Modern Wisdom - #212 - Ashley Mears - Why Do People Go To Nightclubs?

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

Ashley Mears is a writer, sociologist and former fashion model. What happens if a sociologist decides to do immersive ethnographic research and become a party girl for 6 months, following some of the biggest promoters around New York & Miami and assessing what's going on? Why do men spend £1000's on bottles of champagne in VIP clubs? Why is the music so loud? Why is there a very specific type of girl on these tables? What are the anthropological underpinnings of nightclubs? Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Buy Very Important People - https://amzn.to/3gO6azy  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, my friends. Welcome back. My guest today is Ashley Mears and she's a sociologist who has recently done an assessment of the VIP clubbing world. Basically, she did what's technically referred to as immersive ethnographic research, but in reality, that meant she became a party girl for six months and followed some of the biggest promoters around New York, Miami, and elsewhere, assessing what's going on. Given that I've been a club promoter for 14 years, looking at the anthropological underpinnings, like the psychological, sociological reasons for why people enjoy going to nightclubs, I loved every minute of this. It was so fun. So I expect to learn why men spend thousands on bottles of champagne and VIP clubs, why the music is so loud, why there is a very specific look of the girls that are joining the guys

on these tables, the anthropological underpinnings of nightclubs in general, and much more. Awesome, awesome episode. Ashley is so much fun. I'm certain I'll be getting her back on to talk about, I don't know. So I'll find an excuse to bring her back. She was great. But for now, it's time for the Wizen Wonderful. Ashley Mears.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Ashley Mears. Ashley, welcome to the show. Hi, good to be here. Great to have you here. Tell me your background. Tell everyone that's listening what you're the 30,000. Great to have you here. Tell me your background. Tell everyone that's listening to what you're the 30,000 foot view of who you are. Yeah.

OK, so I'm a sociologist. I teach courses in pop culture and economic sociology and gender. And my research broadly is in what we could call cultural economics, but basically the cultural foundations of value and how that plays out in different markets. And I've focused on pretty atypical cases for social scientists. And that is the fashion modeling industry, which was my dissertation, and became a book later called Pricing Beauty. And then my most recent book is about high-end nightclubs and the the fact of champagne waste.

So I know I describe it in fairly bland terms somewhat deliberately because as an academic, you know, there's an impodista kind of be serious and present your stuff and kind of theoretically and conceptually recognizable terms. But yeah, I study this kind of fun worlds. I listened to your episode on conversations with Tyler. Yeah, talking about this stuff and hearing to academic, you remain mostly academic, but he is pure. Like, he was asking a question of like, why is the music so, why does the music have to

be so loud in nightclubs, which is just like just the most pure academic question. And he's like, well, actually, that's fairly good. So I want to try and take an academic perspective, a sociological, anthropological perspective of nightclubs and nightlife. How would you lay it out? Imagine I'm another academic, I've never been in a nightclub, I don't know why people go, I don't know what the purpose is, give us the full monthly. Well that would make you like a lot of academics actually. So yeah, well first there's a lot of different types of nightclubs. There's clubs out there that cater to pretty much any kind of niche and attraction and like kink or whatever, but the clubs that I studied are they offer what's

called bottle service where instead of waiting at the bar to get your drink, you can pay a pretty high price, starting at $500 on up to $5,000 or more to sit at a table and basically rent the table for the night and the bottles of alcohol get brought to your table. And then people use this as an opportunity to show off how much money they can spend on champagne because the big expensive bottles come out with sparklers or they are brought to the table by very attractive young women that are called bottle girls. So it's a clear case of conspicuous consumption. It affords an opportunity to show off in this kind of club world. But if you're just wanting

to hit like, I don't know, the 80s dance party that is used to be up the street from my house. You know, what people seek out in all kinds of nightlife experiences is the opportunity to kind of lose oneself in the moment, in the music. And this explains why the music is so loud because you know, you're no longer distracted as much by the fact of other people and and that kind of co-present and mutual focus on something like loud music, or if everybody knows the words to a song, right? I mean, this is a pretty, this can be a really magical experience that Clumps offer.

It's called that. Collective effervescence, is that right? That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's an old theoretical term for it by the French theorist, Emil Dirkheim, that refers to this as collective effervescence, the kind of losing yourself in the moment with other people.

It's kind of the defining logic of nightclubs, of burning man, you can feel it at protests, you can feel it at the football game when people are chanting together. It's the excitement of being with other people. Okay, that's why the music's so loud. That's right. That's why the music's so loud.

Why are people spending money getting bottles to their table? Yeah, so there's a lot of different explanations for this. The one that I focused on is looking at the extreme sums of money that people were paying, which really was kind of bizarre and struck this curiosity in me. So I started this project. It was around 2011 and your bottle service was at its peak. And I was reading reports of people that were spending thousands of dollars, oligarchs, you know, outbidding each other's thing who could spend more on champagne, that they wouldn't even drink, maybe they would just gift the bottles to people in the room. And, you know, 2011 is a moment where there's a kind of global financial austerity,

because the world is still reeling from the financial meltdown of 2008. And so I just thought that, you know that the disjuncture there was just so fascinating that I wanted to understand how people could engage in that kind of ostentatious behavior. So the explanations that I put forward are really anthropological of it. You know, on the one hand, this is fairly, this is kind of a timeless behavior that showing off of status through waste. And there's a term that anthropologists use for this that was documented in studies

of tribal societies in the Pacific Northwest, where tribal nobility would gather together the tribe and compete with one another to see who could give away the most valuable things, who could hold the biggest feast, who could waste the most food. That's called a polish. That would have real consequences for somebody's claim to status and prestige, and that they can solidify rank in that way. So it was really consequential.

