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Interview with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ); COVID-19 Pandemic Continues to Worsen; Interview with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired December 10, 2020 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:30:00]

SEN. ROBERT MENENDEZ (D-NJ): I would expect that he would absolutely not interfere with any probe.

Look, the reality is, is that question even comes to light because we have seen a Justice Department so politicized and so perverse instead of being the Department of Justice for the American people. I would expect that President Biden will create a clear wall between the executive and the Department of Justice on all these matters, and that the attorney general, whoever he or she may be that gets picked, will ultimately pursue justice no matter where it leads.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Another topic -- and this is ongoing -- the president-elect has nominated retired General Lloyd Austin to be his secretary of Defense. That would require -- as you well know -- a waiver because he has not been out of uniform for seven years yet. You supported that waiver for General Mattis in 2016, will you do the same for retired General Austin?

MENENDEZ: Well, I did so after a conversation with General Mattis then, and I would look forward to a conversation with General Austin about how he sees the role of the secretary of defense considering his past service, and how he sees it now as he will be a civilian when he ultimately takes that position, should he be confirmed.

So I'd like to have that conversation first, but in and of itself I don't have a -- you know, an ideological bar against the possibility.

SCIUTTO: Final question, because a number of Democrats have said they will not vote for that waiver. Is his nomination in danger, in your view?

MENENDEZ: No, I think it's not. I appreciate, you know, the proposition of civilian control of our military, I think it's one of the essential elements. Of course, you know, he will be a civilian when it comes to the moment of being considered as the secretary of Defense.

And I think that, you know, we saw General Mattis, who I did support, I thought he did an extraordinary job, he even pushed back against President Trump at critical times, showed that he was willing to act on behalf of the best interests of the people of the United States in terms of their national security.

So I don't think that it should be an automatic by any stretch of the imagination. Every issue depends upon the facts and circumstances before you.

SCIUTTO: Senator Robert Menendez, thanks so much for joining the program this morning.

MENENDEZ: Always good to be with you, thank you.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Well, a hospital in Nevada converted their parking garage into a COVID-19 health care center, 700 hospital beds now fill the parking spots. We're going to take you inside, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:37:22]

HARLOW: Hospitals all over the country continue to struggle every day just to try to keep up with the increasing number of COVID patients.

SCIUTTO: Yes, it's getting worse, levels we have not seen throughout this pandemic. A hospital in Reno, Nevada, so overwhelmed now, they are now running a coronavirus unit out of a parking garage.

President Trump called this makeshift unit "fake," but CNN's Sara Sidner went inside. It was very real, and she joins us now. Sara, tell us what you saw there.

SARA SIDNER, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Jim and Poppy, you're seeing it from the outside, just a simple parking garage, you'd never notice the difference except for the fact that when you walk into the ground floor, it is transformed into a COVID ward.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SIDNER (voice-over): Dr. Jacob Keeperman is mustering all his mental and physical strength as another wave of COVID-19 patients show up in the intensive care unit at his hospital. Everyone here has been going nonstop for months.

SIDNER (on camera): What was your worst day?

JACOB KEEPERMAN, MEDICAL DIRECTOR, RENOWN TRANSFER AND OPERATIONS CENTER: So my worst day this pandemic was actually the day I posted the tweet, thanking my teammates. I had just finished a seven-day stretch in the intensive care unit. There had been patient after patient after patient who was not surviving this illness.

SIDNER: The tweet he sent was a simple selfie, showing off their new COVID-19 wing. That wing? Set up in the hospital parking garage. That fact seemed to set President Trump off, who retweeted a tweet calling it fake and a scam. That unleashed the Twitter trolls.

KEEPERMAN: I was sad and devastated and I was angry. SIDNER: Devastated and angry because all of the hard work being done

by his colleagues inside this parking garage hospital every single day, from the food staff to the CEO.

ANTHONY SLONIM, PRESIDENT AND CEO, RENOWN HEALTH: This is not fake. This is as real as it gets.

SIDNER: The idea was conceived and executed months ago, but during this COVID surge, patients are now parked in the spaces instead of cars.

SIDNER (on camera): The number of coronavirus cases in Washoe County, Nevada that this hospital services has exploded. This week, there are actually 10 times the number of COVID-19 cases than there were just a couple of months ago, so the hospital had to do whatever it takes to find more bed space. And so here we are on floor G of the parking garage.

[10:40:06]

JANET BAUM, NURSING MANAGER, ALTERNATE CARE SITE: It was scary. You know, we don't expect to go to work and be working out of a parking garage. We've made it a hospital, so we don't even consider it a garage any more.

SIDNER: Did you ever think that in America they would have to treat people in a parking lot?

