The Hotdog Effect: Secrets of the World’s #1 Restaurants - Will Guidara - #1076

I started listening to emo music when I was 12 and 13, like everybody else, except I never

grew out of it, so I'm permanently in band t-shirts that 14-year-old me would think

a sick.

Isn't that one of the greatest forms of success if 14-year-old you would be proud of

you now?

14-year-old you thinks that you're cool.

14-year-old you is saying, gosh, he's like, he's done something.

He's done something with himself, but he's still wearing the bare-tooth t-shirt.

What do you think 14-year-old you would say about you?

I think 14-year-old me would be pretty psyched.

I mean, man, when I was 12, I wanted to be in restaurants.

It's literally the only thing I ever wanted to do when I was a kid, and so for 14-year-old

me to see that I did that at the absolute highest level and then somehow managed to find

another life to carve out for myself afterwards, I think you'd be pretty impressed.

What a cool concept of what would 14-year-old you think about adult you, basically the ultimate

gauge of whether or not your life's gone well, not what do the people in your industry

think of you, not even actually what do your parents think of you, but what would 14-year-old

you think of you?

Or your spouse or your friends or all of those things are important?

I think it's important to show up for the people that you care about and try to make sure

that they're excited to have you in their lives.

I mean, to this day, I want to make my dad proud based on the relationship I have with

him, but and honestly, until I made the joke about your bare-tooth t-shirt, I'm not sure

I've actually gone down this road before, which is...

Me neither.

I mean, 14-year-old me, his opinion of me is as important as anyone's opinion of me.

Hey, with AI, you might be able to cement a 14-year-old version of you that you could

just check in with as a performance coach every so often.

You're not playing enough Xbox.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, what do you think?

Was that good?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know exactly what you mean.

That trajectory that we all end up on and the way that we get captured by the opinions

of people who, in many ways, we should.

I think there's kind of two categories of people with this.

There's one who don't serve others enough, sort of don't care enough about the way that

they're contributing to those around them, the opinions of people, the egotists, the

narcissists, the obsessives that don't take it outside input.

But then there's another group of people who care way too much about what other people

think.

And I get the sense that a lot of people that rise to the top of their careers are actually

in the latter camp rather than the former, that they're trying to please, they're trying

to...

For sure.

...that only I can make myself enough that in the world we'll see.

And is this okay?

Am I okay?

Do these people, do I look okay to them and are they responding to me in the way that

I want?

And also when you start to achieve some level of success, am I continuing to earn it?

Is this...

Am I doing everything I need to do to make sure that people aren't second-guessing whether

I was meant to be where I now?

Like all that stuff.

Gold, not a listen room.

Do you know what's interesting?

You were talking about 14-year-old me versus now me.

I was on the Zoom with some friends who have a company and they're going through this

inflection point where they started up about six years ago and now they're starting to

gain some real traction.

They're growing.

And one of the things they said to me is, it's time...

We need to grow up.

And I stopped them.

I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

It was like, can I offer a different perspective on that?

They're like, yeah, go ahead.

I said, I don't think you should ever grow up.

I just think you all need to learn how to act like an adult when you need to.

And as a time of 14-year-old me versus now me, I'd like to think that if that me was

impressed with me now, it's that I don't think I've actually ever fully grown up.

I've just gotten good at learning when I need to be an adult in a room.

And I hope I never grow up because what I love about not feeling like your grown-up

is that I still see so much wonder in the world, like that child-like feeling of wonder

that comes from everything feeling just a little bit magical, from taking what you do

seriously, but not taking yourself so seriously that you can't just relish in those moments.

That's something that I fight to hold on to.

You can speak adult in the right room, but you're pretending, you're lapping as an adult.

Your cosplaying as an adult, but it's equally distilled in so.

Or you're genuinely an adult, but you still enjoy those moments like a kid.

No, go for it.

I'm just, you sort of saying that you knew that you wanted to be in restaurants when you

were 12, and then you end up having the number one ranked restaurant in the entire world.

By design, there can only be a very small bucket of people that go from that dream to that

reality.

What is it that separated you apart?

How did you get interested in unreasonable hospitality?

I mean, I give a great deal of the credit to my dad.

My dad was my hero growing up.

My dad, my best friend, my greatest mentor for a bunch of different reasons, but close

to the top of that list was that when I was a kid, my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer,

and went on to become a quadriplegic, but the time I was like nine or ten, and my dad,

he would work restaurant hours, which anyone familiar with this industry knows, that's

a lot of hours.

He was a great dad to me, but then he would also legitimately care for her, like get her

out of bed, put her in her wheelchair, wash her, feed her.

And so this was just the guy.

I just wanted to be like him.

Whatever he did for a living, that was likely the thing that I would have wanted to do.

And because of how much I've always held him in such high esteem, I really, I had the

wherewithal did just let him guide my career for a very long time.

I knew I wanted to be in restaurants.

I knew I wanted to go to Cornell to study hospitality.

I knew I wanted to open a restaurant in New York City, but he really made me approach

that in a very incremental way.

I worked in kitchens of some of the best restaurants in America.

I started as a bus boy, a dishwasher.

I did all of the steps all the way through.

That's how I fell in love with restaurants, but how I fell in love with hospitality is

different because for me, I think everything can be hospitality.

Restaurants were just the mechanism that I pursued that craft through.

And I fell in love with hospitality through my mom and my dad.

