Travel’s New Access Divide

0:23Seth Borko: It has been 25 years since 9-11. Hi, everybody. I am Sarah Kopit with my trusty co-host, Seth Borko. And today we're going to talk about all things New York. But first of all, this episode is going to air on 9-11, the 25th anniversary. Seth, I can't believe it's been 25 years. Were you here in New York?

0:46Sarah Kopit: Yes. Yes, I was. I was in Westchester. Yeah. So I was in school. I was in school in Westchester. But I remember the day very, very clearly. my father worked in manhattan all my friends parents worked in manhattan i remember it very

1:02Seth Borko: very very clearly yeah were you in new york i was i was i was i was actually i'm probably in some people's like 9 11 stories like the same one i'm gonna tell you right now because like you know there were no self well actually i shouldn't say that there were cell phones but not in the same way that we know, you know, cell phones to be right now. You know, they didn't have images or anything. And I was, I was jogging. I had taken the day off of work. I was working at Court TV and I had taken the day off of work because I had a job interview at the Manhattan district attorney's office, lower Manhattan.

1:39Seth Borko: And so it was like at 11am or something like that. And so I actually went jogging in Central Park. It was a beautiful day as we all, as we all remember and uh i was up at the top of the reservoir like jogging around the reservoir and on the upper east side and i was listening to the radio as one did in 2001 and i remember they they they said it on the radio and i just i remember it was what just a podcast that just yeah exactly with with songs and the occasional words i remember like turning and looking because That's like one of the highest points of Manhattan. And I could like see the smoke.

2:22Seth Borko: And then I kept going because like that was the first plane.

2:26Sarah Kopit: Yeah.

2:27Seth Borko: And then.

2:28Sarah Kopit: And everyone thought it was an accident.

2:30Seth Borko: Yep. And a small plane.

2:32Sarah Kopit: Yeah. Like that.

2:33Seth Borko: I remember them saying it was a small plane. And then they came back on and they said another plane hit. And like you could like it was just like then it was all different. And I remember just running towards my house and telling all these people, like, I was crying, you know, like, like, people were like looking at me like, what is wrong with you? And I was like pointing. That's what I mean about how like, I'm in other people's stories because like, I was that person who was like, look, you know, look down there. So, yeah, so that was, and then I remember calling my, I remember calling, like, it was actually my law school.

3:13Seth Borko: I don't know why I called the law school and not the DA's office. It's like, it's weird when things happen and you just, like, I was like, I was like, do I still have my, my interview today? And like one person even said, of course you do. And I'm like, have you turned on the TV? And they're like, no. and I was like turn on the TV and they hung up of course I never heard from them again like so you know that and and I did have the wherewithal though like as like a baby journalist at the time I took my camera out really like my film camera and I still of course I still have those pictures like I remember like walking around and taking pictures like there were people walking up to the Upper East Side that was where I lived like covered in in dust I took pictures of them Like I remember taking pictures of like at Starbucks that they had a taped sign, like the handwritten sign that said closed due to like national emergency and stuff.

4:08Seth Borko: So and so I still have those those pictures that I, you know, developed at CVS or something. But, yeah, so it's been 25 years and, you know, it really has changed. I mean, not to like quote love actually, but it has changed the way that we travel. It is in, in, in, in kind of like after so much time in a bit kind of unusual ways, like it made it harder at first, but it's gotten so much easier since.

4:35Sarah Kopit: 9-11 was one of these moments i i was in um i'll highlight i suppose a bit of the age gap between us but i was in i was in middle school at the time um so i wasn't flying a lot but i mean it absolutely transformed um it was it was it was a huge hit for the aviation industry people didn't think they would ever recover and it was a huge hit for the travel industry and it transformed how we fly i mean tsa i mean even not even tsa homeland security didn't exist they created department of homeland security in response to this and tsa didn't exist and there was no major i mean you there was i think there's metal detectors but there's no major

5:17Seth Borko: non-security like the way we know it now i don't even think there were i i've heard that

5:24Sarah Kopit: i've heard that people used to be able to walk onto the shuttle the airplane shuttle New York to D.C. you could just walk on you could basically show up by a ticket and walk on

5:32Seth Borko: because I remember going to the airport and I don't think that there were metal detectors I mean like meaning I don't remember standing in any lines to do anything I just remember like

5:43Sarah Kopit: walking in you know yeah yeah so I mean it's just some of the ways that it's transformed the travel industry it's just it's hard to see like this one I mean it transformed the travel industry in such a way that we don't even really it's just like water like we just don't even think about it like the fact that there is airport security and the fact that we've built all these things like pre-check and all these like status things and clear like clear would not have a like kind of funny thing clear maybe we would have a business maybe we would have a need for biometric identification but clear would effectively not have a business without 9-11 and instead we've built you know it's just such a transformation and i thought it was interesting the wall street journal did a story or they reported that TSA is considering allowing more access to the gate for non-ticketed passengers.

