A Bit of Optimism - Unreasonable Hospitality with Will Guidara

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

If you walk up to someone and say “you’re being unreasonable!” most people would be offended. Will Guidara, however, would take it as a compliment.  A renowned New York restaurateur, Will transformed Eleven Madison Park into the best restaurant in the world by reinventing how they offered hospitality....they made it unreasonable.  I had a chance to sit down and talk to him about how he learned the power of being unreasonable.This is… A Bit of Optimism.For more on Will and his work, check out his new book Unreasonable Hospitality below or wherever you prefer to buy your books: https://simonsinek.com/optimism_press_books/unreasonable-hospitality/ 

If you want to stand out in the crowd, it makes sense that you would innovate around the product you sell. In fact, that's how all the best restaurants in the world stood out. They did something different with their food. But that's not how Eleven Madison Park became the best restaurant in the world. The owner was Will Gadara, and he thought, what if we apply the same attention to detail, to service, as we do to our food? When I learned what Will had done, I realized the power of his thinking. It went way beyond restaurants and hotels. His thinking could be applied to absolutely any company that has a customer or a client. And so I asked him if he would write a book for me,

for my imprint, Optimism Press. And that's exactly what he did. He wrote about what it takes to offer unreasonable hospitality. This is a bit of optimism. Well, you wrote the book, and I published the book, and I guess I edited it as well. So I'm very well versed in what you wrote. But perhaps you can share with people the journey that you came to discover the concept of unreasonable hospitality. So I'm a restaurateur. I spent my entire life working in restaurants. My dad was in the restaurant business. My mom was even in the hospitality business. She was a flight attendant. It's the only thing I've ever wanted to do. And I mean that sincerely. The only job I've held in my entire life, not in a restaurant, was when

I was 14. I spent one summer camp as a camp counselor during the day before I went to be a busboy at the local Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. You are what is known as a one-trick pony. I am a one-trick pony, I am a one-trick pony. Though, thankfully, I've been reasonably successful at that one trick. The restaurant, for people who don't know me, has been the most celebrated as a restaurant I owned for over a decade, 11 Madison Park. Which wasn't my restaurant when I started working there, it was owned by a guy named Danny Meyer, who if you're into restaurants, you know that he is one of the great restauranteurs in the history of American restaurants. I worked for him for years before I became the general manager of Eleven Medicine Park in 2006. After a few years, I was given the opportunity to buy it from him along with my chef partner at the time.

Now, when I got to 11 Madison Park, it was a popular restaurant, but it was kind of a struggling brasserie. It was beloved, but mediocre. Now that said, the room, and you've been there, you know, is an iconic dining room. The kind of dining room that will never be built again at the ground floor of a historic landmark building in New York City. And we had this collective idea that the experience in the restaurant should live up to the room it inhabited. And we started working on that with reasonable success. In the beginning, we focused on excellence, as one does when you're trying to make something better. We started training the servers, we got fancier glasses and nicer wine glasses and removed seats so we could provide a better experience for less people. And it worked out for us. We went from a two-star New York Times

restaurant to a three-star, then a four-star, which is the most stars you can get. We got three Michelin stars. We got a bunch of James Beard awards, which are the restaurant world equivalent of the Oscars. And then one day I received a letter from the world's 50 best restaurants, which is this list that had started a few years earlier. The first one to rank all the restaurants in the world against one another. And I opened the letter and it said, you have been added to the list of the 50 best restaurants in the world. Please join us at the ceremony in London. Now that was an easy yes. I was a restaurant manager, which meant you worked in a single room for about 16 hours a day, six days a week. So an opportunity to go to London was something you said yes to. And we went to London. I put on a tuxedo. I love

wearing a tuxedo and went to this beautiful, amazing auditorium at this place called the London Guildhall. And we had assigned seating. And so I am the kind of guy that when they're assigned seating, I try to figure out what that means. Like where we're sitting must have something to do with where on this list we're falling. And so I guessed on the 50 best, okay, we're going to be number 30. My partner, a little bit more optimistic than me, guessed number 24. And then the whole thing kicks off because here's the thing. I should make sure this is clear. If you're in the room, you know you're one of the 50 best restaurants in the world, but you don't know until the ceremony starts where on that list you fall. They start at 50. They count down to one.