I mean, watching him care for her and never once feeling bad for himself, but to the contrary.

Even as a kid, I wouldn't have articulated it this way, but he, he drew joy and pleasure

from getting into care for this woman.

And then as I got older and had the ability to start chipping in and being a part of the

team as I fed her or as I cared for her.

To this day, I will say there are a few things more energizing for me than when I get to

look, see the look on someone else's face when they've received a gift I'm responsible

for giving them.

And I think I felt that for the first time caring for her.

And then I got to work for Danny Meyer, who's like the greatest hospitality restaurant

her ever.

And through him, he gave me the foundation upon which everything I've built was was set

upon.

What did you learn from him?

To those two fundamental things, one, when I was coming up, chefs were cool.

The dining room guy, no one, no one cared about the dining room guys except for Danny.

And I think it's important to have someone who is cool and celebrated, who's good at

the thing that you want to be good at.

So you have someone to aspire to one day, want to be.

That's not something I learned from him, but that's one of the things that made him so

appealing to me.

He was like a goal post, I was like, gosh, I want to be like that guy.

But if the many things I learned from him, one, the entire framework of how he built

his culture was something he called enlightened hospitality, which you take care of the

people that work with you first and then the customer.

And it's the most scalable and thoughtful approach to take and running a business.

If I invest in the people on my team, they're going to be well equipped to turn around and

pay that investment forward.

But the other thing I learned from him that I will never, I will try to never stop embodying

is the power of language.

Danny is a master of these isms, these short, succinct articulations of his core values.

And in creating these things, it's a meta-signal to everyone of the team that those things

mattered to him and by definition needed to matter to all of us and gave us an established

shorthand to use, amongst one another, to reaffirm these ideas, whether it was the swan,

who was the thing we'd always talk about, how you move through a room, you're elegant

on the top.

And it's better the fact that your feet might be kicking like crazy beneath the surface.

Constant gentle pressure.

This idea that if you want to be the best, you are constantly pushing those around you

to be better, but you push them gently when you had so many of these things, but people

always say actions speak louder than words and they do, but words matter.

And I think too many people invest too little time finding the right ways to articulate

what matters to them.

And in doing so, aren't communicating their ideas clearly enough to the people around

them.

Okay, so you managed to get from 12-year-old dreamer to bus boy, pot washer, service lad,

all the way up to working under Danny Meyer.

And then there's still even further to go, because the difference between no restaurant

and an okay restaurant and an okay restaurant and the best restaurant in the world, most

of the journey is ahead of you once you've got the restaurant.

Yes.

You know, my dad, he gave me this paperweight when I was a kid.

I still have it on my desk today on it.

It says, what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

And I freaking love that question.

I believe it can call you to greatness if you let it.

I mean, listen, when I went to work out of the Madison Park for Danny Meyer, I bought

the restaurant from him a few years later.

And I was only meant to be there for a year or so, because at that point in my career,

I did not like fine dining.

I didn't like the idea that I, as a hospitality person, as a dining room guy, increasingly

found myself trying to convince the chef that what I cared about mattered as much as what

they cared about.

And so Danny offered me this job to go to the Madison and I said, yes, I'll do it for

a year, but then I want to run Shake Shack.

And he agreed.

And I did it, but a year in, I had already started to realize that just because it was

that way and other fine dining restaurants, it didn't need to be that way in hours.

And I found myself having fun delivering this like really, really high-end level of service,

because we had created this space where we were challenging how things had been done

and bringing a more casual, modern sensibility to the experience.

And that really started to work for us.

We were maniacally focused on excellence, but doing it in a way that was enjoyable.

And eventually we got four stars from the New York Times, we got three Michelin stars,

and then we got added to the list of the 50 best restaurants.

And I went there so excited, and that first year we came in last place.

And some would say, yeah, you're number 50 in the entire world.

In that room, we were last.

And that's just how I'm wired.

That was the perspective I had on that moment.

And my dad always says adversity is a terrible thing to waste.

You can't control what happens to you always, but you can control what you let it teach

you, how you let it fuel your competitive spirit.

That night, I wrote down on a cocktail napkin, we will be number one.

Yet a goal without a strategy is nothing more than a pipe dream.

I think you needed to articulate what the impact would be.

And at that point, every restaurant that had been number one was run by a chef, people

who were unreasonable.

In pursuit of the food they were serving, relentless, in pursuit of innovation, what new

ingredients, techniques, all that.

And that night, we made the choice.

We were going to be unreasonable, but in pursuit of people.

And relentless in pursuit of the one thing that will never change, which is our basic

human desire to feel seen, to feel cared for, to feel sensible longing.

And so underneath, we will be number one of the world.

I wrote those two words unreasonable hospitality and took a long time to get there, but that

became the thing that ultimately got us to the top.

What is the difference between service and hospitality, between simply making amazing

food and making people feel seen?

So I think it's a great question because far too many people conflate service and hospitality

as being one of the same, and the extent to which you understand they are two very different

things, I think has a lot to do with the approach you take to work and to life.

And one of the best answers I ever got to that question, what's the difference between

service and hospitality with service is black and white, hospitality is color.

Service is the thing that you do.

In my world, it's getting the right plate of food to the right person within the right

moment of time.

Hospitality is the extent to which that person feels a connection to you, feels seen by

you, feels sensible longing, feels genuinely welcomed.

There's this quote, it's my favorite about hospitality, many people have heard it, it's

from Maya Angelou.

