Little hacks, Big results: Easy ways to add more passion, fun and profit to your life

Hey, everybody, Ramit Sethi here from I Will Teach youh to Be Rich and Braintrust. I'm here with my beard brother, Nick Gray. He runs a business here in New York called Museum Hack. He takes the traditional museum tour, blew it out of the water, and shows you all the fascinating things behind museums that you never knew.

Hi, my name is Nick Gray and I have a company called Museum Hack. We do renegade museum tours at the best museums in the world. They are not what you think.

Okay, So I want to talk about the typical museum tour. I want to talk about why we're even discussing museums and how you came up with this business. And then I want to talk about how we can take some of the principles you've learned and you've applied it to museums and your business and how we can all apply to our own lives.

All right?

All right. So when I think of a typical museum tour, I think some out of touch art person walking me around speaking like this, and they're telling me about impressionist paintings and Monet, and I don't know any of these people and I don't care.

Yeah.

What do you think of when you think of a museum tour?

Exactly the same thing. Pretty sweet competition that we have, right? Not too bad.

Exactly. So they're kind of. When I think of a museum, I think that's for other people. I'm not a museum guy.

Yeah.

Is that how you felt when you moved here Completely.

I was not a museum person. I was raised in a lower middle class family. My dad used to have fast food restaurants. I never grew up going to museums. And I didn't. I've never taken an art history class or something like that. But today, kind of everything has changed. I spend a lot of my time in museums all around the world.

Yeah. And what do you think? People who are in their 20s and 30s who may not have been to a museum since, you know, they were in elementary school.

Yeah.

Like, what are they getting out of these experiences when they go with you and your tour guides?

I have one simple goal when you come to the museum with museum act. First of all, I got to be clear. We're going for people who think they don't like museums.

Oh, okay. So you're not going for everybody.

Not going for everybody. We're going for those people that were like you, that were like me, who say, I hate museums. Museums are not for me. We have an alternative message. We have a renegade tour that says, all we want you to do is have fun once with us. So then you have Like a little bit of a binary shift in your head that says, oh, museums can be fun. I'm willing to go back.

Right, right. Instead of having to become a museum person.

Right.

You're just like, okay, I could do it once. And it's only two hours. Right? Right.

It's only two hours.

So anyone can have fun for two hours.

Right. All right.

And then you do things, like, very differently than other tours.

Yeah.

You move fast.

Really fast. Two to three times as fast as most museum tours. We have an add generation. I'm on my phone at least every two minutes. We have to compete with that.

Right.

A lot of museums think that they're competing with the other museums in town. No. They're competing with Netflix, with iPhones. They're competing with so much more. And so we move incredibly fast to tell a lot of stories.

What else do you do differently?

We drink a lot of alcohol. Yeah.

That's another thing. I remember you told me when you told me to come to the tour, you said, bring a flask.

Yes. Our BYOB policies have changed a little bit.

Yeah, that's.

But we now go through the museum, and we have a sweet deal where we get these hella heavy wine pours.

So people are drinking during a tour, which I would not have thought was something I do. I don't associate that. I associate, like, dressing up and being very quiet. It's like church.

It's like church. Oh, that's terrible. Wow. That's an amazing comparison. That's very unfortunate. It should instead feel like an inspirational fun house of sorts. Yeah.

What else do you do differently?

We move very fast. We hire tour guides that are way smarter than me, that don't come from an art history background. In fact, we hire people who usually are not tour guides. They're like. They're like science teachers or musicians or Broadway actors who are amazing communicators and can connect with people and read a crowd and things like that.

Yeah. One thing I remember about the tours that I think is a skill that any teacher has is, you know, how to give people the nugget that they can walk away with. And for example, I took a cocktail making class, and the teacher was very academic about it. You know, she was telling us the history of liquors and bitters and this and that. And I was like, you know what? I really don't care. All I want to do is be able to make a couple drinks and impress somebody. Right. That's it. That's a good plan. And I took, like, a sake class and the Sake class was totally different. The instructor gave me just the nuggets. They're like, look, if you go to a sushi restaurant, this is what you need to know. You order this, your friends are gonna be impressed. They want it smooth and light. This is the one you order. And he told me just the right. And I remember coming to your tour, it wasn't comparing five different types of paint styles. It was like this artist was insane and he actually ripped off another artist. And I could walk away saying, hey, guys, did you know that that's the.

Highest compliment for one of our guides is if they come back to the museum and see one of our customers? We retelling those stories to a friend, right?

Yeah.

We want to give you the stories that you're gonna remember. And that's what a lot of it is. It's more about the storytelling. We think that storytelling comes first before the art history and before all the details.

You have a very unique style of asking for advice and of bringing people together. And I figured there's no better way to dig into this than to actually look at some of the real emails you've sent.

This is gonna be embarrassing.

Let's go back in time.

Okay.

