Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas

All right, Nick, are you ready?

Well, I'm late because I had to go to Party City.

You are Party City, dude. You're the human Party City.

No, but the funny thing is I went out there because I wanted to get some cool stuff for you guys. For Sam, I got a hot dog hat thing because Sam likes hot dogs. Sean, you know, I got the big basketball because Sean loves basketball. And I got these balloons. And as I'm leaving, this lady sees me with the balloons and the basketball, and she's like, oh, are you planning a birthday for your son? I was like, first, that's sexist. And second, no, I'm going on a podcast.

All right. So let me, let me introduce Nick and I'll introduce him with a little bit of a story. I don't remember exactly how we came into contact with each other, but basically I was in New York maybe 8 years ago. Somehow Nick contacts me and he goes, hey, do you want to go to Washington Square Park and play Frisbee? And I was like, I guess, yeah. Okay. So, uh, Sarah and I go and we meet him at Washington Square Park. And he goes, uh, here, let's just like walk. I'll give you guys a tour. So he gives us a tour. He goes, this is the guy that's always here selling weed. Hey, weed guy, how are you? This is my friend Sam and Sarah. And then he's like, these are the people who are always tightroping. Hey, tightrope people. Like, Nick is just a crazy person. Okay. Like we, we've met him in a, like, you'll go out to dinner with him and he'll be like, all right, for the next 5 minutes, I wanna talk about my dating life. And then from minutes 7 to 13, we're gonna talk about your work. And then from 13 to 27, where we want to talk about philosophy on life.

Like, he had this—

Do you actually do this? Do you show up to like lunches like this?

With agendas?

100% with agendas and sometimes even my own keynote presentations.

And let me, hold on.

Wait, wait, hold on.

I had to give this quick summary. So Nick's summary is basically he made money. Nick started a business. He sold it. He made money. He put all of his money in Tesla stock. And got incredibly wealthy. And now he is single in Austin and he just lives life to have fun. And he does crazy stuff. Like he just recently did a blind date to Tokyo, or he'll, he just wrote a book on having a cocktail party because that's what he cares about. And he just does everything to, that's fun. Is that right, Nick?

Yeah, that is directionally correct. I love to have fun and I didn't put all my money into Tesla and But yes, I did make a lot of money a couple of times in my life, and now we get to have fun and I get to— I think I'm like the end game that a lot of people are thinking about how to get to, and they want to make a business and they want to be successful, but for what? And so there's a lot of talk about when is enough, and I think I found enough, and this is what happens when you get there.

How did you figure that out? Because that is something that not a lot of people have been able to figure out. So how did you figure out what's enough for you? And how did you actually execute that? How did you figure out what you wanted, what was enough, and then do it?

You know, one year I was doing my taxes and I had busted my butt in my business an absolutely incredible amount. It was just one of the hardest years. And I think maybe we netted out like $350,000 profit. And it was one of the hardest years of my life, honestly, for a variety of staffing reasons and other things. And as I was doing my taxes, my accountant said like, oh wow, do you realize you made like so much more money from your investments than you did from your business? And I never thought about my investments. I don't even think I just buy it, set it, and forget it. And at that moment I was like, wow, I'm like destroying my health and my sanity for this amount of money. That's not even as much as I'm making off the investments. There were a few moments like that that I've had over the last 10 years that have just made me reconsider how I spend my time.

And you wrote a blog post, because I went knee-deep into the blog last night, and you have this blog post you wrote a long time ago, which was, what would I do if I had $10 million? I don't know when you wrote this, but I found it in somewhere in the archive. And you basically said, you know, I really want to have like $10 million. And, you know, kind of made me think like, what would I actually do if I had it? What would I do today if I already had it? And you, and you put Photos on there. We should show this on YouTube. There's like index cards and you wrote like swim more, right? You wrote like write a book about hosting a cocktail party, which you actually ended up doing. And you wrote all these things and you, it sounded like the takeaway was first of all, we should do this exercise because like money is a tool to improve your life. But if you don't really know how much you need and what you're trying to improve, like it's sort of crazy. It's like going to Home Depot for a house renovation project, but you didn't know which part of your house you wanted to renovate. Or what, what the budget actually was and what materials you needed. But that's how we treat our careers. And then you got clarity on it and you actually implemented. Can you talk about that, that exercise you did? Because I did it last night too, after you, after reading that.

Oh, you did it. So I hope to give actionable takeaways for your listeners. Listeners, this is an actionable takeaway for you in that you can do this with your friends, with your spouse, with your loved ones. To ask them, if you had $10 million, how would you live your life differently? And get specific. Don't just say, I want to eat better. What does that exactly mean? Now, Sean may know this. This is a Tony Robbins exercise that he's done either at Business Mastery or UPW. And the gist, I'll forward you to the end, is that the vast majority of things we say that we would do differently at $10 million, actually, you only need a million dollars to get there. The vast majority, if you think, oh, if my life was a billionaire, this is what I would do. You actually maybe only need $10, $20, $50 million. And I say, actually, that's still a lot of money, but it helps you to realize that, for example, for a lot of people, oh, if I had a billion dollars, of course I would have a private chef. So they say, okay, well, let's track that out. What does that exactly mean for you to have a private chef? You want to have meals that are set up in your fridge. You want to have a full-time person, et cetera. And it was a very helpful exercise to me to think that in the past, if I wanted $500 million, well, actually the vast majority of the things that I wanted, I could do for much less without sacrificing all that time, money, energy to get to that level.

Yeah, there's— but Sam, have you heard this Morgan Housel quote about money? He says, uh, there's two ways to use money. The first is as a tool to improve the quality of your life. And the second is as a measuring stick. To measure the quality of your life. And basically the people who are happy use money as a tool, and the people who are, you know, the bitter rich, uh, the stressed rich, are the ones who are trying to use money as a measuring stick.

Yeah, the problem with that is like, I, on my list, it's like influence politicians, overthrow governments, um, you know, like bribe officials, and you need a lot more money than just $10 million for that.

For those of you that are listening, by the way, that are thinking That's not enough. He has given up. Money is the measuring stick in the yard and the success of life. I am totally with you. And I lived that way for so much of my adult life. There is money is just a measuring stick, right? We don't spend it. We just keep it. And that shows how good we are. And so I still respect and sympathize with those people who, like Sam, want more money to influence politicians, to buy private jets.

I'm joking. Joking. Okay. But go ahead.

You're on the record as a lobbyist.

Okay. Yeah.

Say, what would you even lobby for?

Yeah. Free Zen for all.

I don't know. I mean, okay. We have a proposal here for like larger serving size of bubble gum. I guess. Sure. It's all good.

That's ridiculous. But Nick, But all right, so you're like, I, you used to be a measuring stick guy for money, but in this blog post, by the way, you say at the very bottom, you say, um, I would do all of these things, which by the way, by the way, like Sean didn't say, but you have a list of like, you want to go bowling, you want to play laser tag, you want to go go-karting. That's literally on your blog post. But at the end it says, uh, I would also, uh, like to work on entrepreneurial pursuits to get to $50 million.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Something like that. Uh, I don't want to get into the gist of this. I want to say that this is an activity that's helpful for listeners to do because it helped me realize that the things that truly make me happy— playing tennis, riding go-karts, eating more healthy, going to the beach— those things don't have to cost $50 million. And I keep a very low burn in my life right now so that it feels like I have $100 million.

Sean, something that you probably don't know about Nick, So he lived in New York City for a long time and he's been like a blogger. A lot of people don't know this, that Nick met Noah Kagan and Neville Medhora, my good buddies, and Ramit via blogging. Nick was like one of these early bloggers. What are you? You're 40, let's say now, Nick. You started blogging when you were what, like in your 20s?

Gosh, I had a website since 1996. Yeah.

Yeah. And because of that, he's actually met like a lot of these guys that are kind of like luminaries now. So for example, He's buddies with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, or he grew up, kind of grew up in New York with the founders of Vimeo and CollegeHumor and a bunch of these like interesting people that sort of shaped the internet that we know. And you were around them when you guys were all like up and coming and doing your own thing. What was that like? Kind of like seeing some of these guys who were your peers become like these, like people who are kind of. Controlling the internet or impacting the culture of the, the internet.

Well, Sam, I'm glad you mentioned that because this brings me into the second lesson, and I'll be using this little lesson harmonica throughout today's podcast. I love it.