She said, people will forget what you say, they will forget what you do, but they will

never forget how you made them feel.

And I believe that to be so very true, when I think and I'd imagine it's the same for

you, back on the experiences that linger with me, it's not because of some little thing

that someone did for me or played a food that was served to me, it's about something

that a human being did for me that made me feel some level of genuine connection to

them and the experience, those are the things that I remember.

Unreasonable hospitality is recognizing that to be true and choosing to be as relentless

and creative and willing to do whatever it takes and pursuit of that, how you make

people feel as relentless as most successful people are and pursuit of whatever product

or service they're selling.

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Okay, so you're in this room with 49 other restaurants who have been here and presumably

there was some that served food that was better than you could have even served.

There was access to ingredients because maybe New York doesn't have this particular access

to the level of freshness or something, a chef that's at once in a generation talent,

a dessert that you can only get in this particular region of the whatever, whatever.

What were the big levers that you did pull on?

What were the practical things that you did that made the biggest difference from 50 to

number one?

There were a few things and they all center around this idea that I think when people think

about hospitality, they think, all right, I seem to hire nice people and encourage them to be nice

and I just don't believe that to be true. I believe you can pursue it and systemize it and

create conditions for it to thrive. The first thing we did was just look at the entire journey

that we were extending to our customers every single little touch point.

In the same way that a chef obsesses over every ingredient on the plate,

we obsessed over every moment of interaction, identifying each one of them and then once we had,

we got to dream about how we could make as many of them more awesome as humanly possible.

I found that in any experience that someone serves, if you can elevate some of the most overlooked

touch points, it can have the greatest impact on the experience as a whole.

So whether it was how people were greeted when they walked through the door,

normally going to a restaurant, there's someone standing behind a physical barrier,

bathed in the glow of an iPad screen. They say, do you have a reservation code? Do you belong here?

And if you do, they turn to the person to the side and say, take them to table 43 and you're

carted through the room like cattle. I compare that to what it feels like when you come to my house

for dinner. Did I throw open the door? I greet you by name. I give you a hug. I welcome you in.

And so we spent an unbelievable amount of time and energy creating something that looked

rather effortless, which was moving a podium around the corner. There was just a person standing there

when you walked in. They had memorized every name that was coming in 15 minutes later. Google

everyone's pictures. If you ever had your picture on the internet, we knew what you looked like.

There was sign language between that person or the person behind the screen. It just felt like

you were engaging with a friend and then being walked into the room. I think in any experience,

we used to talk about it. We'd articulate it as we needed to earn in formality.

Genuine connection happens the moment the other person lets their guard down and that happens

normally in a less formal environment. But yet someone walks into a restaurant like that and

their guard is up. They might be a little bit intimidated. That might be their first big expensive

meal. They might have worked really, really hard to get that reservation. Everything we did

was very meticulous and intentional to get people to let their guards down, to feel genuinely at

home. You know that moment when you are getting to know your partner's dad and you call them

Mr. so-and-so and then eventually they say, hey, call me by my first name. That's the moment you

know that you've been invited in. We tried to very intentionally get to that point with our

guests as quickly as possible so that we'd have as much time to develop a genuine relationship with

them. That's one, like really looking at the experience and identifying every opportunity we could

just to make it a little bit more awesome, more fun, more connective, more genuine.

But then what we realized and there's the story in the book about a hot dog which is a big breakthrough

moment for me. I was in the dining room on a busier than normal lunch service and I was helping out

the team by clearing dirty plates. I found myself clearing appetizers from a table of four. They

were foodies, Europeans on vacation to New York City just to eat at great restaurants. In fact,

this was their last meal. They were going straight to the airport from the restaurant to head back

home. While I was there, I overheard them talking about the trip and they were raving about it.

They've been to Le Bernadin and Danielle and Jean Georges, all the four star restaurants and now

11 Madison Park. But then one woman jumped in and said, yeah, but you know what, we never got to

have a New York City hot dog. And it was one of those light pulled moments. I ran to the kitchen,

dropped off the plates, ran outside, grabbed a hot dog, ran back inside, then came the hard part,

which was convincing my fancy chef to actually serve it in our restaurant. But eventually he did,

and he cut the hot dog up into four perfect pieces, put one on each plate, added a little swish

of ketchup, one of mustard, a little scoop of sauerkraut, one of relish, topped it off with like a

micro herb or something to make it look fancy. And then before their final savory course, which at

the time was our honey lavender glazed muscovy duck that had been dry aged for two weeks.

I brought out what we in New York called a dirty water dog to the table.

And I explained it. I said, hey, I overheard you talking. We couldn't let you go home with any

culinary regrets. Here's that hot dog. And dude, they freaked out. I mean, at that point in my

career, I'd worked in some of the best restaurants in America. I'd served tens of millions of dollars

worth of lobster and wagyu beef. I had never seen anyone react to anything. I'd served them like

they did to that hot dog. And you know, athletes are always going to the tapes and they've had a bad

game to see what they did wrong to try to make sure they don't repeat those mistakes. We all need to

get better at going to the tapes when we've had a good game to see what we did well to make sure

we keep on doing that thing. I think that's how you put intention to intuition. And so we went to

the hot dog. What happened? There's just a few simple things. It just required being present,

caring so much about them that I didn't care about anything else I needed to do.