Nightclubs are not that consequential, this know, popping bottles in a nightclub. But it is, it is, you know, one of many forms that we see throughout history of people asserting their status through waste through the display of waste. And so that's one explanation that I find quite fascinating. And then it, you know, there's a bunch of other plausible explanations. Some people go to clubs and spend in these sums of money because they want to be in the milieu of people like themselves, which could lead to a business opportunity. So, especially for people who work in finance, this might be an opportunity to meet or to entertain clients, which could be written off as a business expense.

So, there's peacocking, there's the kind of practical connectivity in a business world. And I think that for some people, this kind of participation in this world really is kind of the pinnacle of achieving something that is quite meaningful in pop culture broadly because you get to be in these glamorous settings surrounded by fashion models, where your behavior is essentially immortalized in hip hop lyrics that are celebrated around the world, and you get to perform that. And so that's what clubs are offering. I get it. Why the girls on the tables? Why are they there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the girls that I studied in this circuit, they tend to be young women who are very beautiful in the way that the fashion modeling industry defines beauty,

of typically very young, very thin, predominantly but not exclusively white, with a kind of rarefied beauty that people would recognize as a fashion model. And so that kind of beauty communicates status because it's rare because it's been legitimated by the fashion modeling industry. Even if the men who are spending money might not be attracted to that kind of body, those are the kinds of women who are kind of displayed

in the room as a means of communicating and elevating the status of not just the room and the place but all of the people in that space as well. So that's a certain kind of entourage. So this kind of spending wouldn't be possible without that kind of entourage. Why? It would be considered meaningless. It would be, um, nobody, nobody would kind of see the, the expense of the bottle is being, um, as being worth it. If the crowd were not deemed high-satice enough as worthy to impress which fashion models are.

Right, okay. And most of the guys that are on these tables, they're not planning on dating the girls really, they're not sort of long-term prospects, despite the fact that they're quite beautiful. Why do you think that is? Yeah, so that's my, that is something that is a bit of a puzzle that I found, but it kind of depends what you mean by dating, because that has a different time horizon for different people. Okay, long-term prospects, should I say, in terms of relationship, marriage. Right, right. Family.

Yeah, well, it's definitely the case that there are a lot of hookups that happen in probably short-term relationships that form out of nightclubs. Some of them in nightclubs. Some of them in the nightclubs, that's right. Yeah. But among the people that have money, that have professional careers that are kind of showing off in these spaces, that pool of upper class then tends to partner with a similar pool of upper class women. There's a certain homophily, you know, of like birds of a feather flock together, kind of logic, where if you look at marriage patterns, people tend to partner with people like themselves in terms of their education credentials or their family background or their occupational prestige and earnings. And the perception among the clients who are the bottle buyers in these spaces is that

models are great company to have for the night, but not for the long term. That they actually was quite surprising how, I mean, the value that models generate to the nightclub industry, it's almost like they're priceless, right? They communicate status, people spend more money with models in the room, promoters can make their careers off of models. They're creating so much profit, and yet as people, models are really seen as worthless. They're seen as like, airheaded, not serious, right? A woman that goes out frequently in these spaces, doesn't buy her own drinks, can't afford maybe to buy her own drinks,

must be some kind of failure in life, not the kind of woman you would take on to meet mom. Okay, where are the affluent young high-status women? This is a really good question, do you know? No, no who they are? No. No, actually, but if you could get me their phone numbers in an Excel spreadsheet and send them over to me as an aspiring trophy husband, that would be wonderful. So I want to do a project on, I mean, you call it trophy husband, you know, trophy wives is all these are variations of economically asymmetrical relationships. I'm really fascinated where you have such imbalances of power. I mean, the trophy unions, sugar baby,

sugar daddy's, groupies, there's all kinds of different versions of this. And I think that those relationships could really reveal important lessons for everybody else about how people manage power in equality and their relationships. Flipping that power dynamic on its head is an interesting one. Yeah.

Very, very interesting. So where are they? Where are the 25-year-old female with the seven-figure net worth? Where is she? Well, because of the way that gender tends to operate in professional rooms, there is still a pretty big wage gap in the professions and actually across the labor market. There's, you know, those kinds of fields in which you see people who are very young turning out lots of money, they tend to be male dominated fields, you know, so like in tech, for instance, or some sectors of finance. So, yeah, 25 is a little bit young for anybody, but I think especially for women, I have the seven-year-old.

Okay. The young enough to still party in PhD or Lavo Brunch or whatever it might be. Yeah, so it wouldn't be the PhD set, but maybe you could try your luck with like the influencers. Yeah, I meant PhD the nightclub in New York, not the HD, the sorry. So this is where my they should be brand. Yeah, that's right. But no, actually just thinking about where the areas are in which women do really well at young ages. I mean, I am thinking about where the areas are and which women do really well at young ages.

