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Again, that's longangle.com. Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. If you're new here, I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and I'm a diehard optimizer who loves doing all the research to get the best experience in life without an expensive price tag.

So to make this happen, I sit down with the best experts each week, and I learned all their strategies, tactics, and frameworks that shape their success. So if you hear the phrase cocktail party, you might think like me, 1960s, dressed up couples, sipping martinis on a Mad Men set.

But that's not exactly what my guest, Nick Gray, means when he says that almost everyone should be hosting cocktail parties. Nick's the author of a new book called The 2-Hour Cocktail Party, How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings. And he's on a mission to get people to have more parties, to make connections, build friendships, and live a richer life.

Now, between kids and COVID, I haven't hosted many gatherings in a while, but when Nick told me he wrote his book for people like me and not for people who already host events all the time, I was really excited. So we're going to get tactical in this conversation. I want to hear why a cocktail party is a better way to get to know people than just having dinner, why Nick thinks name tags and icebreakers are non-negotiable for parties, and I want to get a complete run through of everything you need to do to make an event easy and effortless from invites to food and drink to getting to leave on time.

But that's not all because Nick also founded a company called Museum Hacks to lead these renegade tours of museums like the Met in New York and others around the country. It's been featured in all kinds of media from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times. And after a little research, I'm hoping I can take one of these tours soon.

But in the meantime, I will make sure we also get all his museum hacks today too. And on top of that, Nick is an avid traveler and a fellow optimizer. So I'm certain we'll uncover some other hidden gems in this conversation. So let's get started. Nick, welcome to the show.

I'm happy to be here. We're going to get real tactical today. That's fantastic. So I'm going to jump right in and just ask why cocktail parties? You can get 80% of the benefits of hosting a dinner party with 20% of the work by hosting a cocktail party. Now, anybody can write a book to teach you how to host one dinner party, but the reality is, is that most people will never do it again.

And dinner parties are too hard. They're too complicated. A lot of people give entrepreneurs this advice, like host a dinner party or host a mastermind. And I think that's actually terrible advice for most people. You get most of the benefits from hosting when you can actually make it a habit and something where you always have your next party on the calendar.

To do that, I built the easiest possible framework and formula for hosting events. Okay, so I've looked at that formula and I know you have all these things, name tags, icebreakers, firm stopping times. Why are they important and how do you actually get people to play along and agree to them?

Well, one of the first things is that the best day to host an event might not be the one that you think. For example, I highly suggest that everybody hosts their parties on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday nights. Why those? We can go into that if you want, basically because they're non-competitive social nights.

Most people don't have things going on. Second of all is I always give a stop time to my parties. Two hours, there's a start time, there's an end time. And there's hidden benefits in having a stop time, one of which is that it gets all your guests to show up on time, right?

When you're a host, that beginning hour when nobody really shows up, it's slow. When you have a tight two-hour thing, then folks show up on time and you end the party when things are going well, so that your friends, guests, your colleagues, they want to come back the next time that you host.

And when you host regularly, is it always the same people or do people feel left out or how does that work? Great question. I usually mix it up. I'll do half repeat guests, half new guests. You really get the best benefits when you're going through life. Let's say that you're hosting a cocktail party once every six weeks.

Between those parties, you're meeting all these random people. Here's why I did this, why I can change your listener's life. We meet all these interesting people that we never do anything with, like you meet them, they're cool and you're like, oh, that person was interesting, but I'm not going to go out of my way to schedule a dinner with them.

I'm not going to go out of my way to schedule a one-on-one meeting or a hangout with them because life's busy and things happen. When you have a cocktail party, you get to kind of collect all of those interesting people that you meet through life and bring them back in and then almost audition them to see if you want to be friends with them or build a relationship, almost something like that.

I hope that doesn't sound bad. No, no, it's funny. We went to a birthday party for a kid named Jackson. I'd never met Jackson my whole life. My daughter has met him at the park with our au pair and we got this kind of invite through the nanny group to us.

And so we go to this party, we don't know a single person. And now we just met, I don't know, 10 couples with our kid's age. And I will share this because we didn't know what to do with them. We're like, "You seem cool. We've got kids the same age, but do we really want to orchestrate 10 playdates or group play?" It just seemed like we met these interesting parents and we didn't know what to do.

So you've sold me on the fact that dinner is not going to happen. I'm not going to schedule 10 dinners because that's going to take me the next, I don't know, it feels like 10 months of dinners straight. Yeah. I get why I should do it, but it seems like a lot of work.

So I'd love to just dial in like, how do you make this, you said 20% of the work of a dinner party. Yeah. How is that possible? Okay. I found when I was scheduling dinners that first of all, you have to stress about all the food. By the way, it's not about the food.

The hack is that if you are insistent on hosting a dinner party, just order out. Don't try to cook the food yourself. Nobody cares about the food. They're coming for the people and for the conversation. When you order out, it allows you to be a little less stressed about that.

But how is it more efficient? How can you get 80% of the benefits with 20% of the work? Well, 80% of the benefits at a dinner party. Have you read the book, the art of gathering by Priya Parker? I have not. Absolutely fantastic book. And in there, she says one thing that when you have a dinner party with more than six people, the conversation will naturally split into two smaller groups.

So if you have a dinner party with eight or dinner party with 10, the conversation will split unless you're doing Jeffersonian single track with a very skilled facilitator, moderator, the conversation naturally will split into smaller groups. And so I generally would have a dinner party. It's about six because that's easy to host.

I find that by hosting a cocktail party and by the way, the sweet spot, the number of people that you want to have attend is 15 to 20. Why is that? Because less than 15, there's not enough energy. There's not enough dynamic, new connections and possibilities. If you have a group of 10 people over two hours, you can survey the room visually.

And generally you'll talk to pretty much everybody with 15 people with 20 people, you probably won't get a chance to talk to everybody. And it leaves this excitement and energy for all of your guests, especially in the room as well. That is a little known fact that the more people you have, the easier it is for you as a host.

If you are hosting seven people, six people, there's a lot of work. You're kind of always on. You are the host at all the time. When you're 15 to 20 people, you get to step back into the role of facilitator a little bit more. And my book speaks a lot about that.

I can share those facilitation tips and tricks for you. But that's why for me, it's so much less work and I can connect with so many more people in the time it takes to watch a Netflix movie. Okay. So I've got the number of people, I've got the day of the week.

Is this send an evite or how do you get the people to the place and where do you do it? Just at your home? Do you rent a venue? I'm just going to go through all the questions I have because in my mind, I'm already starting to plan the next one.

