clients in the introduction. They talked to them at the background and, you know, when they're like some bothered and the fix a job and then they said like, and I didn't even calculate, they said, listen, and, you know, in the 10 year, in the 10 year analysis since the public, they've delivered almost a 19% compounded annual return against, you know, the S&P 500 that is I forget the number, but a lot lower than that. And so the way we've been able to, you know, deliver the growth and, you know, cash flow and, you know, ultimately deliver the returns has been reinvention as a leader and as a team to realize that will get you from A to B is almost never what is going to get you from B to C. So, I'm going to thank my mother for this. I talked a lot about my father who I miss and love dearly as I do. My mother is living in 92 years old, but she was tough, you know, and, and she sort of taught me to wake up every day, you know, thinking you're not that special. She was lovely. She was an amazing human to this day, but it was like, you're never good enough. I can say, no, you know, it takes a village, you've been fortunate, but, you know, you're, you know, you need to wake up every, every day and underdog. And so I do. I try my team crazy. You could ask them because I wake up every day and I'm not like, I do, you know, celebrate our successes and we've had plenty, but I really can't stop myself from thinking about what the next leg up is. Like what is it they were not doing as well as I'd like, where in the world, what brands, what segments, innovation technology, you know, what can we do differently to ultimately deliver like a uniquely better customer experience? And that will ultimately allow us to drive the next leg in performance. And that's just who I am. Again, it's not for everybody and sometimes it drives my team crazy, including this morning. I was driving them crazy. I know, but, but it's worked for me and that is clearly, you know, really, you've lasted 18 years, so you're doing something right. The one question I have, so one of the things that I, when I, I came into the travel industry, you know, 13 years ago when we started, I didn't know the industry before that. One of the things that struck me and I haven't been fully able to put my finger on. Maybe you can. When you talk about growth in the hotel industry, from a business perspective, it seems to me the sort of, is, is the obsession and maybe that's not the right word. The obsession with, with number of hotels you own or the net unit crew of Nugge, which is a term I didn't know a few years ago, I think I, by the way, I, I, I, I'm in a sound terrible. I think I invented it. Not that I invented net. Oh, you did. Okay. Not that I invented net unit or growth. But I think I was the first one to put it together, put it together, okay. And call and make it an acronym and we did it when we were going public because I'll tell you why. We sort of created the acronym for, for reasons, keep going. I'll follow you to the question. Yeah. Well, I mean, the, the question in terms of how you signal to the market, both, both investors as well as the business community, it's very much focused on how many new hotels. Do you find that growth metric satisfied? Like, is that the only way to measure? No. No. No. Here, here. It's much more complex than that. Yes. If you were to go on an earnings call, which you guys, I don't know if you do, I hope you know. Your team certainly does. Yes. Yes. Because I read Schiff notes from various things I say. And you guys do a generally very good job of covering it. It's much more complicated than that. You're, you're talking about, you know, like on an earnings call, which everybody can hear because it's public, you know, everybody going to access it, you know, that that is one of the key outputs. Okay. So from a shareholder point of view, I mean, it's a complex equation, but our shareholders look at the reason we've performed so well is they believe we have a very simple, what they call algorithm. And that is you have same store growth and unit growth. And that does to X, you know, one plus one equals two. And then you have some degree of operating leverage that drives free cash flow growth. And then what we do is the capital like business because all almost all the growth comes from the building of hotels by third parties. We produce a lot of free cash flow and that cash flow then gets allocated by returning it back to shareholders mostly in the form of buybacks. And so I think from an investor point of view, they would, they would say we're a serial compounder, meaning when you start doing that, you don't need a lot of capital for growth. You're disciplined about, you know, your cost structures and you drive free cash flow at an increasing rate. And you're disciplined about how you allocate capital, a K buying back your own shares. When you compound that out over three, five, seven, ten years, it has a dramatic impact returns. And, you know, the reality is our business model is spectacular and there just aren't that many serial compounder businesses out there. You know, there's just a lot of businesses for various reasons, they're great business, but they're, you know, they're much more capital intensive. So, you know, the franchise model, which is the largest part of our model happens to be one of those. If you do it well, you can be a real serial compounder. So that's what you hear on