I mean, I am thinking about like the Instagram influencers, those are where you see kind of really powerful like up-and-coming business people, but business women, I think kind of starting their companies and building brands. Why they're not buying a bottle, big table, getting guys, making them go and eat, like the second rate sushi downstairs

before they come up, why is that not happening? Okay, yeah, so it's a realm in which it's kind of built on the assumption of men as the consumers and it's built on the assumption of heterosexual male taste and the male gaze. And you know women are kind of brought in as the decor And it's the assumption that men are the spenders. It's not that there's never any women's vendors There certainly are but they're pretty rare and they're talked about as like did you see that that was weird? Right, what's a female whale

There's a cop. Yeah, it's a way less a whale of whales. I guess they were just big old whales. But to be called a whale as a guy in a nightclub is a bad runner. To be called a whale in a nightclub is there's little worse. That's right. Yeah. It's not so flattering. So for women in the clubs, for women to get into the club, the most important thing that they have is not money but beauty. And so there are lots of instances where women

who were working in high-powered positions and finance, for instance, would wanna go out after work with their team to one of these places and might get rejected at the door or might end up in some really awkward negotiation. She can't come in because she's only five foot five, right? And like, I mean, how humiliating. And so, so this, yeah, I mean, perhaps if a woman had, you know, so much money or so much celebrity, I mean, that could, that could

Trump the body size, but, but really, to get in, women have to have this, what we might call bodily capital, whereas men can have money to get in, have to have this what we might call bodily capital whereas men can have money to get in they could have connections they could have celebrity and as in the end as long as they're good looking and friendly they could still get in as filler to like buy their drinks at the bar but you know it but some some women could actually get denied entry and could get really insulted like to her face so it's not just denied entry it's like denied entry and could get really insulted to her face. So, it's not just an identity, it's like an identity cruelly. Yeah. Well, I mean, many men will be denied entry at the door if you turn up as a group of guys

and you're not spending a huge amount of money. If you turn up without girls, you're not good at it. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So, there's limits for the amount as well just based on this gender. So there's a there's an amount of capital that you need. And that capital appears to be selecting asymmetrically between men and women. And there are certain pathways that are completely being deselected for.

And that is determined highly by the sort of environment that you're going to go in. Someone's academic accomplishments, their ability to elucidate their ideas, how articulate they are, their ability to be a good cook, unless that's being monetized. Because you have loud music, drunk people, very visceral,

sort of skin deep, but by definition, experience going on, none of those qualities are given chance to manifest, therefore they're not valued at the door. That's right. Yeah, yeah, the music is loud and you know, the lights are low and so it would really matter is it's not your sterling personality. Unless of course it has been monetized in some kind of celebrity. But you know, there's, I don't know, I do think that your point about selection is accurate. You know, these kinds of places attract people that probably are already on the side of getting in. Some people who maybe know about these places would know that they wouldn't be welcome and that in itself would be reason not to even try.

No one wants to be turned away at the door. it's the thing of social nightmares. That being said, Burkain, which you may be familiar with in Germany, the techno club, is famous for having a dorm and who turns people away for no reason. And that's got nothing to do with how much money you have. That's like, have you seen, there's an app available which teaches you how to get into Burkain? I read about it. Yeah, I didn't see it. Because I'm one of those people that would never try. Yeah, yeah. I'm too horrified at the possibility that I could wait in line for an hour and then not get in.

No, drive into the middle of nowhere. Go somewhere that looks like something out 28 days later. And then, yeah, wait, enough freezing. I've never been, I've got a couple of buddy. I've been, I've got a few buddies that have been. If you're listening and you've been to Birken, tell us whether you got in, how you got in, if you know anyone that got knocked back by that, that crazy scary guy on the door that's got like 45 p-sings

and face tattoos and stuff like that. But yeah, it's like, you have to go in groups of three, two people must be wearing black. It's advisable to have something on you that's leather. Like, you know, all of this. And you should always know that who the DJs are. Yeah, exactly. Just claim that Solomon's DJing, that's like that's the best thing to do. Just signal with the fact that you think it's probably Solomon. And then it's not Solomon. I swear it was so, I bet he was supposed to be fl- Oh, this guy knows what he's on about.

That's right. That's right. A bloody do. I went to uni with Jamie Jones's younger sister, Jenny Jones, actually, who's a cool girl. Okay, so you've just redictated to me an industry I've worked in for a decade and a half. Like I've run nightclubs for 14 years, I've watched more drunk people than I can remember, stumbling it out. And yeah, it took me until a couple of years ago to realize what the experience was selecting for. Like why

it's very, very core people were going. And that collective effervescence, it really seems to be one of the driving factors of that to place's a place where other people like you are. So it's selecting already for a particular social group, which is like where you get the UK type of promotion that we do is less bottles service and tables. It's lower value, higher volume. So we'll do 2000, 1000 to 2000 to 2,500 kids a night, four nights a week, but it'll be just by drinks at the bar, tables are just free basically for birthdays, and we try and do high volume. But again with that, that's even more so about that community side, right? So it's the same people will go, it's the same night every week with the same drink stills,

the same sort of DJs. Sometimes we even play the same songs at the same time. So they know the rhythm is predictable. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, it's interesting. But what else did you learn? Tell us about the party girls and about what your learnings were spending a bit of time

with them. Because you got in the trenches for this. This wasn't an armchair philosophy job. This was you weren't in the trenches, donned your high heels and cracked on, right? That's right. Yeah. And some of my colleagues in academia, they would kind of joke about it. Like, oh, actually, you know, such hard field work, you have, you know, in Miami at these

nightclubs, you know, with all these champagne. I was like, it was awful. There were some moments, particularly in Miami, because I was following this promoter who was like a real party animal. I mean, he would chase the after parties until like 8, 10 o'clock in the morning. And I remember, yeah, at one point I was like, there was some beautiful space around it by beautiful people and all of this symbols of money coming out and I went into the bathroom and just cried.

