October 22, 2024 / Last updated: October 22, 2024
My friend Andrew Wilkinson interviewed me on his podcast, Never Enough.
The episode is called “How to Become a Friend Billionaire” which is a term that Andrew coined.
You can watch my episode here on YouTube. I’ll also share some of my favorite moments from the conversation below with additional insights.
Watch & Listen
- YouTube: How to Become a Friend Billionaire
- Spotify: How to Become a Friend Billionaire
- Apple Podcast: How to Become a Friend Billionaire
Show Notes
Here are the best parts of the podcast with additional commentary added by me.
Andrew talks about my newsletter and how much value he gets out of it. It felt good to know how much he loves reading it and how it inspired him to start his own.
6:01 – Starting a Software Company in India to Living in NYC
I shared my journey of moving to India to launch a software company called BuddyGopher. I aimed to grow it into a big venture right after college, but things didn’t pan out as I hoped. Still, I gained a ton of valuable experience along the way.
I spent my 30s in the hustle and bustle of New York City, launching and growing Museum Hack. In 2019, I sold Museum Hack in an interesting way. Read the story here.
11:33 – Benefits of Having A Newsletter
I talk more about the benefits of starting a newsletter. I send one out every month, and I do believe it has helped me more than it has helped my readers. Read my past issues here.
14:25 – The 2-Hour Cocktail Party & Active Hosting
My book “The 2-Hour Cocktail Party” is party-hosting formula with step-by-step instructions that help you meet new people, strengthen your relationships, and make you the person everyone wants to know. I talk more about what inspired me to write this book.
The NICK method stands for Name tags, Icebreakers / Introductions, Cocktails or Mocktails, and Kick them out.
23:03 – Prioritizing Adventure Over Money
Andrew calls me the “Friend Billionaire” instead of a “Money Billionaire”, which is true because I value life’s adventure and friends more than money.
24:34 – Growing Social Circles Through Hosting
We talked about how popular we were during our younger days, and how that pushed me to start thinking about hosting my own parties.
28:33 – Nick’s Friendship Funnel
We agreed that using inviting phrases like “Can I invite you?” makes it easier for people to say yes, and that actively collecting interesting folks can really spice up your social life. We also talked about how some celebs keep things chill by using dual phone numbers to manage their connections—smart, right?
Andrew and I explored some tips for building meaningful connections through parties, like hosting open casting call happy hours at quieter hotel lobby bars instead of crowded venues.
We also touched on the importance of scheduling follow-up meetings on the spot while everyone’s engaged, as this keeps the momentum alive. If someone says no to an invitation, we agreed it’s often about their busy lives, not personal rejection, so I suggest keeping the invites coming—there’s little to lose, and one day, they might just say yes.
44:28 – Adding Value to People You Meet
I really like driving friends to the airport (or picking them up) and making those moments memorable. I also concluded in this part of the podcast that it’s about being genuinely proud of what you offer and making the effort to turn ordinary moments into something special. Read more about why I give airport rides in this article.
1:03:01 – Nick’s Views on Travel
See my travel guides here:
- Bali: My Top Tips & Recs
- Bangalore: My 2 Favorite Neighborhoods and 7 Great Places (2024)
- My 5 Tips for Mexico City: Easy Advice for Visitors
- My Favorite Things to Do in New York City (2024)
- Nick Gray’s Tokyo Tips and Tricks
1:05:22 – Nick’s Blind Date in Tokyo
I solicited a Tokyo Blind Date on the Internet for a weekend meetup in April 2024. The resulting adventure was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done.
See my family office website, Tri Peak Holdings.
1:11:02 – How Nick Enjoys His Money
I spend a lot of my money on services that enhance my quality of life rather than on material possessions. This year, I increased my housekeeper’s visits to twice a week and hired a house manager for tasks like organizing and managing packages. I also prioritize health and wellness, splurging on massages, physical therapy, and even a functional medicine doctor who is always available for my questions.
1:22:43 – Nick’s Productivity System
I talk about the invaluable role my team plays in my life (shoutout team PH!) handling everything from special projects to video creation. I rely heavily on them for administrative tasks, and I’ve found unique productivity methods, like having Leen read and transcribe my emails while I dictate responses. Instead of traditional productivity tools, I prefer personal interactions, such as my “walk and talk” sessions where I respond to messages during evening strolls. For those looking to hire help, I recommend starting on platforms like Upwork to find a good cultural fit—just hire someone for a few hours to see how they can assist you. Read more about the tasks I give my VA’s in this article here.
