Episode Details

David Lorentzen is BACK—this time to share his behind-the-scenes experience as a Swedish hotel manager whose family has run hotels for over a decade.

David gives a rare, unfiltered look at cultural differences he has observed as a hotelier: which groups of guests make staff smile and which ones create the biggest headaches. He walks through the three most difficult categories of guests his hotels have hosted — Russian oligarchs, Chinese tour groups, and certain Indian families — with specific, firsthand stories about room damage, cooking in rooms, overcrowding, and the economics of hospitality.

The conversation then shifts to a much larger topic: the refugee housing industry in Sweden. David recounts the multimillion-dollar offers hotels received to house asylum seekers (especially young Afghan males), why his family turned them down, the insurance and property-value consequences, and the two competing integration strategies Sweden has tried (spreading people out vs. concentrating them). He also discusses literacy rates, cultural distance, and why some groups integrate far more easily than others.

You can find David Lorentzon's various accounts and posts here: https://linktr.ee/davidlorentzon

Episode Transcript

And where I basically shared the story about about what what actually happens when the Swedish, I think it’s called emergency service in English, rescue service. They gave us a phone call, and they said that, would you like to house 30 Afghans? And you’ll get paid at the time at that time about $320 per night per child and do that year round. Now he received 30 of them. Okay. That’s like, what, 90,090 thousand dollars a day. Crazy. Yeah. It it turns it it basically your most profitable day becomes every day of the year.

Malcolm Collins [0:42]:

Yeah.

David Lorentzen [0:43]:

And most of it is profit.

Simone Collins [0:45]:

And it’s

David Lorentzen [0:45]:

hard to

Simone Collins [0:46]:

say no. Yeah.

David Lorentzen [0:47]:

You’re basically earning millions of dollars to accept mostly male between the age of 14 and 26 Afghan boys Afghan males.

Simone Collins [0:58]:

Wow.

David Lorentzen [0:58]:

Now this village has about 350 people.

Speaker 4 [1:02]:

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins [1:04]:

Okay. Hello, everyone. I’m so excited for this. we’ll say more off the record, episode in which we interview David Lorenzen about his experience, with different cultural groups from the perspective of a hotel manager. I will say that when we have worked in the travel industry, we’ve been exposed to some really stark cultural differences, even just from, like, working in different parts of the world. And definitely from working with different groups as travelers, it’s kind of amazing. I think we’re mostly raised to believe that everyone’s kind of the same. Everyone does the same thing. We all, like, get up and we eat breakfast, and it’s all the same. Like, it’s broadly, like, cereal and croissants and fruit. And, like, we don’t realize that people actually live very different lives, have very different habits, and that becomes very clear when you get to see a sampling of people go through a specific pace. David Lorenzen is able to speak to this. He’s gonna explain to us why, and then we’re just gonna I I would love to dive into some things that you’ve observed about different behavioral patterns or or habits you’ve noticed from different groups that you’ve been exposed to through the nature of some of your work.

David Lorentzen [2:08]:

Yeah. So about thirteen years