Required taking what we were doing seriously, but not ourselves so seriously,

that we were unwilling to do something that to others would feel off brand. And required this idea

that genuine hospitality is one size fits one. And we resourced that. We added a position to our

team. Someone whose only job was to help other people bring ideas like that to life over the course

of service. And we did the craziest stuff that we talked about that Maya Angelou quote. We're serving

them amazing food. The service was about as close to technically perfect as possible. The dining

room was remarkable, but the thing that people remembered were the things that we did just for

them because we were willing to listen. And then we cared enough to try a little bit harder

to do something with what we heard. What is some of the other most unreasonable things that you've

ever done for a guest? Oh my gosh, we did so many crazy things. One of my favorites is there was

a family of four from Spain dining with us, parents and their children. We had these big windows.

It started snowing. We learned that it was the kids first time seeing real snow. The dream we were

somehow found a store still open at eight o'clock in our Friday night selling sleds. And when they

left the restaurant, we had an Uber SUV parked out front with sleds in the back, big thermos of hot

chocolate in the front. Jimmy Fallon, after we became number one of the world, he sent us a note

saying first number one in America, now number one in the world, what's next? Space. And he had

dinner with us like a week later. And we had an elevator that went from the first floor to the

second floor. It was an elevator that just went one floor. And halfway through his meal, we brought

him and his friend back to the elevator. And we had these two spacesuits and the elevator opened

up and they went inside and we'd redecorated the entire inside of the elevator, look at his space

shuttle. And all of the buttons were covered over except for one that just had an arrow that said

space. And that's the one that went to the next floor and then you got up there and there was

dry ice and liquid nitrogen and we like replicated space food. Or we did one, there was a couple

dining with us. They just got married at City Hall. Turned out they had a big wedding plant,

but there was drama between the two families. They canceled the wedding. This was now their

big night and they were elated but sad by that fact. The server on her own committed herself to

figuring out what their wedding song would have been. And we slowed down the meal just enough

where they were one of the last tables in the room, which meant most of my team was off the clock.

Rather, they were up in the private dining room having an impromptu staff party, but it was not

their staff party. It was that couple's wedding reception. When they were done, we walked him upstairs,

the month they set foot over the threshold. We played their wedding song, Lovely Day by Bill

Withers. We'd given them the gift of a first dance. And dude, every time we did one of these things,

the restaurant was transformed. I mean, for the people we were serving, obviously.

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slash modern wisdom. What was feeding that just the fact that you're doing something nice for

other people that makes them feel good service, my hospitality, I suppose? Yeah, listen, I think

you get to a certain age and a vast majority of us like giving gifts that the holiday is more

than we like receiving them. Right? Like I like getting gifts, but my favorite gift of you and I

were celebrating something and I spend a lot of time on a gift for you. My favorite gift is when

you open it, if you're genuinely excited about what I gave you, that's a very big gift for me.

And those that don't feel like that, I think they just don't feel like that yet because they've

never fully experienced how good it feels to feel like that. There's investments of energy that

are depleting and I think there are investments of energy that are energizing.

And at least for me, bestowing graciousness upon others always falls into the latter camp.

Why do you think so many companies forget the human element then?

Well, I think far too many companies follow that old adage, what gets measured, gets managed.

What I'm talking about, it's harder to put a ROI to it.

But just because it's harder to calculate the impact of the stuff doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

In fact, in many ways, I believe it matters more. Every company I spend time with is you talk to

the CEO or the president, whoever, they're all trying to identify what is their competitive advantage.

And yet those conversations always center around the strength of the brand or the quality of the

product. But here's the thing, it doesn't just matter how good the product is or how strong the

brand is because eventually and this is not my opinion, it's a fact. Time has proven it to be true.

Someone's going to build a better product. Someone will create a stronger brand.

The only competitive advantage that exists over the long term, I think that comes from hospitality.

From consistently and generously investing in relationships because we all know this,

they take a long time to build and if you build them in the right way, the loyalty you earn takes

a very long time to erode. I think the reason why a lot of companies don't think this way is

because, understandably, they're so focused on today dollars that they're not focused enough

on tomorrow dollars. They're maximizing profits now at the expense of all those that lie ahead.

It's very difficult to growth hack intimacy. It's really hard. There's no way to speed run it.

Your chief growth officer is probably not looking at the intimacy metric.

Yes, but they ought to be. I really do believe there should be another line in the P&L.

Most companies, if you exceed revenue, you're celebrated. If you go below expenses, you are

celebrated. But I think reinvesting in the community, you are there to serve should be a line

in the P&L. If you underspend on that line, you should be penalized because you're reaping future

benefits today and you're selling your future colleagues on the river. Didn't you do some mad stuff

with how closely you looked at your set of accounts as well? Yeah, I call it the rule of 95-5,

which is manage every single dollar like an absolute maniac, 95% of the time. I mean like a

maniac, no expense too small to be poured over. But you do that so that you earn the right to spend

the last 5% foolishly. I put foolishly in air quotes normally because I don't think it's

foolish spending at all. It's all this stuff that I'm talking about. I believe that spending

actually carries the day because it's where you leave people with a lasting impression and a

sense of loyalty and connection to you and the brand that you are trying to create.

What were the things that you were focused on? What were some of the places that you

decided to scrutinize more closely? I mean everything, literally everything.

