Irrational hospitality

What does hospitality look like in a fractured society? We had Why Is This Interesting’s Colin Nagy on Tasteland to discuss the state of hotels, the death of expertise and how to bring back neighborliness. You can listen to the full episode here. — Daisy Alioto 

The following is a condensed transcript of the conversation.

Francis Zierer: Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you've recently fallen into. 

Colin Nagy: I've been using LLMs to put together reading plans for myself. After watching Landman, the Taylor Sheridan show on Paramount+, I was like, “I want to do a reading plan about oil.” A venn diagram between oil, geopolitics, Texas, all of that. It put together a pretty awesome reading plan for me. It's not like I'm trying to do a Master's or PhD. I'm just trying to get to a level of deeper understanding of something that I have a cursory understanding of—I'm auditing the class. 

Another rabbit hole I went down is the rebuilding of Aleppo. The Assad regime curated historic sites to tell a very specific story of Syrian Arab nationalism, anti-colonial resistance, and Ba'athist triumph. So now with the rebuilding of a lot of that country, there's a lot more people at the table but everyone still doesn't have a fair say. I've been thinking about who gets to decide how we remember. But I'm in the business of wormholes, so I kind of have to move on from them to the next one pretty quickly. 

Daisy Alioto: I have been thinking about brute force credibility: the same people that pushed for the death of expertise now want to benefit from positioning themselves as experts. So they've brute forced the Forbes mention, they've created the TikTok presence in rented hotel rooms. And now they want to have an opinion on geopolitics. 

CN: I find this problem with the Silicon Valley era from 2005 to 2020. If you were there, you participated in the most insane upswing of wealth, even if you were working at Yahoo.com in the ad sales department. But a lot of these people then think that they get to be like Marcus Aurelius on shit. That's the next level of social capital, fluency to talk about healthcare policy and dexterity. It's always in every thread with the titans of industry. 

Just by proximity, it could make another person feel like they're in the same room or plane of credibility. And that's funny because when I observe a lot of this class, it's like: “I'm wealthy and therefore I go into the Loro Piana store and I buy everything off the mannequin.” Like I buy the look, right? I buy the package of what I think I should be. 

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FZ: It’s like your ChatGPT reading list, but instead of giving me the things to read and engage with, it's just “give me the products to consume that I'm not gonna engage with on a deeper level.” How does the ideology of this class of people get baked into new hospitality? 

CN: I'm wondering how both the bad side of new money and tech wealth manifests itself in what we build in terms of hospitality experiences and where that's going to net out over the next 10 years. 

It's interesting because there are people that have done the work that have potentially done well, but aren't screaming it from the rooftops and are looking for something that is intuitive and thoughtful and well-constructed. I used to stay at this hotel in Hong Kong called The Upper House which was very much that. Things would happen, incredible design, but it wasn't ostentatious and it wasn't in your face. 

FZ: You use this term “irrational hospitality” which I'd love to hear you weave in here. 

CN: It's like hospitality that is not beholden to the CFO, where it's something that is beautifully done that doesn't make sense cost-wise, but is deep and interesting. 

Some of the best things are these irrational or contrarian things that would probably piss off a cost cutter or someone that lives in spreadsheets all day. The hospitality brands that are not beholden to a holding company or a CEO or CFO that's trying to manage costs, they're able to do some of those irrational touches that make you feel acknowledged or you don't feel like you're being nickel and dimed. You're at a place in Mexico and you're being charged Tribeca prices. So even the very, very wealthy of the world, they're like, “You think I'm a fucking idiot?” But the reason why I find this so fascinating is because luxury is a reflection of the zeitgeist, but sometimes there's this lag of where the trend is versus where things are going. 

Someone told me a great example of when they stayed at The Goring in London, and they had taken a book off the shelf and they read it and had a bookmark in it and then they left. And like three years later, the hotel had made a note of the place in the book and had the book on the nightstand with the same point in the book, several years on. That makes the hair stand up on my arm. 

I'm really excited by those types of notions of hospitality because that's the poetry, that's the compound interest of a relationship that you've built with a hotel over time. And that's why I find this space so fascinating. It gets us back to this notion of like neighborliness.  

DA: With old money, as paternalistic as it was, there was a sense that the more money you earn, the more duty you have towards the common good. And that sense of civic duty is completely out the window. 

CN: The social contract is dead. Zoom calls in coffee shops, music allowed on the subway, taxi and movie theaters, toes out on airplanes. Everyone has main character energy now and thinks the rest of the world is a bunch of NPCs. The more you stare at a screen, the more you feel like you can do anything you want IRL since other humans just wind up seeming like avatars you can ignore, commenters you can mute, or gang members you can run over in Grand Theft Auto.

I know a lot of people are frustrated with this, but I don't know what is required to kind of get back to neighborliness, because part of this pandemic is social media trances where people are not in touch with their environment. I used to think the antidote to this was like hospitals, hotels and these spaces having a little bit more backbone in terms of what they will and won't stand for. But the problem is, that penalizes the frontline staff who are just trying to do their jobs and don't want to have to pick fights with people that can potentially get them fired. 

DA: I think the fact that people could be armed in American society impacts people's willingness to confront other people. There's a lot of things about this social contract breaking down that aren't just people's solipsism and spending time online. It's that we're not really a peaceful society. 

CN: Is there a way to modulate this in a way that's non-threatening but is snapping someone out of like a trance? I've actually done that in airports where I'm like, “Excuse me, can you just put headphones on?” People are like, “Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I was talking to my nephew and I was entranced.” But then other people are like, “Go fuck yourself.” I think the hospitality experience is like a neighborliness, an anticipation, and empathy. 

And that is so powerful. Honestly, people that lose their jobs or are having a bad day, it's like when you call them and just say, “Hey, I'm just thinking about you. No agenda, I'm here.” And people are blown away because no one does that anymore.

COLIN NAGY ON TASTELAND