6:34Seth Borko: I would love that, man. I remember that, like, you go to the airport with your friends or your family. Sit there and wait with them.

6:44Sarah Kopit: Speaking of romantic comedies, you can't do the gate chase to follow your love interest on a way, you know tell them to get out don't get on the plane because you're not ticketed or you have to

6:56Seth Borko: buy a ticket i guess yeah the you know the the gate the gate is is security and it's not as romantic to like get stopped by the tsa tsa agent right you know it's it's it's got it's got it's got to be the the flight attendants closing the door you know um yeah all so many movies uh the

7:16Sarah Kopit: the home alone board in the plane with the wrong ticket. The, the, the, I would love actually, or whatever the chasing your, your, your partner to the, the gate as the flight and then closes the door. So many, so many rom-com and comedy moments have been taken from us, but it is interesting. I mean, it's, yeah, I mean, it's, it's transformative. And,

7:41Seth Borko: but, but we came back the travel and like roaring back through. I mean, I mean, I guess that's probably if there is one big takeaway over the last 25 years and all of the various setbacks that this world has had that have all impacted the travel industry quite a bit. The one thing that we've learned is that people are not willing to give it up. Quite the opposite.

8:04Sarah Kopit: It does. I mean, it speaks to the resilience of the travel industry. And Warren Buffett famously calls the airlines a terrible business. and yet they continuously, I mean, which is what you were starting to say, there's been so much more friction added to the travel process as a result of the terrorist attacks September 11th. And yet there is so much more travel and in so many new and different places that would have been not unimaginable, but incredibly difficult to do in 2001. Some of the places that you and I regularly talk about vacation just would not have been accessible. And it's crazy.

8:40Sarah Kopit: I actually, so we did a research report, me and my former colleague, Walter Geertz, did this research report during the pandemic, looking back on past travel industry disasters. And we actually created a chart showing total travel activity, total international travel volumes. look at international travelers worldwide in the millions of trips and if you're an audio listener i always appreciate our audio listeners um it shows millions of international travelers uh from 1998 uh through 2019 like i said this was done during the pandemic and what you would see if you looked at this chart and if you are watching on youtube you're seeing this chart is that is basically a continuous upward pattern with maybe in a couple occasional dips here or there and that actually within a year with it by 2022 and 2023 we actually saw a recovery of you mean 9-11 is barely noticeable on this chart is the honest it is it is not noticeable yeah and so i think it's interesting it's a moment of remembrance and and of scariness but also it does speak to resilience to recovery and to how these moments that our life changing and our industry changing though it is an industry that can adapt i think that gives me quite a bit of comfort as we think about actually if you were to put if this chart were to be extended to put the pandemic on it you would see the pandemic was dramatically worse than september 11th and we recovered from that and as we deal with all the uncertainty around ai it gives me comfort that um that yeah the big thing

10:18Seth Borko: that I don't like about that chart, Will, if you want to just throw it back up for a second, is that, so you've got 9-11, which was terror-related, terrorist activity. But then the rest of them, and then even if you put, like if you imagine what that dip would look like for COVID, are SARS, bird flu, swine flu, MERS, Zika, and COVID. Like, that's not a, I mean, I skipped the financial crisis in there. That was kind of in there too, coupled with swine flu. but I don't know, Seth. That's not a... That's a bit of a scary pattern.

10:55Sarah Kopit: Yeah, the pandemics are more common.

10:57Seth Borko: I mean, they're just... Meaning, like, the natural progression of what comes next, it's another medical contagion.

11:08Sarah Kopit: Or economic, yeah. Yeah, not...

11:11Seth Borko: Yes.