Well, if you're open to it, can we just plan yours? Can we just do that? And then I'll tell you step by step. Okay. So first step is you need to pick a day and you need to give yourself three to four weeks minimum in advance. That's what I call the party runway.

It's so that you can fill up your guest list, have plenty of time to plan and prepare. And so to do that, then you need to pick a date, a Monday or Tuesday, Wednesday. That's minimum three weeks in advance. Do you have a date that would work for you?

First time here. Should I go like on the short end, four weeks? I got a date for you that works in August, about a month out. Yes. I probably have a date that works in September, like two months out. August is it. Let's do it sooner rather than later, because what a lot of people will say when they host this past, Oh yeah, that makes sense.

I'll do it. And so I want to do it when it's perfect. No hosting is something that we're going to do naturally and regularly. We're not going to wait for it to be perfect. And so I would even rather you do this first one sooner, just so you can see how easy it's going to be.

And then you can do one that'll be even better later in September. So if you have that date, what day of the week is it? Is it a Monday, a Tuesday? Okay, great. Now you need to pick a two hour time block. What two hours for me when I was in New York City, I would choose seven to nine p.m., eight to 10 p.m.

even because I'm single, because in New York people stay up later. Now I'm in Austin, Texas, and people do things earlier. So here it's more like five to seven p.m., six to eight. What two hour time block would be good for you? We have kids. There's a whole question I have about how does this whole scenario change with children, because our kids eat dinner and go to bed.

Like, do you invite them? Let's talk about that right now. So what time do your kids go to sleep? We well, one is only a month. So it's just kind of on demand whenever. But but the two year old, we usually do dinner around six, six thirty, do bedtime routine, seven, seven thirty.

And from seven thirty on, she might not be asleep, but she's kind of in her room doing her own thing, hopefully falling asleep. Great. So you have a one month old and you have a two month old, right? Or sorry, a two year old. Yeah, one month old and a two year old.

So five to seven could work. We would just maybe need someone to help get her some food so that when the party wraps at seven, we'll go put her down. Yes. So I love that idea for five to seven p.m. And you're speaking a lot about what do you do?

How do you have a party with kids? And the advice that I've gotten and I've worked and I've trained a lot of people to host their first party is they say that you have to have the child care handled, not just for your kids, but for any of the other people who you might invite to make it easy for them to say yes and to swing by.

And so to that extent, can you have child care that's available, whether it's your au pair or hiring another babysitter as well? Even if you have to spend an extra, I don't know how much babysitters cost. Fifty hundred dollars. Even if you had to spend a little bit extra to have one extra person that was on hand, the concept or the idea would be to have like a simultaneous children's party in your home, in another room separate from the adults.

How does that sound or how does that hit for you? I think that can work. We could ask around. It's in the summer. There's a lot of kids in our neighborhood that are home from college. We could probably find a couple of people to help entertain kids. Or I'm less worried about that and more worried.

Are the parents going to want to let their kids go hang out with a random person? Are they going to want them to like hang out a second half of the backyard? Yes. Maybe have the kids in the backyard where they're kind of in eyeshot, but doing their own thing.

So we could do that. Yes. Both of those things. But just having the extra set of hands available during the party will let you figure out and feel the vibe. Do you feel that your questions or concerns of managing the kids during the party are now handled doing it on a Wednesday night from five to 7 p.m.?

We'll find out if anyone shows up or they're all like, no, I've got kids. I can't do five to seven. I think the biggest question is if everybody feeds their kids five to six o'clock. Yeah. How are the kids going to get fed? So you might not need parent food, but yes, kids might need food.

Well, I'm so glad that you mentioned that, because if one of your listeners is saying, why are they talking about kids so much? I don't have kids. Well, the next step is going to apply both to you and to somebody without kids. Now that you've picked your proposed date and time Wednesday from.

What time was it again from five to seven? OK, you're now going to think about what I call your core group. Your core group will be your closest friends, neighbors or colleagues who you would invite to this party. And you need a minimum of five of them who would say yes.

So to get to five, you may need to invite eight to ten even. So can you think or can you write down right now the names of five to ten of those people that you would invite first that would be part of what's called your core group? Yes, I don't think I'd have to write it down because we've done everything from baby showers to stuff like that.

So like, I think I have that list prepared somewhere, but we don't have to go through it all right here. Good. Well, you know who that is and you know how to message them. Your next step is going to be to send them a text message, a DM, however you communicate most casually saying, hey, my wife and I are thinking about hosting a casual cocktail party on Wednesday night from five to 7 p.m.

Would that work for you? And if we do it, would you come? By getting those five first people to say, yes, that's what you're looking for is five yeses. You've done a little bit of a survey to know that more or less this will work for them, and now your party is going to happen.

You're not going to make an event page. You're not going to share it with anybody else until you get those five yeses. And so since you've set your date out about four weeks, you're going to give yourself the next one to three days to try to collect those five yeses.

If you cannot get the five yeses because people are saying, no way we can do that. The kids are going to go down. I can't work that with our schedule. Then you're going to modify based on your environmental situation. You'll say, you know what? It's actually impossible for us to do this during the weeknight because the kids were going to rejigger this.

I know that Nick said on a Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, let's actually try this on a Sunday afternoon. OK, yeah, you can do that once you've done the first sample. But once you get those five yeses, now your party is happening and it's off to the races. Do you think that you would be able to get those five yeses?

I think we can get five yeses, though. When you said Sunday afternoon, my gears went, oh, man, Sunday afternoon feels like such a family friendly time after the nap, before dinner. You could do like four to six for the sake of this conversation. I assume everything else will apply the same.

OK, good. So now you've gotten those five yeses. Your next immediate step is to create an RSVP page to collect the confirmations from people. What do we do by collecting the RSVPs? Have you used any of these like social platforms? Paperless Post, Evite, Eventbrite. Which one do you guys use?

Or what have you used recently? I think we did Paperless Post for a baby shower, but I'm very curious to know, like, what's your go to? Because Paperless Post, you can get lost in like, oh, which design do I want? And they charge you. Somebody just told me that in order for you to download a CSV of the emails or something, they charge you, which is sneaky.

I understand. But sometimes for my friends, they're like, I'm not signing up for a subscription service. The platform that I like the best, most that I recommend is a service called Mixily, M-I-X-I-L-Y. The youth love a service called Partyful, P-A-R-T-I-F-U-L. I like Mixily, and that is what I use.

I'm hosting a party tonight. It's the service that I use. There's no charge. There is no fees. They don't spam your guests. There's no ads. You don't need to download special software. We're looking for the easiest way for someone to simply RSVP to your party. And why do we do that?

