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

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Will Guidara is a restaurateur, hospitality expert, and author. What does it take to become the world’s best restaurant? In an era of extravagant dining and over-the-top experiences, the answer might be simpler than you think. So what actually separates the best from the rest? Expect to learn the biggest differences between service and hospitality, how Will went from #50 in the world to #1, how to operationalise magic and why most companies forget the human they are supposed to serve, which tricks of hospitality from well known restaurants most people probably overlook or don’t notice, what the one thing I should get right if you want to run a successful restaurant is and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 are sick. And that's it. Isn't that like 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? Yeah. 14-year-old you is saying, gosh, he's like, he's done something.

with himself, but he's still wearing the Beartooth T-shirt. Yeah. 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 he'd be pretty impressed. What a cool concept of what would 14-year-old you think about adult you as basically the ultimate gauge of whether or not your life's gone on. Not what do the people in your industry think of you,

not even actually what 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. 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. Will, what do you think? Was that a good? Was that good?

Yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you mean. that trajectory that we all end up on and the way that we 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, they're the egotists, they're the narcissists, they're the obsessives that don't take outside input. But then there's a, 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. If only I can make myself enough, then the world will 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? 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 medalist syndrome.

Do you know what's interesting, we were talking about 14-year-old me versus now me? I was on a 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. and 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. I was like, can I offer a different perspective on that? And 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 we're 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 a grown up is that I still see so much wonder in the world. Like that childlike 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 so you're pretending you're lopping as an adult it's your cosplaying as an adult but secretly is still a child inside or you can you're genuinely an adult but you still

enjoy those moments like a kid no go for it i'm just You start off 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 and 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 by the time I was like nine or ten and dude 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 to 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 busboy, 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 true joy and pleasure from getting to 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 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 restaurateur ever. And through him, he gave me the foundation upon which everything I've built was set upon. What did you learn from him? So there's two fundamental things. One, when I was coming up, chefs were cool. The dining room guy, 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 goalpost. I was like, gosh, I want to be like that guy. But of 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 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 on 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 was the thing we'd always talk about, how you move through a room, you're elegant on the top, instead of 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. And he 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 busboy 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 paperwork when I was a kid. 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,

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 11 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 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 in general. And eventually we got four stars from 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 in that first year. We came in last place. And some would say, yeah, you were 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. And that night, I wrote down on a cocktail napkin, we will be number one. But 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 a sense of belonging. And so underneath, we will be number one in 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 and 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. approach you take to work and to life. One of the best answers I ever got to that question, what's the difference between service and hospitality was 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 or the right person within the right

amount of time. Hospitality is the extent to which that person feels a connection to you, feels seen by you, feels a sense of belonging, 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 a plate of 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 in pursuit of that, how you make people feel as relentless as most successful people are in pursuit of whatever product or service they're selling. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that they are top quality, but very few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with Momentus. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet, and their way protein is literally the cleanest on the market. It's fast-absorbing isolates sourced from grass-fed European cows, which means no hormones, no antibiotics, no GMOs, plus it's NSF certified, meaning that even Olympians can use it. And unlike most proteins, it's designed for gut health. No fillers, no junk, low in lactose,

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That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash Modern Wisdom and Modern Wisdom, a checkout. Okay, so you're in this room with 49 other restaurateurs who have been you. 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 a once-in-a-generation talent, desserts 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? You know, there were a few things.

And they all center around this idea that I think when people think about hospitality, they think, right, I need 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 ever,

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 you go into 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 then you're carted through the room like cattle. I compare that to what it feels like when you come to my house, for dinner. Does 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. Googled 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 informality. 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, 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. And 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 clades. And 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. head back home. And while I was there, I overheard them talking about the trip, and they were raving about it. They'd been to Le Bernardin and Danielle and Jean-George, 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 bulb 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 ever heard 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 wagu 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. 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 it 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 are 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 Dreamweaver somehow found a store still open at 8 o'clock on a Friday night selling sleds. And when they left the restaurant,

we had an Uber SUV parked out front with sleds in the back, a 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 space suits. And the elevator opened up and they went inside.

And we'd redecorated the entire inside of the elevator. It looked like a 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'd just gotten married at City Hall. Turned that they had a big wedding planned, 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 or 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. And when they were done, we walked them 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. But also for us, I'd worked in restaurants my entire life. I'd never been a part of a team where the morale was so high and the team was so consistently engaged. AG1 just released their next-gen formula, which is a more advanced, clinically backed version of the product I've been drinking every day for years, delivering more than 75 vitamins, including your multivitamin, pre-and probiotic, superfood greens, and more. And for the first time, they've added new flavors, tropical, citrus, and berry, only available in the US and Canada.