an earnings call. That's how that's why we traded a good multiple. That's why we've delivered an 18 or 19% compound annual return. But why we care about it is something very different. I mean, we care about that too. I don't want to suggest because shareholders can listen and we care about that output. But what we're really trying to do is create a network effect, meaning what we're trying to do is be able to serve any customer for any need they have anywhere in the world they want to be within reason with the right product in the right location. So, and if we do that well and we've done it pretty well and we're still doing it, we believe that the result is that we get an increasing share of our customers wallet, existing customers. And it affords us the opportunity to bring new customers into our ecosystem. And as a result of that, and if we give them good product service technology, loyalty, matters, you know, matters and we do that well, we drive unfair share. As that network grows, it becomes, you know, very hard to compete with. And we drive what I would say is like unfair levels of share. So our brands perform better than the competition. You take our, I'm not going to get into the specifics. We won't talk to them. But our average market share of all of our 24 brands combined is meaningfully higher than any other competitor if you put theirs together. What does that then mean? That then means that we're serving customers well, which is what we obviously need to care about first and foremost in giving them what they need at the right price point, right product type where they want to be. But as a result of doing serving them well, we're driving high market share, which translates into higher returns for owners and better returns for owners than they can get with our competitors. And what does that mean? It means that they allocate more capital to our system. And they will invest in build more hotels and it becomes a virtuous cycle that allows us to continue to grow by building that network effect and produce more and more units in the right places with more more cash flow that allows us to be a serial compounder. So the shareholder while obviously critically important is the last link in the chain. The first link is the customer. The second link is the owner and the third is the and the beneficiary at the end of the day is the shareholder plus employees because I know you talk a lot about for sure, for sure has become you know, you won the great places to work award many years and running. It was the first. I think you were the first hospitality brand to comment it. I think Delta was the first airline, maybe to comment it if I remember correctly. Yeah. And so nobody else in our space has been number one great place to work in the US and and in the world. Nobody. Nobody. What is that? So, and you're right. So I left that link out intentionally because I do we're going to talk about culture. But if you if you think about, you know, the other beneficiary, yeah, there are two other really important beneficiaries in that ecosystem. And for expediency, I skipped them and I probably shouldn't what one is, I'll finish with our employees, our communities, so the more we grow and the more people we have, the more opportunities there are for employment and the more benefits there are to the supply chain. I mean, every hotel is an essential part of every little community or big community that attend. So, you know, they are the more we grow, the more we build network effect, our communities, our huge beneficiaries and the most important in the end of all of our beneficiaries because they make it all happen are our team members and, you know, our team members are benefiting because it's more opportunity. It's more opportunity to bring more team members on as we grow every time we open a hotel, we need more team members and every time we open a hotel, it's an opportunity for upward mobility for for our teams because you need a general manager. I had a sales, you know, you need the whole suite of people to do it and so it creates a very dynamic ecosystem opportunity for our team members. I kid our teams all the time. I said, what would you all do when I do a leadership talk? What would you all do if I sent them a month and said, you know, we just decided we growth as, you know, we've been doing a lot of that. We're not going to do anymore. There's going to be, we're not going to grow anymore. What would you guys do? When I sort of like, you know, they all laugh, it's like, yeah, we'd, you know, we'd get a resume ready. We'd start looking somewhere else because we all, you know, everybody wants upward mobility. And so, you know, it gives us, you know, extraordinary opportunities to create a dynamic environment for learning, learning growth and opportunity for our team members. So there's, there's the culture at your headquarters as in the corporate office and then there's the culture at each of the hotels around, you know, I don't know how many, how many countries 100 plus whatever, 140, 140, 140 countries, each of them very likely each hotel has its own subculture if you will. So is it okay? Like, is the, is the million subcultures? And then there's a corporate culture. How do you sort of think about the difference? It's the complex, it's really complicated is the short answer. And so I would say when I got here 18 years ago, we, you know, we were a company that invented the