For a minute. Because I couldn't take it. I was like, I'm in the dredges of humanity. Why, to my tears came back out. It was like partying again. But I made a thing really sleep deprived at that moment too. Yeah, so the fieldwork is called immersive ethnography, this kind of, you know, sometimes we call it participant observation, but I kind of flip it. It's more like observant participation.

So I really did become a girl. This was my point of access. I could have done the study in any other kind of way, just by interviews, or if I didn't look the way I did, I was a woman. I probably would have had a harder time getting access. But because of the access that I had, so I was an ex-model, and I was doing this fieldwork, and I was about 32, which is much older than most of the other young women that are called girls.

The girl is not just referring to their youth. It's also a kind of social category. Marks a woman is like the type of woman that belongs in the space is a girl. And so the way that I got in was, I'm a girl that would be known as a good civilian, which is so civilian is a kind of term from the military, which refers to somebody who's not really part of the action, right? And then a good civilian is somebody who's like,

maybe not exactly a working model, but good enough. Pretty like when the lights are low. She's acceptable if she puts, if she sort of dances with the back towards for long enough like. Right. If I keep working my heels, then you know, she's got the height. And I know, you know, and I had the same body measurements.

So yeah, I got in as a good civilian and I followed the promoters and I would follow them from the start of the night, which is, you night, which is unfathomably late at this point in my life, but it would be dinner at 10 o'clock, and then into a nightclub at midnight, and then staying into a nightclub into three or four o'clock in the morning. And sometimes I would really push it and try to stay as late as the promoters, which meant going to after parties,

or staying past closing. And yeah, this was pretty intense fieldwork, even at that age. I think for me by 32, I had kind of, I was kind of over this kind of forms of sociality, you know, I was, I was a little bit, I always think if I had my promoters when I was like 18, I probably would have had a much different experience with them. What a dream. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I, you know, I liked would have had a much different experience with them. What a dream. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I liked clubbing and I really liked all forms of dance music.

And free things. I like free things. I don't know who doesn't like free things. That's right, although, you know, that's also one of the kind of ideas of the book, is that there's really, you know no such thing as a free lunch that the gift always has a counter-gift or any time you give a gift there's this expectation of reciprocity and that's in the anthropology of Marcel Mos who argued that arguably at the root of any society is the gift its exchange because if I give you something I've put you in a relationship with me and you have to reciprocate in some way. And so I forged a tie. And so these ties are kind of the building blocks of community.

And in the nightclub world, the gifts do flow. Like for good reason. Like there's all kinds of free drinks, free dinners. The promoters are spending so much time during the day giving favors to models, taking them to lunch, driving them to their castings, taking them bowling. You know, like, you know, hanging out with a flirting with them, making them feel special, building a relationship with them so that then the girls will reciprocate. And people do really talk about promoters as their friends, even though they know that promoters are making money off of

them. And I don't think that the girls are fooled. It's not like an old school marks a story of false consciousness. It is a story about the power of the gift. This is a kind of relational economy. It's like pieced together through relationships. And there's work that goes into making those relationships and making them feel good and not exploitative, which objectively it is.

I would. I would. Why did the girls not want to just get paid? Why don't they say just give me money? Yeah, so some of them do, but that's pretty rare. So when money exchanges hands usually it's earmarked, so it'll be like, I'll come out with you, but you're going to pay my cabs, right? Like you pay my cab fare, 40 bucks. So that's a case of like, it's not just cash, it's like cash for a purpose. And then some of the promoters will offer housing in what's known as like a model house

or model apartment. And so the girls will get delivered. That's supplied by a promoter. Yes. So select a models one of fucking storm and putting girls up in New York City to do the day job, but the promoter that they eat cheap sushi with and go for- No. No, so there's lots of different types of models. Right, Storm or Select, they'll have a legitimate model apartment somewhere. Right.

But the promoter's also to know where it is and the promoters are calling it. Trying to get the call out. Off-premotors. So there's those promoters, those promoters know where those model houses are. But some promoters know that there's a lot of girls that don't have representation yet and are maybe really good civilians,

but they're not good enough to get in with a legit agency yet. And so they're coming to New York through their friend networks and the promoters know their friends and then the promoters know that they need housing. So they'll offer them free housing in exchange for going out, say, four nights a week. Yeah. If you're a girl who's listening, does this sound like absolute heaven or absolute hell? And if you would be so kind as to just tell me your age when you give me this back because I'm fascinated at why 18-year-old you would have loved it

and 32-year-old you hated it. What's, when did it stop and try if you can to detract the fact that you now have a family and a little bit, like, what is it about us? Well, you cross, is it 30 and you just, just like you can't stay up after 12 o'clock without dying the next day? That's right. I mean, I had a career by the time I was 28. I mean, I was in grad school in my 20s.

