How Shaman Bros Killed 1Oak
Last weekend, for the first time in several years, I ventured into the basement of a NYC night club – not just any NYC night club but Tao Group’s leading entrée into the scene, Little Sister (in my defense a friend of mine had a birthday there).
NYC night clubs are finally opening up and an old social order is trying to re-exert itself.
But will it succeed?
My answer after a one-hour excursion is no.
People will return to various forms of robust socializing but the allure of table service night clubs with doormen and velvet ropes and thudding rap music and Leo sightings will be dead.
It will die the way all ecosystems die – having lost its keystone species.
Every eco-system has a keystone species, and they are the species upon which all other species unwittingly depend on.
Off the coast of Newfoundland, the keystone species was Cod.
Cod eat Sea Urchins, which eat kelp, which the rest of the ecosystem depends upon as their base nutrient source. If you kill the Cod, then the Sea Urchin population explodes and they eat all the kelp and the whole ecosystem collapses. You end up with vast stretches of ocean that are called Sea Urchin barrens….
That is exactly what happened off the coast of Newfoundland in the early 90s in one of the least appreciated environmental tragedies of the last fifty years. A maritime area that was once arguably the most bountiful place of marine life on the planet became barren – almost overnight due to the collapse of the Cod stock – the keystone species.
It went from this –
To this -
The NYC bottle service night club scene is in many ways identical to the ecosystem of Newfoundland fisheries. It too has a keystone species and that is the 20 something model / Instagram influencer.
This key stone species is what attracts the apex predator. In the NYC club scene that is the celebrity / trust fund kid / buyside finance bro.
They get tables to target the keystone species – the model.
If you kill off the keystone species, then the apex predator doesn’t get the table. If he doesn’t go then the incremental filler female who is there to get free drinks from the apex predators doesn’t go and if she doesn’t go then the beta males – the guys working middle office jobs who are blowing their entire bonus to pose as an apex predator for a night – they are gone too.
And those guys are crucial to the whole operation.
The wannabes posing as a hitter for a night are to clubs what little old ladies who spend hours playing slots are to Vegas Casinos – they are the highest margin customer who secretly fund the whole thing but are busily ignored by management who instead cater to the whales.
If the wannabes aren’t clamoring to get in, then the whole business model collapses and you are left with the nightclub equivalent of a Sea Urchin barren – that is a place overrun with the bridge and tunnel crowd. Once they achieve critical mass and start pumping their fists in unison, there is no coming back – you have to shut down and re-brand.
Now what I noticed when I walked into this club was that the eco-system was careening towards collapse. The fist pumpers hadn’t arrived yet – but they were on their way.
The keystone species, the model/Instagram influencer types, no longer go to clubs.
Now before I explain why – let me caveat that some still do.
That Saturday, there were a few models but they were more of the off beat variety - covered in tattoos, more interesting looking than beautiful. They wandered around like aimless giraffes who had been separated from the rest of their herd.
Where was the rest of their herd?
The rest of the herd is hanging with the Shaman Bros.
When the ordered night life system broke down during COVID – it was the Shaman Bros in their guise as DJs who organized an alternative social world of underground parties and destination venues. The model / influencer crowd was already heading in this direction pre-COVID with the rise of Burning Man and Tulum but COVID super charged that shift.
The model/influencer girls are not going back to a night club to beg a predatory VP from Morgan Stanley for a Vodka cranberry juice after she spent a week in Mykonos doing acid and dancing to Shaman Bros transcendent DJ set.
She enjoys the fact that Shaman Bro is so smug and on so many hallucinogenic that he forgot how to be predatory. Nightlife will shift to venues like Gospel that embrace this new culture and to lofts and underground venues in a real permeant way as young people in general shift from drinking to drugs.
And this is probably the least appreciated thing about COVID.
During COVID young people were not going out and getting drunk with other young people. They were at home or in underground environments and they were trying novel psychedelic drugs like ketamine and 2CB and LSD.
It was like the whole world joined a countercultural commune for a year thanks to the lockdown and got hooked onto a totally different experience – a psychedelic one.
Psychedelics are not only being used in ever greater numbers – an over 50% increase from 2015 to 2018 alone (see here) but they are now entering the mainstream as well with Big Pharma seeing an explosion in new trials.
Are MDMA and Psilocybin and LSD to cannabis what cannabis was to alcohol only ten years ago?
It is not crazy to imagine that many of these drugs will not only be available but be socially acceptable over the next ten years.
And if that happens it will dramatically change the way we socialize. No longer will people desperately seek out dark crowded dens filled with loud rap music to get drunk – they will be onto entirely different social experiences.
Night clubs that survive on selling Vodka at a 20x mark up will have a hard time surviving that shift.
I can’t tell you exactly what the new modes of socializing will be but I can promise that 1Oak will be a lot easier to get into next year.
The problem is that you just won’t want to go…