11:12Sarah Kopit: Anyway. I mean, and, you know, this also... I mean, I will say, you know, We're talking about the resilience of the industry. 9-11 also led to a wave of particularly airline bankruptcies, restructurings, and mergers. 2001 coincided with the dot-com bust. So we had the dot-com stock bubble burst. Then we had the September 11th terrorist attacks. That led, I'm going to say inevitably, but almost inevitably to wars and conflicts in the Middle East, which in turn drove up oil prices. And that was when we first started to see that by 2004 was when we had oil barrels back above, you know, hitting$100 a barrel for the first time ever.

11:54Sarah Kopit: And so this was a time of resilience for the travel industry, but it was also what led to the modern airline industry we have today of highly consolidated. This is when U.S. Air went out of business, when TWA went out of business. this is when a lot of these mergers and consolidations with Delta Northwest all of that really this was the moment that sparked that wave of financial consolidation not just the terror attacks but everything surrounding it as well so it was a moment of resilience and I was trying to draw analogies to COVID or even to AI disruption saying we can be a resilient industry but I think The other lesson is that the same companies that the demand proved to be resilient and the companies proved to emerge, but they were not necessarily the same companies as they were post 9-11.

12:45Sarah Kopit: So I think that's worth a brief, I don't know if I'm going to call it a stroll down memory lane, but a quick look. And I'll show, I'll pull one more chart about inbound travel to the United States. So while we did say that overall international travel remained steady, that is because across the globe, travel continued to pick up. and offset declines in the United States. But the U.S. tourism sector took a major hit as a result of both the burst of the bubble and the economic recession, all the things I just discussed. What we're looking at here, this chart, is U.S. tourism flows, where we're looking at volume of travelers and spend of travelers.

13:32Sarah Kopit: We're looking at inbound arrivals and receipts, outbound departures and expenditures, as well as domestic departure and expenditures. What's interesting about this chart is domestic travel was effectively unaffected. Domestic travel was growing. It stalled in 2001 and it continued to grow immediately thereafter. But international inbound outbound travel took many years to recover with inbound. Let's just look at dollar spend. The amount of inbound dollars from international tourists spent in the United States peaked in 2000 and did not recover until 2004. And outbound travel of Americans going abroad dollar-wise peaked in 2000 and did not recover until 2003.

14:15Sarah Kopit: Now, the fact that it peaked in 2000 does tell you something that it can also be linked to the dot-com bubble. The fact that it didn't recover until 2004 probably tells you that oil prices and some economic factors were also probably playing a role. And it wasn't strictly the terror attacks. because there wasn't strictly the loss of connectivity. In fact, we know that that connectivity and airline routes recovered with some relatively quickly. But this was a momentous event in, I mean, in global history, of course, in US history, of course, but it wasn't a blip. It had multi-year impacts on American and US and New York City tourism.

14:54Sarah Kopit: And so while the overall international global market showed great resilience, The New York City market took many years to recover and the airlines themselves restructured. Yeah. An interesting time.

15:07Seth Borko: Yeah. You know, when I look back at that time, though, like thinking I'm now kind of pivoting and thinking about what it's like to be in New York today in 2026 and to like go back to not back to work. But, you know, summer is over. September is here. kind of what it's like to travel to New York right now. And I think that the biggest, I don't know if it would be shock, but like we have our global forum in a couple of weeks. UNGA, the United Nations General Assembly is on right now. It seems like everybody who is going to have an in-person event in New York is having it in September. If you try to get a hotel room right now in New York City, it is like ghastly expensive.

15:53Seth Borko: just like you know i went and i just kind of did a did a quick you know midtown google on hotel prices and you know it's like i think the lowest i found was you know like around upper 400s highest is of course like in the thousands you know so just for like a normal regular regular old hotel room that you know a business person who might be coming in to spend two nights at the office six or seven hundred bucks that's a lot yeah um that's huge yeah i mean that i know uh it's it's massive it's massive it just goes to show like the world has or i always feel like there are two starts of the year one is in january after new year's

16:44Sarah Kopit: and the other is in september after the summer yeah the first is when you set your intentions and the second is when you actually follow through on your intentions. If you're going to have a good year, it's going to be September and October is the make or break to make it happen. All the more reason to come to Skiff Global Forum and meet your customers, clients, vendors, learn about the industry. Sorry, shameless plug there. Well, I mean, the New York City market is insane. And I think it does speak to, I mean, not 25 years is not a recovery, But it does speak to how the city has truly recovered over the last quarter of a century and is now the hottest destination.