It starts a debonair British MC kicks it off. And there was, I'm sure some preamble before he kicks it off and says, coming in at number 50, a new entry from New York city, 11 Madison park. In other words, Simon,

if you're not tracking the math here, we'd come in last place. I thought we were coming in number 30. I felt like someone kicked me in the groin. I bowled over in disappointment. Now, here's the thing. What I could not possibly have known, because it was our first year at the awards and we were the first restaurant that was called, was they give you a signed seating, not having anything to do with where on the list you're going to fall, but just so that when they call your name, they can train the camera on you and project your image in front of the entire auditorium. One, to be clear, that was filled with like my heroes, my mentors, the best chefs and restaurateurs in the world. And they do that. So regardless of how

you feel about where you fell, you can smile and wave and pretend to celebrate. Except we weren't celebrating. I saw it. I elbowed my partner. We looked up, we tried to like a smile and a wave, but it was a little bit too little, too late. It's like being caught on the Jumbotron at a stadium. Yeah, exactly. When you're not expecting it. Picking your nose in the Jumbotron. We did as most people would do in moments like that. We left the party early.

We went back to the hotel. We grabbed a bottle of whiskey from behind the bar and we started drinking. And we went through the stages of grief, anger, denial, bargaining before we settled on acceptance. Here's the deal. It is patently absurd to say that one restaurant is the best restaurant in the world, but that list acknowledges as the restaurant that's having the greatest impact on the world of restaurants at any given time. Yeah. Yeah. And the more we talked about it, the more we realized, listen, we were a great restaurant. Our food was amazing. It was delicious.

The service was gracious and as close to technically perfect as possible. Our dining room was one of the most beautiful out there. But if we really were honest with ourselves, we hadn't done anything impactful. The restaurants that topped that list before us, a restaurant called El Bulli in Spain, pioneered molecular gastronomy, which changed the way restaurants all over the world cook. There's a restaurant in Copenhagen called Noma, where they pioneered local ingredients, sourcing, foraging. They changed the way restaurants everywhere worked. And these restaurants really had an impact. These chefs were unreasonable in how they moved the craft of cooking forward

at about every detail that went into that, the sourcing of the ingredients, the presentation, the preparation, all of it. My dad, when I was a kid, he gave me a paperweight that said, what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? His whole thing in giving that to me so early was that so many people are so scared to answer

that question honestly for fear that if they don't achieve whatever the answer is, they'll let themselves and those around them down. But that if you do have the confidence and the conviction to answer that question honestly, maybe you won't achieve what you set out to, but you'll get really far down the road just for having tried. And so that night we wrote, we will be number one in the world. But I wanted our impact to be different from the others. They made their impact by focusing on what needed to change. I wanted our impact to focus on the one thing that never would, which is the human desire to be cared for.

They were unreasonable in their pursuit of the thing that they were serving. I decided that I wanted to make an impact by being unreasonable in pursuit of how we were serving it, how we made people feel. To be unreasonable in giving people a sense of belonging, to be unreasonable in making people feel seen, to be unreasonable in making people feel welcome. And so underneath the words, we will be number one in the world, I added two more words, So underneath the words, we will be number one in the world, I added two more words, unreasonable hospitality, which guided our trajectory from that point forward. In the hospitality industry, the terms service and hospitality are often used interchangeably, but they do not mean the same thing. Every restaurant offers service. What is hospitality?

The best way I've ever heard this described was from a woman I interviewed within the first couple of years of being in the restaurant business, just after I graduated from school. This was before I was confident enough to have an interview where I just let the conversation flow, where I was just looking to see in a person, do they have integrity? Do they care? Do they have passion? Is this someone I want to spend time with? And so I would have like scripted questions. And that was one of the questions I would ask.

What's the difference between service and hospitality? She said, service is black and white. Hospitality is color. See, service is just doing the thing that you do with precision, accuracy, and efficiency. The thing that you do with precision, accuracy, and efficiency. Hospitality is how you make the person who you're doing that for feel. In a restaurant, service is getting the right plate to the right person at the right time. Hospitality is the extent to which you've created the conditions for connection while you're serving them that plate.

Walk me through some of the things that you did that made you, dare I say, the most hospitable place on earth. Well, okay. So I wrote the words unreasonable hospitality on a cocktail napkin without honestly fully understanding what they meant. And I think that's okay. I think that it's okay to start pursuing something without fully understanding what it means so long as you feel a connection to it in some way, shape or form.

