How Bryan Johnson and Andrew Huberman Killed NYC Nightlife
Just as empires have a certain cadence to their rise and fall, so do late night spots in New York City.
If you’ve lived long enough in NYC, you come to understand the basic truth that no establishment stays cool forever. Every big club of the late 00s from Cain to Bungalow 8 no longer exists. Everything succumbs to the “cycle.”
To understand the cycle, you must understand the two opposing forces – there are things that make you cool and there are things that make you money. They often exist in tension with one another.
A hot spot will begin its life in phase 1.
During phase 1, models/artists and cool gays predominate with some sprinkling of famous people. This is where if you are lucky enough to get in you might be able to take a blurry photo of DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire hitting on a 19-year-old from Ohio who just got signed with Wilhelmina.
In Phase 1, the night life spot pretends not to care about money – you can’t really buy your way in. There is usually a gay door guy with some indecipherable criteria for letting people in.
But phase 1 doesn’t last forever and generally ends at some point – the place loses its newness factor and needs to make money. This is when the finance bros enter the chat and they get in by buying tables.
They expect to be surrounded by hordes of models and famous people, but by the time they have entered the chat that crowd has left.
Instead of Moldovan models, they get a soft 7 who fancies herself a hard 9. The finance bros over time realize that it is cheaper meeting soft 7s off of Hinge and buying her a $100 dinner and asking her if she wants to watch The Office at his apartment afterwards than dealing with a club table. So he stops going.
After finance bro, you then enter the outer borough phase.
This is when you get gaggles of plus sized women on on bachelorettes and lots of guys named Tony who you think are throwback Italians but are actually Albanians. This phase blends easily into the next phase, which is the urban phase. Sometimes the outer borough and the urban phase are basically the same thing.
The urban phase is when guys named Terrence take over and tipping goes away. The hot bottle service girls are no more. The club will usually close shortly there after and rebrand.
Now this used to be how things went, and it was a life cycle that more or less worked. But now clubs are closing and closing permanently. There is no re-brand or re-launch.
What killed it was the finance bro. Finance bro splurging on tables and getting wasted on Fridays and Saturdays is drove the long term unit economics.
But two things have changed.
Finance bro finds that dating apps provide a way better ROI. Rather than spending $1k for a share of a table he can spend $200 for a dinner date and get to a likely better outcome.
But more importantly finance bro or people under 30 for that matter do not drink anymore.
They have imbibed too many Andrew Huberman and Bryan Johnson podcasts about alcohol’s ravaging effects on sleep and they have collectively decided that longevity is more important than listening to Rihanna at a crowded table.
This chart says it all. How is nightlife supposed to survive if the key drinking demographic – young people – spend almost 90% less than their grandparents?