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The lesson is, you know, about 15 years ago when people were using Twitter a lot and there were a lot of startup founders that I knew, like Dennis Crowley of Foursquare and Zach Klein of Vimeo and other people, and I had absolutely no name. On the public internet. I was a blogger, but I didn't have followers. I was just known amongst a certain crowd. Somebody figured out that all of these famous people or famous and successful people in New York all followed me. I think this was when there was a list of kind of like the public follows were more available. And they were like, dude, why do all these people follow you? And I was actually waiting to get a message like that. I think there's actionable data. That you can get to from finding and looking who else famous and successful people follow. Now, follower lists are still available on Instagram, so you can see the bulk of it. I think on X, they've throttled it back, so you don't have the full follow lists available. But if you are looking to make contact with some of these ultra successful people, there's no way that you will. They have pretty much too much inbound, but you can befriend their friends. And that can be your foot in the door. That is the lesson. That is an aggressive networking example. You have to lead with value. You have to have something good. You can't just do it to take, but I think there is sigma, there is alpha in looking to see who all of the major people follow. Cause there's reason for that.

Why do they follow you?

I think people followed me in New York City because I hosted events. Oh my God. I hosted events. That was my way to become interesting. It was my way to be relevant, and I just started hosting all these house parties.

So I want to tie up the kind of like the shift from killing yourself, kind of working really, really hard to make money, to be successful, which is where, you know, I've been, Sam's been, a lot of the listeners will have been. So that's a relatable struggle to then the, the next thing you do, you did with Life Shift, where you sort of prioritized experiences, adventure, fun. Which I think a lot of us want to do but are sort of afraid to do fully. It's hard to get off that money, money train. So can we just do the speed run of like, what did you actually do in your career? How did you actually make it? What'd you try? What'd you actually do that worked?

Yes.

Speed run of my career. In middle school and high school, I started to design websites. I was not a popular kid. I had friends, but I wasn't in the popular crowd and I was really into computers. And when I was in About 9th grade, I made a web hosting company that just so happened to get lucky. If you searched on Yahoo for the phrase cheap web hosting, then you would find my website. You can see that at vs3.net.

Did, did you do anything to be the discovered one or literally was it lucky?

Dude, it was just dumb luck. We didn't even know about SEO then. It wasn't like trying to optimize. It just so happened that when I wrote my description, that's how it work.

So you're in high school and that helped pay for college, as I understand. So what, what, what'd you kind of roughly make on that business?

Not a lot of money, maybe. So the web hosting was $15 a month per client. I— it cost me $5 per month per client, and at the most I probably had 200 customers. It more average was throttled out to about 120 customers per month. That helped pay for college, but then I also got a scholarship for entrepreneurship, which is very rare, merit-based scholarship that allowed me to go to a nice college. So web hosting business. I did some other stuff. I sold these like alphanumeric pagers. That was never a huge success, but I had all these little hustles. When I got to Wake, by the way, I started to sell speakers for laptops and I named the business wakespeakers.com. And I'm going around door to door. I'm like, oh, you bought your kids this laptop? They need speakers to listen to Shazam or whatever. Um, and then the lawyers, the school lawyers called me up like, you can't call this Wake Speakers. That's like the name of our school. Meanwhile, I'm like dropshipping pallets like onto the quad of the campus. When I was in college, I tried to start a software company that was massively popular on campus, but made absolutely zero money. I tried to move to India to start a software company and hire people because I thought that I could bootstrap it farther there. It was a terrible success. I hired 2 people. One of them was in Boston.

The story is hilarious. I've heard him say this before. He's like, I moved to India because I was like, I'm going to bootstrap this. So I need cheap talent. So he moves to India to start a software company, hires 2 people. One guy's in Poland and one guy's in Boston and he's in India. Indian labor.

You got that equation wrong. You, you, you answered yourself like if, if it's like X plus Y, you, you put yourself in the wrong variable.

I know, I outsourced myself to the wrong thing. I did though develop a really nice relationship with the people and the country, and it was just a wild experience.

Well, but let me, let me ask one question there, which is nobody cares about this, but I do, which is even though that was kind of a failure, right? You go to, you move to India, you hire a guy in Poland, a Boston software company. Nobody knows the name of this. It didn't work out. But there's something, if somebody told me that somebody did that today, I'd be like, this person's going to be a winner. This is probably going to be the failure, but they will, that person is going to be a winner. What made you even want to do that in the first place? Because that's a pretty radical step. Most people I went to college with did not just graduate and like move to India with the idea of bootstrapping a software company.

It did seem like the craziest thing to do at the time, and I think that's why I was attracted to it.

Hmm. Harmonica lesson, you think?

I think so. Thank you so much. So I do, I use this harmonica at all my events as a crowd control device. And I think if my legacy has anything, it's that the harmonica can be a helpful crowd control device. In that you can get people's attention in a calm, cool manner without a whistle or like a bum bum bum.

Right.

So consider that there's a tip within a tip. Why'd I move to India? Yeah, it just, at the time it seemed like the future. It did seem like a piece of the future. There was all this news about BPO and outsourcing and everything. Why pro moving over to India?

You had said your college roommates were the guys who created CollegeHumor and Vimeo. Were you involved in that or you just kind of sitting by and they were doing it right next to you? What was that like?

I was very happy to not be involved in that and to be their friends and a soundboard. I was the first non-employee user of Vimeo. I— Jake, the guy who started Vimeo, famously said that our thinking helped him think about vlogging and stuff like that. Um, but they were absolutely an inspiration to me and it was so cool to be in that world of people, really, really great guys.

And then if you fast forward, I think you're like the first time that you kind of, you said you've made money like 2 or 3 times. The first time was after that India trip with your, you and your father, right?

Yeah. He started a business in the basement of our house. I didn't end up seeing that money till much, much later and still lived very frugally. Probably I still live very frugally actually, but I guess I didn't really have money per se until maybe 10 or 15 years after that. But yeah, my dad started in the basement of our house. This was my next big adventure. I came home from India, not sure what to do next. My dad had been working on this business in our house that did in-flight entertainment equipment for small jets.

Sam Parr, I was on a, on a plane with Nick. It's just the two of us on this plane. And Nick is like, we get on and instead of just like sitting down, putting his bag away, relaxing, he's like immediately fiddling with all the gadgets on the plane. He's like trying to like pull off the in-screen monitor, like where the, the map is of the plane.

I'm like, they made them.

I'm like, yeah. I'm like, is there something behind that? What are you trying to do here? And he's like, I just wanna see which one they have. Like, this is what, and he's like, did you know this? And he's like giving me all these facts. And 5 minutes later he finally tells me, oh yeah, this was the business that my dad and I worked on, which was like, they sold these little parts, electronic parts to planes in order to like, you know, hey, you see how your tray table comes out and how there's this little thing here? That's what we did.

And it was like a, like I've talked to, and his mom were, it was the, it was his mom and dad and then Nick. And I've talked to them about it and it was like a smashing success. You know, it took a, it took a while to like work, but it was like a, it was a, it was a home run in terms of like they were working on it together. It turned out to be financially fruitful and his parents are like the cutest parents you'll ever talk to. And it was literally like a mom and pop shop. It was like a, you know, where it's like, Nick Gray and Son, like, type of business. Like, the name is— that's what really what it was. And it sounded awesome. It sounded— it was a very wholesome business.

Were there any great stories from that, that chapter where either, uh, an unlock you guys figured out that made things work, or a moment you thought it was— you were screwed, but then you figured something out? Is there any good stories from, from that?

One thing I can tell you is that even in those early days, search engine optimization played a huge role within the business and searching for FAA certified in-flight monitors. What a niche thing. And yet all we needed was one. And we really got a million dollar deal from the SEO because I bought every domain name. I was creating fake blogs. I had everything pointing back to our company that we dominated, not just the first 3 results, but like the first page of results, because this was 2009-ish when There was a lot less SEO stuff, but even now it's such a niche industry. One major lesson that I think I could say was that I was lucky to come up under this salt-of-the-earth sales guy who ran our sales team. And he was the type of guy you see in movies today. He's got no social media. He has nothing. This was an Air Force guy who, you know, would pick up the phone at the, at the, at the shortest instance, would cold call people. There's a vivid memory that I have being at the trade show of somebody's badge being flipped around and they walked up and tried to talk to him and he just looks at them, looks down at them, grabs like, like gets in their space, grabs their badge, turns it around and says, oh, Dan McNormick, you asshole. And just like that, that like good old boy type of attitude that I got to come up under. And so there's so many people out there that are trying to solopreneur, that are trying to bootstrap, that are trying to hustle, that just don't have any experience, that have never learned those lessons that I'm so thankful that I got to learn through him. And so that was one of those experiences. His name was Jay Healey. He was a huge influence on how I think about phone calls and sales and outbound and things like that. Oh, wait, wait a second. I had a business idea. So someone told me, Jack Smith said, this crowd loves business ideas. And so I have a business idea for your listeners. I have a couple business ideas, but one of them is this. You need to create a white label enterprise sales team. Quit trying to hire programmers, whatever. I want you going out there recruiting the guys selling Cutco knives. I want you going to the mall, finding the most hustler guys selling that shoe soap stuff. And I want you to start building them and training them on how to sell B2B SaaS. If you are looking for an acquihire, salespeople are in high demand. If you have guys that can sell and girls that can sell, this company will get bought. I don't care what you're selling, but start collecting salespeople and build a sales team. You'll either get bought out, you can build a SaaS around it, or you'll just get acquihired in. This is a good business idea.