If anything was 5% over from the month before, we would do a deep dive into it. I think you

need to do that because listen, everything I'm talking about, when I say you need to earn the right

to do it, I mean that in two ways. One, you need to be cognizant enough with how you're managing

your money that you have actual money to invest in this. Obviously, you need to legitimately earn

the money to spend. But two, I think you better earn it because anyone not spending that last 5%

foolishly, I really do believe in the long term is being financially reckless.

But where we went from there, which is cool, is this story as I told you about the

wedding day or the sleds or they're amazing and yet you can't scale them. You need to hear

someone say something, you need to come up with a good enough idea, you need to turn it around

on the fly. You can't do that for as many people as you are invariably doing business with.

But when you're doing something that's not scalable and it's really working, you need to ask

yourself, can I put some level of system behind this? So we did an exercise that I think is

transformational. I call it pattern recognition of recurring moments where we looked not for the

touch points, the things that happen always for everyone, but the things that happen sometimes

for some people as often as once a day, once every week. And by the way, every business has these,

the good ones and the hard ones. And if you can name them in advance, decide what is the coolest

way to respond every time that happens. Invest whatever is required to develop the assets needed for

those reactions. You can start making magic all the time. I'll give you one from my restaurant and

I'll give you a couple from out in the world because I think they're so powerful. And my restaurant

a lot of people got engaged with us, probably happened once, twice a week. And when that happened,

we would pour them free champagne, like most good restaurants would. But once we had identified

that as an opportunity, we said, how do we make this more awesome? Tiffany and co had their

offices across the park one day. I went over there and started knocking on doors until I met

the chief marketing officer eventually convinced me to give me 1000 to those iconic Tiffany blue boxes

each with two champagne flutes in them. Next time someone got engaged, we poured them free

champagne like we always would have, but they wouldn't notice that their glasses looked just a little

bit different from everyone else's glasses. And when they were done, we'd take them away,

wash them dry them, put them back in the box, and at the end of their meal, we'd gift them the

glasses they toasted their engagement to. Was that less special because we had a bunch more in the

back? No. Was it unbelievably easy for our team to deploy? Yeah, all they had to do was go into

the back and grab a box. And I've talked to people who got engaged with us then, who don't remember

a single thing they ate, but they will never forget how we made them feel when we gave them those

glasses. Here's an example from out in the world of a similar thing. Four months ago,

I got in a flight, we pulled away from the jet bridge, and that dreaded announcement comes over

the speaker, ladies and gentlemen, there's something wrong with the plane. We're going to be delayed

here while they figured out. We'll come back to you with more information when we have it. And those

delays are the worst. A, you can't even go get a coffee anymore. B, there's always some dude,

three rows behind you. Let's have that groan of exasperation and the morale on the plane starts

spiraling. But this time, something different happened. The pilot came out of the cockpit. There

were three families on the plane, parents and their kids. Pilot goes up to the first family,

says the kids, hey, you guys want to tour the cockpit? The kids are so excited, which made the people

sitting around them a little bit excited, right? It started to uplift the vibe. Does the same

for the second family? Does the same for the third family? Now there's no more families. We're

still delayed. The pilot just goes into the aisle and says loudly to the cabin. Do any adults

want to tour the cockpit? Adults started taking them up on it. Eventually, we take off.

I'm a student of this stuff, so I asked the flight attendant. I said, hey, what, what was that?

She goes, he's the best. Every time we're delayed on the tarmac, that's what he does.

There's a pain point. You can't control it. This guy recognized that this was something

he could do every time that happened to make it at minimum less painful and at least in the

circumstance that I experienced quite enjoyable. This stuff exists. I guarantee if you look at

your business, there's these recurring moments. If you pick a good one and a bad one,

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like to have the specific server have that idea enough time to be able to reverse engineer what

their first dance was and upstairs is actually this room we can do that. I mean, I'm saying you

should still do that stuff like to be innovative in hospitality. Do unscalable things all the time,

but you can't just do those things. You need to have innovative things that are scalable as well.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about stuff. I'm about to open up my first studio here in Austin

and we've got a bunch of guests coming in. We'll start recording in it pretty soon.

They're thinking about the sort of guest experience, but when they get met and about what it's

like when they leave and we have some pretty cool merch and well, maybe I could give them,

maybe I could give them some merch and maybe we could take a Polaroid and maybe the Polaroid

there could be two copies of it and they could have one and I could we could have one for the wall

and then wouldn't that be cool? So yeah, I mean, we used to do I ran nightclubs for a very long time.

So technically, I was in the hospitality industry except for the fact that nightclubs are the

least hospitable of all of the hospitality industry opportunities. Except that's one where you

derive significant genuine pleasure out of telling people they can't come in. Yeah. Fuck off.

Fuck off to everyone. And one of the things that we did, which was using the peak

androl from Daniel Kahneman, which you're probably familiar with, your time in restaurants,

we realized that we were really great at peaks, but the ends of nights out are almost always

the worst part. Especially you're in the northeast of the UK. You've just spent all of this time

in a club. Maybe you met a guy or a girl and now you've lost them and whatever. I've had a

bit much to drink. I've got work tomorrow. And then you get hit by this sort of wall of freezing

cold wind and rain as you step outside and you're reminded that maybe you need a cabab but maybe

I'm not sure. Where's the can? Where can I get the taxi from? And I'm going to start chanting stuff.

We were in the middle of it's a city and there was residence is everywhere and we got noise

abatement orders all the time because the UK is so parochial in the way that it's put together that

even the noise of your customers leaving the venue is apparently your responsibility.