Transcript
Here’s the entire transcript of the podcast. And if you liked this episode, you might also like my appearance on the My First Million podcast.
Nick Gray: Look, here’s the most important thing. I found that I could change the trajectory of my life by becoming a host. The best people learn how to make hosting a habit. They host once a quarter, once a month, and you bring people into your orbit. It wasn’t really a healthy social life. I lived at home, I worked with my parents. I had no social life, no friends, no dating life. And eventually I was like, wow, I really need to make a change with this. I, like, haven’t had a girlfriend in forever. And that’s why I moved to New York City. I’m gonna give free tours for my friends. I’m gonna become the best tour guide. The saudi royal family will hire me, and for $20,000 a tour, I will be the best tour guide in the world. And the funny thing is, I actually gave a tour for someone in or adjacent to the saudi royal family once, and it was, like, the worst tour ever.
Andrew Wilkinson: So, Nick, how are you doing today?
Nick Gray: Well, I’m ready to begin our podcast after I have a drink from my mateina. Yerba mate.
Andrew Wilkinson: I love it.
Nick Gray: So please. Wait. Is that still a thing? Are you doing that?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s promote it. Let’s do it.
Nick Gray: Okay, good, good, good. I was ready. I had my product placement. Come on. Who else has done product placement here? It’s embarrassing that nobody else. All right, good. I’m number one for product placement on the pod. So far, I bought two cases of it to transition off of coffee. I’ve been drinking cold brew coffee in the mornings, and I think that gives me a little bit of anxiety. And I have a hunch that if I get onto the yerba mate, that’ll be less anxiety.
Andrew Wilkinson: It’s been interesting. When I drink drip coffee, I’m an anxious wreck, and if I drink more than one aeropress, I’m destroyed. But I can have one or two of those yerba mates. And I think because it contains theanine, I think it mellows out the caffeine high, kind of like green tea.
Nick Gray: I like the aeropress as well. And I would say that if you want to have the aeropress, you actually can supplement it with theanine beforehand. Have you ever done that?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, I was actually putting it in my coffee. So I’d take the capsule, open it up, put it in my coffee. I was talking to my doctor, and I said, you know, I really haven’t been sleeping well. Every morning I just feel sluggish. I can’t quite wake up. And it turns out that theanine has some sort of effect on cortisol. And so I was actually making myself tired. So you have to be really careful with theanine dosing. I think in the evening it’s really good, but in the morning it can actually fuck you. Cause it’ll reduce your anxiety, but it’ll also reduce your cortisol.
Nick Gray: I feel. I like the idea that we are talking about theanine and cortisol, as I think we can both say that we are lay people that did not go to school for medicine. And so I will add the legal disclaimer to do your own research. Neither Andrew or I are doctors. We’re just. I think both you and I get into things like this. Cause we are interested in human performance, and we both wanna be at the top of our game, taking a proactive approach in that. I think you and I both enjoy that.
Andrew Wilkinson: So my first recollection of you is actually seeing you on Tumblr. I remember in, like, 2009 or 2010, Tumblr was like, where are the cool kids of the Internet hung out? And the coolest kids on Tumblr were like, you and Zach Klein and Maureen Fishinger and all these. All these Tumblr users. I was like a little 18 year old nerd following all you guys and being like, oh, my God, I have to move to Brooklyn. This looks so cool. And you and I never actually met, I don’t think. But I went to New York and I stayed in your room. I rented your room while you were in Europe, and I really pissed off your roommate.
Nick Gray: Really?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah. So I got there. So I’m, like, 19 or something. I’m kind of nervous. You? I think all your roommates were, like, late twenties, early thirties. They’re a bunch of lawyers and stuff. I get the key, and I can’t sleep all night. I have this weird thing where I just. I’m tossing and turning, and I wake up at 05:00 a.m. and I go out and I come back to the apartment at, like, 10:00 a.m. and I go and put my key in the door, and I turn it, and it won’t turn. I can’t get into the apartment. And I’m like, what the fuck? Like, they must have given me a bunk key. There’s a problem. And so I call your roommate. I don’t remember which one, but I think he was a lawyer or something. He’s busy at work. And I’m like, look, I’m so sorry. I need you to come back and let me into the apartment. And he’s like, I’m in Manhattan. I’m in a meeting. Like, fuck. Okay, fine. So he comes and he looks at my key and I show him. I turn the key in their thing, and then he just puts the key in and he turns it the opposite way. And I was like, oh, my fucking God. And so basically your roommates hated me for the month I was there and I got off on a bad start, but that’s how we met. So random.