Because they make a social contract and they say, I'm going to show up. And a lot of the work that I'm going to give you advice is just going to be making sure that people will attend. And one of the ways we do that is by getting them to RSVP.

Not just saying, yes, they'll come on text, but to further their commitment by RSVP. So all those five who have said yes, you're now going to text them back. Perfect. Let me make an event page. I'll follow up in a day or two. You make the event page, you send them the link and you say, will you please RSVP here just so we can get a head count?

You will now have a landing page for your party that lists five or more people who are coming, showing social proof to everybody else you invite that people are actually going to come to this party. Have you ever been invited to an event? And you've clearly been spam the invitation.

It's 93 invited and two attending. That's bad. And we're never going to do that because we're always going to ask people, can you come before you send the invitation? So you get your five yeses. You make the event page. You get them all to sign up on RSVP. Now you can invite a wider group that I call your great guests.

These are your acquaintances. These are where you're going to fill up the rest of the guest list to get from 15 to 20 attendees, not including the kids. I'll take a pause to see what type of questions you have or thoughts or feedback. No, that makes sense. I assume a guest, if you're inviting mostly couples, is each couple is two people.

If you're having 15 to 20, you're having eight to 10 couples. Yes. If that's mostly the demographic. Yes, yes, yes, that makes sense. It's so funny because when I would host my dinner parties, I would finally curate the guest list and I would try to invite all these entrepreneurs and other people.

And they'd ask, oh, can I bring my girlfriend? Can I bring so and so? And I would say no, because I'm curating a specific group of people there. And that is blasphemy. If you tell somebody that they cannot bring their partner, unless it's a very strictly business event, if it's a social event, they can't bring your partner.

It's very sketchy. So I now no longer suggest that people limit their guest list. And oftentimes for people hosting their first party, you just want warm bodies. You just want as many people to say yes. And so for your first party, I really need to encourage you, Chris. Do not try to finally curate it.

Do not try to invite VIPs to this. Simply invite people that you feel comfortable with to run through the pieces of this party formula that I'm going to share. Great. So I've got this page set up. What do I put on it? So the important thing about the page is you have to set the expectations of what is going to happen at this party.

And there's two unique things at one of my parties. Number one, is there are name tags? And number two, there's icebreakers. I can talk about why those are important, but I can tell you that by listing them in the invitation, it will remove 95% of concerns that people that have on the event that they're going to sign up to an RSVP, by the way, you're also going to list not only the start time, but the end time.

Many people are like, how do I get people to leave my party? And by letting them know that there is an end time by clearly listing that, then it helps people to know. And it also encourages them to show up on time, like we talked about. So letting them know that there will be name tags and icebreakers.

I usually say something simple like. Hey, I'm getting some friends together to have cocktails and a round of icebreakers. There will be name tags because I'm bad with names, lol. This is super casual. You don't have to dress up. You don't have to bring anything. We'll have mixers, drinks, alcohol and seltzer.

And maybe you'll meet some new friends. That's the general gist of what the invitation page will say. And by giving people knowing what to expect, it not only helps them have a successful event, but it also encourages people that are kind of shy or like introverted. Many times we don't think about those types of people.

You're a podcast host, so you're probably pretty outgoing. I probably sound pretty extroverted and outgoing. But a lot of my work in my book works to help people make their parties feel safe and comfortable for those that might be a little socially awkward even after COVID too. OK, so you didn't mention anything about food.

Is that because there's no food at this party? There's no food. There's only the most basic snacks. If you had to think of a simple way to think about my parties, you would think about the NIC party formula. N-I-C-K. N stands for name tags. I stands for icebreakers. C stands for cocktails only, no food.

And K stands for kick them out at the end. The party is only two hours. Now, why is there no food? I have a pretty hard rule that there's no food, because in the event that you say, well, maybe we'll just do some past appetizers. It completely changes the level of stress that's involved.

You can add food later on. And in fact, my book goes through and I can just tell you what to have now. You can have baby carrots. You can have salted nuts. You can have prepared easy food like snacks, chips, dip. People love guacamole. Those things are simple that take minimal preparation.

But the whole purpose of this is to show you how easy hosting an event can be and that it's not about the food. It's about the people. OK, so no food. Name tags make sense. Kick them out makes sense, though. I do want to know, what's the way to kick people out?

Like, let's say it's five to seven. It's seven rolls around. Yeah, I'm guessing most people there aren't like, oh, looking at the time. What do you say to people? So you as the host will make a last call about 15 minutes before the party is scheduled to end. You would turn down the music and make a little announcement.

And so I'll say something like, all right, everybody, thank you so much for coming. It's seven forty five. I said this party would go till eight. I know it's a school night, so I'm going to let you home. Grab a last drink. Say hello to somebody new if you hadn't had a chance yet.

And we'll start to wrap up in about 15 minutes. And then I'll turn the music back up at the time the party is scheduled to end. I will turn all the lights up. I'll turn the music down. I'll thank everybody for coming. Maybe I'll do a group photo. I do something else that I hesitate to say because it'll make the party sound very weird, but at my parties, I do a little cheer.

I've had people have very success with doing this, but it does feel like a kid's summer camp. But it adds a finality or sort of an end to it. And as silly and ridiculous as my formula sounds, I promise you that it really does work. I love it. OK, OK.

I have a couple of fobs. You said music is there like a go to playlist. I feel like that could be a stressful thing for a lot of people. Try to curate what's playing. Oh, my gosh. Never, never try to preprogram a playlist. You want easy, happy music that is not too loud.

I will play the Beach Boys channel on a streaming service. It's easy. It's non-controversial. It's upbeat. It's generally positive. I'm looking for stuff like that. I have collected a list of playlists, www.party.pro/playlists of party playlists that my friends and readers and other hosts have used. But generally, you just want something very easy.

That's background music that's upbeat and happy. I feel like I've nailed most of these follow ups, but. Cocktails, you brushed over quickly. Yeah, it can be a lot of work to make a mixed drink. Is this really just like only cocktails or is this beer, wine? And if you want a cocktail, you can make it a first controversial thing.

There's no beer. And I'll tell you why there's no beer. Second thing, I wrote a book called The Two Hour Cocktail Party, and I don't even drink alcohol. So that's ironic. There's not a single mixed drink recipe that's in the book. But we use that phrase cocktail party because it encapsulates a social construct of an easy event that is lightweight and acceptable to pop into.