Anyway, one of the things that we realized was that if we gave out lollipops, just little 10

p lollipops in a big bucket with a nice smiley girl on the door as people were leaving,

it did a ton of things. It stopped them from going to the cabab shop because they thought they

got a little bit of something and actually sobered them up a little bit because they finally got

some glucose in the system that was in the red bowl. It caused them to shut up because they had

something in their mouth and it stopped people from fighting because no two guys wanted to have

a fight while they were sucking on a lollipop. By the way, that is an unbelievable example of the

first thing I was talking about. What is every touch point? Your touch point is leaving, leaving

sucks. How do we make it suck less? If I give them something to suck, yeah. Yeah, second

there. Yeah, it was funny. It was funny. I mean, I tried as I was starting to learn,

I was getting Rory Sutherland pilled and Richard Chotten pilled and understanding consumer behavior.

I tried to implement as much of this as I could. I guess margins, it's in fine dining, it must be

at least somewhat easier because the margins may be a little bit nicer, I guess. But I mean,

we tried. But actually not. People in our industry would say that fine dining has the worst

margins. I've just learned a long time ago that, listen, you spend money somewhere. A lot of

places have big marketing budgets. I think this is the best marketing you can do. You give people

stories like this to tell what do you think they're going to do. They're going to tell them over

and over and over again. And if you spend money on smart marketing, it's going to return itself

to you over and over and over again. Are there any tricks, any hospitality tricks that you've seen

other fine dining places or even well-known restaurants that you experienced and you thought,

fuck, I really wish that I thought of that one. I mean, coming up, there are all sorts of little

things that I think in the beginning, like anyone, when you're building a business and you're trying

to get to a certain level, the best thing you can do is be a really good curator.

Just go around and study other people and if they do something really well, take it and do the same

thing. And if they do something kind of poorly try to do it a little bit better, but that only

gets you to a certain point. Right, then eventually you're doing really well, but you need to start

to develop your own point of view. And I was inspired by Thomas Keller's restaurants and Daniel

Ballood's restaurant, all the big people here and I'd borrow little bits and pieces from each one

of them and that got us honestly onto that list, just last place on the list. Just from that point

that we had to start developing our own stuff. But I will say this, even today, as I travel,

I'm learning so much from different people. This is something I learned from a guy who read my book,

I was inspired by it and tried to figure out a way to put it to work in his world, but his world

is very different from the one I came from. He owns two UPS stores in Sarasota, Florida,

which are not the places anyone would immediately think of as being the most hospitable in the world.

But he wanted to figure out how to put this into practice. And so he came up with an idea and he

shared it with me because he said it transformed his entire culture. He made a rule that everyone that

worked for him, that worked the register. They were required to once a day, one time during their

shift, comp someone's order up to whatever, 30 bucks. That one changed, transformed the culture

of his stores. And it was a win, win, win. It was a win for the person on the receiving end.

Imagine if you went to a UPS store to send something to your mom and they're like,

sir, it's on us today. You can be like, what the fuck is going on? It would blow your mind.

And you would talk about that. You'd be like, dude, the weirdest thing happened. I was the UPS store.

It was a win for the people that worked there. Because listen, I don't care what you do. I don't

believe you can do it well. If you don't feel some level of genuine appreciation for doing it.

And there are places that even the most generous among us aren't necessarily good at showing

appreciation for the people that worked there. And yet, the people that worked there, when they

did comp someone, they're like, oh my gosh, they really appreciated that. This feels great.

Well, it's the freest gift of it, right? It's somebody else is picking up the track for you

gaining the goodwill. Exactly. But that's what led to the third win. Because when he implemented

the rule, they were required to do that. But after they started feeling that level of appreciation,

now they were allowed to do it, but only one time a day. Which meant they had to now

work to more deeply understand everyone that walked through the doors of that store to decide who

deserved it the most. Was it someone having a good day that needed a cherry on top? Was it someone

having a bad day that needed something to go right? Every customer was receiving better service

and hospitality in pursuit of figuring out who was going to get that one gift.

I was thinking about I have this smarter energy drink called Newtonic. And one of the things that

we did for the investors, we raised our first round and you never forget your first. So we got

metal cards made. And these metal cards have got a near-field communication chip in them.

And what all of the investors were told to do is to keep the card in their wallet. And then

if they were ever at a party and the topic of neutropics or brain health or cognitive function or

energy drinks, it's like, oh yeah, you know, I haven't been able to focus so much on my mood to

being a little bit down. I've been thinking about trying to improve my dopamine or I want to get

off using so much caffeine and really whatever. However, it sort of slotted in. They had this gold

card that had their name on an investor and all that they needed to do was take the card. And if

they just tap it on someone's phone, it opens up a website on their phone where they just put

their address in and we ship them a case, ship them one case of everything for free. So it's like

a business card, but it's a functional business card. They do tap it on the phone, boom, just put

your address in there. And then two days later, they'll get one of everything about. It's a

brilliant gift because you're giving your investors the gift of giving other people gifts.

And invariably, they're now doing more consistent marketing on your behalf. Of course, these people

are in room. Like these are the people who are investing in us. They're in the big rooms. So yeah,

that was fun. I have no idea what mine is. We didn't need to put the kibosh on one of the

lads that works for me because he had given away more money than he didn't need more money

and stock that he'd invested. I didn't want to like crush the vibe of that story when I was about

saying, did anyone take too much advantage of it? Yeah, we had to have an intervention with one

of the lads that worked for me. I was like, look, mate, this is good, but the check size wasn't that big.