I happen to have an email you sent from 2010. I think you were pretty new to the city at this point.

I'd lived here about two years. Yeah. All right.

And you were trying to get a group of people together for like a barbecue or some kind of event.

Yeah, just a party on the weekend.

All right. So the typical email that people send out for this is like, hey, come over on Saturday. We're gonna have a burgers and beers. See you guys then. Here's the address. Right. You took a decidedly different approach. Yeah, I'd like to read from this email.

Okay, let's start off.

It says, we will be hanging out at my friend's apartment, which has a beautiful backyard, including plants, flowers, a pond.

And a bench painting. That mental picture for me really getting vivid in there.

So you give the address, and this is where most emails would stop.

Right.

Not Nick. You proceeded to go on with a drink menu including mojitos, cosmopolitans and shandies, which you go on to define multiple languages. You list off a food menu, you tell people what to bring. And then my favorite part of this email is this multi page listing called guest list gossip.

Yeah.

You bullet pointed out every single person's name and email address. And then you said, like, here's one of them. Says, this person does this for a living. It is rumored that she Only dates Indian men discuss.

Yeah, I thought you'd like that one.

I love that one. So there's all kinds of hilarious gossip about people. So when I go there, I'm like, I already know this crazy person. I gotta talk to him.

Yeah.

What's going on in this email?

I had to fight to get my name in New York City, right. I lived in the shadow of my roommates in college who started a very successful business here and I never wanted to ride off of their coattails. So I actively decided to go out and build my own social circles and I wanted people to come to my events. I think that I tried really hard to get people to know that this was not a regular just hangout session.

Some of your comments of guest list gossip include, sold me an IBM ThinkPad from Craigslist. Works in it. Really built. Yeah, that's one person. Another person. Friend of my friend Nadia. Tall and hot and then another person has the best fit face and name memory of any person I've ever met. We used to date and I'm secretly jealous of her new boyfriend.

Oh, that's awkward. The thing with those is that it's just a stream of conscious, like, here's some details about somebody. And that whole message probably took me no more than 25 minutes. Right. I didn't put a lot of thought into it. I'm just like, first things that I can think about, I'm writing down. I got so many comments on that. It helped people mix up at the event and actually want to come to this barbecue.

So instead of just saying, here's a barbecue, bring beer, we're gonna have a good time on the deck. You just took a little bit of extra time. I mean, I wanna go to this party. It sounds amazing.

Let's go back in time together.

Let's take a look at a new email you recently sent out. I got this one and it said, subject line, drinks and icebreakers, Thursday night, 9pm Howdy, Ramit. On Thursday night, me and my matchmaker friend Amy are hosting Friends for a Nightcap and Icebreakers at my studio. Delete this email if you're busy. No problem. And then it says, Mastermind Alumni Cocktails Mixer. And it says the time 9pm to 10:30 sharp.

Sharp.

We're going to talk about that. Email me if you plan to swing by at 9. If you bring a friend, please bring a beer or a cheap bottle of something you'd like to drink. P.S. if you're on the fence or just want to swing by for 30 minutes, do it I promise you'll get a shiny sticker with your name on it and meet at least one interesting person. There's so much going on in this email.

A lot going on.

Alright, what's going on here?

First, you may have noticed the name tags. I'm big on name tags still. I think this is the number one thing that you can do. If you're watching us talk right now and you're like gonna have my friends over, get name tags, mix your groups up. I try to pull from all various types. There's no clicks or anything. And name tags are really helpful to like set the stage that everybody is on an equal footing and you feel like you can walk up and introduce yourself.

Cause you can just go, hey, my name's Ramit. Oh, hi, Sarah.

Yeah. Yeah, you could call somebody by their name, but it's also more just a physical signal that says like, we're in a safe space to meet people.

Ah, okay. So it's almost symbolic.

It's symbolic, really?

Very interesting. You also said something like, just come by for 30 minutes if you just want to come by. What's up with that?

There is in New York and big cities, I'm sure, you know, a lot of competition to attend things at night and people don't want to get committed or invested in something that they don't know if it's going to be good. And maybe they have an early morning the next day. They don't want to be rude if they leave early. I totally don't want people to have any of those feelings. And if you just want to come by, then just come by. Your company's enough.

Why did you say 9pm to 10:30 sharp?

Two reasons on that. One is I got a strict neighbor situation.

Okay. It's very practical.

Practical. And the second thing is I hate nothing more than a party that like gradually winds down. That's like the long five hour tale of a party. And I think I'm doing my guests a service so they can go home and you know, really live more vibrant lives.

There we go. Very nice. I love it. Tied it up with a bow.

Yeah.

No, it actually reminds me of what you said about the museum. Like you want to leave on a high note rather than, oh, okay, we saw that one last room and it's like I don't remember any of it. I don't want to be here at the end of this party. Yeah, and I've seen you, you said, okay guys, we got to wrap it up now and everybody's out, right?