Nick, what makes you special and Sean experienced it because you guys hung out. And I don't think that he fully understood, like, this is the type of stuff that Nick Gray does. It's the weirdest, quirkiest stuff, but when he decides to be quirky and weird, it's pretty authentic to him. And he goes like a 10 out of 10.

Sam is exactly right. And it's the same idea of why I'm getting, you know, things like the hot dog hat for Sam or the basketball thing for Sean, or like, why do we just do little things to just make it interesting? Because I think that it's just different. We can live life a little bit differently. And I like to have fun.

Yeah, dude, your crayon box has like 4 extra colors that I don't have that I need to pick up. I need to go find these colors. When I was doing the research last night, I made a note. I go, I think that Nick has chugged the biggest glass of be yourself juice and now he's just belching the remainder out for the rest of the world. And you had this great quote. You said, uh, you tweeted this out. It didn't go viral, but I loved it. You said, quit playing it cool. Life is too short. Be intense and passionate and mildly insane. Now whoever's left hanging is your friend.

Yeah. Yeah. The lesson that I would have for listeners. Is that I can live that way now. I think because I grinded it out, ground out, I ground, I gritted it out. I think that I can live that way now because I achieved some success and I did some truly great things. This is not your carte blanche permission to go be an insane person. That's not what I'm telling you. And there's a fine line between genius and insanity. I'm not saying that I'm genius. I'm probably more insane. But I am 42 years old. I have had some successful business. I have been playing the game of business for way more than half my life. And I feel that I have the confidence today to be who I want to be because I have achieved some of that success.

Do you get lonely?

Probably. I don't exactly know what it would be not to be lonely, but I have a lot of friends.

You have a lot of friends and you have a lot of friends that are like, I consider us to be very close. We're like, I, you're family to me. But sometimes I think to myself, I want a 9-to-5 just because people throughout the day can't hang out with me. Or I want like a routine just so I could have a family. Do you know what I mean? But then other times I see you just jetting off to Japan on a blind date and I'm like, oh, that adventure seems fun. But it's hard to have both the stability of like a family sometimes and the eccentric excitement that you get to have. So Do you ever get lonely leaning into one of those sides versus the other side?

The largest and most valid critique of me and my lifestyle would be that I am 42 and single and no kids, and that people will say that that will be one of the greatest fallacies, that I've waited so long to begin my life and my family, and that no happiness can come from the happiness of a parent loving their child. And I think that that is 100% valid. I also do not agree with the critiques that say, just get married as soon as you can, business will follow. Get married first, above all else, make that your priority. I lived my life thus far through at least my late 30s, making business success, financial freedom, my number one priority. My number one. In fact, I hired a matchmaker for a little while when I was in New York, and she set me up with like 20 or 30 dates. And at the end of it, she was like, Nick, you know what? I don't think you even want a girlfriend. She said, I think you just want to go on dates. She said, with your business right now, you have no room in your life. You would never make a woman your number one priority. And I said, that's exactly right. Yeah. We should have talked about this beforehand. There's like, there's no chance. Like, my business is my number one refundable. Yeah.

Yeah.

And I said like, that like, this is my number one priority is my business. It's all that I think about. It's all that I do. I would wake up, I had this girlfriend in New York who was a poet and we would wake up in the morning and she would want to, you know, color and and drink coffee and hang out. I'm like, babe, I gotta grind.

Like, I don't, I don't have time to call her. There's no time to call her. We can't call her today.

Color me unimpressed with this plan.

Yeah, yeah, no time.

It's like, babe, you gotta go, uh, and I'm not here to hang out. And that was a different time in my life when I was so focused on that. So this leads me to my next business idea. I am going to do potentially, if enough people ask me for this, the first 7-figure millionaire matchmaker that is only based on a contingency fee. So I'm going to have no cost. I'm only going to take the top of the top clients. We're talking people like, um, I'm not going to name names, but, but folks that have a minimum, probably $50 million net worth, 5 million social followers. I'm going to be matchmaking for these people. And if they get married, only success, gentleman's agreement handshake, million-dollar minimum success fee. I think that that's interesting for a few reasons. Number one, because think about all the cool people that I'm going to get to meet. If I have this little roster of close friends and incredible people that I get to go up and approach and I'm like, oh, I'm matchmaking for such and such. Number two is most matchmakers will never work on a contingency basis. They only work on a retainer. But I don't need the money. Like I have plenty of time. Like I'm happy to let this play out over 5 years.

Can you explain how a traditional matchmaker works? I don't think most people know. How much does it, how much does a good matchmaker in New York cost? And what do they give you?

I think there's a variety of different matchmakers and it's not just in New York City. You can find these in Dallas, Texas. You can find them in San Francisco and Chicago. Matchmakers, by the way, gosh, let's talk about this.

There's a huge range.

There's a huge range, and actually PE companies do like to buy these businesses. I've heard of two of them. Brent Beshore's company has bought one, and someone else we both know looked at acquiring one of them. But matchmaking services can go from $5,000 all the way up to $100,000. And the ones that I have heard of, it's, it's roughly a thou— or sorry, it's roughly $5,000 a date, and they set you up and they extensively prescreen these women. Yeah.

And in advance you get like a PDF. Like I've, I've helped some of my buddies like review some of 'em. You get like a PDF of like 5 different people and they, it's crazy. It says like lives in Jackson Hole, but willing to relocate. And then it like does a profile on them and you kind of pick and choose.

And how, how much better is this PDF than just a, if I went to somebody's Tinder profile and right-click save as PDF, what would I be getting that's different in this?

Oh my God. Well, the next piece of advice for listeners is you need to delete your dating apps. You guys need to get off of the dating apps because you are not going to be able to make a difference. Nobody cares about you unless you're above 6 foot. You're devilishly attractive. The vast majority of men need to delete their dating apps, please. And I'll give you one tip. You need to join a sports club. Specifically, consider joining a kickball league. Now, why kickball? Kickball has the largest number of teams. So the team size is larger than any other sport. And generally both teams go out for drinks afterwards. Now you've heard other things like join a run club, go to yoga classes, things like that. If you do those things, you basically can talk to two people at each one. You can talk to somebody before, and you can talk to somebody afterwards. But if you're trying to ping pong around this run club to get numbers, it's going to be very, very low signal and you're not going to look good. Think about that. Start a match.

You gotta, you gotta answer Sean's question.

You have to run, which sucks.

Uh, okay, Sean's question was, how much more details do you get from a matchmaker? The one that I worked was a different way, and so I would not get these detailed advanced prep sheets. For the $5,000 a date ones, they are checking to make sure that the things that are important to you are important to them as well.

And sometimes they do, they do background checks on, on everyone.

Yes, they do.

$5,000 a date? I don't know if this is like the Indian DNA in me, but it's like, that sounds insane. $5,000 a date sounds insane. And obviously, even if you're wealthy, I get the rationality of why it would make sense, but that sounds crazy, especially when you have a low hit rate or low success rate with it.

But if you asked me today, how much would you pay if I could introduce you to your perfect person.

That I'm a believer in. If you said, and I've actually told 7 figures, 8 figures, wealthy friends this, I'm like, you should set up a bounty, which is that if you introduce me to somebody that I, I, you know, you fall in love with or get engaged to or get married to, like, why would you not put up $1 million, $2 million for that? For them, it would make such a huge difference in their life. It's, it's the best thing money could buy for those people.

And that is why I'm retitling myself to be Nick Gray Babe Bounty Hunter. And if you are listening to this and you are interested in putting up a 7-figure bounty to find your person, give me a call.