And as you pursue it, it will start to reveal itself. The first thing I did when I got back was to look at the experience and try to identify what about it felt transactional. Because I do think like a feeling of transaction is one of the enemies of hospitality. It undoes everything. A hundred percent. It reminds the guest that they're actually a customer. And so we like kind of did an audit of sorts. And again, if the word unreasonable was over hospitality, I decided to be as unreasonable

as I possibly could to do whatever it took to remove every element that felt transactional. So I'll give you an example. When you walk into most restaurants, the person who greets you, that's the first person with whom there could be connection, right? That's the first opportunity a restaurant has to make you feel a sense of belonging. They're standing behind a physical barrier, looking at a digital screen with a blue glare shining in their face. You walk up, they ask you what your name is. They stab down at a computer screen and then they turn to their colleague and say, take him to table 44. Compare that to when you walk over to your friend's house for dinner. They throw the door open. They greet you by your name. They invite you in and you're in their home. There's something beautiful. There's something profound about that.

So, we got rid of the podium. Sounds simple. Now, I won't bore you with all the details that went into how you make sure that the person who's standing there knows your name the moment you walk in before you even say it, how they know what table you're going to, how they have to employ sign language with someone who's standing around the corner in front of a computer screen that you can't see to know what table you're going to and whether that table is ready or not. That's the unreasonable part. The hospitality was just recognizing that if the goal is connection, one of the first most literal ways to establish it is to remove the physical barrier that stands in the way of that. I'm glad you're revealing to me that it was actually a process

because the couple of times I had the opportunity to go to 11 Madison Park and walk in that door and they greeted me by name without a podium and just somebody standing there as if I had just come into their home. I always just thought it was some sort of witchcraft. I never really understood how it was done. And it amazed me every time. And so I'm glad to know that there was actually a process of sign language and somebody had a computer because that makes it less scary. Here's the deal. It wasn't hard. It just required that we tried harder. And I think it's important to make a distinction there. Things that require that you try harder to achieve them, those things aren't hard. Nuclear physics, that's hard. Figuring out a system to know who somebody is when they walk in

the door, not hard. Yeah. It just requires that you're willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen. And so we started going through all this stuff and kind of with each change, I was like, is this unreasonable? Is this unreasonable? And then one day I was in the dining room during a busier than normal lunch service, helping the servers when I found myself clearing appetizers from a table of four foodies on vacation to New York, headed to the airport to go back home after their lunch. And they'd had an amazing trip. They were going on and on about all the different restaurants they'd been to, whether it was Le Bernardin or Per Se or Momofuku.

And then one of the guests said, yeah, but you know what? The only thing we didn't have was a dirty water hot dog from one of the street carts. Anyone who doesn't live in New York, dirty water hot dog is a term of endearment. As a friend of mine used to say, there's two types of hot dogs in the world. There's good hot dogs and there's clean hot dogs. Yes, exactly. All right. So you know those moments in the cartoon where the animated light bulb goes off the character's head. They've come up with a really good idea. Remember, we're a fancy restaurant. So as calmly as I possibly could, I walked back into the kitchen and dropped off the plates I just cleared. And then literally ran

out the front door down the block to the hot dog cart that lived on the corner. I bought a hot dog, ran back into the kitchen, then came like one of the speed bumps in this having to convince the chef to serve it in our fancy fine dining restaurant. This is a three Michelin star chef who you're saying please serve a New York City hot dog in your restaurant. three Michelin star chef who you're saying, please serve a New York city hot dog in your restaurant. But I told him it was important to me. I asked him to trust me.

And eventually he agreed to cut the hot dog up into four perfect pieces. And we made it look super fancy, right? We'll put it like a little swish of ketchup and mustard and a perfect scoop of sauerkraut and relish onto each plate. And before their final savory course, which was a honey lavender glaze, Muscovy duck that had been dry aged for two weeks, utilizing a technique that had taken years to perfect. I went over to the table and dropped off their hot dog. And I introduced it. I said, for your next course,