When I say the phrase cocktail party, what do you think of? What sort of comes to mind to you, Chris? I said in the intro, it feels very like, you know, walk in, grab a martini kind of thing. When it comes out of your mouth, it obviously doesn't feel that way.

It feels a bit more casual. Well, the reality is, is what drinks are you going to have at your party? You're going to have a do it yourself, serve yourself bar. And so that can be a couple bottles of alcohol. You can have vodka or tequila or whiskey or bourbon or whatever.

You're going to have some basic mixers. You'll have a bowl filled with ice. You'll have maybe some juice and plenty of non-alcoholic options like seltzer, seltzer water or hard seltzer. Now, I do not include beer for my list. Are you a beer drinker? I'm a casual beer drinker. Like, I enjoy beer, but I wouldn't say it's always my go to.

Do you have friends that are beer drinkers that are beer drinkers? Yeah, I would be shocked if anyone ever says no to that question. So generally, what I find with beer drinkers is that they are highly brand loyal. Beer drinkers are very specific in their beer preferences. They're highly brand loyal.

And beer just creates a lot of party shrapnel. What do I mean by that? I mean, like there's extra beer bottles, there's beer cans. It's just like all this extra stuff. What type of beer? Well, if I'm going to buy this beer, then you need another type of beer for somebody else.

If you want to serve beer at your party, you absolutely can. But I want to tell all your listeners I've hosted hundreds of parties never serving beer, and it's just another thing to remove the stress for me. And I've never had a complaint. So there's all these little hacks that I'm doing, which is just trying to make it as easy as possible to teach you that you can host and you can make hosting easy.

And then it can absolutely change your life if you become someone who hosts. OK, so I've got the drinks that you didn't mention wine. Is there wine there? Wine, some white wine, some red wine in the summertime, a rosé. Just get two bottles of each. OK. So I am quite comfortable right now, which is actually true almost every day.

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So whatever the occasion, download the Drizzly app or go to Drizzly dot com. That's D-R-I-Z-L-Y dot com today. Must be 21 plus not available in all locations. That hit everything except this looming topic of icebreakers, and I think anyone listening right now is kind of wondering, oh, gosh, what does Nick mean when he says icebreakers?

Yeah. And why do icebreakers? Aren't those silly? Aren't those childish? Well, we do icebreakers because it's a short survey of the room. And icebreakers also not only give your guests excuses to go meet new people, which, by the way, that's why your party is going to be very successful.

And that's why your friends will love you for hosting this, because you are going to help them meet new people. Most adults haven't made a new friend in the last three years. And yet, as we get older, we need friends more than ever, right? Friends become like a game of attrition.

They have kids. They move. Things happen. We don't see people as often. Your party will be successful because all of your guests are going to talk to a lot of new people. How do we encourage that? By using these icebreakers. Icebreakers are a short survey of the room. Generally, you'll go around the circle.

You say your name, you'll say what you do for work. If you don't want to say for work, you say something you're excited about. And then the third one, which is the icebreaker question. OK, so each icebreaker has three parts name, what you do for work, and then the icebreaker question, right?

You'll do three rounds of icebreakers. I think of icebreakers as a green, yellow, red scaffolding where you would want to start your party with a green level icebreaker. A green level icebreaker. The one that I use that I suggest everybody use for the first one is what is one of your favorite things to eat for breakfast?

So first, how does that hit with you? What are your thoughts? I'm ready for it. If you hate it, then tell me and I'll tell you why it's great. But I just want to hear your thoughts. I don't actually eat breakfast that often. So because because why not? Why don't you choose to eat breakfast?

I don't know. You just skip. It's not for health reasons. You're not intermittent fasting. You just I'm just lazy. I have just I forget. Sometimes it's been intermittent fasting. Sometimes it's just one more thing to think about during the day. Now, when you do eat breakfast, what's one of your favorite things to eat for breakfast when you do?

I mean, I do eat breakfast. It's usually some ridiculous make an amazing breakfast for the weekend kind of thing, like lemon ricotta pancakes. Are you lemon ricotta pancakes? Are you kidding me? That's like a go to once a month kind of thing in our house. I've asked this icebreaker hundreds of times.

I've never heard somebody say lemon ricotta pancakes. That's incredible. So I think it's like I don't make a lot of breakfast. So if I do make breakfast, yeah, I'm going to step it up. And I have this recipe. Now I feel like I should put in the show notes that I think is just like every time I make these lemon ricotta pancakes and they're not that hard.

It just wins every time. Wait, now I got to know how long does it take you to make? OK, look, if we're doing this at my party, I just want to show you right there what just happened. You expressed a piece of your personality that you share and you make your secret thing, lemon ricotta pancakes.

Now, you might not always eat breakfast, but you did get to share when you do make breakfast what you make, OK? Everybody chooses or not chooses to eat breakfast every single day. And it is generally a positive, happy feeling that we have. A good green level icebreaker is an icebreaker that's quick to answer.

It's fast and it doesn't incur judgment from others. A bad green icebreaker, which I would never do, would be something like, say your name, so what you do for work and say your favorite book ever. OK, because that's subjective. That's definitive. That's very hard to pick. It's going to maybe elicit a little bit of judgment.

People are going to try to show off. They don't know. Now, how do we modify that? Right. It's what I said. What's one of your favorite things to eat for breakfast? I still wouldn't ask. What's one of your favorite books? I would ask that later because a book is an intellectual thing, right?

Breakfast is a human delicious thing. It's a fun thing. It's an easy thing. So we ask that as just a way for everybody at your party to sort of sound off and express a piece of their personality. You do it very quick. A good icebreaker is a quick icebreaker.

So you're not going to allow for follow up questions like I was drilling you on, right? You're just going to have everybody go around. And then you just say, all right, thanks, everybody. I do those icebreakers so we can all meet somebody new. Maybe I hope you'll say hello.

And then you as a host shut up and you just let the party go, which is so awkward as a new host. If you've never done this, you're like, this is terrifying. But then you do it and the room explodes. It comes alive. People go up and they talk to new people.

You turn the music back up and everybody's making these conversations. So we do that because most parties you go to, you just what? Like you went to your kid's birthday party recently. They didn't do icebreakers. Maybe you bumped into somebody and started the conversation. I'm guessing. Right. It's just physical prowess.

Like don't let your kid drink that juice box because my daughter just threw it on the ground like that was our icebreakers. Yes, yes. And there's nothing wrong with those. Those are fine gatherings. But for listeners of your show, they're interested in how to get more out of life.

They're interested in optimizing things. And as cliche and as ridiculous as it sounds to optimize your social situations, it does help if the goal is to help your friends make more friends, to do a survey of the room, do a couple of them during your party to give people excuses to go start a new conversation.