Dude, Babe the Bounty Hunter. That's such a good moniker. You could have your own TV show with this. Sam, Nick is so funny because when we hung out, he was the only person I've ever met in my life who calls people babes, but not like, not like he calls people all turbo babes. Yeah. He's just like, I was hanging out with these two babes and I was still laughing. I was like, I've just never heard someone say that. He's like, yeah, they were. It was cool. Um, okay. So you're Babe the Bounty Hunter, million-dollar contingency fee, sell it to private equity. I kind of love this idea. You know, I don't know if you're raising for this, but I'm interested. We can get you some distribution on the pod. We could do some special episodes once a month. We talk about our, our, our, our suitor here.

I'm super stoked. I'm excited. I'll cut you guys in easy. It's a, yeah, yeah, it's a good deal. Look, here's the thing. It's very, very hard. For extremely successful people, whether it's men or women, to sell and to market themselves appropriately. And I don't necessarily believe that having money is a bad thing. I think it is something to be proud of, but there's no good way to say that about yourself. Anyhow, do you know a lot of single wealthy men, Sean?

Yeah, I know so many of them. I call them Peter Pans. Uh, like I've got, I've got, uh, yeah, sorry, Nick, you're a Peter Pan. Um, and what's crazy to me is Nick's not one of these guys. Typically, I would have thought you'd be good at some type of public speaking, whether even if you just have a team of 10 people, like you could talk to them in front of them. There's a lot of attributes that you would think would translate to women. Not the case. Not the case with a lot of friends. And I, that has always boggled my mind. You know what I mean? Do you have friends like that, Sean? And doesn't that seem kind of crazy?

Yeah, I mean, the crazier part honestly is that, you know, you'll talk to 'em and it's basically like, yeah, this is the one thing I really want. That's the area of my life that I want to, you know, invest in. I want to grow, to bloom. That's the part of my garden I want to bloom. And then you talk to 'em, they say that to you, but then the next 4 weeks they're like, I'm on the road, I'm doing sales calls, I'm going to this pitch. It's like, dude, you took 49 pitches in the last 2 months, but you know, one date. And it's like the priorities don't match the calendar, but I get it. It's because there's a human tendency, which is that whatever is not going well for you, wherever area you're struggling in, it's easy to just avoid that and gravitate towards the things that are giving you that immediate dopamine hit of success, of progress, of being great at something. And I wish that they wouldn't do that. You know, the ones I respect the most are the ones who like fight against that grain, and they're like, dude, the incremental dollar does nothing for me at this point, but meeting You know, my life partner would be an amazing thing for my life and really put, match their calendar with their priorities.

Dude, I have, listen to this, Nick. I hung out with my friend. Yes. Uh, last week he's worth probably $200 million. Sold, sold the company, fabulously wealthy. He's 6'4". He's polite, nice. He's awesome. He's just an awesome guy. And I met with him and my wife and I met with, like, we hung out with him and he was like, hey, I met this girl on Hinge and we matched. I don't know what to say to her. Can you guys like, can I like run some ideas? I'm like, are you kidding me? You're nervous to have this text-based conversation. I'm like, dude, you're the catch here. Like, you're like the, you're like perfect. What are you talking about? And he was nervous and we had to like go through each line. He's like, does that sound weird? Does it sound weird if I say this? And I think there's a shockingly large amount of men that are like that, which is, which is insane to me.

The dating thing is interesting. I, Sean, I put my hands up when you were doing this. Cause I was like, yes, the calendar doesn't lie. If this is important to you, but you know what? I'll say something that folks are saying online. If you're listening to this podcast, because you want to be financially successful, I think you need to have priorities in life. And it is very hard to run and be laser-focused on your business when you're trying to build a relationship. Dare I say it's almost impossible.

Just a bunch of dudes playing with harmonicas with balloons, talking about how to get chicks. Yeah.

Oh, what are you doing over there, Johnny? I'm listening to this guy on the harmonica talk about how to find your life partner. Oh, he must be very successful.

Is he married with kids? No, he's single. What was, what was your other idea?

Do you have another idea?

Okay.

I got another business idea. I think we should bring back web hosting companies, specifically services agencies to help local small businesses build very basic WordPress websites. We poo-poo these simple ideas. Notice what the focus is. The focus there is sales. Can you sell it to them? But you go to somebody and say, look, for $50 a month, I'm going to host your site. I'll make sure it doesn't get hacked. I'll keep it lightly updated. You know, you can buy an additional thing if you want to make updates, but this is a SaaS business. You are now creating websites where you are selling them this service, Hacker Web Hosting, whatever. You're just doing the basic stuff. I think we think that we have to come up with this new AI stuff. Go back to the basics, like start making web pages for restaurants in town and start at the basics. I think we need to bring back web hosting companies.

I got a cool twist on this, which is, uh, the why now or what, what you could do differently now. I have a friend who's doing this right now. They took— I won't give away the category because I don't want them to feel like I invited competition for them, but they, they found a specific category. So a specific type of business. It's not pest control, but let's just pretend it was pest control for a second. So they picked a category and then they were like, cool, if I hired like a fancy New York design agency to make an awesome website for this company. It doesn't have to look super, super slick, but like much slicker than what they have by default and checks all the boxes of what a company like that needs. Oh, they need to immediately be able to request a quote. They need to be able to do X, Y, Z.

Cool.

Got the requirements, got 5 design templates made. And then what they did was they were like, cool, you know, AI is actually amazing at this. So they told the AI, they were like, AI, go find every, let's just use pest control as an example, every pest control business in New York. Right now that you can find on, on the online. Easy to do. It crawls, it gives you a spreadsheet of all the, the names of the companies and their URLs. It says, great. Then it created another AI agent that said, take their existing website, pull out the info, and then apply it to one of these 5 templates. And it did that. And then it said, and then he said, another AI agent was draft a cold email to this list of prospects and include in a mockup, an attachment that was made by Agent 2 that, that redid their website. And so they're getting this crazy response rate because they're going to these businesses and they're saying, hey, I was checking out your site. Just so you know, I'm a web developer. I help companies like you. I actually made a mockup of your, I made a mockup of your, your website, like of what I think I could do with it. If you think this looks cool, I'll be happy to do it for you for this monthly fee. And they're doing lead gen. They're, they're getting amazing lead gen because they're coming with a hyper-personalized offer, which is not just, Hey, do you need a website? Or, hey, I make websites for companies like you, but hey, I looked at your site. I thought I could, you know, improve it. Here's what it looks like improved. Do you want it? And that is, is just that makeover can now be automated with AI, which again, I don't think you need to make your idea successful, but it does add a turbo juice that like didn't exist before that now can work.

What do you use for that? That, I mean, that, that's, that outbound seems amazing for everything.

It is amazing. It's the AI sort of go-to-market idea, which I think right now the people who are going to make the most money in AI are the people who, the AI tool providers, but then also, but then the second one is going to be people who can string together AI tools to like turbocharge sales.

I want to use them. Do you know what they are?

Yeah, I mean, it's 3 different things, right? So there's like, let's say for the automated emails, there's a certain tool called Clay that's really good at that. Clay sends personalized emails. It basically takes, gives you a prospect list. It'll enrich the prospect list. So it'll say, cool, give me all the companies who fit this criteria. It'll give it to you. Then it'll say, add in how many employees they have, roughly their revenue range, who is their CEO, and what's their phone number. And it'll, it'll fill that whole table out for you automatically. And then you could say, cool, draft some email scripts for me to email these people. And it'll basically create templates that then could be sent hyper-personalized templates. But before that, let's say you need the other piece. Well, you might use Claude or something like that where you're going to say, build a tool, build a little tool for me where I can basically input this and I can get out a website in this format. So you maybe use Claude with artifacts to do that or some custom work around that. And then the first piece, which was just the prospecting, that's pretty easy. There's a lot of tools that can do the, just the, just the prospecting side for you.

That's crazy. That is crazy. Goddamn.

Help me think about this, guys. Is there something here that I want to riff on, which is that Sean just had this great idea. Notice that my idea was go to local restaurants and try to sell them a new website. Sean took it to the nth degree. No, write a script. So now you can do 5,000 a day and blah, blah, blah. And I want to pull listeners back to my side of the aisle. Yes, I think, I think I midwit memed it for you, which is to say, like, there is beauty in the simplicity of getting started and calling and hand coding and building your business. And that has shown up for me when I did my museum tour business. I was a tour guide, you guys. I built a multimillion dollar business out of being a tour guide. Every Friday and Saturday night, I was literally leading people at the museum. And I did that for 2 years before I even hired my first person.

How much money are you making just you doing that?