Nick Gray: That’s amazing. I’ve never heard that story before, so I never actually heard that that happened. What were you doing at the time? Were you, so you had started tiny or what were, what were you doing then?
Andrew Wilkinson: I was just a designer. I was starting, I started Metalab and was designing websites for clients and stuff, working with this startup in New York. And so I came for a couple months.
Nick Gray: So cool. That’s awesome. That’s nice. Yeah, that’s how we got connected. I think I probably somehow, because we had emailed about the room, then I added you, against your will to my friend’s newsletter and probably just started looping you in on my newsletter then.
Andrew Wilkinson: And, yeah, honestly, I think your newsletter is my favorite newsletter of any that I get. And I’ve kind of copied it a little bit of, I think it’s so interesting. So for those that don’t know, Nick has this newsletter where he calls it his friend’s newsletter. And he basically provides updates on his life and little hacks and things that he’s enjoying. So I remember one was like, you were really into overnight oats, and you’re like, here’s how to make the best overnight oats. Or you were like, hey, I’m wearing these weird five finger shoes. Here’s, here’s a, here’s a blog post about it. Or it’ll be like, I went to Hawaii and here’s the best hotel, or here’s a tour. I just got really into this newsletter and got so much value out of it. How did you even get to the newsletter in the first place? Like, what is your story? Like, how did you even come to live in New York with all those cool people?
Nick Gray: Came to live in New York because. Through a circuitous route. But I’ve been on the Internet for a long time, right? Since, you know, I’ve probably had a homepage on the Internet since 1996. So a very long time. I’ve been on the Internet. I’ve been publishing on the Internet for a long time. And I had friends on the Internet. I happened to go to college with the guys who started Vimeo and college humor and was very good friends with them, roommates with them, and so sort of ran in those circles a little bit. We were all doing online stuff. I moved to New York because after college, I tried to start a software company. I don’t know if I ever told you this. I moved to India to try to start a software company after college. I didn’t have very much money, and I was like, I’m gonna bootstrap this. I figured my dollar would go a lot farther in India where I could hire more people, and so I tried to go to India to hire people. It was a terrible failure. I hired two people who weren’t even in India. One of them was in Boston, the other guy was in Poland, and I was in India. It was very bad thing. But the software project was at the time. Do you remember Aol instant messenger?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, I loved it.
Nick Gray: And did you ever use away messages? Yeah, I wrote a software program that would scrape all of my friends away messages and display them in, into one dashboard so at any one time I could see them. And then it would scrape the old away messages and turn them into, like, tweets so I could read all their old away messages. So it was this huge data scraping operation, and college kids liked it, but could never really figure out how to monetize it. This was 2004, 2005, and I moved back home. And my dad was starting a company in the basement of our house, and I helped him hire his first employees and do a little bit of marketing. And what I thought would just be a few months of getting back on my feet after my software project failure. That turned into several years as we grew the company. But it wasn’t really a healthy social life. I lived at home, I worked with my parents. I had no social life, no friends, no dating life. And eventually I was like, wow, I really need to make a change with this. I, like, haven’t had a girlfriend in forever, and I was like, I need to move to a place where I can have friends my age and a social life. And that’s why I moved to New York City.
Andrew Wilkinson: Hmm, that’s so cool. And so when you were living in New York, what were you doing there, like, for work? Were you still working with your family?
Nick Gray: Yes, still working with the family business, running a lot of our sales over in Europe. So it was a remote job that I could work flexibly, and that’s when I got into hosting events. Because I worked at home, it became my way to have community almost.
Andrew Wilkinson: What was it like living in New York at that time. What years were you there? 2008. Til when?
Nick Gray: I think I moved there about 2007, 2008 until, gosh, I left 2020. So I was there for a long time. What was it like? It was great. I struggle with recommending. I think you’d probably agree with me. I don’t know if New York is the best place to live if you want to start a business. There’s just simply so much to do that it’s very hard to stay focused and grind and have a quality lifestyle. But it was great for somebody who wanted a social life. And I certainly loved the time that I was in New York. Wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Andrew Wilkinson: And then my understanding is you sold that business, the family business, and you started a business called Museum Hack, which I thought was a very unconventional business, not something that somebody fresh out of Harvard with an MBA would think of.