I want to make sure you don't go home with any culinary regrets, a dirty water hot dog. Simon, they freaked out. Like the table freaked out. At that point in my career, I'd served hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of food. And I mean like lobster, caviar, Wagyu, all the fanciest stuff. And I'd never seen anyone react the way they did to that hot dog. You always hear about athletes in the locker room after a bad game, going to the tapes to see what they could do better. They don't often enough go to the tapes and they've had a good game to see what they did well to make sure they keep on doing that thing. It's something not nearly enough organizations do. But I went to the tapes and started trying to break down what had led to that gesture,

because there was lightning in a bottle in it. Ultimately, kind of coming up with the three things that did. The first, it required being present, which is so overused these days. I understand that. But for me, being present is just caring so much about the person you're with that you stop caring about everything else that you need to do. I think way too often, we are all, myself included, if I'm not intentional about it, so preoccupied by our inboxes or our to-do lists that we don't have the capacity to slow down enough to actually listen to the people around us. If I hadn't

been present at that table that day, I never would have heard the line about the hot dog. Second, it required this notion to take what we do seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. Whether it's in customer service businesses or even as individuals when you look at how people post on their Instagram accounts, I believe we way too often let our self-imposed standards, let our desire to live up to whatever brand we've set for ourselves stand in the way of us actually being ourselves and perhaps as importantly, making the people around us happy. Serving a hot dog in a four-star restaurant is sacrilegious until you look at the way it made them feel. You weren't just reinventing food, you were reinventing hospitality. And because of the way it made it feel, all bets are off, totally acceptable. Whereas if it was

just about the gastronomic experience, you would never, ever, ever have done it. A hundred percent. In restaurants, and I think this equation can be applied to almost every business, the food, the service, the design, they're just ingredients in the recipe of human connection. No individual ingredient should supersede whether or not people feel connected to one another and you, the person serving them. This is a really, really important insight that I think it's worth just spending one second on. If you ask most people, what business are you in? You know, we're in retail.

We're in fashion. I'm an accountant. I'm a restaurateur. I'm in the food business. And what they're all forgetting is in 100% of those professions, you're actually in none of those businesses. You're in the hospitality business. Because ultimately, what you're doing is always for another human being. And the question isn't how good was my accounting?

It's how did it make me feel? Like? How did the experience with you make me feel? If you're in the retail business, it's not teaching them just how to push the next product and where the product is in the store. We don't teach people how the skills they need to make people feel good, whether they buy or don't buy, or they buy a little or whether they buy a lot, when they walk out the door. Those people who went to La Bernardin and Per Se and 11 Madison Park for a culinary experience went back to wherever they're from, having eaten at the best restaurants in the world, and they will talk about a hot dog. They will talk about a hot dog for the rest of their lives. Because I can guarantee you they've forgotten the menus of every single one of those meals

to this day, but they still remember the hot dog. I want to say three things. I mean, the best quote ever about hospitality often attributed to Maya Angelou, people will forget what you say, they'll forget what you do, they'll never forget how you made them feel. That is profoundly true.

We can all think about our own experiences in life and at work and connect to that if we dig deep enough. I would also say everyone can choose to be in the hospitality industry. Everyone's not until they make the choice. Because it's about what you prioritize. And honestly, it's not rocket science. It doesn't even require training people how to do it. It requires encouraging them, inspiring them, and giving them the resources to do it. The reason that they remember that hot dog, the reason it made them feel a certain way is the third thing. It's one size fits one. It was the fact that that was just

for them. They felt seen. I listened to them. I did something just for them. And that's why it made them feel so good. I could have given them a Home Depot bucket of caviar. It wouldn't have had the same impact. One size fits one is genius. This is for you and only you. And I think what almost every business on the planet should be in the hospitality industry, should they choose to, your standard, what they're forgetting is you don't have to provide these experiences for everyone. You have to do it when the opportunity is honest and sincere, and dare I say authentic, another overused word. That's what makes it work. It actually is special. It's not that we're trying to come up with one size fits one for everybody,

but we're trying to come up with one size fits one when it fits. Just to underline that, yeah, you can't force these things. They either present themselves to you when you're serving people or they don't. But when you do this, you're setting it as a standard in your culture that impacts the people that work there just as much as it impacts the people you're serving. And let me unpack that a little bit because what started happening, okay, so we did the hot dog, and then it was electric. We knew it, and we just, we made it a huge part of our culture and gave everyone on the team the autonomy to start coming up with their own ideas.