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If you're still unsure, they've got a 90-day money-back guarantee so you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. If you don't like it, they will just give you your money back. So you've got nothing to lose. Right now, you can get a year's free supply vitamin D3K2 and AG1 travel packs plus that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. And 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 at the holidays more than we like receiving them. Right, like I like getting gifts, but my favorite gift, if you and I were celebrating something

and I spent a lot of time at 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 really difficult to growth hack intimacy.

Yeah. 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. Like I really do believe there should be another line in the P&L. You know, in 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 item in the P&L. And if you underspend on that line item, you should be penalized. Because you're reaping future benefits today and you're selling your future colleagues down 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 955. which is manage every single dollar like an absolute maniac 95% of the time. And 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. And 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 those stories I told you about the wedding day or the sleds, 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, it'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's required to develop the assets needed for those reactions you can start making magic all the time what like 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, started knocking on doors until I met the chief marketing officer, eventually convincing her to give me 1,000 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 toast to the 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 on 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 figure it 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, that lets out 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. The pilot goes up to the first family, says to the kids, hey, you guys want to tour of 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 a tour of the car? But Addle started taking him up on it. Eventually we take off. I'm a student of this stuff. So I asked the flight attendant.

I said, hey, 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 you if you look at your business, there's these recurring moments. If you pick a good one and a bad one, figure out what would be the coolest way to respond, you can actually systemize graciousness. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I am frankly dependent on it,

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to the link in the description below. I heading to drinklmn.t.com slash modern wisdom. That's DrinklMNT.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, because it's too hard to build it on the fly 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 there's room and we can do that. I mean, I'm saying you should still do that stuff. Like to be innovative in hospitality, do unscailable things all the time, but you can't just do those things.

You need to have a foundation. Innovatively things, innovative things that are scalable as well. Exactly. Yeah, 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, and we'll start recording in it pretty soon. I'm thinking about the sort of guest experience about 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.

Maybe we could take a Polaroid, and maybe the Polaroid, there could be two copies of it, and they could have one, and 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 opportunity. Except that's one where you derive significant and genuine pleasure

out of telling people they can't come in. Yeah, fuck off. Fuck off. Everyone. And one of the things that we did, which was using the peak end rule from Daniel Kahneman, probably familiar with your time in restaurants. We realize that we were really great at peaks, but the ends of nights out are almost always

the worst part. Yeah. 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 kebab, but maybe I'm not sure. where can I get the taxi from and I'm going to start chanting stuff. We were in the middle of a city and there was residences everywhere and we got noise abatement orders all the time because the noise, 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 10p 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 kebab shop because they thought they'd got a little bit of something. It actually sobered them up a little bit because they finally got some glucose in the system that wasn't for a Red Bull. It caused them to shut up because they had something in their mouth. Yes. And it stopped people from

fighting because no two guys wanted to have a fight while they were sucking on a lollipop. No, by the way, that is an unbelievable example of the first thing. I was talking about. Like, what is every touch point? Your touch point is leaving. Leaving sucks. How do we make it suck less? By giving them something to suck, yeah. Yeah, it was funny. It was funny. I mean, I tried, as I was starting to learn, you know, I was getting Rory Sutherland-pilled and Richard Shorten-pilled and understanding consumer behavior, I tried to implement as much of this as I could. I guess margins, in fine dining, it must be at least

somewhat easier because the margins may be a little bit nicer, I guess. But I mean, you tried. We did. Actually not. Like, 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, right?

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 at 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 were 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. Then eventually you're doing really well, but you need to start to develop your own point of view. I mean, I was inspired by Thomas Keller's restaurants and Daniel

Balludes 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. And 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 and 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, 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 like send something to your mom and they're like, sir, it's on us today. You'd be like, what the fuck is going on? It would blow your mind. And you would talk about that. Like, you'd be like, dude, the weirdest thing happened. I was at 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 work 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. It's the freest gift ever, right? Somebody else is picking up the check for you gaining the goodwill.

Exactly. But that's what led to the third one. 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 know, you never forget your first. Yeah. 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, I'm a I haven't been able to focus so much, or my mood's been a little bit down, or I've been thinking about trying to improve my dopamine, or I want to get off using so much caffeine. I'm really, whatever, however it sort of slotted in. They had this gold card that had their name on and 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. Dude. We ship them one case of everything for free. So it's like a business card, but it's a functional business card. all 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.