Nick Gray: I was doing museum hack for fun, like, as a hobby, on the weekends, just for free for my friends. And I got really good at it. I did it for two years as a hobby. And then eventually, when I couldn’t take it anymore, when there was overwhelming demand, then I was like, all right, I guess I’ll try to make this a business. And that’s when I stopped working for the family, started my own thing.
Andrew Wilkinson: And you’re basically just giving the world’s best museum tours. So how did it work?
Nick Gray: Yeah, yeah. It was basically museum tours for people who don’t like museums. And that was me. I don’t like museums. I think they’re boring. They’re stupid. I have a very short attention span. However, we lived in New York City. Have you been to the Met museum, by the way? Have you been to the Met?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, many times. I love it.
Nick Gray: Yeah?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah.
Nick Gray: It’s huge. It’s enormous. 13 acres, more than 2 million, Central park. But I moved to New York, I think, to go to cool stuff like that. And so I started to hang out there, and I’d look things up on Wikipedia, on YouTube, and then started to show my friends around when they would come to visit. I’d be like, oh, my God, let me show you around the Met. And then for some reason, I thought I wanted to be the tour guide for the saudi royal family. So my stupid idea was like, I’m gonna give free tours for my friends. I’m gonna become the best tour guide. And then the saudi royal family will hire me, and for $20,000 a tour, like, I will be the best tour guide in the world. And so I worked really hard to try to have the best tours. And the funny thing is, I actually gave a tour for someone in or adjacent to the saudi royal family once. And it was like the worst tour ever because they were not laughing at any of my jokes. They like, had their arms crossed the whole time. They were not fun at all. And that’s, I think, what I want. I just want to have fun. I just do stuff where I can have fun.
Andrew Wilkinson: And so you sold that business to, I think, to your employees and then this whole time. So you had this newsletter kind of growing. How are you allocating your time? So you’re doing museum hack, you’re doing the newsletter, and then I think you started writing the book.
Nick Gray: Oh, the newsletter is just an afterthought. I’ll just let it rip whenever I think about it. Generally once a month or once a quarter. And you had asked how, where that came from, by the way, actionable takeaway for the listeners. You should probably start a friend’s newsletter that you can send to your friends once a quarter with your life updates. Put them all on BCC. I have found it a very helpful practice for myself. And remember, the purpose is to add value. So don’t make it like a diary. You want to add value to them with the interesting lessons, learnings, articles, books, movies you’ve seen. Add value first, I’ve talked a lot.
Andrew Wilkinson: About on this podcast and other places about the value of parasocial relationships. Right? So one way relationships where you know someone knows you, but you don’t know them necessarily. And there’s two ways to use a newsletter like this. One is, you know, keep up with your friends and keep them up to date on what you’re doing. And you don’t have to remember to tell, you know, text all your friends constantly. It’s a way of keeping in touch. But also, you end up having this relationship with people like me who have only known you until recently. I think we met in person maybe a year ago or two years ago, but I felt I knew you, but I actually didn’t. We had never spoken. I don’t even know that we had sent more than one email to one another. How was that manifested in your own life? Like, what’s been the benefit? What kind of interesting experiences have you had as a result of that newsletter?
Nick Gray: Well, I mean, you know, the benefit of it. And a friend of mine said this to me recently because he’s very viral on LinkedIn. He said, dude, do you realize, does this happen to you where people come up and say hello and they don’t even introduce themselves. They don’t. And you’re laughing because I think this probably happens to you. You’ve never met this person before. You have no clue who they are, but they don’t even say their name. And sometimes you have a big. I’m sorry, what was your name? Like? Remind me, how do we know each other? Which, by the way, I don’t feel guilty or bad about saying ever. What’s your name? Remind me what we’re talking about. How did we meet? And I’ll be very direct with people about that. Yeah. What are the benefits of, like, the parasocial stuff? I think that, you know, it just paves the way for social interactions, for investing, for business, for other things. When your reputation precedes you a little bit more, people know me and recognize me. It makes things easier to attend stuff. It’s. I mean, it’s fame, and there’s a lot. It’s a very small piece of fame. It’s a tiny piece of fame and a very weird circle, but it is largely good and positive.