Because, by the way, the other reason we do icebreakers is it gives people an easy excuse to end their conversations. So are you doing these like every 30 minutes you pop into an icebreaker and then turn it off? That's exactly right. You do them every 30 minutes. You're going to do them three times, two or three times.

And they should only take five or so minutes. By the way, a hack that everybody needs to know the icebreakers. You have to be standing. You cannot let people sit down. It is the kryptonite to a successful. You can't do icebreakers sitting down. People ask follow up questions. They'll drone on a good icebreakers, a fast one.

OK, you said you go from green to yellow to red. What are the more advanced ones? And because people are coming going, do you redo the names and the works each time? Yes. You redo the names. You do that for all of them. So your first icebreaker, I'll give them the details with you.

Your first icebreaker. You're going to do when there's only five or six people who've shown up. And that is what I call lovingly the awkward zone at a party. It's the first 10 or 20 minutes when not many people are there. It's a little bit awkward. There's not enough energy in the room.

You do the icebreaker to bust out of the awkward zone. You're going to do that same icebreaker about 20 minutes later when now everybody has arrived. And then 30 minutes later, you'll do your last and final icebreaker. And what I like to ask is, say your name, say what you do for work, and then say one of the favorite pieces of media that you've consumed over the last couple of months.

That could be a show on Netflix. It could be a podcast like this. It could be a great book that you read, a long form article, a funny meme that you saw, a TikTok video, just a cool piece of media that you consumed and enjoyed. And Chris, this one works so well because everybody's sharing great recommendations for a book, a movie, something.

And people are wanting to write down stuff. They're feeling smarter because everybody's sharing these great ideas. So I love that one. OK, what about that middle break? Any other tips for icebreakers beyond the two you shared? One more that you could do. And this is you've probably seen this online used for engagement bait.

What is one of your favorite purchases of the last year? It could be a service or an activity, or it could be a physical object that you've purchased. Maybe it's a new car. Maybe it's a kitchen appliance. But what's one of your favorite purchases that's made your life better during the last year?

And people love to show. I love this one. Yeah, that's good. OK, there's one more thing I tell you about this. OK. Reminder messages. You need to do three reminder messages leading up to your party to keep it top of mind. And you'll send those reminder messages, one of them one week before the party.

Simple message. Hey, everybody, what's up? Excited to have you guys over. We'll see you next week on Wednesday night at 5 p.m. More details to come. OK, the next one you'll send is three days before your party. And for that one, you're going to use something I call guest bios and guest bios you're going to do for half or more of your attendees.

It's a brief blurb about your guests. So for me, it could be Nick Gray recently moved to Austin, Texas. He lived in New York for 13 years. Ask him about green tea. Right. It's a quick little blurb or summary that you could pull from their LinkedIn or their Instagram or something like that.

And it doesn't have to be 100% right. You're not asking for permission from other people to get this right. You're just writing some stuff to give these conversational access points and also to get them locked into attending and to give those sort of introverts or shy people an idea of who's going to be there, an idea of who they might want to talk to and to raise the excitement of all the other people as well.

But not everyone. Just a few people. You don't have to do it, everyone. What I suggest is half or more. I'm more focused on the minimum. Don't do any less than half. So if you have 16 people coming, you need to do the minimum of eight. But don't feel that you have to do every single person.

I generally feel more is better, but don't feel like it has to be work. You're not going to spend an hour writing this thing. It's just a quick little blurb. OK, so I think I got it handled. I think I'm ready to go. Good. Any follow up after? Do you try to get feedback on how it went?

Yes. So right before you do your third round of icebreakers, you are going to do a group photo, right? A quick selfie. What's up, everybody? Turn around and take a selfie real quick. OK, group photo. The next morning you will send them a thank you message. Thanks, everybody, for coming.

You include everybody on BCC. Thank you guys all for coming. Can I invite you next time? Right. Simple question. It's easy for them to say yes to. And you attach the group photo. That's it. That's all that you do. Yes, you can do surveys. That's an advanced level move.

I don't recommend it yet. But yes, surveys are helpful as you start to host more. Any other advanced moves for people who are hearing this? And they're like, no, no, I'm ready for them now. Oh, gosh, I hesitate to say this. But yes, I will tell your listeners, but please don't do this first.

Please do not do this first. OK. A popular theme that you can do. I'm trying to teach and I wrote this book and all this stuff that I'm sharing because this is an operating system to run events. You can use it at kids birthday parties. You can use it at a lot of different type of events.

For your first one, just do a cocktail party. Don't try to get fancy. The one that is an absolute banger. Huge success is for your neighbors and friends to do a book swap. Everybody likes books. Everybody has extra books they want to get rid of. Everybody likes to get new books.

A book swap is so easy. You use the same exact formula name what you do for work, but maybe instead of something else, you'd say, and tell us about one of the books that you brought. Right. Why is it a great book? This book swap thing, I'm telling you, I've had people do it and it's their most well attended event.

So that's a good one. You can host a clothing swap. I have a formula for hosting a clothing swap. All of these things that you can do, you can do more thematic ones if you want. But those are sort of advanced level. Get the formula first. Most people have never run an icebreaker before.

Can I tell you about how to run a good icebreaker? Yeah. So here's a key thing. A lot of people don't like icebreakers because the host, all right, we're going to do an icebreaker. Say your name and what you do and the worst first date you ever went on.

Chris, you go first. Right. It's like terrible. It's so bad. It's a good example of a red level question where there's not enough rapport built up among people yet. So we wouldn't do that one. But a good icebreaker always has the host go first. Ask permission for who can go next and then indicate to the group which way the round of icebreakers would go.

So as an example, if I was setting up the icebreaker, I would say. All right, so now we're going to do this round of icebreakers. You're going to say your name, what you do for work and one of your favorite things for breakfast. I will go first and then looking to my left.

Chris, can we go to you next? And hopefully you'll say yes. I'll say great. So I will go first. We'll go to Chris next. And then we're going to go around the circle this way. It sounds childish. It sounds like I'm a clown telling multiple times the instructions and which way to go around.

But it just makes the instructions crystal clear. It makes it run fast and it gives power to those. I don't know those people with social anxiety. I dated a woman who had a lot of social anxiety. And she said the more that I could know which way it was going, the less surprises, the better.

I love it. Unfortunately, you are coming to San Francisco soon, but not later. So you won't get to see me do this in action. But I will let you know how it goes. And we'll maybe save some of those advanced tactics for later. I'm going to give one last thing.

