What is New York City?

Shake Shack's switch to fresh-cut fries and costly reversal to crinkle-cut illustrates how listening to the wrong audience (status-seeking critics vs. core customers) destroys productivity and profit, and how quitting a bad decision restores both.

“They switched to fresh cut French fries because they wanted the status that came from New York cultural critics saying, "These are guys authentic. They're the real deal." And the French fries were no good. and the entire internet blew up and say, "What have you done to Shake Shack?" And the staff hated making them and it was a mess and you had to clean things differently. Nothing good came of this shift except making a couple people in New York City happy because that's who they decided to listen to. And one day, Danny looked at this and said, "What is the purpose of the French fries at Shake Shack? Do the French fries at Shake Shack exist to help a non-C customer feel good about eating at a Danny Meyer restaurant or do the French fries at Shake Shack exist to further the story of what it is to come to Shake Shack? And they ripped everything out and they went back to the crinkle cut fries and the world rejoiced. profits went up, productivity went up, and they got back to what they were trying to do in the first place by forgiving and ignoring the people who needed to say, "You need fresh cut French fries.”

New York City runs 250 diesel-fired LNG trucks per day to deliver gas to town border stations, a direct consequence of pipeline constraints.

“They were running 250 trucks around the city, diesel-fired trucks around the city to move LNG to their town border delivery points to keep the city up.”

New York City flipped from the best hotel market in the world (1987-2007) to the worst in the US (2007-2019), illustrating how radically and durably market leadership can reverse.

“If you go back the most interesting and best performing hotel market in the world from 1987 to 2007 was New York City. The worst performing hotel market in the United States from 2007 to 2019 was New York City.”

Between 1916 and 1961, New York City's diagonal setback zoning gave larger assembled land parcels greater building rights, creating strong financial incentives to absorb adjacent plots.

“Between 1916 and 1961 New York basically had this they had a rule that you drew a line from the street the line a diagonal line upwards and you could build under that line and obviously if you just think about the 3D geometry there the more you build out that plot the bigger you can build and so there weren't any rules for like forcing people to come into your plots but the bigger your the bigger your assembled unit of land was the more rights you got so you had strong incentives to keep absorbing more.”

A single NYC mafia tour guide generated $1M in revenue through Airbnb Experiences, a hyper-local in-person offering.

“There was the guy in New York City who was doing a million dollars on Airbnb doing the police tours, right? What was it? The mafia tours.”

David Sacks frames NYC's AI school pilot as ideologically anti-AI indoctrination.

“It sounds like they're going to put them through Doomer Academy, quite frankly.”

David Sacks calls AI bans in schools a self-imposed form of modern segregation that will push kids into poverty.

“It is a self-imposed form of modern segregation. And it is going to completely push an entire generation of kids in these cities that are subject to these rules into poverty.”

New York City has approximately 50,000 ghost apartments left vacant because renovation costs are prohibitive for landlords.

“I'll just have 50,000 ghost apartments according to reports in New York City.”