And then I started my professor job and was really focused on trying to get tenure. And so I think that once you once you have a reason to wake up early in the morning, staying up late becomes harder and harder, right? If you're a bit more free and you don't have those kinds of constraints on your time, then you probably, you know, it just feels a lot more appropriate to be up until the sunrise. So it's partly that. I mean, it's a life course story. I think it's also the fact of doing this as research meant that I was going out sober. I said, I would hold a drink and maybe take a couple of sips of a drink over the course of the night. And maybe at the end of

the night take a drink. But while I was there, you know, everybody else would be drunk or high and feeling it. And it's not that much fun. It's over person. That's right. When you're in work mode, that's when you're ready to go cry in the bathroom. This is awful. Yeah. So the question that you had asked was why don't the girls monetize their value?

What keeps them from doing that? You've said that they're essentially the... They are not the currency, but they've moved themselves. They have somehow managed to move themselves vertically, integrate themselves backward up the value chain to be the thing which drives the revenue for both venue indirectly through encouraging people to buy bottles to get the girls to their tables and directly for the promoter because I'm going to guess that he must be paid based on how many girls he brings in or potentially percentage of tables as well.

That's right. Promoters will say that they're paid on the quantity of quality that they bring, quality, meaning how many real fashion models and then quantity of those. Is that like, so you brought in five girls that were a six out of ten, you brought in six girls that were an eight out of ten and one, what are they doing? How does that work? Yeah, yeah. So, when they come in through the front door,

the bouncer will do the first screening to say, like, your sixes aren't good enough to come out. Right? The sixes are no good here, buddy. Right. I think I might not use that term. Those terms exactly, but they'll make the first distinction. And then at the table, the manager will cruise by

and make sure that enough good looking girls are there at the table. And it also will look at, like with the vibe, to see if they're fine, if they're having, if it's good energy, if people are dancing, or if people look bored, and if it's not adding, the kind of energy that they're hoping, that it will. And so, yeah, there's multiple, I don't know, gatekeepers

on that process. But yeah, I proposed it to a couple of my friends that I know that were fashion models or were still fashion modeling at the time. And it was like, why don't we just cut out these promoters and we can go to the club directly, we just organize ourselves, you know, arbitrage the market and get paid each like $100 a night, and then rather than the promoter getting paid 800. They were like, no, that sounds like too much work.

And they're not, if they go out, they don't want to go out for work. They're going out really for leisure. And it's that split that people have, you know, where like if you if you pay somebody, then you move into a different category that we define to your experience, not as fun or as leisure or something of your own volition, but as work, you know, which which means that that collective effort for festins gets felt in a really different way. I also found that among the girls, actually among everybody that I spoke to, there was an assumption that if you were getting paid as a woman to be in this space, you were much closer to I also found that among the girls, actually among everybody that I spoke to, there was an assumption that if you were getting paid as a woman to be in this space,

you were much closer to this very stigmatized category of women, which is the prostitute or the sex worker. And there are lots of sex workers in these spaces, but it's assumed that the bottle girl is also for sale. So people would talk about bottle girls as being close to sex workers. And people would talk about fashion models who were getting paid to be at the tables as being kind of these, you know, sad paid women that had this kind of sad fate of having to actually get paid. That's a sad paid woman,

but the one that did it for some sashimi and a couple of glasses of moe, she's somehow fine. So it's not even moe sometimes. It's just like Prosecco. It's just sparkling wine. And it's not that sashimi. It's like the cucumber. It's like the cucumber roll when you go to these dinners, you get the kind of leftovers from the kitchen. Stop bringing bala to your table and claiming that it's champagne. It's not. It's not. It's it's Prosecco with a lightly upy logo. That's right. But if you're 18, it's all good. So we have something that we refer to as bubbly, which is the most nondescript term that we could come up with

for classing what is 5% volume sparkling peri. And this is given away for free if it's your birthday. So if it's your birthday, you're getting for free, your friends getting on guest list, you get free table, and you get a bottle of this, bubbly. But you're right. I'm like, it was just me and my business partner came up with it like 14 years ago.

I swear to God, there was a point at which he had a direct contact with the ventors that made it, because we were going through half a pallet a week. It's like, it's your birthday, and it's your birthday, and it's your birthday, and that's it. Why champagne? Why that is a drink. Yeah, so champagne is a high status good. You know, it has been for a long time. It's also like a great party beverage and because it's like it's light and bubbly, it has that kind of,

you know, nice uplift in your mouth. It's like sparkly. It's also, it lends itself well to shaking and spraying. So if you want to go nuts and make a big show of how you can waste this rare high-stay, that's good, then you can shake it and spray it. And without... That's right. And you know, imagine you can't do it with like a lembrusco, right? Like you can't shake and spray red because it's just... Everyone's alive. So we weren't allowed. My one experience of proper New York parking was last year on my friend's tag due. We went to Laval brunch on the Saturday.

And the table bill came to $34,000 before we even got to PhD. Then we went to PhD shout out to Troy Gordon, who I'm going to send this to, who I'm absolutely certain at some point soon, is going to have a coffee table book of all of the nightlife texts that he gets, which are something else. Anyway, so we went to PhD and we'd got, we'd stolen someone's, literally hijacked someone's hummus, stretch home a limousine, was firing champagne through the roof of this thing. It's like, to me, it feels an awful lot

like becoming a customer when you were originally the supplier. It's like getting high on your own supply of industry. But I was like, ah, I mean America, fuck it. So I do what I want, New York. And then arrived at PhD, and we were like, Larry, I don't know whether you guys use that term in America, but kind of raucous and loud and just being like, it's staggedy, right? To batch the party.