ROSALIA MARTINEZ, CORONAVIRUS PATIENT: I apologize for what I'm going to say. When they started building this, I laughed.

SIDNER: Making a dusty, dirty parking garage into a sanitary space seemed laughable, but then she ended up hospitalized here.

R. MARTINEZ: People don't realize how bad this is, the pain, how you feel, the not being able to breathe. That's one of the worst things that I ever had to experience in my life.

SIDNER: A few days later, he husband of 35 years was also hospitalized with COVID.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I thought, you know, she's going to die.

SIDNER: After spending days in isolation with no visitation, they found each other again, parked just four beds apart in the parking garage.

R. MARTINEZ: He coughs at nighttime, I can hear him. And if I yell, he can hear me. He knows that I'm still alive.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SIDNER (on-camera): The Martinezes are the sweetest couple, they smiled the whole time because they finally got to sit with one another, and now they're going to be able to recover together. They are expected, actually, to be released from the hospital in the next couple of days or so.

And I just wanted to share this one more thing with you, Jim and Poppy. The CEO and president of Renown Health here said that this parking garage behind me is very special to him, and this particular COVID ward has a special meaning. Because the day that it opened, he got a phone call: His father had passed away. His father was in New Jersey, where he's from. He died of COVID-19 -- Poppy, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Folks, it's (ph) hitting (ph) real people at home every day. We hear those stories on this broadcast every day. Sara Sidner, thanks so much for bringing us some of those stories.

HARLOW: Thank you.

SCIUTTO: Well, this just in. This morning, the president-elect has now named two picks for two roles, and they're two familiar faces: Denis McDonough has been tapped to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs. McDonough is a longtime chief of staff to former President Barack Obama.

Biden has also chosen former national security adviser Susan Rice to lead the White House Domestic Policy Council.

[10:42:45]

HARLOW: All right, well, this pandemic has devastated so much including, obviously, the travel industry. But Airbnb is bouncing back in a huge way as it goes public today. How did they do it? The CEO is here, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HARLOW: Well, 12 years ago, three roommates had an idea: rent out their apartment for a few nights and make some extra cash. Well, that idea became Airbnb, and then the company took a huge hit as the pandemic hit and brought travel to a screeching halt.

But now, this morning, it is the comeback story and the comeback kid. Airbnb has just gone public and, wow, it looks like an enormous debut. Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky joins me now.

Brian, wow, stunning. It -- we talked in June, and you were in a dire situation, the company was. How do you explain going from that to what looks like it could be $100 billion debut today?

BRIAN CHESKY, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, AIRBNB: It's -- I could have never imagined, in January, where we would be in June with very difficult circumstances, and then now to get here. I think there's kind of two explanations.

The first one is, you know, people still do yearn to travel and, you know, after months of being stuck inside, people did want to go in cars and they wanted to travel nearby and they wanted to stay places longer, and so they chose homes, and they chose homes on Airbnb. And so it really just shows our model is really adaptable. But I'm also reminded of something that my dad used to tell me growing

up, and I had to tell myself this a lot during the depths of, like, our dark days. He said things are never quite as good as they seem and as bad as they seem. And you kind of have to remind yourself of that, to kind of find the midpoint between these highs and lows.

HARLOW: There you go, keeps you humble even through a debut like it looks like it's going to be today.

CHESKY: Yes.

HARLOW: There was a lot of pain for you guys, including the, you know, 1,900 people you had to lay off over the summer --

CHESKY: Yes.

HARLOW: -- that's 25 percent of your workforce, so today's got to be a bit bittersweet because they can't share totally in all of this. I know many of them got to keep their shares. But I just wonder, I keep thinking if this IPO goes as well as it looks like it's going to, can you hire some of them -- all of them -- back?

CHESKY: Yes, absolutely. I mean, quite a lot of them have other jobs now, and I presume that many of those people are happy in those jobs. But when we had to do the layoff, which was absolutely the most difficult decision I or any CEO really has to ever make, we published a directory. We allowed employees to opt in, saying we'll publish your information online if you'd like, and then we can point recruiters to you.

And we did that. Over a thousand employees opted in, and more than 500,000 people visited their profile. So quite a few people got hired -- not all of them, but we would absolutely welcome people back. And so yes, I -- you know, I want to see how the storm continues to play out, but absolutely.

[10:50:10]

HARLOW: Yes. Well, that's a big deal for any of them who are listening.

Is the travel industry forever changed? Like, does business travel ever go back to what it was, do people ever go back to the way they used to travel and where they used to stay?

CHESKY: Well, I don't think the world ever goes back to January. And if that's true, I don't think travel goes back to January. Now, it doesn't mean travel's over, it doesn't mean business travel's over.