Andrew Wilkinson: Okay, so you have that newsletter, and then you also wrote this book, which I thought was really interesting, and it’s called the two hour cocktail party. It’s how to host an amazing event, basically, where you connect a bunch of people. And I was lucky enough when we were in Austin, you hosted an event for me and Sam Parr and a few other people, and it was so cool. I feel like whenever I go to these events, I get stuck in a conversation pitae, and I end up having a lot of small talk, and I also don’t know who’s there. And so I remember you got all of us into a circle, and you said, what do you do? What do you do? What do you do over and over again to every single person. So I knew who’s in the room. And then you did such a great job of creating everybody. You forced everyone to break up into different groups. You’re constantly moving people around. You’re saying, you should know you, and then at the end, you’re left leaving. You’re left wanting more. I remember it ended after an hour and a half or something, and I was like, what? That’s it? And you said, well, you can stay if you want. And it was such a great psychological hack. Can you talk a little bit about, like, how did you come to even write that book in the first place? And, yeah, what’s happened since then?
Nick Gray: Yes, yes. I’ll talk about the history of the book. First, I want to give a pro tip for listeners who may have heard me talk before at the event with Andrew. I was watching like a hawk Andrew and who he was talking to. And I knew in my mind how long he’d been talking to people. At any moment, I could tell you, because you were my special guest, who was talking to you? I may have had my back turn, but trust me, I knew who you were talking to. And I think you probably noticed that during that event, I was bringing you new people and introducing you. I’d come up and tap you and say, andrew, can I borrow you for a second? Constantly moving. And so that is the role of an active host who takes an active role in leading an event. And the problem is that most events have passive hosts who say, oh, no, I’m not gonna do name tags. No, man, I’m not gonna do intros. I just want it to be chill. I’m a chill host. I want it to be a chill party. But you said something when you came in town for the Sam par event, or something you said, which was one of the greatest compliments I’ve got for my hosting. You said, whenever Nick is around, I feel like I can relax, because he is the one stressing that you carry that burden for me. And I get to relax. And I was like, yes, I feel seen. That is exactly how I feel. Let me stress so that you can relax. And so that is. Do you want to say anything about that? But that in that moment, I felt very seen by you.
Andrew Wilkinson: No, I love it. I feel like a kindred spirit, because when I’m in groups, I just want everyone to be happy and to have a good time, and it really stresses me out, actually, if I bring a group together and I realize that two of the people should have met, and they didn’t. I have this rule of, like, when you travel with someone, there’s always the aggro person and the chill person, and whoever rises into the aggro role where they’re like, oh, my God, we’re going to miss our train. And we’ve got this reservation here. The chill person can relax. Right? And so normally, I’m the aggro person. I’m the anxious person. I’m, you know, doing what you do. And so, yeah, I mean, going to an event where you were playing that role, it actually allowed me to really, really relax, and it was kind of a beautiful thing, and it was a reminder of what I kind of do. I haven’t got as much of a system as you do, but I tend to do a lot of the same things, actually, when I host events, so it’s really cool. I love your book. Everyone should go read it. It’s called the two hour cocktail party. It’s available on Amazon and it’ll make your life better. I can’t say that about that many books, but it’s definitely helped me run better events.
Nick Gray: It’s a very simple, practical book that has simple things like put a label on the bathroom and where your trash can is obvious common sense advice. But how often have you been to that rich friend’s house and their trash can is hidden in some door. And as a guest, we’re like, where the hell is the trash can? I have no idea. It’s hidden away purposefully, but you’re trying to throw stuff away. So I’m like, put labels on this. Send three reminder messages. Let people know what time your party starts and what time the party ends. Say exactly this to the first few people who arrive. It’s very common sense advice. That is not rich on storytelling like your book is. That is fantastic. But it’s very tactical and specific and practical for a specific type of event. And that is my goal, is just to raise the bar for all these events. Because you mentioned, we went around the room and you said, hey, what does everybody do? Why do we do that? Cause we get it out of the way. It’s one of the things you ask everybody, now let’s just get it out of the way now. You know who’s there, you know who you may want to talk to. You don’t have to wait to bring that up. Be like, oh, I really want to know that. Cause actually, I want to know that from everybody.
Andrew Wilkinson: Can you give, like, a quick summary of, like, what are the kind of three elements of a great party in your mind?