17:29Sarah Kopit: The Wall Street Journal did another article about how 25 years after 9-11, downtown is the hottest neighborhood for new development in the city. I mean, there is so much new building happening there, so many conversions. And, of course, hotels and demand for hotels and demand for tourists to visit New York City. So it is great to see the city recovered. You know, Sarah, I did a little bit of data prep for this call. I did it quite late. I'll admit that I did it in Claude. So I don't want to let, I don't, I, this, I'm, I'm, we can fact check it live, but I actually pulled up because we were talking about how expensive New York City is.

18:02Sarah Kopit: I actually pulled up, um, average daily rates in, um, in New York City, um, in 2025 and how they, they changed since the pandemic. Um, so let's pull up that chart. So check this out, Sarah. Here's what I did. I pulled up average daily rates, so how much the cost per night for New York City, and then I adjusted it for inflation in New York City. And then I pulled up average daily rates across the rest of the U.S., and I adjusted it for inflation around the rest of the U.S. And what's interesting is what I found was that actually, in many cases, rates in New York City on an inflation-adjusted basis are actually still cheaper than around the rest of the U.S.

18:49Sarah Kopit: and still a little bit below where they were in 2019. I thought that was interesting. I'm surprised to hear that. i will fully admit i did this in claude so i will ask our our wizened um listeners yeah to fact check us and write in i'm not trying to give misinformation i'm just trying to be transparent about how i was looking at this but i think it speaks to yeah the rates are up the rates are outrageous but it's it's the what's driving the rates and you know as well as anyone it's the squeeze stuff what's driving the rates as much as anything is the cost of running a business in both New York City and in the United States so I always think that's an interesting counterpoint to how we think about oh my god I can't believe how expensive it is yeah I always you know I I

19:38Seth Borko: will I will say that I one of the reasons I I found it so shocking that it was like 700 to stay in a hotel in New York is that it's not usually like that. Like I've always thought that, you know, granted, you can stay at like the nicest hotels in the world in New York City. Like, don't get me wrong. And those are always going to be like gazillions of dollars. But for New York, or, you know, when you think about coming to New York, usually you can get a pretty, you know, if you're willing to stay in a very, in very tight quarters, as we do here in New York, all real estate is like that. Live like a local.

20:14Seth Borko: Yep. Live like a local. It'll be it'll be tiny. But it's not, you know, wildly different than in, you know, Grand Rapids, Michigan. You know, it's like a couple hundred dollars. And but, you know, in the but the difference between Grand Rapids and New York City is a lot. So so when you're go so when you're looking for just your basic like I'm not looking for a luxury stay, I just need somewhere to sleep. and you're coming up with 700 bucks, like that's, therein lies the like, whoa, this is the moment, September.

20:50Sarah Kopit: Two things interesting about that. I think there's two components to what you just said there that I'd like to react to. And the first is that you're saying, it's not actually that much more than Grand Rapids. And that actually is in that chart I just showed that actually adjusted for inflation, the rest of the U.S. has seen, New York has lagged behind the rest of the U.S. adjusted for inflation. And I will say I used New York metro area specific inflation. So I use the cost of living in New York relative to New York hotel prices and the cost of living in the rest of the world relative to New York.

21:20Sarah Kopit: So it actually makes sense that like the Grand Rapids stuff is almost as expensive. I feel like people do feel that when I went to go price out a vacation in the Florida Keys, I was shocked. And even like in California, I was shocked at how expensive it was. But this is not just a New York thing. The second thing I say,$700 a night, that absolutely must be the UN General Assembly and New York. And those are the... Climate week is coming up too.

21:47Seth Borko: Like there's just all these like big international events, in-person events.

21:53Sarah Kopit: Those are, the industry likes to call those compression room nights when available rooms in the city compresses because there's so many people staying there. and I don't know the exact number I haven't looked at recently but there there has been studies that compression room nights which are nights when occupancy is above 90 percent which is when hotels have their best price and power compression room nights drive a substantial amount of overall hotel profitability so like it's sort of like the rest of the nights just keep the lights on and the five you know to ten nights a week when Taylor Swift is in town or the U.N.

22:29Sarah Kopit: is in town and you can charge outrageous amounts is when you make your year, make a break for your year.