business as you know it most of what, you know, was everybody, all of us take for granted. Hilton was the tip of the spear and the pioneer that, that figured out a long, long time ago. But to be truthful, you know, we had gone through a period of decades where, you know, as we split the company apart, you know, international US, you know, and I'd just put it back together and they really were very different companies as well as, you know, we just, you know, I think culturally had not, you know, sort of been as focuses maybe we had been in in early days. We did not have a, what I would say is a terrific culture and certainly not a hyper connected culture. There was very much a corporate culture that was one thing. Well, I'll believe not, not the best in my opinion, but of course I'm going to say that, but I think objectively it wasn't. And then there were, you know, there was a very different sort of culture in the hotels, not just a subculture by hotel, which of course you're going to have because these are living breathing beings, you know, these hotels with the, you know, people that live in the heart, you know, work, they're open 24/7. It's a difference in our business than, you know, a lot of other businesses like you open a hotel and it's open forever forever. Every holiday, every weekend, forever. I mean, occasionally hotels get torn down, you know, maybe after 34, but maybe listen, the most hotels last 100 years, right? So they never close. And so it's, you know, it is definitely, you know, there is a microculture in every hotel and that I'll come back to that. Well, I'll say that is generally, you know, going to emanate from the leader of the hotel, just like the culture of a company is not defined by its leader, but it's certainly, you know, the tone is set by its leader more so in a hotel because it's a smaller environment. It is very much dictated by the tone of, you know, the general manager and the most senior people there, but really the general manager. But when I got here, I would say, honestly, we were really disconnected is the first thing I observed as I traveled around the world was like, we had a, you know, had a corporate culture, which honestly, I said I didn't love that probably shouldn't, but I, I will. I didn't love it. And then individual hotels had, you know, some of them had great cultures because they had great leaders, some of them had okay cultures, but the one thing that was consistent, they were totally disconnected, you know, from the enterprise, like they weren't like in their own minds, like part Hilton. And so while it's been hard, it took many years. Frankly, the thing I am most proud of is that we connected those dots. So we worked really hard to rebuild our corporate culture. We worked really hard to connect it to the to the front line of our business and leaders. We worked really hard on making sure we had the right, you know, leaders in these hotels that understood that that connectivity is really important. And when you think about getting great place to work in the US, the world, and I don't know, we're never one in like 26 different country. I may get that wrong, but many, many countries around the world. That's because we, well, we're not perfect and like everything I wake up every day, thinking I told you that we could be better. And there's lots of things I want to do with our culture, but we really did connect the dots in a way where everybody feels like they're part of the same thing. Okay. And that has been why if you talk to Michael Bush, he runs great place to work. I hate to call him out and he'll get mad at me, but like he would say like when we were getting number ones and all that, the most astounding thing was how we connected the cultures, meaning that the, you know, the front line folks in the hotels around the world who tried it, because that's the bulk of our population. Right. They really didn't feel like they were part of something special, something bigger than themselves. And it was a one big enterprise. Now, they still felt good about their hotel, and they had allegiances to their hotel. But he said to me many times, like the most astounding thing about our ascendancy was that that connectivity, which made me very proud because that's the, and what was the one thing that you did that change that that sort of enabled that connectivity between your employees and the corporate office? Yeah, this is going to sound like to some people like they get stuck to that too much. It was finding our North Star happens to be true. Our founder founded the company 106 years ago on a founding principle, which he called, you know, we're here to sell the earth with the light, warmth of hospitality. When you read what he meant by that contemporaneously, he meant we can make the world a little bit better place because we are going to provide states, comfortable places for people to sleep, eat, whatever, in communities all over the world. He was the first person that took the show on the road and took, you know, a hotel company overseas because he said, I want to be in this gamble in abusia and, you know, ria and Tokyo. And when nobody and really done that because he really felt like there was an opportunity to create greater cultural awareness and better understanding as between cultures, if people had a means to travel. And of course, this was, you know, when the jet age, he was doing this just when the jet age was getting