But I do think there's going to be a major (INAUDIBLE) shift from business travel to leisure travel, because obviously a world with Zoom is a world of flexibility. It's a world where you don't necessarily need to get on a plane for a single meeting, and so I think a number of people are going to decide, I'm more flexible. And maybe they'll actually live more remotely, work-from-home could be theoretically work from any home. So I think you're going to see a general (INAUDIBLE) shift away from

concentrating into tourist districts and a lot of business travel. But business travel's still going to be around. So long as people are in business, they're going to meet. And the travel industry's going to be just fine, but it's going to have to be different because the world's going to be different.

HARLOW: Sure, it is. And here's one big question I had for you guys when I thought about this today. Your announcement, this comes on the same day that the FDA may grant authorization for the first COVID vaccine in this country, that would be huge. Are you thinking about mandating vaccination for anyone that wants to stay in or rent out on Airbnb? Proof of vaccination? It seems like it would keep people a lot safer and healthier.

CHESKY: Well, these are great questions. And you know, we actually hired the former assistant general of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy. He's actually now the co-chair of the COVID task force --

(CROSSTALK)

HARLOW: Right.

CHESKY: -- for (ph) President-elect Biden. And so Dr. Murthy worked with us on a lot of health and safety guidelines.

One of the first things we implemented was an enhanced cleaning protocol, which is basically new standard of cleanliness guidelines for hosts. More than a million hosts have opted into it.

And so we've tried to just use the guidelines through Dr. Vivek Murthy. We have other experts, and we will continue to evolve these guidelines as we -- you know, as we learn more.

HARLOW: So maybe a mandate for vaccines, something you're thinking about?

CHESKY: Well, we're -- I don't want to speculate on things that would --

HARLOW: Yes.

CHESKY: -- involve people's health, but I will say that we are working with the experts, and we want to be a standard for health and cleanliness.

HARLOW: New Year's Eve, for example, you guys are cracking down with new rules. And I ask this because there are some who don't love Airbnb as neighbors, right? They talk about a revolving door, people, it worries them during a pandemic, about a spread. How do you enforce that and what do you say to those folks as they watch this offering?

CHESKY: What I would tell people is we want to strengthen the communities we're in, we do not want to be bad neighbors. And we know that there are people who abuse our platform. And so we want to be proactive, we want to get in front of it. We've tried our hardest to do that.

We have instilled a party ban, we've increased risk detection, we've limited people -- for example under the age of 25 to be able to book single stays in their own city for a night. We've continued to try to clamp down. We're now taking legal action against guests who throw parties and have a huge amount of damage, just as a deterrent. So we take this issue really, really seriously.

HARLOW: So, Brian, you count among your mentors in this process the former president Barack Obama; Warren Buffett, who famously said in 2015 he wished that he had the idea for Airbnb, which is quite a statement coming from him. What is the best piece of advice either or both of them have given you in the last few months?

CHESKY: Warren Buffett, I'll tell you a quick story. One day I got to meet Warren Buffett -- the first time I met him was at a conference, and actually I was with him and Jeff Bezos. And in front of Warren Buffett, I asked Jeff Bezos -- because I knew that Warren also, like, mentored Jeff -- I asked, what's the best piece of advice Warren ever gave you?

And Jeff Bezos recounted this story. He said, one day, I called up Warren Buffett and I just -- I said, Warren, your investment thesis is so simple, why don't more people copy you? And Warren replied, because nobody wants to get rich slow. In other words, I think we're so focused on quick hits, overnight successes. And many of them -- including in Warren's case -- are decades in the making.

And the only other thing I'd just say is with regards to the president, one of the things he said is, it's just really important, before you go public, that you institutionalize your intentions so that even as a public company you can, you know, minimize what conflicts with your vision.

And so I think just, you know, trying to be really thoughtful about the kind of company we want to become.

HARLOW: That advice, coming from President Obama, I hadn't heard that from him before. Brian Chesky, it's a big day for you guys. I'm glad your mom no longer has to worry about her art major son having health insurance, you've done pretty well for yourself. Good luck.

CHESKY: Thank you very much, Poppy.

HARLOW: Jim.

SCIUTTO: Yes, least of their worries now.

HARLOW: Right?

[10:54:49]

SCIUTTO: Well, one random act of kindness at a Dairy Queen led to a chain reaction that was two days and hundreds of cars long. This will make you smile.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: Welcome back. Well, a Dairy Queen in Minnesota, home state of my colleague here --

HARLOW: The best state.

SCIUTTO: -- may have hit a new record for one of the longest acts of spontaneous kindness. The store manager in Brainerd says one man decided to pay for the car behind him. Then what happened? The next car paid for the car behind them.

[11:00:01]

HARLOW: That's what we call Minnesota nice. And so on and so on, until the chain reaction lasted nearly two days.