During the tour guide, each ticket was like $80. I would tour for 10 to 20 people a night and doing it every Friday, Saturday night. So you can do that math.

Dude, Sean, my, uh, so Nick had this company called Museum Hack where like, was it, was it MoMA or where, what museum?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the best museum in the whole world. That's where we started.

He just hijacked it. So like he didn't ask them permission if he could give tours there.

Yeah, you called it Renegade Museum Tours, right? So it's not part of their offering.

And so he built that business, sold it, whatever. Sarah, my wife, and Nick are close friends and she was like, hey Nick, can you give my mom and I like a private tour of MoMA or the Met, something like that? And he's like, yeah, I got you. So apparently my mother-in-law was like, oh, you know, I like, Nick, but I kind of felt dangerous being around him because like the security guard would be like, hey, you can't go through that elevator. And Nick would be like, oh no, no, trust me, it's okay. And he would just like walk on the elevator. Like he, like he would tell them like, no, you're wrong. It's okay. Trust me. And he would just go and do whatever he wanted to do. And that's, is that how you ran your business?

Yeah.

I like to think that some of those guarded off areas are more suggestions rather than rules. And that as long as you're being respectful— This is a rope, not a fence. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Whoa, can't go under it. Watch me. Um, no, no, no. Um, I have a lot of respect for these museums and for the art, but we would do different non-traditional things. We would lay down on the floor to look at the ceiling. We would sit down to talk about the art. We would talk about how much the paintings cost, which is a very taboo thing in the art world. And we would do all these non-traditional things in a museum space to really do museum tours for people who didn't like museums. And I want to just say that again, I did tours myself as a side hustle while I was still in the family business. This was my thing to build up enough money so I could quit the family job and start my own every Friday, Saturday night. Like, like that is why I had no dating life because I was running this business. Which brings me to my next business idea, Airbnb Experiences. If you are interested in starting a new side hustle, you can sign up on Airbnb Experiences to lead a tour in your town and charge people for it. This is a way for you to immediately start to get money from people searching for cool things to do. Now, this only works in major towns where they've launched Airbnb Experiences, but it's generally tier 1 and tier 2 cities. Find your favorite stuff, do tours for locals, show them around to some of your great stuff, provide a great experience, beg for 5-star reviews, and you can literally create a side hustle on Airbnb Experiences.

Dude, I love Airbnb Experiences. I've done probably 15 of them. I freaking love them. You ever do those, Sean?

I've never done one, but I've looked at it a bunch. I like Nick's framing of this, which is like, I've been thinking about this a lot, like starter businesses. Cause I wrote this blog post, this essay last week that was about my kind of like first 2 years out of college, this like really, I called it being strategically broke. I like just avoided getting a job. I said, I'm not going to get a job. I want to have max freedom. And so I calculated instead of how do I make the most money, how do I make like, what is the minimum money I need to have max freedom? And that shift, what everybody else that I graduated with was just like, how do I get the best job, make the most money? Which you don't even make that much money anyways as an entry-level job. They all suck. And so I think skipping that level of the game altogether was a great choice. But at the time, it looked really bad. Like, my apartment looked like shit. I lived super scrappy. We slept on air mattresses, like, all of that stuff. We couldn't afford a dog, so we got a mouse. We did a bunch of random things like that. But then we did little things that were starter businesses. Like, I had a little tutoring company, and then I started doing, like, a basketball camp once a, you know, during the summer. And then we did this like thing where we sold wristbands to like sororities and fraternities who needed like just like a themed thing. Like they wanted their name written on some shit. And that taught me how to make a website and go to Alibaba. And like, none of these were like businesses that were super lucrative or that most made no money. Some made a little bit of money, nothing you'd be impressed by, but they were amazing starter businesses that get you your first dollar, which is like a very addictive feeling. And it's, it's, It gets you out of theory and into reality, and it gets you moving, and it teaches you a bunch of the core tools and skills that you need, like sales and marketing, that you're gonna have to figure out when you're ready for a bigger business. And Airbnb Experiences, I love this idea because it doesn't even sound like a business. It's that much of a starter business. Anybody could do this. This is literally now just a question of like, are you willing to actually do something or are you just gonna talk about it for the rest of your life? And anybody could sign up to do one of these. Like, can you walk? In your, the area where you already live and can you point your finger at things? If you can do, if you can do that, you could host an Airbnb experience. And I think it removes all excuses and it gets the ball rolling for people. I love these starter businesses.

Love what Sean said, that it takes you out of theory and into practice. My First Million listeners, some of y'all have never run a lemonade stand and it shows. Okay. And so we're going to give you some ideas. Here's the next one. It's a similar one because you may not like doing tours. Like, I'm not a tour guide. Geek Squad type neighborhood computer service. I'll give you one that is a genius. I was hanging out with a friend yesterday. Her laptop was disgusting. The screen is all smudged up. There's cookie crumbs in the keyboard. There's all this stuff. And I've had this fantasy of doing, of dressing up and just going door to door to help fix people's stuff. I'm talking boosting their Wi-Fi, cleaning their computer, helping them with some basic tech support stuff, measuring the power. Another pet peeve of mine is a lot of people have really bad cell phone chargers and cables. They're not charging with USB-C with the full max power. New business idea. It's Geek Squad as a service where you go door to door, maybe even just to clean up their laptops and phones. I found this gunk online. That's this like gel sludge that you put into keyboards to suck up all the dust and the dirt. You can walk around with a little toolkit and for $100 make some massive improvements for people. All you need for that is about $100 worth of supplies. You need a little bit of knowledge on the tech side and you need to dress up nice and look respectable. But thinking about these things that don't necessarily scale, do those things, start there. You need to get your hands dirty in these type of environments. That's my suggestion.

Did you see Sean when Nick travels? Did you like, did he show you all the gadgets he keeps in his bags?

Yeah, he had, well, I didn't see too many. He had a pillow, he had like an Apple Vision Pro. Uh, I don't know what else he had. Like, you know, some juggling balls. He had like, he had, you know, the essentials, dude.

He, he's so funny when he travels. Like he researches stuff like crazy. Like he'll have like the best. Charger, but he also is, he knows how he wants to live and he lives that way. So for example, apparently I don't even know what buckwheat is, but there's a buckwheat pillow that he loves. And whenever he goes to a hotel, he buys that $50 or $100 pillow and he has it shipped to the hotel room because he's like, I have to have this buckwheat pillow.

Nick, what's up with the pillow?

Think how wild this is that we will spend $300, $400, sometimes $500 a night for a hotel, even $200 a night. And yet your sleep can be ruined by some of the smallest things. The pillow was the one variable that as I traveled the world, I realized that I could control. And someone once said to me, strange pillows equals strange dreams. And I realized that I might, might not be able to control the mattress, but I can at least control the pillow. And so I learned about these Japanese buckwheat pillows when I was over in Tokyo. You kind of even love them or you absolutely hate them.

The largest one, it's like hard as a brick. Have you ever had one of these? I think I might've done it wrong. Mine is so hard.

Yeah.

You need to remove half of the holes. Okay. So if that's a complaint that you have, that it's too hard, then just dump out half of the holes. And the good news is it's buckwheat, so you can have it for dinner.

I guess what I appreciate about you is, so like, I think Sean's the same way as me where I will see something or something disappoints me and I'm like, ah, fuck it. I'll live with it. You know what I mean? Like, oh, uh, you brought me pesto pizza. I ordered a steak. Fuck it, whatever. Like, I don't even like pesto, but like, I'm just going to deal with it, whatever. Or my haircut's bad and I don't want to complain. It'll grow back. Fuck it. You are not that person.

Yeah. When the barber asks you, do you want it rounded or squared? You have an opinion. Whereas I'm just like, whatever, it's fine. You don't even have to do it. Just, I can leave now. You want the money?

Fuck me, right? You have an opinion about stuff, and I appreciate that.

Thank you. Thanks.

And you like put in the effort to like have life your way. I, I don't really do that as much.

Is there some story about like a billionaire who does the same thing, Nick, uh, but not with a pillow, but Peter Thiel does that with a mattress, right? Yeah. What's the story?

I don't want to comment on it. I have heard that somebody does, has positioned a couple dozen mattresses around the world in major metropolitan areas. And so that when he goes to the hotel, his advanced team moves the mattress into the hotel room so he has the same exact sleep anywhere, just to remove any number of variables possible.

Uh, Sam, what does your advanced team do?

Yeah, I don't even know how to reply to that. My advanced team.

I'm your advanced team. I love being Sam's advanced team at events. I love to Get himself safe.