going. And so he was smart enough to figure out like if you have that strategy, there's no way for people to get there. It's not going to really work, but, but now there's a, you know, pay an M and, you know, TWA and these airlines, you know, now people get around the world. And he was right on the tip of this fear doing that. And so I would just say like that was what repelled people in this business for decades and decades thinking like we're special. What we do matters, the work, I do matters. Even if it's, I'm cleaning a room or I'm working in a kitchen or I'm the engineer like, yeah, I have, you know, some of my job is hard or whatever, but if I do my job, well, I'm part of this bigger thing that is allowing, you know, hundreds of millions of people to move around and giving them, you know, safe quarters and giving them the things they need to be comfortable and safe and, you know, have these different experiences. And I think, honestly, a lot has gone into it, are becoming the number one great place to work. You know, there's a lot of micro granular data driven things that we weren't doing well with benefits and, and well, you know, that we've really done better at and development opportunities and training and a whole bunch of whole suite of things. But if you said to me, really what did it was all sort of connecting people back to our founding purpose and getting, and I think purpose is a reuse, I call it purposewashing. In our case, we didn't go to the marketing department and say, "Give me a tagline." I went and spent weeks reading his autobiography like three times, by the way, be my guest. I recommend anybody that it's a quick read. I read his, his son who would run the business, Baron Hill, who passed away in 2019, gave me a bunch of his, the, you know, his notes and things, you know, I had lots of different sources of information. And instead of like breaking from the past, I basically grounded the rebuilding of our culture in, you know, what was so great about our past. And then it took time. You know, then it's like storytelling. It's like really, you know, communicating and, you know, because we're still making a big difference around the world in every community and people's lives and owners lives and customers lives, massive contributions to local communities. It's all happening. It's just nobody was thinking it, but nobody, it wasn't being I.T. is it, but nobody was packaging it and like telling the story internally. I'm not talking about it externally. And so we really started to sort of ground it back in basically what you do, matters, right? No matter what you do as part of Hilton and managed to franchise and that in those years we own stuff, your work matters. And if you do your work really well and we all do our work really well, it's going to aggregate up. And here's the impact that we're having around the world, you know, on people's lives and communities and serving our customers. And you know, if you stick to it, and this is one of the benefits of tenure, right? There's probably some downside and running stuff for 18 years, that if you keep grinding and you really keep storytelling and, you know, over over periods of time and find ways to get people in a real authentic way connected to that, it can be super powerful along with a lot of granular things. So if you're saying, you know, we're the bet, you know, we're we're we're having a huge difference in people's lives and our team members lives. And the experience they're having is terrible, then it doesn't work, right? It's not authentic. So it's a function of like killing the good stories of the things you're doing and continuing to work in a very granular way on programs and and approaches to to the team that that are aligned with that. And over long periods of time, if you keep grinding and grinding, it turns into something free awfully magical, but it's it's hard. There's a reason not everybody does it. It's hard. It takes time. One of the things I, as you said, you travel 75 to 80% of your time. Do you foresee that cutting down just because never, never, yeah. Now my kids are gone. So it got easier. Even more easy. And my wife, my wife, I love her. We're childhood sweethearts. And I think if she were listening, she would agree with us. We love each other. We have a fabulous relationship. She was your prom day, right? She was. I don't think she wants me around all the time anyway. And she likes to you know, see places and get around, but our kids are grown up. So it's easier. It was it was harder when they were at home. But I honestly, we're fine. You know, it's funny. You know, the year you and a lot of other people have asked me this, I don't think you can do my job without it. And like, honestly, if I wanted to really cut back, I would say it wouldn't be time for me to do something different than this. And by the way, I want to keep doing this. I know I've been doing it 18 years, but I've said our board. I've got I got a lot of energy and a lot of. But you have to have thought of succession planning, right? We have obviously thought of it. But in this kind of job, you'd see they're you're all in or you're not in in my opinion. And the reason I say that is world's a complicated place. And I mean, listen, not to diminish. I have the most amazing team on earth. And we've worked hard to build it and build alignment and, you know, and a great strategy and a great culture. And they're they're