And sure enough, PhD is packed. The stag starts doing handstand walks up and down the table, like the overlooks the whole, so he's upside down doing handstand walks and then starts spraying a bottle and we've got it on video and the MC comes on on the mic and says we don't do that here boys, this is New York City. If you do that again my friend LeBron's gonna knock you the fuck out. Points to LeBron who is like a six foot nine huge behemoth of a dormant and we will let LeBron's going to come over again sure enough. So yeah, it was, that was my one experience, but it's clubbing in America, especially that side, that like brunch, STK sort of party vibe is something

that I'm seeing increasingly moving over to places like Ibiza. So I was in Ibiza last weekend, socially distanced. And in defense of the party industry generally, that product to me feels more wholesome than the previous incarnation, which was the raviour open from 10 or 11 o'clock until 6, 7 in the morning with a long lineup of DJs, sort of events which were dominating the European clubbing scene. And I feel like health and wellness goes UK US, but clubbing goes Europe, US. It goes like, we kind of swap. You're always ahead of us in terms of wellness, but we're always ahead of you in terms of partying. They're safe.

Americans make terrible music. Sorry to be on this listening. You make good rap. You get good rap and hip-hop, but everything else is just awful. So I think that's the way it is. I think that increasingly we're seeing these sorts of parties that are actually very heavily focused on food, on the quirkiness of the experience, the bottle shows, the guy in the light up doll outfit that comes out and dances next to your table for no reason, the quote boards that you can hold up that say something funny that you can hold up that say

something funny that you can put on your Instagram. And everyone from CandyPantsEvent who will be listening to this as well, including Nick that runs out in Dubai and they've got some stuff in Vegas and all the rest of it. They are the gatekeepers of sort of what's happening at the moment, I think, with like cool young parties like this. And they have something really, really similar to what you were talking about, but I think is... I'm gonna try and drop Nick in it too much. It's more wholesome. They have a deal with all of the Emirates girls

and all of the... I think it's like the air-cutter girls. So all of the air-hostesses that work for them, they all drink for free, eat for free, entry for free. And that's a slightly less sort of surreptitious way of doing, because it's like category wide, right? It's like if you're, it's not that you need to know the promoter and have had sex with him and like be six or six. Yeah, sure, sure.

Although there is certainly a rigorous screening of the Amara's have apply to tendons too. That's it because they've pre-selected, right? Yeah, yeah, often from economically disadvantaged countries, like in the Balkans, for instance, and so there's certainly still some inequities, you know, unfortunately it is a capitalist system even with, I mean, I agree that these are very beautiful and wonderful experiences and an really important part of the economy, you know, and it's called the Experience Economy Everything from like the, you know, festivals to these kinds of Instagram worthy

kind of pop-up things. But so often what I find what makes these spaces valuable is the implied exclusivity of them, which means that not everybody can get in. It means that inherently there's going, it's predicated on a hierarchy in which not everybody looks good enough to be in your picture and can't come in. It's interesting that for the most part, nightlife, and I'll break the fourth wall for everyone that doesn't know it, nightlife is entirely constructed in the heads of the people who attend and the people who don't. Like if you look at Lavo, brunch club or PhD or STK or whatever, in the cold light of day when there's no music on and the cleaning lights are up. And it stinks. It's an awful lot smaller than you think it is. It's about one third

the size of the venue that you think it is when you're tendering steep and dancing away. And the exclusivity, all of this stuff, it's entirely socially constructed. It must be fascinating for you to look at, for you to research. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. I think that's a really good observation about, like, in the daytime, you know, compared to the nighttime. And actually, you're like, listening to your story about the $30,000 bill, and, you know,

this kind of wild night in which you ultimately get kicked out or the threat of getting kicked out. They become kind of immortalized as the story that you can tell of like, I did this and I know that it was reckless, I know that it was silly, but in the moment it really made sense and it probably felt really good. And I found this throughout the research process, I would observe people in, you know, spending this kind of money, burning money, shooting, champion bottles. And then in interviews they'd be like, oh money, shooting, campaign bottles. And then in interviews, they'd be like,

oh yeah, I'm not really like that. That's very vulgar behavior. I don't spend as much as these other guys spend. And so what people say versus what people do are how people think and how they can trust themselves. That's a real problem in social science. Because it's... The experience self-versus, the remembered self, is just...

That's right. So my master's dissertation was on the effectiveness of anti-alcohol advertising on students at Newcastle University. And in essence, the result of the dissertation was nothing works. Like the drinking to young people, especially in the UK, is seen as a badge of honor. Not only is it a badge of honor, it's a right of passage. There's very few things that you can do where the seriousness of the destruction is directly correlated to the worthiness of the story. Like, you don't say,

hey man, how was your football game? And you say, oh, it was amazing. I broke my leg. You're like, but if I say to you, hey, Ashley, how was your night on Saturday? Oh, my God, it was so good. I got taken home in an ambulance. Like I woke up, I had no idea where I was. Like I was missing my shoes. Like I don't even know where my shoes were. Like my eyeball was on the bedside table next to me.