As soon as that started happening, two things became very, very clear. One, well, obviously the guests were happier, but the team was happier and more connected first because for the first time they had creative autonomy. They weren't just serving plates of food that someone else had created. They were actually able to come up with their own ideas, to think creatively, to exercise their brains in a way that they hadn't been able to before. They had agency. They felt a sense of ownership. It was effectively like turning salespeople into product designers. And here's the thing. I've never met a single person that won't feel more connected to the experience they're serving than when they feel that they have a hand in helping to create it. Well, this is the magic of being human,

right? This magical chemical oxytocin, which I've talked about a lot and have written about. Oxytocin is the chemical in our bodies that makes us feel all the warm and fuzzies, all the unicorn and rainbows. It's responsible for love and friendship and loyalty and all of these magical things. There are many ways to get oxytocin. Human contact is one of them, which is why it feels good to get a hug. But we also get oxytocin when we perform an act of kindness or generosity with no expectation of anything in return. And when somebody does something nice for us, it's overwhelming because we get oxytocin when that happens. But my favorite thing about oxytocin is that if you hear a story of generosity

or you witness a story of generosity, it releases oxytocin in you. So it feels good to hear about or witness the stories. And the more oxytocin we have in our bodies, it actually biologically makes us want to be more generous. This is the human body's way of desperately trying to get us to look after each other. In other words, the reason you don't have to perform a one size fits one for everybody is because when they see it happen in another table, they smile and feel good and they will leave and they will probably do something nice for somebody simply because they saw you do something nice for someone else. I'll tell you my Eleven Madison Park story that really sealed it for me, that you were doing something magical. I was taken there for dinner. We didn't have anything special done for us that night. We just had fantastic food, fantastic service. Everything was flawless. Everything was efficient. Everything was great. It was a great meal.

And I looked around the restaurant and everybody was smiling and everybody was getting along. And when my server was with me, I asked, I said, I have to ask you, everybody seems to get along in this restaurant. Do you ever have grumpy customers? He said, yeah, occasionally. Occasionally we do. I said, what are those occasions? He goes, sometimes it's when somebody's assistant books the restaurant, they didn't know what they were walking into, they get a little grumpy. Or sometimes they don't realize it's a tasting menu and they want to order off an a la carte menu and they get really grumpy. I said, well, what do you do in those situations? They said, we give them a menu. We let them choose what they want. And then he added this bit. He says, it's just food. I've been to restaurants before where I ask for

ketchup. And they literally say to me, chef prefers you not use ketchup on your dish. Those are restaurants that have forgotten that it's just food. Those are restaurants that are serving egos and not guests. Brilliantly put. The product that you dealt in is not the cure for cancer. No, we would always say we're not saving lives, but we can change the world. And I know that sounds like insane, but I really do believe this. If you're just really, really kind to every single person that walks through your door, they will pay that

forward and it can have an incredible exponential effect, right? If you actually think about that mathematically, if you serve a few hundred people every single night, and those same people go out and pay that forward to three people, it can be remarkable. So I have two questions. Question one. So all of these people have regular jobs. They're the servers, they're the bussers. They actually are very, very busy. And some of the things that you're asking them to do, the creative solutions they come up with, if they see an opportunity, and you say, aha, but the problem is you have to do table seven now solutions they come up with, if they see an opportunity and you say, aha, but the problem is you have to do table seven now and you have to go pour their water and bring their food. You actually have a job. How do you balance the fact that I have a job

to do and yet I have this idea of something we could do? Well, I'll tell you how we did it. We decided that it was important enough to invest resources to make it happen more frequently. And so we added a position to the restaurant. Someone whose only job was to help bring other people's ideas to life. What did you call that position? Because it's freaking brilliant. So we called the position the Dream Weaver. I wanted people who are helping to weave dreams for people, to give people memories. People don't

collect stuff anymore. They collect experiences. And I wanted to create a position that could help us give people memories that would last a lifetime. Because if you don't have those, then is the experience even worth collecting? I think this is where leaders fall short. They have this big idea and they give this locker room JFK style speech about the importance of the idea. And then they don't follow up those speeches or those ideas by giving the team the resources to actually bring the ideas to life. Do you know, I was just on a podcast and I got to share this because you know me well enough. I smile a lot. There's a lot of things that make me smile, but this one made me smile really, really big. So I spoke at Dave Ramsey's Entree Leadership Conference. There was a couple

there and they run really good events. And there was a couple there that have a business that is all about relationships with couples and they engage with people in different ways. I'm not entirely sure the complexity of the business, but I was just talking to them. And they said that since they went to that conference, they've added a line item in their budget called unreasonable hospitality. It was one of the coolest moments to think that the books already affected this one business that, okay, they're in the relationship business. So in many ways, it's exactly what I do, but in other ways, it couldn't be further away. And they have a budget for it, which was super cool. And I thought about you when it happened. I love that. I can tell you candidly,

I have fallen short on this space. And I'll tell you, it's not just the resources, because I'm willing to release the resources. The problem is, there's a combination of vision and structure. I have the vision of what I want done, but I don't necessarily know how to get there. You are one of the few people on the planet that has a capacity for both. But at some point, even you said you let go and they may not have done it the way you wanted it done. They may not have done it as well as you may have wanted it done. But the point is it was done and it was done beautifully and it was theirs.