fantastic. But still, at the end of the day, when you're at the top of the heap and you're the CEO, a lot of decisions, the big decisions are still going to end up on your desk, not not of, you know, the medium and the small, hopefully, very few of those end up on your desk. But the really big strategic ones end up on your desk. And I don't think without being all over the world, because the world's complicated nuance that you can really effectively make those decisions. I mean, I think the greatest example of that I experience coming out of COVID, I mean, I mean, it was amazing. I traveled probably more than most humans during COVID, wherever I could. But that ended up being basically, I could do a little bit of travel in America. And then after a while, I could get into Mexico. That was it. Couldn't go anywhere else. Couldn't get to China for three years. And then when I could start getting out, and I did, and I started getting meeting with our partners and our teams and our owners and my lead, you know, I realized like, wow, like even though we were talking all the time, and I've got lots of data like all the nuance that you get by being out there and like interacting with people at all levels of our company, with all your partners and owners and people in the community and government, you really don't have the appreciation you need, I think, to be the kind of leader that I want to be. So I think you absolutely got it. You got it. You got to do it. I don't think there is, I mean, listen, is there a 5% or whatever, but I think it's a 70 to 80% like world that I think I live in. And at the moment, I love it. And you know, I'm young enough, I know I'm aged a little, I've been doing this long time, but I've got a lot of energy and I love it. Succession, you ask is hugely important. And the older I get, I'm not old, but I mean my early 60s, you know, when I started here, I was in my early 40s for mid 40s, you know, you're thinking in your mid 40s, you think you're going to live forever. And statistically, that's not true, but you think it, near and near, you know, early 60s is different. And so I think about it, I thought about it then, I think about it a lot more now. Our board, the tiered by John Gray is, you know, Runs Black Stone is a super thoughtful, incredible leader himself. And they built, you know, an incredible culture there in their world. I think the best of the best. And he's, you know, he's gone, you own the whole company, but he's been kind enough to lend us his, you know, time and remain even without Black Stone owning any of the company's thing as our chairman. He cares a lot about it. As does, as does the entirety of our board. And we are very diligent and thoughtful about it. And so the way I would describe it in its most simple form is it's a layering concept where, you know, what I'm trying to do, first of all, successions more than just what happens if I get run over by a truck. Succession is throughout the organization, all the key roles. So when my lower fantasy is our CHROs extraordinary, I think you know, Laura, yeah. She spends an immense amount of time working with me and our whole senior team on succession throughout the whole organization. We just did it last week. We do what we call our QTR our quarterly talent review, where we go through literally our entire, you know, senior management, right? So really the top several hundred people in the company. We look at like where we have succession, where we don't, where we need to go outside. We look at data, like we look at how many of those do we, you know, what percentage do we feel like we've got, you know, people ready for people developing. I mean, we're, I could go on. We're super rigorous and data, data driven as much as you can be. And then as it relates to me, I think about it in a similar way, super rigorous and disciplined and layering. So thinking about like making sure that we are rotating even my most senior people, you see things we do when you read like somebody was hired or we, we change somebody's role. An element of that almost always is about succession. We're testing people. We're rounding them out. And my, you know, my strategy has been to create layers. We have more than one person that when I'm gone is a candidate to run this company. We have different people and different roles and they're developing. And some are going to be ready sooner than others. By definition, I think that when I say layering, you got to have a plan that we know, three, five, seven, 10, right? You got to have sort of a plan that, you know, you don't know. I haven't declared that, you know, and I want to, I want to keep doing this for a while. So you have, you have to have a plan that sort of, you know, that is, that is flexible enough to work in that environment. And we do. We have really good talent. And we have, you know, I folks that I think, you know, are developing incredibly well in a relatively short period of time. We certainly have emergency succession. And then we have a whole category of people that I think go over the next three, five, seven, 10 years, you know, massive or super high potential. And we're developing all of those. Could an outsider come and run Hilton? Or would it have to be from inside just because of the nature what you do? Yeah. I mean, the answer is, like, definition, I think always. Yes. But here's our, our and my strong, super strong desire is to have, to have