Today's Wisdom - Interview, IMAX and Choices

Welcome back to A Little Wiser. Today marks the first edition of our new interview series. Know someone we should talk to next? Reply and let us know! Today's wisdom explores:

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

Daniel is the founder of TITIN EVOO. Originally from Spain, he now runs the business out of Boston, importing single-origin extra virgin olive oil from Jaén as he builds an American audience one bottle, and one video, at a time.

What is it actually like importing olive oil from Spain into America?

“This is a question that requires a long answer,” Daniel laughs. Getting a single bottle onto a US shelf starts with FDA registration for both the factory in Spain and himself as the importer, plus a specific investor visa if you are a non-citizen. His business partner, the farmer who manages his family groves, gives him direct say over which lots get selected, always from the October and November harvest. “We only focus on quality. Everybody wants to sell volume instead of quality; it’s a price war that we don’t want to be part of.” Even the shipping route is shaped by politics he can’t control. Tension between Spain and the US pushed his containers away from the southern port of Algeciras, so they now travel from Jaén to Valencia, on to Portugal, and finally to Boston. Once they arrive, there is no warehouse crew waiting. “Ben and I unload the container ourselves. We have a forklift and we unload it. TITIN is a startup,” he says.

Where does the money actually get made and lost once the oil lands in America?

This is where Daniel gets even more specific. Food service is the cleanest channel, he says, because retail is where brands quietly destroy themselves. “You have to think carefully about which retail channel you want to enter, because Costco and Whole Foods play very different roles in the market. Costco will almost always offer a lower consumer price, while Whole Foods operates at a higher price point. For a young brand without strong name recognition, entering both channels with a significant price difference can create problems. Retailers may question the brand’s positioning, and the lower price in one channel could make it harder for the brand to gain or maintain distribution in another.” Distributors take their cut in ways that aren’t always obvious upfront either: rebates for hitting sales targets, marketing program fees, monthly fees if you want dedicated sales reps, and cash discounts if you want to be paid within ten days instead of thirty. “The distributors make money not only from your product, but from all these fees,” he says. Independent grocery chains, meanwhile, often want one case of free product upfront and four months of promotional discounts per year before they’ll properly stock a new brand. It’s a maze most founders don’t map out until they’re already lost in it. “You need to be smart and know the industry,” he says, “or you’re just giving your margin away.”

What's been the biggest challenge you've faced?

“At the beginning we were investing money in ads until I stopped it,” Daniel says, “because the olive oil ads are super expensive, like $10 a click.” With no outside funding, he abandoned paid social, switching instead to filming his daily life through a pair of Meta smart glasses. “We don’t have a lot of followers, but we have like 10,000, 20,000 views per video, and that’s good.” Retail proved harder to fix. “The average velocity of olive oil is 1.4 bottles per week per store in America,” he explains, competing against established names like Graza. “We can have the best olive oil in the country at the best price. If no one knows Titin, it’s throwing money in the bin.” After a few painful months, they deliberately pulled back, now running the business at roughly 70 percent food service, 20 percent retail, and 10 percent direct to consumer. Even the bottle itself was a lesson. “In Spain, I use like 1.5 litres a month. Americans, no.” Their original 750ml bottle moved more slowly than retailers wanted, so they redesigned a smaller 500ml version built to increase velocity. It’s one more example of how nearly every challenge they’ve faced has ended with the same solution: adapt quickly and keep moving.

A big thanks to Daniel for taking the time to speak with us. If you're in the US, check out TITIN below. Great quality Spanish olive oil is one of the single greatest upgrades you can make to your health and your kitchen at the same time, and Daniel's is the real thing!

The word IMAX now appears on so many cinema tickets that most people assume it simply means a big screen, yet the format is something far more specific and far rarer. Ordinary film runs vertically through a projector, four perforations per frame for standard 35mm and five for most 70mm prints. True IMAX film uses frames of fifteen perforations that run horizontally, giving each image an area many times larger than anything else in cinema. That surface area is what produces the resolution, estimated at up to three times what digital cameras capture. Christopher Nolan calls it the best film format ever invented and the standard every other technology still fails to match. The trouble is that projecting it requires enormous, temperamental machinery. Fewer than 41 screens on the planet can currently show it.