What's the name for that?

Where you, you, Nick is my body guy. So, so sometimes I like, for example, sometimes I'll get invited to speak someplace and I'll be like, I'm only gonna go, like for example, we had one and I was like, I'm only gonna go if Neville and Nick will go with me cuz I don't want to go alone. And I'm like, Nick, do you wanna come with me? He's like, yeah, can I be your body guy? And I was like, well, I just want you to come as my friend. He's like, well, but can I be your body guy? I'm like, I don't know what a body guy is, but yeah, I guess like as long as, yeah, sure. As long as like it's nothing that would make my wife angry.

I'm not usually into that, but I guess so.

And so he He's my body guy and he like, he goes, all right, Sam. So, uh, what that means is like, uh, so on Wednesday, your schedule is this, this, and this. We're going to go here, here, here, and here. And like, I go to this talk and there's like 10 people in the crowd. Like no one came. And he's like, all right. Um, we're going to do autographs and photographs over here. So, uh, Sam, come with me. And like, I'm like, dude, Nick, like this, like you're no, no one wants to do any of this stuff. He's like, no, no, no, we're going to do this. And then, and then I'll be like, uh, he'll see someone walking by and he'll grab them. And be like, hey, so is it true that you want to take a picture with Sam? And he's like— and he's like— I'm like, is that what a body guy means?

A body guy is like the opposite of a bodyguard. Bodyguard keeps people away. A bodyguard brings people to you. That's great. I love it.

He like created this hype. He's like a hype man. And it was so funny.

I had the funniest embarrassing interaction the other day. So I was— when I went to that trip in San Diego, I was wearing this hat, this hat, um, right here. And so I was standing waiting for like my tacos at the Taco Shack and this guy goes, hey, I don't want to bother you, but like, do you mind if I take a picture? And I was like, yeah, sure, man. That's cool. You know, you've been listening for a while. He's like, no, no, I just like, I like your hat. My friend has a company called West and I just wanted him to see this. And I was like, oh yeah, I just assumed that you want me— all right, you know what, are you getting tacos? Do you want my tacos? I had no way out of that, that moment.

Do you want my tacos?

Um, by the way, Nick, cue the harmonica. I got a riff on your idea, your Geek Squad thing. I think it's a simpler version of it, which is every, uh, parent I know that's like kind of like my parents' age has this box in their house of just old home videos. And so I think an even easier one versus like, can I help you with your stuff is just to say, hey, do you guys have any like home videos from your kids? Uh, because I can convert them into stuff that you can have, you know, on your computer on the internet. So you'll never lose them to live forever. Can't even find a VHS player anymore. So I could take, if you just have that box, I'll just take the box and I'll do it for you. And then you basically drive it to like, you know, CVS or Costco and they do this shit for you. But like, there's a gap there where most people don't they're not really aware of the problem or it's on their to-do list. They'll never do it. But if a kid showed up at their door, dressed nice, million-dollar smile, and said, I'd love to take care of that for you. I'm doing that for people in the neighborhood. I could take it from you right now. Just show me the closet where it is and I'll go grab it. I think that you can make, you know, an easy few thousand dollars, um, you know, in a couple months of effort, uh, effort there, which sounds like not that much, but you know, at different phases of your life, a few thousand dollars is all the money. It's all you need, right? Uh, and, and it gets you going.

Knock knock, ma'am. Can I ask you a question? How much are your memories worth?

Boom.

Boom. Keep your memories safe.

Yeah.

It's an easy, it's an easy sell.

Use the Wolf of Wall Street. Fair enough.

Close.

It's like you watch all the YouTube videos about sales and you over— you're complete overkill going door to door. It's like, Sam, have you seen that? That company that's doing these nap, these nap bands. Me and Nick were talking about this on the plane. There's like, you haven't seen this on Twitter, Seb?

It's this company. What's a nap band?

They have this like device that's like, you gotta find it. It's called Element or something like that. It's, uh, to put your sleep.

Element. Send me my free element shipping address.

I know, I've been begging these guys to try it because I'm a prolific napper and napping is like part of my brand. And, uh, I really want—

So how do you spell it?

E-L-E-M-I-N-D. And Sean and I can act out the skit that we're going to do as a promo video for you if you want. But yeah, Sean, please.

I'm Deepak Deepak Chopra or a billionaire. This is what they're doing right now. It's a pre-release product, but they're building insane hype on Twitter because they'll go to a famous person. So Nick, I'm the billionaire and you're the founder of Ella Mind.

Okay, Deepak, I'm going to give you the new Ella Mind. Why don't you put this on and see if it'll set you to sleep?

Just like this?

Okay, that's it.

What's up everybody? I'm Suzy, CEO of Ella Mind. This is Deepak Chopra. Look at that little bitch, fell asleep in 5 minutes. He's out like a light.

You can't even hear me. What's up, Deepak?

Little bitch. Pre-orders open now.

This is a social strategy right now. They take a famous person and they just knock them out so fast, but almost to the point where they're just drooling. And it's like, yo, they're almost—

She literally puts a picture of them sleeping.

It's like my worst nightmare. It's like Punk'd. It's like a mix of Eight Sleep and Ashton Kutcher coming out the van. It's amazing. It's the best marketing campaign I've seen in a while.

She does have that attitude. She's like, Deepak Chopra, got him.

Is this the leader of the free world right now? But watch this. Boom. Out like a light bitch.

Yeah.

Oh, sleeping like a little baby. Little CEO needs nap time.

Is this legit at all?

I think it is legit. I think I would pay for this thing.

I want it.

Yeah. Yeah. This is insane. There's no way this works, right?

No, I think it works. Yeah, I'm a believer.

Speaking of unique marketing strategies, can I talk about what I did on Google Reviews with my Google Maps photos?

Well, and by the way, the Equinox lady came up on this Elementor thing. I want to hear the Equinox story.

Yeah, tell the Equinox story first because I hadn't heard that, uh, before until you texted me last night, but I have only heard what you texted me, so I don't, I don't know the story.

Great. So first of all, the moral of this story— I'm just going to cut to it— is that Listeners, next experiment that you need to be doing: bring back blogging. You need to fill the AIs, and the AIs need to have data from the public web to scrape.

I've been saying this for a long time— blogging needs to make a comeback.

Take some of your best tweets, put them into your blogs if you need to. You don't have to create new content, but just put the stuff you're sharing elsewhere into blogs. A great example of that is my own monthly recaps. If you go to nickgraynews.com, you go to the blog, you click the monthly recaps. I take some of my best posts and I put it there on the blog, on the public internet in order to scrape. And you need to do this for a few reasons, but one of the reasons is for nefarious purposes. I wanted to find a list of all of the Equinox gyms in New York City that had swimming pools, very hard list to find. And so I made my own list of all the equinox gyms with swimming pools. It started to rank pretty quickly as the number one search result for other people searching for the same thing. Unfortunately, my gym started to get very crowded and I would have to wait for the lanes to swim at my gym. And I'm getting 50, 100 visitors a day to this page. And so I, uh, closed my gym swimming pool according to my blog for maintenance for a year. So that I would have to wait for less people and people would say, hey, they'd go there. They'd say, hey guys, sorry, this pool's closed for a year. You know, we're resurfacing the bottom pavement, but these are some other nearby pools. And yeah, so that's what we are going to do.

Listen, Chad, Google like Nick Ray Equinox. He has a PDF on his website. Download, download my full list of Equinox. Gyms with pools and you could, and if you sign up, we'll send you the pool links for each of the New York City Equinox pools.

You know, I got that lead magnet for the Friends newsletter, brother. I'm out here.

Yeah.

You're going to be, you're going to have just dozens of pool fans in New York who worship you.

Literally, that's my life. A dozen here, a dozen there. It's all good.

You SEO hacked your way into having your own pool time for free because you told everybody the pool's closed. That's on them for not having better SEO. Cool.

Yes. Yes. I have a couple other stories like that.

What? Okay.

Yeah.

Give us, give us a couple other. I like these.

Uh, cool.

So, you know, gray area. Oh dude, the gray area. Perfect theme with your last name. All right. Keep going.

Gray area. I like it. All right. Here's another reason that you should be blogging and writing about interesting things. I noticed that that movie about Herbalife. The Bill Ackman movie was produced by this hedge fund guy named John Fitchthorne. And I couldn't really find a lot about him and he wasn't ranking for a lot because some of these guys—

the story is basically that John must have been pro Herbalife and Ackman was anti-Herbalife. And so they were having like a PR fight.