You know what I mean? Like that. This is a language. Yeah. But that's the language that people use, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've seen that before in some stuff on research on alcohol and young people. The badge of honor points is, yeah, I mean, that's a real problem also on college campuses,

because you know, here at our university as well, it's a kind of, it's a. It's part of what is the experience of higher education. I mean, the university is also part of this experience economy. Like, while somebody shell out 50k or 70k for university, if not to have those kinds of magical moments of coming of age in this environment of the university, in the dorm, in the city. And yeah, that poses a real problem for health and well-being because alcohol is such a close, it's like this lubricant that is kind of foundational to the college experience. It's an all-cause mortality risk, but when under the age of 25, you're made of rubber and magic.

So like, you're so fine. I'm so fucking pretty much anything. I'm super curious. Can you tell me a little bit about what social distance it is a party is look like? Yeah, that was interesting. So that was last weekend. I went out with my buddy. Owen, I did the season in Ibiza.

I fell in love with the girl when I was like 22, classic holiday romance, classic, fueled by far too much alcohol and some potent drugs. And I dropped my life and moved out there in between my bachelor's and my masters. And the boss that I worked for then is now Karl Cox's manager. And I've kept in touch with him for years and years and years. Amazing guy called Owen Irish Guy. And I was, I went out and I met him. And he told me everything about the island last week.

So, so she distance partly at the moment. None of the clubs are open. Night time clubs. The only venues that are open are open air. So places like Ocean Beach, a Shwaya decided they weren't going to open at all this year. Which was an interesting decision. But I think their overheads are high, their operating costs will be high because they're used to having these big DJs.

It is not cheap to open a venue where you've got open water, like deep enough for you to fall into and all this sort of stuff, there's going to be security costs, there's going to be blah, blah, blah. But Ocean Beach, we were there. You sat on a table. You're not allowed to go to other tables or mingle with other tables, although they were fairly lax in the VIP, which was the section that we were in. But mostly, you're not supposed to intermix.

If we take that one step further to what I think is going to happen in the UK, a venue that's my friend knows the owner in Leeds where we operate, they were shut down last week for having, and I quote, too many people standing up. There was too many people standing up in that venue. So you can imagine, like, I'm on this table, I'm on this table, you're sort of over there, and I'm chatting to my friends, and I think, oh, she's quite pretty, but I'm not allowed,

I'm not allowed to talk to you. What I have to do is say, hey, do you fancy go to the smoking area? Because I can't go over my line. There's a piece of paper on the floor that says, like, don't go past this line. And if I do, the door staff will come over and say like stop talking so now there's this whole new Rhythm of how people are speaking to other groups by having to go outside

Which is I guess testament to how adaptive Humans are yeah, that you give them a rule and immediately there is right., okay, where's the hole in the, okay, I can't speak in second. The work around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm surprised I wouldn't solve that with like Tinder. Peter, you can just like see who's in the room. Set the radius to three centimeters and see.

That's right. Yeah. Or some other sort of mediated communication. Well, one of these things, the things, the entire last sort of six months has caused a lot of changes. But every one of those changes has offered an opportunity for someone to step in because the supply of everything no longer meets the demand because the demands

are completely changed. Zoom, the stock price of Zoom. Also, did you know that there is a Chinese company also called Zoom, whose share price has gone up by nearly 50% from people make it wrongly buying the wrong company? That's right. In part because sports are closed, you have so many people that are now doing,

you know, this little investors, like as gambling as a substitute for sports gambling. So they just like, yes, do the wrong zoom. Oh, man, this is the sun poetic irony in that, I don't know. But yeah, that's, that's like, that's a big part of it, but it was weird scanning your menu on the table because they weren't bringing over actual menus and all this sort of stuff. I don't think we're going to see partying be the same, certainly not in places like Spain this year, it may be next year. We are in, I don't know what it's like in America, I guess it's federal, right, so it's state

by state. But in the UK, we are the only industry, the nightlife industry that hasn't got a reopen date. Which is, what do you think that says? What do you think it says that the government hasn't bothered to give nightclubs a date to reopen when every industry has from live music venues to sports and recreation, to big stadiums.

How do you think it viewed them? Have bars opened. So bars have opened table service only. And how they categorize bar versus nightclub is kind of. Great. It's a little bit loose, but no one can do anything that would be analogous to the sort of experience that you would expect in a club. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's the stand-up problem that you're describing in a club.

In a bar, you can imagine there's some way that a managerial or security staff could necessitate that people not get shoulder to shoulder and embrace and stand up and feel the music. That is the purpose of a nightclub is to be close to Stryngerous. It's sadly an industry that was designed to transmit a virus. It's hot, it's sweaty, people shout, people kiss, people mingle and use the same glasses. Even if they've gone through the dishwasher, like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's a real chance. So what's next? Are you, what, what are you going to delve into for your next research project?

Have you got any idea? Yeah, I have a couple of things going on. Nothing, nothing has worked out yet in terms of ethnography. Probably that's because I've got these two little kids now. And so trying to imagine doing ethnographic field work in the style that have been trained to do. Nobody told me this when I was like, you know, 22. And I get learning my field. But I get all of you have researched done before.