Nick Gray: Yeah, three elements of a great party. I mean, I say that there’s the nick method. N I c k n stands for nametags. I will die on this hill. I do a lot of marketing around this, but I think name tags are helpful and needed at almost any event. When there’s mixed social groups of five or more people, name tags are supremely helpful. Note, by the way, what the name tag is. And you may not know this, but the name tag serves as a visual unifier for everyone in attendance, almost like a sports jersey. So think about when we wear a sports jersey. We’re all on the same team. The name tag unifies us to say, this is not a party of cliques. This is not like, oh, these friends and those friends. We are all on the same team. And the nametag ties that group together with a visual unifier. That’s especially important. If you ever do a party at a bar or something like that, you need to know the jerseys of who’s on the team. So, Nick, n I c k name tags is n I stands for intros or icebreakers. More and more, I’m calling them intros instead of icebreakers because of the negative reaction to the word icebreaker. But just doing a round of intros not only helps create new conversations, but it also helps end the conversations. Cause a guess that I would have about Andrew is that he’s too nice to say, I’ve had enough. I’m going to go meet somebody else now. Most people will not do that. And so, as a host, when you lead a round of intros, it actually serves as a breaking point to let people break and then they can reform later. And I c. C stands for cocktails or mocktails only. Do not over index on food. Most people think hosting is about feeding people. I would rather have someone leave my party hungry rather than bored. So I think more about the conversations and the introductions and less about the food.
Andrew Wilkinson: And then why does food cause problems?
Nick Gray: Food causes problems because people think that they can do that, and that’s what they should be spending their time on. It doesn’t cause problems necessarily. However, I will note that generally, when you eat food, you sit down, and sitting down is the kryptonite to a successful mixer. You get locked in. Generally, you just sit down next to the person you’re talking to. You can’t mix and mingle as much from all the new hosts I’ve talked to. They’re like, oh, my gosh, I’m gonna host a dinner party and I’m gonna do this. Dinner parties are very complicated. They’re very stressful. They’re actually harder for people like you and I to say yes to who are very busy. Dinner party assumes a three hour time block more or less, versus, I’m guessing if you were invited to a cocktail party, you know that you could pop into that. You stay as long as you want, you leave whenever you want. So I really have people say, look, just do happy hours. The food is gonna. You can do the food when you are good, when you are good, and you can do this well, but I want you to focus on the conversations and not on the food. So that’s c for cocktails or mocktails only. And then k stands for kick them out at the end. You really want to end on a high note. You don’t want to just let it drag on. Now, my book’s called the two hour cocktail party. More and more, I’m actually hosting 90 minutes events. I actually like shorter, shorter and shorter stuff. Yeah.
Andrew Wilkinson: So you wrote that book. You have the email newsletter. You sold the family business. You sold museum hack. You’re an investor. You’ve been very successful financially. But now, the interesting thing, when I talk to people about what they want, they’ll often say, I want to get rich. I want to be a billionaire. But I said this to someone else. I said, I think Nick is a friend billionaire. I would much rather be a friend billionaire than a money billionaire. I think having a broad group of people who know you deeply is really valuable. Is that a fair assumption to say that is your goal? Are you just trying to basically have as many interesting social interactions and experiences as possible?
Nick Gray: Look, I know what it takes to, or I think I know what it takes to make $50 million or $100 million. And after running my last business, I decided that I wasn’t willing or ready to do that, that it wasn’t a trade off I was willing to make, and I didn’t feel pulled towards that money as much as I felt pulled towards life, adventure, and experiences. And I’ve often thought about, okay, what would I really spend the money on? Now? Maybe it’s easy for me. I don’t have kids. I don’t have a family that I’m building yet, so I don’t feel pulled to the need of that money. But I am lucky that right now in my life, I have more money than I spend, and I don’t. I’m not willing to trade and make those sacrifices towards the freedom and flexibility I have in my life right now.
Andrew Wilkinson: What caused you to create all these systems? Because I like you. I’ve come to similar conclusions. So I was always relatively popular and well liked in high school and stuff, but I never felt like I was the guy that everyone had to invite to the party. I might find out about the party, but I wasn’t, like, I wasn’t in a clique. I wasn’t, you know, I was never. I don’t know. I just never felt like I was. I was the man, right? It’s so to. So to speak. And so I learned over time that if you want to go to great parties, you have to create the great party. You have to be the host. You have to make it happen. You have to build systems, and I started doing that. So for you personally, like, you seem like a very extroverted friendly guy who would just generally be well liked. Was there a period in your life where you weren’t and you wanted to get to this point, or have you always kind of been like this and this is just you sharing your, you know, your system?