John was anti as well and was funding this movie to show Bill's sort of anti story. Some, some reason or another, John got involved. I don't remember the gist of it, but he was a hedge fund guy who was a producer of this movie and there wasn't a lot about him. So I wrote an article about all the stuff I could find about him, various news articles, whatever. I scraped it. I put it all into a thing. And literally like 6 months ago, he called me up. He's like, hey, is this Nick Gray? I was like, yeah. He's like, uh, this is John Fitchstone. You wrote an article about me. Um, I was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. Like, do you want me to remove it? He's like, No, I just want to fix some things. Can you change some of these things that you got wrong? And we ended up having like a 30-minute phone call. He told me about his new strategies and ideas and all the things he's doing. Super cool connection that he doesn't know me from anybody, but because I ranked for him, he reached out and he wanted to help out. That's one reason I've done this in other times. If there's this art thing called the Normandy panels, okay, the SS Normandy was a French cruise ship that traveled the world in the 1930s, basically to proclaim to the world that France is awesome. And it had some of the most amazing Art Deco interiors. I became captivated with the story of the ship. Um, World War II broke out, the ship was changed into a military craft, and all the guts were ripped out and now show up in private collections around the world. I love this stuff. Nobody was really tracking these panels. And so now I am the de facto resource for these panels on the internet, just as a hobby project. That I've maintained on my blog. Last week, I literally got a call from a conservation expert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art asking me for advice about who they can talk to as they're thinking about these panels and how they're going to show and display them. All of this is through publishing and living your life online. These are little moments of when I've done that, that have paid off for me in the long game. It's important to know this didn't happen overnight. This is a long-term investment.

Nick, there was a guy who I did a podcast with a couple days ago. Sam couldn't make it. And it's a guy named Guy Spier, and he's a kind of well-known value investor. He's a disciple of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. He ended up meeting Warren Buffett and all this stuff. And one of the things that came out of it that I didn't realize is he read the book Persuasion by Robert Cialdini or whatever the— I forgot what the exact title is, but I think it's Persuasion.

Influence.

Influence, sorry. I guess the context is he had a fund and he was investing kind of friends and family money. He's like, dude, I'll never get beyond friends and family money if like I don't learn how to do sales and marketing. I have no idea how to do that. But like, oh yeah, let me go try to read a couple books. So he reads this book and he reads about the guy who was the number one car salesman in the world. And he says, this guy broke the Guinness Book of World Records, sold the most cars more than anybody else. And they went and they studied him and they said, what, what are you doing differently? What is your influence? What is your persuasion? Technique, and he used to send out thousands of handwritten notes to anybody he would meet. He would send a letter and the letter was very simple. He would write their name and he would write, I like you. And he's like, you know, people like to be liked.

That's it. It just said, dear Sean, I like you from Carl Sagan.

I don't know the exact, that's what the book says. I don't know if there was more to it. Now he reads this and he's like, he's like, I don't know much. He's like, I'm not great at many things. He's like, but when I do hear something that like might help me, he's like, I'm desperate enough where I just throw my all into it. The one good thing about me is I don't half go in. So he's like, I decided, all right, I'm not leaving work any day until I've written at least 3 notes. He's like, first one he wrote was like, you know, Sam, I like you. He's like, oh my God, I can't send this. This feels so weird. So he's like, okay, I'll change that to thank you. He's like, I can always say thank you. He's like, thank you for blah, blah, blah. He's like, I can always find something to thank them for. And so he started writing 3 thank you notes a day and he started writing that and he started upping the volume. And then he tells a story about how that led to ultimately him actually meeting Warren Buffett. And he's like, it's not that every thank you note turned into some transactional thing. He said, but I didn't even want that. He's like, it's not even that I actually genuinely felt it in the moment. He's like, I forced myself to do it, but then I started to kind of feel it as I went because I'd have to think, what am I thankful for? And if you keep asking yourself, what am I thankful for in this person, you'll start to actually appreciate them more. It started to work. And what happened was he went to the annual meeting of this guy, Mohnish Pabrai, and Mohnish was a famous investor. He's been on the pod. He wrote him a letter afterwards that just said, thank you for having me at the event. And by the way, he didn't invite him. He just said, thank you for having me at the event. I had a great time. And that was it. And Mohnish called him the next day and he goes, hey, I don't know. He's like, I'm Mohnish. He's like, oh wow, how'd you get my number? He's like, well, I looked you up because you are, you know, I've been having these meetings for years and you're the only guy who's ever wrote me a thank you note afterwards. And so I just, I just had to get to know you. Would you like to get lunch tomorrow? So they get lunch and at the lunch he says, you know, this lunch is great. Warren Buffett has a charity lunch and I think we should bid on it. Uh, would you come in with me? Like, you know, whatever amount you're comfortable with, I'll cover the rest. I'll cover, you know, 4/5 of it, 3/4 of it. You cover whatever your share is, but I want to go to it with you.

Oh, so Guy Spier was more up and coming with than Mohnish.

Yes, exactly. Mohnish had like a, he had like a, at the time, like an $80 million net worth. Guy was much smaller than that, single digit millions. And, um, so Guy was like, I think I could put in like $150K, $200K, $250K max, please. And, uh, and so they, they bid on it and they won and then they end up meeting Warren Buffett. Now the story comes full circle while we're doing the podcast, he reaches back and he goes, is this on video? And he pulls out a letter that Warren Buffett sent him just saying, Guy, thanks for coming to the event. You know, um, you know, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, Warren, he's like with his assistant. Sends out these holiday cards every year to thousands and thousands of people. And he's like, he's like, Warren gets this principle of basically everything you publish out there, whether it's a directed thank you note or Nick, in your case, these blog posts that you're publishing to the world is an invitation for serendipity. You don't really know what's going to come out of it, but if you do enough of it in the long term, like you will far outkick your coverage. You will get a huge return on this investment. Plus it just feels good to everybody involved doing it. You'll feel good doing it. They feel good receiving it.

That's such a good story. That's a great story.

The surface area of serendipity. And they talk about that in a lot of different things, right? That's why we, we, you don't get lucky. You put yourself in the opportunity to become lucky.

Right. You, uh, you want to hear another fun fact about Nick? I, he's the only person who has host parties and literally 5 of his ex-girlfriends will be there at the same time. And they all love each other and they get along perfectly.

I want to host a girlfriend conference. I want to host a conference for all my ex-girlfriends because I really do think that they would get along and they're such incredible, amazing people. It might be the worst idea ever, but, but I do think—

I think you should 100% do that. Just—

I think there's no doubt I love this idea.

I see no potential issues.

Yeah, I don't think— I think this is, this is going to go wonderfully. I, I think that's I think that's perfect. I think you've nailed it.

Nick, can you talk, can you give us the 5-minute crash course on how to throw a party? Um, you know, what is the, I haven't read your book yet. I'm sorry. I bought it, but I haven't read it yet.

How many copies have you sold by the way?

20,000, maybe 21,000. It's pretty good.

That's great.

Pretty good, right?

Each one. Here's the thing about a party book, by the way, nobody wakes up and says, you know what I need today? Is a book about how to host a party. They want books about how to get rich. They want books, how to lose money, how to blah, blah, blah. Nobody says they want a party book. And so that's been an uphill battle. So I'm very, very proud of that self-published sales figure.

And, but I understand you have something called the Nick Method. I don't know what the Nick Method is. What is the Nick Method for hosting a party?

So the Nick Method to host a party will absolutely level up. I'm gonna do harmonic on this. Because if you do this one thing, you will level up your events to be so much better. And the reason is that the bar is so low for a successful event. Think when somebody invites you to like a company happy hour, you're just people standing around at an open bar. It's like bad. That's a, that's the old way. And the future can change if we bend our will to make it do that. You can do that with the Nick Method when you host events. N-I-C-K, like my name. The N stands for name tags. Fill out the name tags, first name only, big block letters. The name tags I like are the Qualfec 300s. I also like the Avery 5424s. The Qualfec 300s come in 6 different colors, and you guys may know those. They discontinued the 5426s, which was really sad, actually.

It's the vintage. You should— that's a good year.

You should completely make up the model numbers, by the way, and just see if anyone ever finds out and be like, I've been waiting. I have an envelope for the, it's a golden ticket. It's like for the first person that realized that I was completely making up the model numbers of these name tags. You are my fellow nerd.

I may have got those model numbers wrong.

Why do the name tags matter? Because I went to a party of yours and at first I was like, okay, this is second grade. This is cheesy. But then it was kind of useful, obviously, because I don't remember a lot of people's names, but it seems like there's more to it than that. What is the, like, what's the why behind the why?