it be somebody here, you know, and, and, and here's the reason. I think, listen, just my own view. I study these things that I read a lot, and I've lived, lived, you know, that a lot of experience at this stage of my career. You know, I think when you have a company, and I'm not suggesting, in any way, shape or form, we're perfect in any, in any of the things we do, but we're reasonably good. We have, we have a good strategy, we're, you know, we have a really, really good culture. I mean, I think that's hard to debate. I think we're executing the strategy well, or the things we want to do better, faster, different, sure, we're working on those. But we're generally, you know, we have decent momentum to good momentum and thing, and, and we're performing, I think, reasonably well. And so in that environment, you would not want to disrupt that, right? You know, you would not like, you would be better off saying, because by definition, you bring somebody new at the high levels, you're going to change all that stuff. Everybody knew at that level, we'll have a different view on strategy, a different view on culture, because they will. And so you are going to, by definition, put a bit of a stick in the spokes. Now, long term, it could be great, but I would say when, as a risk manager, and as a very large shareholder of the company today and after, I would say, that is not a risk you would should take, like you should, you should build a succession plan. So you don't have to take that. However, there are cases, and you see, I'm not going to pick on companies, you see them out there. There are definitely cases where you have companies that aren't doing as well. Or, you know, they really do need to evolve or transform because of what's happening, the technology or the demands of their customers, the whole business model is sort of being challenged. And in those cases, I think there's a lot more reason to say, like, yeah, maybe you need to blow something up or sort of disrupt it in a different way. And getting somebody with a totally fresh outside perspective could, could really work. And so that's not the circumstance we're in. By the way, I was an outsider 18 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Right, you know, John Gray's view was, we need to disrupt Tilton and we need to do things wildly differently. Yeah, in that case, it was a, it was a, we needed somebody to sort of do the turnaround and outside. Correct. It's already working and running and and functioning well. Correct. So we did it. I mean, we brought it out. So we brought me, I was an outsider, now I'm an insider, but we're in a very different place. So again, not perfect, but we're in a, we're in a pretty good place. And I don't want, I knew one of my most important responsibilities. The most important responsibility is that what I do decide it's my time and I hand it off. It's seamless. Like we announced it that everybody takes, oh, yeah. Okay. Hopefully they say, well, you know, it was a good run. Sorry to see them go, but Sam or Sally is fantastic. And we have every confidence. They'll continue to take the company to new heights and the stock goes up and everybody's happy. That's, that's what that's what I want. Okay. I want to finish with the state of our country, because, because you and I both don't care. I'm out of time. I'm out of time. As I said at the start of the podcast, you are somebody who people turn to to understand sort of the state of US travel, the policy, et cetera, you're in Washington, you're connected in the political circles or at least the leaders consult you and the think of policy. And so we're sitting here in the fall of 2025, the brand of USA, not to say brand USA brand of USA is not the best it could be. A lot of your business depends on brand of USA become being good, not just because you have business in US, but because you are, you are an American company in different parts of the world. And because you care as a human being as an American who grew up here. How do we get out of this quagmire? So let me, my, some people that are listening are going to agree with me and some are going to disagree. That's the, you know, that's the, you know, when you have an opinion by definition, you know, you're not going to, you're not going to, not everybody's going to agree with you. But in my whole attitude, there is a lot of noise in the system. I live in Washington as we pointed out. I'm not here that often because I travel so much, but I'm, I live here. And there's no question, you know, that it's as noisy if not more noisy than it's ever been. But my whole, you know, sort of philosophical view on life, personal, professional and alike is like steady hand on the wheel. Like don't freak out. Don't jerk the wheel. Like there's all sorts of stuff coming at you all the time. And the best way to sort of figure out the path forward is left way up. You know, be up, lift up above the noise and try and be objective. I think that's very hard in the current environment, because it's because the political system in America is so venomous right now on both sides. And so I think it's easy to get sort of caught up in the whirlwind of like you got to hate this, so you got to love this. So that's what I say to you with. I'm sort of a flaming moderate. And I'm my job in any event is, you know, to rise above the noise in running Hilton and be objective. And so here's what I'd say with that lead in I