When you do your round icebreakers, I want your wife to stand next to you. And I want her to talk too much so that you can actually kind of cut her off. Why do you want to do that? Because then you can signal to everybody else that we're not going to use these icebreakers to drone on and on and talk too long.

You can cut her off first. People will laugh a little bit. And I think that'll help. Or she can go first and cut me off. She could go first, but then she needs to facilitate it and she needs to be the one who is the facilitator. So, yes, absolutely.

There's nothing worse than doing icebreakers and one person talks forever. So, yes, I'm a big fan of finding a way to politely show people that this is not a time to give a presentation. Yes, yes. And sometimes we have to do that. We have to lead a party with generous authority.

And that means that what is best for the whole group is not always being ultra polite to one person. So with a successful cocktail party, what do you hope people feel after it? And what kind of comes out of this whole experience? A successful cocktail party has the energy in the room very high.

And somebody leaves your party saying, wow, that was like the best party. That was awesome. And it's so simple. I got a message from a woman who just read my book and she hosted a party with name tags and icebreakers. And she said that night she and her husband got multiple text messages from friends saying that it was the best party that they'd ever thrown.

Why? Because they just added a little structure to it. So what's the feeling? It's that feeling that when you're done hosting, you say that was awesome. And that was also easy. Like I could do that again, because I think we've all hosted parties where we're absolutely drained afterwards. And while it may have been a success, we never want to do it again.

What's the energy that your guests have? It's that they met so many people. They had a really great time. You let them go early, right? They didn't feel like they had to. Oh, I'm so sorry. We have to see that. No, you're telling them they got to go get out of here.

You're ending it while it's going great. I want to turn to talk about this business. You started Museum Hack. And my understanding is you started a little accidentally and you became a lover of museums, not intentionally. And you probably started on the other end of the spectrum. How did this all come about?

Yeah, I hate most museums. I think they're really boring and they just don't have anything to do with me. I didn't grow up going to museums. I think they're stupid. However, I lived in New York City where they had the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And it's a big museum.

Have you been to the Met? I haven't. OK, it's enormous. It's the most popular museum in America. It's 2.3 million square feet. It takes up 11 acres of Central Park. It's enormous and it's overwhelming. And for many New Yorkers, it's just a tourist attraction. It's not a place they have a relationship with.

This woman brought me there on a romantic date and she showed me things. And she talked to me at my level, which I have like a third grade reading level. And so she just sort of talked to me like, wow, look at these Egyptian artifacts, sculpture, furniture, paintings. And so I started to go back to the museum because I was like, I think I moved in New York to hang out at places like this.

And so I'd go to the museum and just explore. I'd look things up on Wikipedia. I'd watch YouTube videos. And I started to do these tours for my friends, just showing them around when they'd come visit. And they became like a famous thing because my tours were basically 10 cool things I found and three things I wanted to steal.

Not like a narrative arc of art history, just cool stuff I found. And then it became very famous and celebrities started to come. And I hired some tour guides to lead the tours. And what was special was Museum Hack would hire Broadway actors and stand up comedians to be the tour guides instead of the museum volunteers.

And they would work for me, not for the museum. And so they would tell the juicy backstories about the art, about how much the art cost, about stories of the donors, things like that, that people wanted to hear. And so that was our whole thing was attracting new audiences into these storied museums.

Obviously, people can go take a Museum Hack tour, which is still running as a business. But if someone asked me the question, how do you do a museum? I don't feel like I would have the answer. You would. And I feel like you have a better answer. Yeah, I'll tell your listeners exactly how to visit a museum.

And they're in San Francisco. Have you been to the Legion of Honor? I have. Yeah, it's a nice museum, right? That one and the DeYoung are two really nice museums there. So here's how to visit. Here's exactly from all my time. And I've been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art more than a thousand times.

And I've been to many other museums. Here is how you should go about experiencing a museum for the first time. So you're going to a new museum, any museum, or is it, you know, specific categories work better than others for this? This applies to any museum. Museum Hack, in my opinion, works best for art museums.

But the thing, the hack, the special sauce I'm about to tell you, the way to approach works for any museum. And here's what you're going to do. As soon as you get there, you're going to go in right where you buy your ticket. You'll get a map and you are going to walk the entire floor plan and you're not going to stop.

You're not going to stop and look at it. I don't care if you love it. You're not going to stop. You can circle it on the map and you'll come back later. But you're not going to stop. You're going to walk the entire floor plan to build a mental map of the space and to know where you want to go back to later.

So first, you'll walk the entire floor plan. It could take you between five and 45 minutes, depending how big it is. You will then go to the museum cafe. Almost all museums have a cafe. If they don't have a cafe, you can just sit down and you're going to take a little break.

I like to go there and I like to get a cup of coffee. You can get a glass of wine if you want and you get a little snack. You're going to replenish your glycogen or your glucose or whatever. You're just going to have some carbs, maybe some sugar to build up your energy store to go back now that you've seen everything briefly.

You will now go back and look closer at the things that captured your mind and interest. What happens to many people, why we do this is have you ever done this? You go to a new museum and you waste all of your cognitive load and looking energy on things that you don't even want to look at because the best stuff sometimes is at the very end.

The stuff that you're most excited about. And by the time you get to that stuff, you're tired and you're exhausted. So the way to do it is to walk through the entire floor plan. Do not stop at anything. Circle things on the map, go to the cafe, take a break and then go back and look closer and deeper at the things you're curious about.

And how long would you tell someone to budget for a trip to a museum? I personally can't spend more than two hours. I think that this is one of the biggest things that I changed. A lot of my friends thinking about is that you don't have to go try to get every single dollar's worth and stay there as long as possible.

I can spend about two hours at a museum before I get tired. This is a real thing. Getting tired at a museum, it's called gallery fatigue. It happens because we're not in an activated space. We're quiet. We're thinking we don't know how we're supposed to act. It can be stressful sometimes.

So I spend about two hours total. OK, so about half that time is a run through and a cafe. And then the other half is actually spending time in the things you're interested in. Yes, yes, yes. Sometimes if I go to a museum for two hours, I'll spend an hour in the cafe because I just want to go approach it with a strategy.

And many times we don't have a strategy when we go into a new physical space like a museum. We're just walking where our body takes us and we're looking. And before we know it, we've wasted an hour and we're tired and we didn't even get to go see the really cool stuff that's on the second floor back in the modern way.

And could you do that from the map at home or do you need to be there? I think you need to be there because you need to walk it. You need to physically get in your body and see the stuff firsthand. For example, I love that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there's this beautiful green sofa.

