59: Joe Gebbia - Design We Deserve

Joe Gebbia (0:00)

I don't think people deserve mediocre. Why would you put something mediocre in the world, especially at the nation level? Is that how we respect Americans? Airbnb could not have launched years earlier. The internet had to grow up to prepare for Airbnb. I remember we were in the apartment when we were 10 employees, and the early engineer gets a phone call. He goes, oh, hey, okay, go to the top right. Yeah, click where it says profile. No, no, no, go back a page. No, no, mom, mom, go back. We all looked at each other and we go, guys, if our moms can't figure out how to use our website, this will never become a mainstream company. Now in the government, it's different because it's not just moms. Actually upgraded and we operate the team that has to be grandma friendly. We've come up with not another website, not another way of bureaucracy, but entirely new front door to the United States. It's called America.gov. Whoa, taking 29,000 entry points and saying, let's just make one. It's the front door, you just tell us what you need and we, meaning the government, go get it done for you.

Jackson Dahl (0:53)

To take that literally, like, is it like a Google or Chatchity style text box?

Joe Gebbia (0:56)

Yes.

Jackson Dahl (0:57)

One, people don't trust the government Two, people don't trust AI. How do you increase the likelihood of people really getting the upside of what you're describing?

Joe Gebbia (1:05)

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 it, their platform. In some ways, there's parallel of having to navigate through a gap in trust. 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 Dahl (1:27)

Welcome to Dialectic Episode 59 with Joe Gebbia.

Joe is the first Chief Design Officer of the United States and leads the National Design Studio which was created via executive order by President Trump in August 2025 Joe is about a year in and he and his team are leading a modernization of so many of the interfaces and systems that Americans use to access government services. And that includes the recently announced America.gov, a central entry point for accessing information from the government. America.gov is a chatbot style interface with LLMs under the hood, including Rampart, a privacy preserving open weight model that the NDS developed earlier this year. We talk about that as well as many of the other things the NDS has worked on, from Trump Rx to Trump accounts to RealFood.gov or the New Food Pyramid, as well as the early work Joe did to modernize and speed up the federal retirement application process. Joe is also the co-founder of Airbnb and Samara.

We had a conversation about why design matters, how he thinks about designing for trust, and the scale and stakes of a role that serves every American and that has a ticking time clock associated with it. I hope you enjoy the conversation and are inspired to think about how you might serve others or your country. If you enjoy the conversation, please share it with a friend. I'll also link to America.gov, the transcript, and everything else we discuss in the description. Before we get into the things, I would like to thank Notion, Dialectics presenting partner. Notion has become something like a Switzerland in the crazy era of AI that we are in. As new models release constantly, and new capabilities and agents are always available, Notion acts as a context and consolidation layer for all of the ways you and your team work with AI and agents.

By sharing and storing context, skills via the Skills API, and all of the other ways that you work with AI, Notion can be a command center, control hub, or simply a resilience layer, so that even if you change the AI model or product you're using, your context can come along with you. You can also work with agents right from within Notion, whether that be custom agents that you create there, workers via Notion's developer platform, or tagging other agents you work with across various tools. OpenAI also just announced that you can sign in with OpenAI right within Notion to use your credits there, and I suspect that will follow for many other services. I don't think the capability ramp on what these tools and agents can do is going to slow down anytime soon, so it's great to have a single place in my workflow that doesn't change. Notion is that hub where all of my context lives. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.