Nick Gray: No way, dude. 100% high school never had, you know, I say. I say that I never had a girlfriend because for some reason I feel like that’s kind of like a corollary to, like, how popular are you? But, yeah, high school was not super popular. Same thing. What you said resonated with me. I wasn’t the first to get invited, but maybe I’d find out about it eventually. College was not super popular. Years after college had no social life at all whatsoever, and then moved to New York and found myself feeling very much as an outsider at all these events. I wasn’t tall enough, I wasn’t rich enough, I wasn’t muscular enough. And so there’s that phrase, some phrase that’s like, if they won’t invite you to speak, then build your own stage. And I felt that way about hosting parties, that I was like, I’ll just start to host my own parties and get the people that I want to be in the room and build the experiences that I want. Look, here’s the most important thing. I found that I could change the trajectory of my life by becoming a host. The best people learn how to make hosting a habit. It is not something that they host once a year for their birthday. They make hosting a Habit. They host once a quarter, once a month, whatever it is, and you bring people into your orbit. So think about someone like Andrew. He’s going to meet you. You may have a great conversation, but the reality is the next step for you to see Andrew again could only be, oh, can I pick your brain for a coffee? Oh, can we go out to dinner? That’s never going to happen. It doesn’t fit in his schedule. As opposed to, if you say to Andrew, hey, Andrew. Occasionally I host this little happy hour with the most interesting people that I meet in Vancouver. May I invite you? Can I send you the info? And eventually, if you invite him enough times to something like that, it may work out and he’ll come. I once went to this dinner party that this woman hosted in New York City, and she had a very famous author who came to the dinner, and this woman, in all niceness, was a nobody. And I mean that in the best way, just like I’m a nobody or something, but she was a nobody. And I asked her afterwards, I say, how did you get that guy to come to your dinner? And she said, well, I just invited him. And after about seven invitations, it finally worked out. And what I realized is everyone wants to be invited to a party. You may not go, you may politely decline, but generally everyone wants to at least be invited. And so I found that by hosting, I got to give the gift of invitations. I got to extend the courtesy of inviting. And eventually folks start to come. Then it’s up to you to actually host a good event.
Andrew Wilkinson: It’s really nerdy to apply this framework, but if we think of it almost as a marketing funnel. So you have this email and YouTube, and that’s how you blast out into the world, right? You say, this is who I am. And hey, you can have a parasocial one way relationship with me. Then you get people who are interested in knowing you. You invite those people to a party and you get them talking. And now you’re the host. Can you tell us how you actually go from knowing somebody, though, just at a cocktail party to actually becoming friends? And I’m curious to know, like, you have such a broad base of friends. What does your actual core look like? What’s your core ten friends look like? So let’s go through that funnel step by step.
Nick Gray: Okay. Before this episode goes live, you or I need to register friendshipfunnel.com because when you said friend billionaire, somebody snapped it up. And I still don’t know who got it, but I want it. I feel like that’s my domain name.
Andrew Wilkinson: You got it, dude. That’s the best one liner. I think you should write a book called Friend Billionaire. And I’m dead serious. Like, I’ll help you write it or something. It’s such a good moniker.
Nick Gray: That friendship funnel is very real. And I tell people, you should go through life collecting interesting people. Have a great interaction at Trader Joe’s. Tell the person, hey, eventually I’m going to host a happy hour for some interesting people in town. I’d love to invite you. May I have your info? Can I invite you? Note, by the way, the words I’m using, can I invite you? Not do you want to come? Can I invite you as an easy yes, do you want to come? Is like it’s a commitment. It’s a little bit personal versus can I invite you? Everybody always says yes. It’s an easy way. It’s an easy way to get their thing. By the way, wait, before we talk about this, someone last night who’s hung out with some very famous celebrities told me that many ultra famous celebrities. Do you know that? Is this a thing? Have two phones? They have a phone that they will take out sort of at events, and then they have their real phone. And they do that because when people ask for their number, they can give this burner phone number and it not feel like a fake thing. And so he said, yeah, you know, with the celebs, when they give you their real number, that, like, that’s when you’re in. And I thought that was so smart, because I have a mutual friend who I think we both know, and she gets. Folks will really, like, be very aggressive to try to get her phone number. And I. It’s like a problem of sorts, and I’m going to tell her about this dual phone thing.