Don't take your Uber driver with a bunch of fruit. How many goals did he speak to at SoHo House in

LA? Crazy. You mentioned before about the difference between taking work seriously and taking

yourself seriously. And I've been kind of fascinated by this question myself. I like to take

things seriously, but also you know that play and fun are where a lot of the enjoyment in life comes

from. So what does that look like? How do you avoid seriousness in pursuit? How do you stop that

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Well, I think it can be kind of addressed in two different ways. First, just in how you

show up and do business. I think you need to take what you do seriously, but if you try to be so

serious in how you do business, I actually think you're letting these self and post standards get

in the way of you giving other people the things that will bring them the most joy. I think so many

people, they're so focused on perfecting their own brands that they're not nearly focused enough

on just pursuing people. And they're selling themselves and those around them short as a result,

like joy and humor breaks down barriers. The more connected someone is to you, the more successful

you will be in that relationship and like a bit of levity goes a long way. And those that,

and I think some people that take themselves so seriously, that's rooted in some level of

insecurity, they feel the need to always have their guard up. But if your guard's up, how are you

ever going to expect someone else to let theirs down first? Now, as it pertains to just living a life

worth living, what are we doing? Like nothing that any of us is doing is that important.

We want to make an impact on the world. We want to put good out there. But gosh, we should have

some fun along the way. And if we think that we're doing such important stuff that we can't

have fun, I think we just end up a, not having a life that is nearly as enjoyable as it could be

and b, not being that enjoyable to be around. Oh yeah, and ultimately,

even though it's very difficult to measure one of the big mediators between

a customer's experience and what's going on is the vibe of the staff. What's it like?

So yeah, if it's this very stringent dictatorial sort of uptight,

procedural thing, I work at a UPS store where each of us gets one credit to give a customer

a free package each day. Yeah. That is so different to I work at a UPS store whose a package

sending error rate is below 0.001%. Yeah. By the way, and I bet the two more often than not coincide,

right? Like, I think you can feel joy in a room and every single business I've ever engaged with

if the people that work there are having fun, the experience will be better. They will do a better

job and it's pretty hard to have fun if the person you work for doesn't allow themselves to.

What's the line ambitious envision but patient in pursuit? I mean,

those for my dad. My dad always wanted me with that paperweight as a starting point.

To be like crazy audacious in what I tried to achieve with what would you attempt to do if you

knew you could not fail? He'd always say, hey, ask yourself in that question. Whatever the honest

answer is, just try, try to do that. Saying that far too many people are scared to say their

biggest goals out loud for fear that if they do and don't achieve them, they'll let themselves

in those around them down. But, and you know this, if you don't have the confidence and the

conviction to dream the crazy dreams out loud, it's pretty unlikely they'll ever come true.

But that's only half of it. I think when you want to be the best, you need to understand that

getting there takes time. And it's something that I find myself coaching younger people on all the time.

Like, if you want to be the best at anything, it's going to take time to get there, enjoy the ride,

celebrate each season. Like, allow the years to pass, such that you can fully build the foundation

you need to do something extraordinary. And so audacity combined with patience, I think,

is the winning formula. Either one of those on their own, I think can be disastrous.

I'm interested in, it sounds very fun. The culture that you brought to this, the sort of

almost child dish rebelliousness against what I imagine. I haven't done much fine dining,

but I have to imagine that when you get to the upper echelons of multiple Michelin stars,

it can get pretty stuffy. And the opportunity to kind of turn that on its head with a bunch of

play toys seems fun. But I have to assume that chasing number one must have put a kind of

pressure on you that wasn't just a blue sky helicopter thinking vision. There is a degree of

tension in that pursuit that can sometimes be a hollowness in the victory of it.

What did you learn about the joy of chasing number one? What did becoming number one actually cost

you? Well, I think there's a couple of things you just said. One, we had a lot of fun for sure.

And it was also extraordinarily difficult. It wasn't all hospitable. You don't get there without

pursuing excellence with the same rigor that you pursue hospitality. And it's better the fact

that they're not friends. Excellence in hospitality, they work together, but they're opposed to one

or another. Excellence is about control. Hospitality is about empowerment. Excellence is about

holding people accountable. Hospitality is about celebrating their initiatives and affirming

them. I'm talking not just literally with the product, but also culturally. And there was

plenty of tension. I think anytime you work alongside like-minded people who are as passionate as you

are and wanting to be the best, there will be tension. And that's something to celebrate. And

embrace because if you can, if you can figure out how to navigate through those moments of tension

thoughtfully, you grow closer to those around you and together can figure out what is the right

next best step for the business as a whole. So there's a lot of pain. There is a lot of exhaustion.

There is a lot of tension alongside all the fun stuff I'm talking about. And yeah, the

culmination of it all was wildly all over the board. I mean, in the moment where you realize you've

achieved this thing that you've spent a decade of your life working intensely hard to achieve,

there are a few feelings that could ever match that level of elation.

In the moments that follow, yeah, there's an emptiness for a moment.

Because when you've been so fixated on one thing and then you've achieved it, then what?