22:35Seth Borko: And we're not going to belabor it here on this podcast today, but, you know, it's not like you can get an Airbnb.

22:40Sarah Kopit: I was just going to say that. And then, you know, the same this those same studies will tell you that Airbnb significantly undermines the compression night effect. And here in New York City, you cannot get an Airbnb. And so the hotels are free to really swing for the fences when uh the entire world shows up for the un i love our

23:04Seth Borko: our our hotel folks but man new york should have it new york should have airbnb i don't know i agree um moving on to ai where we we just like have to talk about it like every every pod now um have

23:20Sarah Kopit: you signed up for instinct yet i haven't this is um this is that buzzy new ai tool right you're Yes. Yes. What does it do?

23:29Seth Borko: Oh my God, Seth. It's like magic.

23:33Sarah Kopit: It's great.

23:35Seth Borko: I have, so it's a little scary. Um, it's invite only right now. So I don't know if that means, I don't know. I don't know if that's in means it's in beta and I've like given it all my secrets and like, it's going to, you know, I may not be here next week.

23:49Sarah Kopit: Instinct may be sitting in for sitting in for me on the, on the

23:53Seth Borko: pod. But it's an app or you can talk to it however you want to, but you basically sign up and it's in either your iMessages or WhatsApp or however you want to talk to it. If you must do email, I suppose it'll go into your email as well. But you basically have to give it a bunch of permissions. It's very easy because it just asks for them. It's like, check a box. Can I go into your email? Can I go into this? Can I go into that? It's already preloaded. It knows what it needs to do. And then you ask it to do things. And this is where the magic happens. So like, I'm going down to DC at the end of the month.

24:38Seth Borko: And I was like, book me a train to from New York City to Washington, D.C., 29th to the 30th. Go. And it came back with four. And then it went away and it came back, you know, a few seconds later and said, here are the four, you know, the four of the best ones for you. Which one do you want? I said, number one. It gave me the times and the prices. I said, number one. And then it said, okay. It knew it had somehow like funneled into the bowels of my computer. It's like, which credit card do you want to use? And it gave me like the last two digits or four digits of a few of them. I said that one and it was done.

25:24Seth Borko: And I got the confirmation in my email. And then I asked it to go through my email and tell me all of the subscriptions that I had. And then there were, of course, several of them that I had signed up for, like the death clock, for example.

25:40Sarah Kopit: What was the death clock?

25:44Seth Borko: You know, it was something that, it was like fill out a form and I'll tell you when you're going to die. I did that apparently at some point and I forgot about it and$230 later for the yearly subscription, I know I couldn't get a refund, but I will not be paying that again next year.

26:04Sarah Kopit: Wow. Wow.

26:06Seth Borko: So anyway, so I was like, tell me everything that I am subscribed to. It did. So I'm like, okay, unsubscribe to this, this, this, this, you know, basically anything that you can think to ask, like all of these kind of admin-y kind of tasks that are kind, I mean, you kind of have to think what is going to show up on your computer, show up in your email, that type of thing. I'm about to ask it to unsubscribe to like every retailer that is in my, that is in my inbox, like that type of thing. But then like, I, I also asked it, you know, tell me what is time sensitive today? And it did. So, so, you know, but, but the travel part of it.

26:52Sarah Kopit: you booked a train ticket that's incredible so that's your first the podcast first fully agentic trip booking on the CF travel podcast wow and I did it the future is now the future is now

27:07Seth Borko: now it did have to ask me if you quite and I was glad it asked me a question it didn't ask it it didn't book it without my my permission and I will say I had I had looked the night before like last night i knew i was going to book this train ticket i went on amtrak's website so i kind of i kind of already knew what it was going to tell me so it was pretty easy for me to confirm that what it said was not only accurate because i had seen it the night before it was accurate but you know that it wasn't why and it wasn't wildly off um but i will say that i've been And I've been quite pleased with what it gave me.

27:51Seth Borko: And I can see why people are very excited about it.

27:54Sarah Kopit: This is interesting because there's a lot of debate about where the agentic layer is going to live. Is it going to live with the brand? Is it going to live with OpenAI? Is it going to live with a personal assistant? And it feels like instinct is a move towards I'm going to have a personal agent and you'll have to just deal with it. although not everyone agrees because i read some stories about the sport in new york city these days and it is a blood sport dear listener is making restaurant reservations in new york city for the hottest reservations and i've been reading some stories about people who downloaded instinct and are using it to try and snipe the hottest table reservations in new york city go to resi check it and tell me when a table at four charles which is supposedly the best burger.