And by the way, 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. These are the people who are investing in us. They're in the big rooms. So, yeah, it was, that was fun. I have no idea where mine is. We did 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, more money in stock than he'd invested. I was about to,

I didn't want to like, I didn't want to like crush the vibe of that story, but I was about to say, did anyone take too much advantage of it? Yeah, we had to, we had to have an intervention with one of the, one of the lads that works for me. And I was like, look, mate, this is good, but the check size wasn't that big. Don't, don't tip your Uber driver with a bunch of reasons.

Just throwing them around and like, out. How many goals did you speak to it? Soho House in L.A. Fucking hell. Crazy. That's funny. 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 from bleeding over into seriousness of persona? In other news, this episode is brought to you by RP Strength. This training app has made a huge impact on my gains and enjoyment in the gym over the last two years now.

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So you can buy it, train with it for 29 days. And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code Modern Wisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. 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-imposed 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 guards 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 take, 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. Yeah, and ultimately, even though it's very difficult to, 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 the much like? So yeah, if it's this very stringent, dictatorial, sort of uptight, procedural thing, it's not. I mean, I work at a UPS store where each of us gets one credit to give a customer a free package each day. Yeah. Like that is so different to I work at a UPS store.

UPS store whose package sending error rate is below 0.0.01%. 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 in vision but patient in pursuit mean?

That was from 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 for 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 like.

for fear that if they do and don't achieve them, they'll let themselves and 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 childish 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. There can sometimes be a hollowness in the victory of it. So 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 things you just said. One, you know, we had a lot of fun for sure.

And it was also extraordinarily difficult. It wasn't all hospitable. I mean, you don't get there without pursuing excellence with the same rigor that you pursue hospitality, instead of the fact that they are not friends, right? Like, excellence in hospitality, they work together, but they're opposed to one another. Excellence is about control. Hospitality is about empowerment. excellence is about holding people accountable.

Hospitality is about celebrating their initiatives and affirming them, right? I'm talking not just literally with the product, but also culturally. And there was plenty of tension. I think any time 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 was a lot of pain, there was a lot of exhaustion, there was 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 Um, 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, 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 we're playing. For me, the Infinite Game became unreasonable hospitality.

I wanted to, alongside an amazing group of people, redefine what 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's 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 where we're 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. Yeah. 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. bigger, each different time that that gets bigger, you look up from your run, 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. Yeah. And I don't know, I've got this rule that model the rise, not the result, which is when you're, 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 the stage where they can't remember the issues that the people they're talking to are dealing with. And, you know, it's all well and good talking about your work-life balance and the importance

where a strong meditation habit is actually where the competitive advantage lies. And you go, okay, just, just humor me for a second. What did you do 30 years ago when you were at my stage? Oh, oh, a lot of Adderall, actually. I did a lot of Adderall. I worked 16 hours a day for 10 years straight. And that was like, correct. Don't fucking tell me what you do now, dude.

Tell me what you did when you were at my stage. And that insight, I think the rule of it's all about the pursuit. Don't worry about the accolades are often proclaimed by people that have just achieved them. Yeah. And 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, a coach, Joe Hudson, yesterday. I'm talking about this new show.

So I'm going on tour. And 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. The lesson I'm trying to get people to take away. So I wrote this thing yesterday,

which is this needle that I'm trying to thread. Here's the danger, and 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 one, achievement still feels like oxygen. So if I stand there and talk about the hollowness of success, it can land like a luxury belief. It can feel premature. Like I'm handing out a lesson designed for people at the top to people who are still trying to get out of zero. And 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. And if I attack ambition, I alienate them. If I glamorize misery, then I trap them. And if I preach renunciation, I lose credibility. So 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. I mean, 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, two of 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. Heck yeah. Will Godara, 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 unreasonable hospitality.com and sign up for my newsletter. That's the thing I love. I believe in creating practices when I wrote the book. I created a practice writing and I keep it going through a newsletter.

that we release every two weeks. And then I have a new book coming out, Unreasonable Hospitality, the Field Guide. If unreasonable hospitality 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, corpulent statue. He's a legend. Well, you're great, man.

I'm really glad you're in the world. Thank you for having me. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988, Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know, just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime.

988, suicide crisis, help, is funded by the government in Canada.