The why behind the why is it's like a sports jersey to show everybody that we're on the same team. Have you ever walked into an event? It's the first time you've gone to something and you figure that it's me walking into something else. Everybody else must know each other. They must all be friends already. I am the outsider. When you have name tags, you show that you are all on the same team. This is not a party of cliques. We're all here together. By the way, if you host meetups, you absolutely have to do name tags when you host at a bar or another public spot. So you know who is there for the meetup. Have you ever gone to a meetup and it's at like a beer garden and you're like, well, who's here for the meetup? Like, oh, these people. It's like, great. I guess I'll just figure it out on my own. Amateur hour.

All right. And name tags. I'm in. I buy.

Yeah. And his name tags. I stands for intros or icebreakers. When I wrote the book, I called them icebreakers, but there's such a cringe reaction to the idea of icebreakers and that word. So now I call them intros. And this can be in small groups. It can be your whole group together. But what's the first thing that everybody asks when they meet you? What's your name? What do you do for work? We're going to get that out of the way by having everybody say it real quick. I think it is important, by the way, to say what people do, especially for listeners of this pod, because you never know who's looking for a job, who wants to network, who's working on growing their business. But those rounds of intros give you an excuse. It's a conversational crutch for your guests to go up and start new conversations. Your role as the host—

Is there a gray way to do that? Like, is there a better and worse way to do those intros or icebreakers?

My man, of course there are. Dude, I've done more icebreakers. I live and breathe icebreakers. You have come to the right spot. Uh, welcome to Nick Gray's Party Icebreaker Therapy, because I've spent a lot of my life doing icebreakers. Um, here's the deal.

There's two different— Dude, do you know, uh, Do you know Stefon from SNL's Weekend Update? You know, like, you are Stefon right now. That is you. That is you.

I'm so passionate about icebreakers because I've seen so many bad ones. You know, an example of a bad one is, all right, everybody, team meeting. Let's go around and say one fun fact about yourself. That's a terrible icebreaker. So much of my work involves making people that have social anxiety or consider themselves introverts to feel more welcome. And I know that some of them are going to hate this idea of intros, but ideally what they like is to be able to know what to expect and minimal surprises. And so a green level icebreaker or intro at the beginning of an event, when there's no social rapport, when people are new and a little uncomfortable, is just an easy one that doesn't take time. The exact question that I have most people do is, hey everybody, real quick, let's just do a round of intros. You gotta say the why. The why is that there's a lot of interesting people here, and I really want you to go meet somebody new. So we're going to have you say your name, say what you do for work or how you spend your day, and then tell me one of your favorite things, one of your go-to things that you like to eat for breakfast. Now that's a bit of a red herring because I actually don't want to know their breakfast. I want to know what they do for work, but we take away the attention. We make them think about the breakfast. The breakfast one works because it's easy. It's subjective. People don't judge you for it. And it's not hard. You don't get locked up in your head. A bad example would be, hey everybody, let's go around, name, what do you do for work? And tell me your favorite business book. Favorite is definitive. It is your absolute favorite. People are going to judge me. Oh my God. Favorite. What's my favorite? What's my favorite? So we start with a very easy one. So you could do the breakfast. If you want to make it a little edgier, you could ask people and say your favorite vice. Or say, what was one of your first online screen names and why did you choose it? Or what was one of your first jobs that you ever got paid cash money for? Now, those are beginner-level ones. I want to tell you an advanced one, but I want to check with you guys. Can I keep going?

Yes. Yes. Keep going.

As you continue the event, about an hour later, you want to do one more advanced round of intros. And this is what I call a value-additive intro. Value-additive means that everybody's answer adds to the benefit of the room. And so for Sam, for example, who lives in Connecticut now, say that he was hosting this in Westchester, you would say, hey everybody, we're going to do our last round of icebreakers. Your question is going to be, what is one of your Westchester pro tips or life hacks or little secrets? What's a small business you support, a dog park you like, a hiking trail you enjoy? What's the best coffee shop in town? Tell us one great thing in town that you like and want to shine a light on. Okay. So that's one example. One more example. If you don't want to focus on your town would be, hey everybody, we're going to do a last round of intros and I want you to share a great piece of media that you have consumed recently. What's a movie you watched, a documentary, a podcast like My First Million, like and subscribe, gentlemen's agreement. Uh, what are some of those things? That you liked and you want to share. Okay. And then you go around the room and you do that. Why does this work? It works because every answer gives somebody value. Oh, I've been meaning to go to that restaurant. Oh, My First Million.

I love those guys.

Oh, I, I heard about that book. I want to check it out. And you do it towards the end of your event. So at the end, people get all these new ideas. They've met all these new people and they leave with a feeling of value. They leave feeling that they're better than when they showed up. That's what a good party is.

You did something at a party I went to of yours where, I don't know, you were like lurking around or you were hopping from convo to convo, but then when you brought everybody back together, you go, James, will you tell people that amazing, uh, email trick that you did that, uh, really improved your, your open rates? And the guy said something that was like so useful to me that I was like, that one thing alone made this party worth going to because It's like you had eyes and ears around the room so you could pluck the best kind of like pro tip that you heard and you had 2 or 3 people go and you just had them share with the whole group in that moment. I thought that was pretty awesome.

That's an advanced tip. And the main thing I want your listeners to know is that I found that interesting people want to meet people that are doing interesting things and the fastest way to become interesting was for me to host my own events. So we talked before about those business ideas that you don't need a lot of capital for. Hosting events is kind of the same way. You can do it with very little money. Each party should cost you less than $100. These strategies start from beginner to advanced, and I've helped hundreds of people to host their very first party using this method. You should be going through life, collecting the interesting people that you meet. And why is this helpful? Well, it helped me launch a multimillion-dollar business called Museum Hack that was launched on the back of the network that I built up from hosting all of these events. I hear from a lot of people, oh my God, I'm gonna do a startup party. I'm gonna do a launch party for my new app. I was like, awesome, perfect. How many events have you hosted? Or when was the last event you hosted? Oh, oh, I've never hosted anything. I'm like, bro, you have a cold list. Like nobody knows you, like no offense, but like in real life, nobody knows you. Nobody. Care. This is not going to be a successful launch party. You need to start building up and hosting these little events. By the way, the perfect size for a happy hour, in my opinion, is about 15 to 22 people. I could talk forever about this, but a small plug. I wrote a book called The Two Hour Cocktail Party that is really more like a workbook or a step-by-step guide that helps you actually do it. And by the way, if you want to go through a cohort or something, You give me $100 at the end of hosting the party, I'll give you the $100 back. That's how it works. But hosting the party, it might change your life.

The book made you like the king of the introverts because I had so many introverted friends who like read the book and they started hosting Nick Gray parties. And I would be like walking around Austin at like 7 o'clock at night. And in Austin, all the bars are outdoor bars. And I would see, I would, I swear to God, there was this one 1-mile walk through East Austin of like where all the bars are.

And I would see multiple Nick Gray parties happening, harmonicas all throughout downtown Austin in the night.

They would be in a circle and they would, I call them, we would call them name tag Nick. So they always had Nick's name tags and they would be in a circle and I could see the person in the middle pointing exactly like he tells you to do in the book. I swear to God on one 1-mile walk, I saw 3. I saw one at Lazarus, one at Whistler's, and one this other bar. It was 3 Nick Gray parties. It was insane. It's like you were the introvert's king for a handful of months where I would, in Austin, so many people were doing it.

The reason we're doing this is that people are hungry for in-person events. We're all digitally saturated. We want that human connection. And I found that you can add value to people by introducing them to other interesting people. If you're looking for a business idea, if you're looking to raise your status in the world, you have to start by adding value and hosting a party, introducing the interesting people, you know, that is a way that you can add value.

Dude, you have so many stories. We probably should wrap up in a minute, but you got like so many fricking stories. I just want to, I want you just to like rattle off stories. I just like hearing all the most interesting things that have happened.

Even without explaining it, for the completionists, can you just say what the C and the K stand for in the NIC method?

The NIC method, N-I-C-K, N is name tags, I is intros, C stands for cocktails or mocktails only. Do not do a dinner party. I talk about why dinner parties are a recipe for failure for new first-time hosts. And K stands for kick 'em out at the end. This is only a 2-hour gathering. You want to keep it tight. You want people to leave when they're wanting more, leave when they're wanting more, end it when it's going great. Just like this podcast. Thanks for watching. Bye-bye.