But I think that was alleviated to a certain point because of this idea of unreasonable

hospitality. Have you read The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek? Yes. So I do love the central message

in that book, which is if the entire game you're playing is in pursuit of an accolade or whatever,

you're going to get to the point where you've achieved that and then what is your reason

for doing that thing anymore? Now, the only thing I would add to what he wrote in The Infinite

Game is I believe we should also have finite games replaying. For me, The Infinite Game became

unreasonable hospitality. I wanted to alongside an amazing group of people redefine what a

hospitality could look like. How far could we take it? How seriously and intentionally could we

pursue human connection? That's The Infinite Game because there's no winning. There's no finishing

that. It's a journey that never stops. It's a game I'm still playing today.

But I think cultures need to win a game every once in a while, too, because when a team of

people is working so hard, they need to feel that sense of victory from time to time.

It's such a good point. I think the best version of the world were just driven by the love of

doing the pursuit. It is not respecting the biology. It doesn't respect the way that human biology

and psychology works. The reason we have dopamine is so if there's something really, really far

off in the distance and as you run toward it, you look at it and you see it and it's slowly,

slowly, slowly grows bigger and bigger and bigger. Each different time that that gets bigger,

you look up from your run and you go, fuck, it's still so far away. It's a little bit closer than

it was last time. You're encouraged to keep going. I've got this rule that modeled the rise,

not the result, which is when most people that have achieved a level of success that others go

to them in order to ask them about how they achieved success are at a stage where they can't

remember the issues that the people they're talking to are dealing with. It's all well and good

talking about your work-life balance and the importance of a strong meditation habit is actually

where the competitive advantage lies. You go, okay, just human me for a second. What did you do 30

years ago when you were at my stage? Oh, a lot of Adderoll, actually. I did a lot of Adderoll.

I worked 16 hours a day for 10 years straight. Don't fucking tell me what you do now.

Tell me what you did when you were at my stage. That insight, I think the rule of,

it's all about the pursuit. Don't worry about the accolades. I'm often proclaimed by people

that have just achieved them. I've got this line. In fact, let me read you something. I wrote just a

little, I was talking to a friend of mine, Nicole, Joe Hudson, yesterday. I'm talking about this

new show. I'm going on tour. I love my live show and this new one that I'm trying to do is

significantly more difficult than the last one. I think it's significantly more difficult. Less

than I'm trying to get people to take away. I wrote this thing yesterday, which is this needle

that I'm trying to thread. Here's the danger. This is what I keep circling back to. If I tell a room

full of people who are still climbing, that greatness won't cure their pain. I risk sounding like I'm

asking them to take their foot off their gas, even as they're still on the ascent. Can feel like I'm

deflating the very thing that's keeping them moving. For someone who hasn't yet won,

achievement still feels like oxygen. If I stand there and talk about the holiness of success,

it can land like a luxury belief. It can feel premature. I'm handing out a lesson,

designed for people at the top to people who are still trying to get out of zero. That's the

tightrope. The message can't be don't strive. It can't be slow down. It can't be none of this matters

because most of the audience are on their upward trajectory and they need fuel. They need

direction. They need momentum. If I attack ambition, I alienate them. If I glamorize misery,

then I trap them. If I preach renunciation, I lose credibility. The point that I'm trying to play

with this new show is subtler than that. I'm not telling a starving man that food doesn't matter.

I'm telling him that food isn't love. Achievement expands your life. It gives you resources,

leverage, opportunity. It is important. I'm not trying to renounce that, but it doesn't repair

your sense of worth. Greatness doesn't cure pain. It just makes the pain more expensive.

So I want them to climb. I want them to encourage the ascent and I want them to separate the fuel

from the wound. I just don't want self rejection to be the engine. I don't want I am not enough

to be the thing that's doing the pushing. So I'm not warning anyone off ambition. I'm warning

them off confusing ambition with self acceptance and that distinction is everything.

Dude, I love that. Thanks. That's quite beautiful. Thank you. And it dovetails exactly

to what we're talking about right now. Yeah. That line, greatness doesn't cure pain.

It just makes the pain more expensive. I chuckled what he said that.

Yeah. But that's what I'm saying. Listen, I am a competitive person. I like to surround

myself with competitive people. I like to set crazy expectations for what we can do and

gosh, there better be moments where we feel the pleasure of a win, where we can stop working

for a moment and just celebrate all of the effort we invested into doing something extraordinary.

And yet, if we are not also at the exact same time pursuing an idea that is unwinnable,

then those victories will always ring hollow. If you're playing a finite game and an infinite game

to those things always concurrently, you get the pleasure of pursuing things that actually matter

and all of the little celebrations that you can have along the way.

Yeah. Well, good hour, ladies and gentlemen. Well, you're awesome. I really appreciate you.

Where should people go to keep up to date with whatever it is that your new life is doing now?

You can go to unreasonablehospitality.com and sign up for my newsletter. That's the thing I love.

I believe in creating practices. Whenever I wrote the book, I created a practice of writing and I

keep it going through a newsletter that we release every two weeks. And then I have a new book

coming out, unreasonablehospitality, the field guide. If unreasonablehospitality was the why,

this is the how. And it really coaches individuals and businesses,

step-by-step on how to bring it to life. And that is out at the end of April. And so,

buy it where you buy books. And it would mean a lot. Unreal. Well, Rory Sutherland put me on to you.

And he has got fantastic taste, not least in food for a man of his corpulence staff.

He's a useful legend. Well, you're a great man. I'm really glad you're in the world.

Thank you for having me.