(upbeat music) - Obviously people can go take a museum hack tour, which is still running as a business, but I'm so fascinated as someone who, I don't know if I could tell, 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 there 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 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, 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 on 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 while we do this is, have you ever done this? You go to a new museum and you spend like the first hour looking at the stuff that you happen to just walk, like 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 does that usually take? Would you say for, I know there are museums of different sizes, but 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 was 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. - So about half that time is a run through and a cafe.

And then the other half is actually kind of 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 wanna 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 wing. - 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. And also there's not gonna be, the museum's not gonna feature like all, like you may be interested, like for example, I love at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there's this sofa.

It's like a green, beautiful green sofa. It's not gonna 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 gonna find that when you do the museum's website tour of the galleries.