28:44Sarah Kopit: I wouldn't know, but supposedly the best burger in the city. So my one-on-reservation of Fort Charles opens up and book it for me. And the instinct, the agent, obliged, was successful, got the reservation, and in the process, pinged Resi's API servers over something like 200 times, I don't know the exact metric, but let's call it a minute, thousands and thousands of times such that resi's fraud whatever detection system detected it didn't just block it but banned the user's account and said you are no longer welcome to use resi please thank you uh and uh i think i was reading one where this guy was like the one my one value add in the household is making restaurant reservations now i need to ask my wife to make every restaurant reservation not just for us as a date but if i want to go out to reservation with my friends i need to ask my wife to make the reservation for me and my friends so there are unintended or there is blowback um and i think this is increasingly the war that will be fought is will you allow i mean is it even fair like i'd be kind of pissed if i was for like for charles has nothing to do with it that's the funny thing it's resi versus the agent for Charles I don't even know how they feel about it let alone anyone I don't care I mean unless they

30:08Seth Borko: have some like anti-ai stance but yeah I mean I don't know but part of me is kind of thinking I don't know maybe Rezzy and and that like that part of the business transaction they're going to be the ones that have to change like right now go away then

30:27Sarah Kopit: if I have an agent that can talk to 4Charles why doesn't my agent just talk to 4Charles why do I need Resi to intermediate for me

30:35Seth Borko: because 4Charles may not have the infrastructure technical infrastructure to do it they could just buy instinct

30:42Sarah Kopit: they could just pay for instinct

30:45Seth Borko: I know I was thinking last night when we were talking about this it's like the it's like the the the ai or tech equivalent of you know it's it's it's not business it's just personal like i'm a really nice person i have i have great manners but my agent man whoo you know

31:05Sarah Kopit: it's it's very it's very it wasn't me it was my agent you know you know because you can you can

31:12Seth Borko: also tell it like don't don't stop until the job is done but like can you imagine like with i mean talking about tickets talking about like can you imagine like it's already a nightmare yeah like telling your telling your agent um we'll just use taylor swift because it's easy to understand you know buy me tickets to taylor swift anywhere in the world your cap is five thousand dollars uh i you know i would like to be in north america like in rank it north america europe of asia but i feel like i don't know whatever people especially with i feel people already

31:51Sarah Kopit: do that they may be not using ai to do but there are plenty of people who wrote scripts or whatever or scalpers yeah like i feel like this race this arms race has already been happening it's just uh to use the tech term it's just now at scale like there was always organized novices ticket scalpers who were using ai who using just not ai who was using their tech skills to scalp and pick up concert tickets or reservations this isn't new what's new is that every single person you know can put it in their phone in their pocket and have them do it for them all the time all at

32:25Seth Borko: once everywhere you know what i mean the nor the normies are here the normies are here yeah i think

32:31Sarah Kopit: that's it yes the normies are here for web scraping and pinging and doing all this like this this behind the scenes web scraping reservation contest fight war is now is now in the hands of normies

32:46Seth Borko: oh i just yeah i just i just i just thought of something else to do i'm not going to mention it though it's it's between me and my agent yeah so it's just it's kind of like it's kind of like anything else with tech like once you start playing around with it it's like hmm i wonder

33:04Sarah Kopit: if it can do that well of course it can this will come to travel very very soon it's gonna

33:11Seth Borko: it's going to take it over I don't know.

33:16Sarah Kopit: Let's give it six months.

33:18Seth Borko: Let's see. We're in September. Let's mark it on the calendar to revisit this conversation in February when it is very cold and gloomy. And we're going to see if our agents have overtaken our entire calendar and workflow and all of that stuff.

33:35Sarah Kopit: We will see. Do we want to move into winners and losers? Is that the time of the pod we're at.

33:41Seth Borko: Yeah, I think it is that time, Seth.

33:44Sarah Kopit: Because I have a loser. Do you have a winner? Okay, go for it. Yeah, go for it.

33:49Seth Borko: Go for your loser first.

33:50Sarah Kopit: My loser is the poor, unfortunate, downtrodden Western Michigan University.