Nolan has been using the format since 2008 when The Dark Knight became the first Hollywood feature to shoot sequences with IMAX cameras. One obstacle always stopped him going further. IMAX cameras are extremely loud, which makes recording clean dialogue impossible. Directors confine them to action scenes and cut to smaller cameras whenever anyone has to speak. For The Odyssey, Nolan told IMAX chief executive Rich Gelfond that he would shoot the entire picture in the format if the company could solve its own problems. Engineers developed sound-dampening housings known as blimps which were quiet enough to place a camera a foot from an actor's face. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema proved it worked by filming a child reciting the lyrics to David Bowie's "Sound and Vision" in enormous close-up, footage Nolan described as electrifying.

The practical demands of shooting this way border on the absurd. Each camera magazine holds only two and a half to three minutes of film before it must be reloaded. The blimps blocked actors from seeing one another, so the crew rigged a system of angled mirrors letting performers meet each other's eyes through reflections. Filmed across Morocco and the Mediterranean, every exposed reel was flown back to FotoKem in Burbank, the last laboratory on Earth still producing 70mm prints. Thousands of cuts in the finished film were spliced together by hand with glue, one negative at a time. IMAX has reported its largest opening ever for a Nolan picture, with 70mm screenings selling out worldwide and demand exceeding anything the company had seen. An industry convinced audiences only want convenience has just watched people travel hundreds of miles to sit in one of 41 rooms.

✦   COMING SOON   ✦

Daniel's Guide to Buying Better Olive Oil

We also sat down with Daniel for a separate interview for The Vitality Club, diving into the health side of olive oil: the Mediterranean diet, why Spaniards consume so much extra virgin olive oil, how to choose a quality bottle in the supermarket, which labels actually matter, and more. A practical guide built on decades of Spanish food culture and Daniel's own experience sourcing premium oil from Jaén.

Subscribe free to The Vitality Club →

Almost everyone knows the experience of settling onto the sofa, picking up the remote, and scrolling past thousands of titles on a streaming service before going to bed having watched nothing at all. Psychologists have a name for this, and its most famous evidence came from a tasting booth in an upmarket California grocery store in 2000. Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper offered shoppers free samples of jam, sometimes displaying 24 varieties and sometimes only six. The large spread drew a bigger crowd, with around 60 percent of passers-by stopping to taste compared to 40 percent at the smaller table. However, of those who browsed the 24 jams, a mere 3 percent bought a jar, while roughly 30 percent of the shoppers who saw only six did.

Barry Schwartz turned the finding into a bestselling book in 2004 and gave the effect its name, arguing that beyond a certain point choice stops liberating us and begins to paralyze us. Every option you reject becomes a possible better life you failed to pick, so more choices means more imagined regret hanging over whatever you finally select. Schwartz also drew a distinction that has outlived much of the rest of his argument, dividing people into maximizers (who exhaustively search for the very best option available) and satisficers (who take the first thing that clears a bar of good enough). Maximizers tend to end up with objectively better outcomes, landing higher salaries and better deals, yet they consistently report more regret and less satisfaction than the satisficers who settled, because they never quite stop wondering about the option they left behind.

The story took an awkward turn in 2010 when a meta-analysis of 50 studies by Benjamin Scheibehenne and colleagues found the average effect of choice overload across all of them was close to zero. Plenty of experiments had failed to reproduce the jam result, and for a while the whole idea looked like a casualty of psychology's replication crisis. Later work rescued something more useful from the wreckage by identifying the conditions under which the effect actually appears. Choice overload bites hardest when the options are genuinely similar, when you lack expertise in the category, when the decision feels consequential, and when you simply want to decide quickly and move on. The difficulty fades almost entirely with experience, which maybe explains why a wine expert savors a sprawling wine list that everyone else finds daunting.

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The A Little Wiser Team