would say we're clearly you saw like you see it real time in the data. You see it. You heard it when we report and everybody else reported second quarter. The economy is reasonably good. Resilient GDP print got, you know, up, you know, updated to three, four jobs numbers obviously going the other way. But, you know, broadly you'd say that the economy given the tariff issues and everything else going on has been pretty resilient. But what I would say you as it is, but it's not evenly resilient. Okay. What's really happening is the high end so the high end consumer is doing much, much better. You know, I say the rich are still rich. I mean, around liberation day, maybe they felt a little less rich for a while, but the markets are, I don't know what they're doing today. I'm busy, but they've been near or above all time highs. So people that own financial assets, hard assets, you know, they've done really well, you know, not just now, but over the last bunch of years. And so you see that in the numbers. You see like the luxury, you know, the high end business doing really well. But at the same time, what you see is the middle middle, you know, upper middle, middle and lower middle, not doing so well. Why? Because they've been squeezed for five years, right? They've been, you know, they've had wage growth, but real wage growth has been negative. And that's because while they've had wage growth, everything they need to do to live, rent, gas prices, energy, food, you know, go to the grid, all the normal things that normal people need to do to live, you know, I've gone up more. And so, you know, and, you know, coming out of COVID, the government just pumped so much money in the system, it sort of clouded it a bit because you had a consumer had more money, but that's sort of been burned off. And now it's sort of like back to normal. And you have them, you know, have a middle class, the middle of the market that's saying like, I don't feel so good. Like, I, yeah, I'm not, I don't, I don't have. And so they're acting accordingly. Now that doesn't mean the business is terrible. It just means, you know, the middle of the, the middle market business is sort of like, I would say flat to, you know, really modestly down. And that's what's going on. And then you have the things that you're suggesting inbound international down. It's a relatively small part of the business, government business, by the way, down. Yeah. I'm also a small part of the business, but the dose thing's real and government travel is meaningfully down. And so all those things, I think, sort of puts you in a place where there's a lot of uncertainty. And you haven't, the trade stuff is still sort of playing out. There's a lot of uncertainty. People are, you know, a little bit, you know, on edge. And it's showing up in results. And like, but at the moment, but okay, I underline but my view in the next two or three years, again, lifting up above it all is, is very positive. You know, I mean, I'm positive. I'm optimistic. Yeah, guided by nature. But I actually think this is really hard to debate. So why am I, why am I optimistic? Okay. Number one, inflation is coming down and we'll continue to come down, right? Because the housing component is the largest component of it. It's on a lag and it's coming down. Structurally, inflation is coming down. Interstrates are going to come down. I can't tell you how much they're coming down, right? So, you know, that's good. Tax policy is fixed in known to the next three, four or five years because the bill got done, you know, companies, businesses, individuals, they sort of know where they stand. And that uncertainty is going. You're in one of the biggest deregulatory environments in modern history. That means financial services, manufacturing, energy, and everything else, right? And so think about just financial services, you know, more money, you know, lower capital requirements, more money that needs to be put out, lower interest rates, those, you know, those, those are all really good things. And then you have a productivity boom that's coming, right? You know, they're going to be consequences of it that we need to deal with. But you can't go through any time and history that I'm aware of, where you have massive productivity booms that aren't good for broader economic growth. There's displacement, there's things you need to do, but it's good. And that, that's going to be driven by technology, and particularly the AI complex. On top of all of that, and most importantly for, for our business, you have a huge investment boom that is, that is warming up. And what, what are the components of that? One, that $1.6 trillion, you know, of core infrastructure that got approved under Biden, in the Biden administration, very little of that's been spent. That's coming. Chips act, I think it was $6 or $7 or $800 billion. Oh, yeah. Very little of that has been, been spent. You have the tech companies, you know, vying for their existence by investing in the AI complex. Yeah, that's right. And stuff like that. Do you build them? Yeah, then you, well, then the data centers, the energy complex around it, even if half of that gets a quarter of that gets done, that is a huge investment cycle and a lower, you know, regular, lighter regulatory environment with more money and lower cost in the system. In the next two or three years, it just has to mean good things for our business. The other thing