It's not going to be on any of the museum website or featured top galleries. I don't know why I like it, but it was owned by the King of Spain or something. And I love that thing. And you're not going to find that when you do the museum's website tour of the galleries.

Do you have some favorite museums? If you've been to the Met a thousand times, I imagine when you're in a new city, how could you help yourself from going to check out a new museum? Yeah, I love to go to new museums. So the Metropolitan Museum of Art is my favorite in the whole world.

And it's what's called an encyclopedic museum. That means there's many different galleries and curatorial departments. So I love encyclopedic museums, maybe similar to the Legion of Honor there in San Francisco, in Washington, D.C. I like the National Gallery. I like the enormous big museums because they have a little something for everyone.

And using my strategy maybe will help your visitors approach these really big museums that can be so intimidating to feel like you don't have to get it all in at once. It's OK to leave and not see everything. What about deals on going to museums? I feel like running Museum Hack while the whole brand wasn't getting a deal on getting into museums, what have you found in that space?

For deals, I could tell you how to beat the line so I can tell people how to skip the line. Deals, it's really. Oh, yes. Oh, my God. Wait, I completely forgot I have the best deal ever. I've won. Oh, my God. I have the best. I hope I'm not blowing out my mic levels being too loud.

I have the best hack ever. And don't put this in the show notes. There is a membership called the American Alliance of Museums. It's essentially an industry trade group for museums in America. You can join as a non-employee. It's called a friend of the association or something. It's called AAM, American Alliance of Museums.

You can join as a friend of the association for under $100 per year. It will grant you access, a free ticket to almost every single museum in America. Wow. Do not blow up my spot. Don't blow up my spot. American Alliance of Museums. It's like the friend membership or something.

It should be $100 or less. And me and my friends have done this for many years. Now, you should also support if you're listening to museums. I'm not trying to scam people out of how to pay for these culture institutions that largely are underfunded. I want to tell you about this, though, so that you feel like you can go to a museum for an hour and fall in love with it.

And you can go multiple times. You can buy this and go to the Legion of Honor for 45 minutes. And hopefully you'll fall in love with it and buy a membership and support it in other ways. I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show.

Your support is what keeps this show going to get all of the URLs, codes, deals and discounts from our partners. You can go to all the hacks dot com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. What about skipping the lines? You said there was another thing for skipping the lines.

Yes. So for skipping the lines, some museums have additional entrances. Major museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art will have an education entrance that's for school groups and other things. At the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, there is almost always an enormous line out the main entrance, but no line at the education entrance.

Doesn't mean you have to be part of a school group to use that entrance. You can just go in and buy a ticket like normal. That's another hack. Love it. The one hack I want to share. It's not for everyone, literally, because it's a Capital One related deal right now.

But I mentioned this in the last episode, but since this is all about museums, if you have a Capital One card, I think for almost the next year, it's until June 2024, I think you can with any Capital One membership get a six month membership to this site called the Cultivist, which gives you and three guests access to 100 museums around the world.

I know it includes the Louvre, the Guggenheim, the MoMA and a lot more. After that six months, you have to pay $40 a month if you like it and you want to keep going. Great. But there is a six month free membership that I'd recommend anyone with a Capital One card check out.

And I'll put that in the show notes as well. Great one. And then the other one, most museum memberships are all tax deductible donations. Yes. Most museum tickets are not. So if you ever see that thing where it's like, buy your ticket, you can apply the cost of your ticket to your membership.

Technically, the ticket price is not a deductible contribution, but the incremental cost is. So if you're going to join, join before you buy the tickets. But we looked into it. And after you factor in the deduction you get for making a contribution, it was cheaper for us to buy a one year membership to the Academy of Sciences, which allowed us a certain number of guests than it was to actually just buy the tickets the day of.

Yes. So in many cases, that's true, which has now resulted in us being members of the Oakland Zoo, the Academy of Sciences, a place called Curiosity on the peninsula, which is kind of like half kid science museum, half zoo. So I feel like we're collecting memberships because it turns out that factoring in the cost, it actually ends up being about the same cost as going sometimes once, sometimes twice, but almost never more than two times.

It's really not that expensive. You're exactly right to join at the lowest level for many of these institutions with unlimited membership. I'll tell you something else for your listeners, a hack for many of these organizations, the biggest ones I'm talking about in major cities, New York, Chicago, D.C., Seattle, Denver, big, big cities.

Their art museums and sometimes science museums will have something called a young members program, young patrons program, something like that, that typically goes after members 45 or 40 and younger. And gives you extremely VIP access at a disturbingly discount rate. I'll give you an example in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There was something called the Apollo Circle Group that was a thousand dollars a year. Now you might think, wow, that is expensive. It is expensive for some people that gave you once a month after hours parties at the museum with incredible past appetizers, open bar, private tours from the curators.

Insane level of access that for older members, they were charging five, 10, 15, 20 thousand dollars a year. But they subsidize this for young people, hoping that you will develop a long term relationship and donate a lot more. So young patrons programs at these museums. The key word would be to ask if you're looking to buy a membership and you're curious about this, say, oh, what type of young patrons memberships might you have?

And I forgot about Bank of America. If you have a Bank of America card, I think the first weekend of every month, you can go to a ton of museums around the country for free. Yes, I know. In San Francisco, it includes the Legion of Honor in the DeYoung Museum.

Even like a free Bank of America checking account would, I think, qualify. If I remember correctly, that's another one. I'll link to that in the show notes. With Museum Hack, you probably talk to lots of people and learn a lot about planning tours, booking tours. What do you do if you're in a new country and you want to find a tour?

Do you have a way to do that that cuts through the noise and finds the best tours? I'll tell you right now, the people that are killing it are Airbnb experiences. Have you done an Airbnb experience? We've done a bunch of virtual ones that were kind of company organized events during COVID.

No way. You got to do the real in-person Airbnb experience. And I would even challenge you to set up a date night with your wife and do one of them in San Francisco on the Airbnb experiences. The problem is now they're spamming them a lot with these photo things where they're just trying to juice for photos.

Skip all of those. I'm looking for food tours and walking tours that have an average rating above 4.9 with at least 25 reviews. Generally, you're going to get some really good tour guides. And what I like about that is they're empowered tour guides that have set up their own businesses that are going to be very passionate.

So I like Airbnb experiences, and I will generally schedule it. The first thing I do to a city, because then I can ask the guide for advice. Awesome. This show isn't usually a show about someone's story, their resume and that kind of stuff. But I looked and I was like, "Oh, you sold your company.