Right. Before you have. You know, unless I do something on like the PTA, like the parent teacher, associate, the school or something. Which, yeah, there's some interesting questions there too. I mean, I had a professor in grad school, Craig Kelheim, he used to say that all of all of social life is like high school. And so there's like, you can study hierarchy and inequality and boundaries and transgressions and categories of worth in any kind of field.

So the PTA is just as politicized in that sense as a nightclub. So, you know, I could go for it. But I don't know, in the immediate short term when working with a team of graduate students to interview people that work at bars that have been out of work. So we're looking at bartenders and bottle girls and how they transition skills. And yeah, I like how they think about the future right now when their industry is in such shock.

Could put. Well, there will be a lot of people from the nightlife industry promote as DJs, especially bar stuff, table servers, managers and assistant managers, AGMs, GMS, ops managers, anyone that's listening, like let me know, you know what, find me at Chris WillX, wherever you follow me, or put it in the YouTube comments or do whatever. What's your thoughts? Especially, we're a heavy UK audience, but like 35% of people listening will be from America as well, so we'll get a good insight from there. But like, the UK really, really hasn't helped the nightlife industry that much. And I can see the, I can see both sides. I can, my, the house that I'm in is built because of the people that go to nightlife,

but I also appreciate that there's a big public health concern. And I don't know, it's an interesting one, but I'd love to know what people think. I'd love to get a little bit of feedback. So throw that in the comments below. Actually, I'd better get you, let you go. You've got two, we can't just do this all night. This isn't like 2010. That's right.

But this has been really fine. I feel like you're the kind of perfect audience for for my work. Very much so. Very much. Very much. So yeah, exactly. I am. I'm going to leave it with a parting. Not at all, actually, before we started, but I had my first socially

distance modeling casting today, which was hilarious because I turned them. We were told to turn up, um, must wear facial covering, must do everything. And I got in there to find that the guy that was running the casting, who must run, must run the company, wasn't wearing a face mask. I was just like getting in, like putting the shirt, making sure that the shirt fitted, like there was something up with the shoulder on one of mine. So he put a shoulder pad in to like change the shape of it. I'm like, no one, no one gives fuck anymore, do they?

No one can have, but yeah, you're not on, you're not on any social media or anything are you? No, not really. I know for someone who studies and teaches in pop culture, this seems a little incongruent, but it was a deliberate thing to try to protect my attention. What do you want people to go? The link to your new book will be in the show now to below. Anything else you want to check out? Well, actually, I am on LinkedIn. So, yeah, I guess, I feel like that's the, I don't know, the adult legit in that version.

LinkedIn, as Mike Winett passed Modern Wisdom modern wisdom guess says is Facebook for Wankers. Yeah. Okay, nice. I want it as well. Everyone listening is on it. It's just that you act differently, you know? Yeah, that's a very interesting, different kind of norms. I might need to get you.

I feel like we've got tons of stuff that we could go through. I might need to get you back on and we can have another discussion and deconstruct some other bizarre world. Yeah, I want to hear more about the fashion modeling industry now and what's happening and the future of fashion modeling. That sounds awesome. I mean, socially distance casting,

I'm telling you, they're the way forward. Turn up with a mask on, you could be anybody. That's so cool. Yeah, but I think the standard for your personality is gotta go way up, right? Like you gotta really make it shine behind that mask. I know exactly, yeah, you gotta go and go. Well, lies now.

Gracious. That's it, yeah. You're like really like expressive hands or something. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, did you see those images a while ago where people were editing celebrities to remove their eyebrows.

No. Or it's terrifying. Just search celebrities with no eyebrows on Google. Oh wow. It's so scary. I'm going to leave you with, actually, because I haven't told you this. And Rob Henderson, the guy that told me to get in touch with you, was on the show and dropped some amazing knowledge bombs.

Tinder dating stats for you. One in five swipes from a woman is right. So it's like one in five is whereas the for men, it's like one in 10 left. And the stats, the data comes back as the bottom 20 percent. Sorry, the bottom 80% of men competing for the bottom 20% of women and the top 80% of women are competing for the top 20% of men That's how hypergamous Yeah, the Tinder dating pool is and yeah, yeah They were talking Rob was looking at some amazing dating statistics. I'll try and link you guys in. Looking at some great dating statistics from university campuses. And he found that there was a increasing challenge for highly educated women to find mates

that they really wanted to be with. And the implication is pretty terrifying. As girls become richer and better educated, but always want a partner that is at least as educated and or as rich. The challenge that you have is there's only two things that can happen. One of them is that you stay single and the other is that you start to date a person that you are fundamentally unattracted to. Well, what is attraction though? I mean, in this case, it's rooted in a socially constructed norm that men are more powerful and have more resources than women.

And so I'm totally fine with that changing. And then the pool opens up. I think that's great, but can women find a man attractive when their typical signals of success and signals of attraction? You know, it's the dad bod sexy again argument. Yeah. Resource acquisition is part and parcel supposedly as is muscle acquisition as is straight teeth and good speech and tall height.

Yeah. Blah blah. We could go on, actually, I gotta let you go. You gotta go back to your topic. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go on forever if I'm not careful. Your link to your fantastic book will be in the show on it's below.

If you've listened to this and it's resonated with you, let me know what you think. There's tons of people that'll have loads and loads of stories and I'll pass them back onto Ashley and maybe you'll feature in the next book or something, I don't know. Yeah, all right, great. This was a pleasure.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.