This was not one person's idea that one person executed. Though you did it first, what you figured out was a system and positions that allowed people to be creative and do it themselves. And then you just stepped back and watched and you smiled. That's really what leadership is, right? Leadership is the awesome responsibility to see those around us rise. And the joy we get from leadership is like the joy we get from me being a parent. When you catch your children, you know, doing the things that make you feel proud, you just sit back and say it was worth it. And as a leader to sit back and watch your restaurant hum and watch these things happen must have been the most satisfying thing in the world.

A hundred percent. The coolest part with these gestures, once we had the Dreamweaver, they were just happening constantly for so many different people. And my favorite thing was being out in the world and someone would come up to me and say, thank you for something that they had received in the restaurant that I had absolutely nothing to do with. And in fact, when they were thanking me for it, I was hearing about it for the first time. If I owned a restaurant, oh my God, I could do this perfectly. But I'm not a restaurant owner and I'm struggling to understand how to bring unreasonable hospitality to my industry. Can you just walk me through that? I mean, I really love to think about this

with real estate agents. When you're looking for a new home, you're spending weeks, if not months with that person. And you're spending time not just having a meal. They're working with you to find your new home. They should know every single intimate detail about your life. Now, I don't know about you, but every time I bought or rented a new apartment, at best, I've gotten a bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge as my thank you slash congratulations gift. Imagine instead, if the first time my wife and I walked into the apartment that we fell in love with, they overheard my wife talking about the nook where there was like sun shining in through the window that she can imagine herself doing yoga in every morning. And imagine when we moved in, instead of the obligatory bottle of bubbles in that nook, we found a brand new yoga

mat along with a candle and a note that said, welcome to your new home. Okay, A, that would be super cool. But B, compared to the average commission, it's a very insignificant investment in what will inevitably become a lifelong relationship. What it shows is you care enough to listen and then actually do something with the thing you heard. Because here's the thing, hospitality can be felt in a bunch of different ways. But I think one of the most profound ways to feel hospitality is to feel seen. And there's no better way to do that than when you actually deliver on something that someone put out into the world. Maybe if it wasn't even directed at you, it just shows that you care. Like this whole thing, it's just about being intentional in pursuit of relationships.

And one of the best ways to pursue a relationship is to just meet someone exactly where they are. And I think that's so fun when you get to do it. And when it comes to hospitality, this is the thing that I want to break down about that word. A, hospitality is not just reserved for restaurants and hotels. It's reserved for anyone who makes the choice to be in the hospitality industry. But B, it's not just this woo-woo thing that's amorphous and hanging up in the sky. It can be pursued. It's a muscle. It's a craft. You can get better at it. And like anything, it's a practice. You need to decide what is your practice within it. You make people feel really good through that system and through that practice. It's hospitality. It's relational. It's emotional.

But none of that means that it can't be backed up with a disciplined approach. And that's the entire thing. People are so persistent and unreasonable and ambitious with so many things. We just need to be a little bit more ambitious, a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more unreasonable in pursuit of how we make the people around us feel. I have the joy of getting to call you friend. And one of the nice things about being your friend

is that your idea of unreasonable hospitality extends into your friendships. You are the best gift giver, not because your gifts are extravagant, but because your gifts are so thoughtful. And sometimes they're small and not very expensive, but you overheard a conversation or you took note of a sidebar and a year later, you'll bring it back and something will show up. Your ability to invest time and energy for your friends, speaking as a friend, makes us feel so seen, so heard, and so special, Will. It's why we love you. I'm smiling. The people at home can't see me right now, but I'm definitely smiling. Love you, buddy. Such a treat to chat with you. I could do this for a lot more hours, and I'm sure you and I will have a chance to chat later.

And for everyone who's listening, if you'd like to learn how you can offer unreasonable hospitality in what you do, check out Will's book by the same title, Unreasonable Hospitality, available at fine bookstores everywhere and some not so fine ones too. not so fine ones too. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other.