34:07Seth Borko: So, do you wish to say more and then I will jump in?

34:10Sarah Kopit: oh these the those evil big blue big house michiganers so i will i will tell you so i

34:19Seth Borko: have a group chat with all of my college friends and on game day the group chat is on fire and we actually have one friend who went to western in there too and you know and we are just we i say

34:32Sarah Kopit: we you know because i obviously also play for the university of michigan so that's right we were

34:37Seth Borko: playing terribly and obviously all game and it was just i mean it was it was just embarrassing and you know it's just like oh it's first game and all this stuff so i actually when they threw the what would which i thought was the last pass but was all the second to last one they they threw it it was not caught the announcer said game over and i'm like ah turned the tv off and then there was some talk on the group chat but i thought i don't know i just i didn't i didn't get it like i didn't get that like i had turned it off and michigan actually won like there was no celebrating in the group chat i will say that and it wasn't until the next day well so i was like wait a minute we didn't win that game we lost that game and then i read about it and i went back and i watched it i turned it off like two seconds too early seth oh my god

35:33Sarah Kopit: it's great that is crazy it is crazy for our listeners who aren't um avid sports fans and i even don't even have a sports fan i got into my feed uh uh sarah's a michigan university of michigan alumni and yes uh they were playing their their cross state rivals western michigan

35:52Seth Borko: western michigan won see that's the thing seth i have to correct you oh sorry Western Michigan is not a rival of the University of Michigan. I welcome the hate mail that I'm going to get for that statement. But like that was one of the reasons why this would have been a rival.

36:11Sarah Kopit: Michigan State Spartans. Yeah.

36:14Seth Borko: Or really Ohio State.

36:15Sarah Kopit: Ohio State. The Ohio State University.

36:18Seth Borko: The Ohio State. Yeah. So but anyway, I digress. Continue.

36:23Sarah Kopit: No, no. And the refs called the game over. they found some sort of what happened they found a time timekeeping error so basically there is the

36:32Seth Borko: clock this is this is my understanding of it i was unaware of any of this until until just a couple of days ago apparently there is a clock that you see on the field and what all of us see on our tvs but there is a another clock that has a slightly different time that they use as the kind of official clock like there was a mismatch by a second on like what everybody saw and what the official clock is which seems a bit suspicious to me like like it really does like that like especially for I mean college football which sometimes I have to explain this to the folks who are not you know maybe who aren't American who who are not ensconced in college football college football is not just you know some students playing football like it is such big business like what are you talking about the clocks are different yeah like the clocks can't be different they can't be different so i don't know it was the uh the football atomic clock

37:38Sarah Kopit: differed from the scorecard clock western michigan got one second back on the clock and did a Hail Mary to a touchdown and won the game. And people have not stopped talking about it since I had to bring it up for Sarah. And if you're not from the U.S., it's not even an apology that we've talked about this for so long. It's a, we want you to understand what U.S. culture is really like. This is a welcome to American culture. If you liked Freddie, L.A., traveling the world of non-coastal America, this is what they're talking about in non-coastal America.

38:09Seth Borko: I'm telling you, all of our international listeners, you have to come in, I would say November is a little bit too cold. They still are playing football in November, but there's the snow. September and October in the Midwest and in the South, you come and you go to a college football game. It is quintessential Americana in every single way.

38:35Sarah Kopit: Sarah, do you have a winner?

38:37Seth Borko: Well, yes, sort of. It's not travel related. But for any of our listeners here who are New York City parents, it is the first week of school. When you're listening to this, it's Friday. It is the second day of school. So little round of applause for all the parents. I'm sure all of our summers were excellent. Our summer vacations were excellent. But deep breath. We are now all back at school.

39:03Sarah Kopit: amazing i have a small small winner as well uh and my winner is going to be uh skiff's very own tech reporter adriana because the ceo of marriott on the earnings call uh referenced her article on ai discovery and search for travel and we love an ai we love a ceo mention uh and uh we love do Do we?

39:31Seth Borko: We absolutely love a CEO mention. There you go.

39:34Sarah Kopit: So I think that's a good winner as well. Tony Capuano reads Skift. You should as well. Duh.

39:40Seth Borko: Absolutely. Yeah. And come to Skift Global Forum. You can meet all of us. Okay. All right.

39:46Sarah Kopit: That's it.