that I'm really happy to say, they think it means good things for our society and the broader economy, meaning this bifurcated, you know, sort of situation that we've had where the rich are doing better in the middle class. That's not sustainable. So in the world that I just described, if I'm right, I think it will be, but you know, time will tell, it will be, it will drive broader economic uptick and growth. It'll drive uptick and growth, but it'll be much broader because all of those thing, the investment, the data centers and chip factories and core infrastructure and all of that is the middle, right? You know, that has to mean that you have much broader based recovery and hopefully that you're finally getting to a place where you have middle class real wage growth. And that gives the middle class, which is the biggest piece of our business and the entire hospitality business more disposable income to do what they want to do, which is to travel and have experiences. They haven't, they're desired to do those things, hasn't diminished. It's just there. Yeah, their capacity to do it has. The last question on because you talked about AI and one, do you use AI yourself or are you using CAD, TBT type type? Yeah, I am. I haven't, I do. I've been exploring a lot. I mean, inside the company, we're doing tons of work as you might guess, with AI. I mean, I think we have 41 real use cases that are ongoing. I mean, we've been using it for a long time and certain areas of HR and finance and particularly revenue management. And so we're just getting more and more sophisticated. You know, at a high level, because we're going to run a time and I thought, I just couldn't do this quickly. I sort of view AI is, you know, at the moment, it'll change, but it's in three big buckets. The first is just, you know, process and efficiency, like doing things better, faster, cheaper. That's one big bucket. The second big bucket is how you go to market, you know, it's sales, marketing, distribution, you know, there's the defense and offense, like making sure you show up in the new, in a new world order, but also taking advantage of the new world order to be more thoughtful, more precise with all the data that you can use and the agents you can build. And then the third big bucket, they all excite me, but the third excites me the most is just CX customer experience, like the ability and we're already bringing it to life in real ways, because we have a fully modernized tech stack of how do you enable the teams you have on property with the tools to be able to deliver in the moment, you know, even better customized experiences for guests across all hotels, you know, Hampton or Waldorf Astoria. And how do you give them the information and the tools to be able to solve problems again in the moment? It's sort of hard other than with, you know, in the old days, other than people on the front desk or coming down and screaming at people like, you know, to know in today's world, we already have it. We have enough, I must say we have 100% of the information. We have a large part now of the information we need with, you know, our, you know, our ability to scrape unstructured data and social media, our, you know, enterprise-wide messaging capabilities. We have the real ability to know like what people want when they want it, when they have a problem, how to fix it. And we have an ecosystem technologically to be able to actually create, you know, an action out of it, which, you know, again, in our world, we're serving hundreds of millions of people a year. It's like how do you enable hotels and teams with tools so that they can very systematically, you know, and consistently be able to respond to people, customize the experience or respond to very unique individual problems. Five years ago, you couldn't do it because you didn't, these sort of tools didn't exist. Today they do. And so I, you know, we are super excited about the, and I'm of the belief we could revolutionize how we customize on property experience. Love it. Last question, but one word answer. In five years from now, 2030, would you have less employees or more employees based on what the scenario they just told me? More. A lot more. Well, to think about it, we're opening almost two hotels a day. And while there will inevitably be some efficiencies that get garnered over time, the real ideas to like, you know, have those people then, you know, they don't do the root nice things focus more on the bespoke elements of the job. And so I think it's sort of like what people are doing. I mean, I would guess there's there going to be efficiencies, but then, but a lot of it will be repurposing. And then the other part of when you're opening that many hotels, they take people. Like, there is no world where we're a business of people serving people. There is no world I see in my lifetime. And I hope it's long from here where the like the bots aren't running. The bots aren't running our business. So we're, you know, we're going to open 100, you know, we're going to open 600 hotels this year 700. Well, you know, we can people. So we'll be we'll be not just bigger. We'll be a lot bigger people less. Well, thank you, Chris. That was fascinating wide ranging. We could go on for hours. We didn't. I could. I hope somebody's interested in it, but at less than I, I really appreciate it. It's really fun to do. Great conversation. Hopefully to get you on the stage again.