Cool." You know, a lot of shows would be like, "Tell me about that." I wasn't that interested for the purpose of this show. And then I saw that it was actually a very interesting way you sold your company. Something that I think most people probably as business owners wouldn't think of and most people as employees wouldn't think of.

And so I would love to just hear the quick version of that and how it's gone, because I thought it was something that at least one person listening might get a lot out of hearing. Yes, I sold my last company, Museum Hack, to my then CEO and marketing director.

They came to me with an offer to buy the business. I never thought that I would sell it. It didn't seem like a business you could really sell to somebody. And I sold it to them using seller financing. What that means is that they put zero money down and they said, "Look, we're just going to run the business like we've been doing.

And yet we will pay you off over five years from all the profits. So you get to lock in five years of profits of the business and have zero responsibility." And so that's how I sold the business. And they've done so much better than I ever could have done.

They've taken the business to new places and it was a big win for everybody. That's great. There's an episode I think you've done on a podcast about it that I listened to briefly. I'll link to that in the show notes. But I just thought it was a cool story because most small business sales, nobody really talks about how that works.

And this was a different one. Yeah, it was super unique. And it now would give me the opportunity to do a lot of traveling myself, which I do have some questions for you about traveling myself whenever it's appropriate. OK, so Nick ended up asking some great questions about round trip versus one way flights, getting flight refunds, using chase points on Southwest, avoiding jet lag and travel gadgets.

We also talked about where we'd go if we magically got a free weekend vacation without kids. I got Nick's take on his trips to Kyrgyzstan and the Azores, two places I've never been. And I shared why we ended up deciding on an au pair versus other child care options.

However, despite that, those questions were really great since it was a bit off topic and ended up going almost half an hour. I'm going to release it as a bonus episode this Friday. So come back and check it out then. And now back to the conversation. You run a friend's newsletter, and I think I've seen you write that everyone should you talk about it?

I think everyone should have a friend's newsletter. When you were growing up, did your parents send like an annual Christmas card or holiday card with family updates? My grandparents always did. Your grandparents always did. All right. And what would be in that card? It was just here's everything we and all of our kids and grandkids families did this year.

Yes. Yes. My friend's newsletter came out of that tradition. My parents were in the military. And so that idea of giving this annual status update before social media, where we do daily status updates, that annual status update was something I wanted to do on a quarterly basis for my friends.

But I tried to add value. So it wasn't just about me. I'd include a nice Netflix show. I'd seen a great movie or a book. I'm making recommendations for my friends about cool stuff. And I started it just every quarter sending to my friends, throwing them on BCC, adding a little note.

Hey, if you don't want to get this, just write me back. We'll still be friends. I won't be offended. And it has been so powerful and helpful to me. I'd encourage everybody to think about starting a friend's newsletter. In many ways, the origin of the all the hacks newsletter was that many, many years ago, how I started this newsletter called Life Updates, and it was like once a year, a life update of what I was up to.

And then every time I started some new project, like somewhat folded them together and it kind of evolved and evolved. And some people have been on it since then. Some people have obviously just found out about it since launching the podcast. What things when you were sending that newsletter?

Think back to the earliest days, for example. I can't talk about this now, but I added people who didn't ask to be added. I just sort of spammed my friends a little bit. And that helped me get started, to be honest. But I'll tell you what, if I did 100 friends and if five of them were mad that I spammed them, the other 95 were not mad.

And some weren't even happy to receive my updates. So because everyone likes to travel, I love to ask every one of my guests to pick a place anywhere in the world that they know well and tell someone who's there what they should do, what they should eat, where they should have a drink and kind of give them a few ideas.

All right, because I spent 13 years there, I'm going to say New York City, but I'm going to give some new ideas that maybe people may not have heard elsewhere. Number one, the second best park in New York City. The first best, obviously being Central Park. The second best park in New York City is Washington Square Park.

It is a locals only filled with characters. The vibes are immaculate. You can go almost any time for people watching. And it's very centrally located there at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I mentioned that there's two entrances. There's two entrances at the Met. You, listeners, can take the entrance at 81st Street to skip the lines.

Now, when else should you go to the Met? Well, on Friday and Saturday nights, because the Met stays open late till nine o'clock. Most people do not know this. I would suggest arriving at seven and you can enjoy the museum almost all to yourself. So I would suggest that before the Met, why don't you go to Central Park and go to my favorite place in Central Park called Sheep Meadow?

Sheep Meadow is a sprawling green area with skyscraper views. It's a great place to have a picnic. Really the best place in Central Park, in my opinion. And then the last thing that I'll suggest is if you want a fun activity in New York City, I'm not sponsored, but there's a thing called Scott's Pizza Tour.

Scott is a classic tour guide in New York City, and he has a whole network of guides where they show you the behind the scenes of how the pizza is made and things like that. I love that place. Scott's Pizza Tour. That's awesome. You've written about a ton of things on your blog, everything from Chrome extensions, you love using a virtual assistant, saving money, buying a car.

I had this lofty dream of getting to all of these topics. We're not going to do that. I definitely recommend people check out the book, check out the blog. Where else can people find you online? What do you want them to check out before we wrap? So I wrote a book called The Two Hour Cocktail Party.

If you like this show, it's incredibly tactical and practical with a lot of specific instructions. And the name of that book is called The Two Hour Cocktail Party. If you go to my book website, www.party.pro, www.party.pro, you can get a free two page party checklist that includes an executive summary of my book with all that you need to know.

And you can download that there. It's like a PDF file. And then I do have a friend's newsletter, which I think is like my favorite newsletter. Nobody likes to read my friend's newsletter more than I do. And it's great. Some people say it's one of their favorite newsletters after the All the Hacks newsletter, of course.

And you can find that on my website, which is www.nickgray.net n-e-t, nickgray.net. And on social media, I'm @nickgraynews. And the show notes will include how to host a clothing swap, how to host a happy hour, how to plan a networking event. Other ideas that you can use to just bring people together.

Oh, here's the last thing I'll say. All the stuff I've taught about is not rocket science. Hosting a party is something anyone can learn, but no one really teaches us how to throw a well-run event. This is something you can learn and you can become good at. That just might change your life.

I love it. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. As I mentioned earlier, you can catch the great travel questions Nick and I discussed in a short bonus episode on Friday. And if you haven't already left a rating or review for the show in Apple Podcasts, I'd really appreciate it.

I'm on a quest to get to a thousand reviews. And every single one means so much to me. Thank you so much to everyone who's already written one. Finally, if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me or just want to say hi, I'm Chris and all the hacks.

Or you can DM me on social. See you Friday.