Andrew Wilkinson: There is a. I remember I was in Las Vegas with a group of guys, and there was this absolutely gorgeous waitress that was serving us, and, you know, it was in a. It was in a nightclub. And he was like, I’m gonna go get her number. I’m gonna get her number. And we were like, dude, she must get asked 100 times a night for her number. You really think she’s gonna give you her number? So he walks over and it looks like it’s going well, and she’s smiling at him and everything, and he comes back and he pumps his fist, and he goes, she gave me her Facebook, and then as soon as he adds her, it just says, this user has too many friend requests and rejected.
Nick Gray: Right?
Andrew Wilkinson: It’s like the same thing. I think, like, you know, you don’t want to be rude. And everyone comes up with their hack to deal with this. So walk us through the stages of the funnel friendship.
Nick Gray: Funnel could be on. The high end is social media, so the high end is, you know, somebody follows you online or something like that. Next stage would be maybe something more like a newsletter or something like that. By the way, my LinkedIn is not run by me. If you ever chat with me on LinkedIn, first of all, I want to say thank you so much. But second of all, it’s run by a group of college kids in New Jersey who are just trying to get you onto my newsletter, and they will have sort of a way to chat with people through that. But then I host events, and I will host sort of larger events for people that I’ve never met before. I don’t want it to sound like I’m using those events to audition people to come and. But I will mentally make a list of who the really great guests are at those types of events, who I want to see?
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, I’m wondering. It’s one thing. What I’ve noticed is I have a lot of really shallow relationships that I think are positive, where it’s like I see people around and we like each other, and maybe we’ve had a coffee or we’ve had a really positive interaction, but my actual core group, my OG friends, it’s like there’s four of us on an imessage thread, and that’s it. And then I have a scattering of other people I talk to on iMessage. I have a few other people I get coffees with. But I’m curious. You have such a big inbound funnel of people who want to be friends with you because you’re hosting all these events. How are you choosing, and then how are you spending your time to deepen relationships? So I’m curious from a couple levels. One is, you know, let’s say that you have, you know, 150 people who want to get on your calendar, want to get coffee, want to do stuff. Are you batching those into smaller events and building over time? And then two, how are you even keeping track of all these people? Do you have a CRM or a system? Is an assistant doing that? I’m so curious how your system works.
Nick Gray: Great. Here’s how it works exactly. For that, I will tag people in an airtable database that my team manages for me for next cocktail party list. Many times I will get an introduction to somebody or something like that. That is a tag that I keep. That’s like, next cocktail party. Let’s invite these people, and that’s a way for me to get to know them better. Second is, I do not do these one to one meetings, hey, let’s meet up for coffee. Let’s do this. I readily share my phone number and I tell them to call me anytime. And I find that that immediately filters out, for better or for worse, filters out a lot of people who will not call. That’s probably a good enough filter. I’ve had some people get mad about that, by the way. Two people that I can think of that are like, my reputation speaks for itself. Look at all this stuff that I’ve done. Why won’t you schedule a time? And I’m like, wow, I really dodged a bullet on that one. I’m so glad. Because not somebody who I want to get to know.
Andrew Wilkinson: So you’re saying. So just talk about that for a minute. So calendar hygiene. So you’re saying that if Sam Parr emails you and says, hey, buddy, I want to get lunch, would you do that with a friend? Or would you just say, call me?
Nick Gray: If Bill Ackman said, hey, I would love to schedule a time? You bet your bottom dollar I’m going to schedule time and fit in. It’s sort of a hierarchy thing, right? Where folks that are monumentally ahead of me, I will work around their calendar. I will do whatever necessary. But if it’s not clear to me, somebody, or if I’m busy or it seems like peer or relatively peer plus, then I’ll just say, would love to chat, please give me a call. I don’t really do scheduled things, but for Mark Zuckerberg or for whoever, yes, of course I’m going to bend hell in high water.
Andrew Wilkinson: What does your calendar look like day to day? Then how does that manifest? Are you busy and scheduled? Are you blissfully open and you just get random calls from people?
Nick Gray: I am blissfully open and I get some random calls. I had a 1 hour call yesterday with a friend who’s going through an acquisition, and I was able to be there for him to help and be a sounding board, I would say. I generally don’t schedule things before eleven in the morning. I really try to stack things. So like a podcast recording, like today, I have two or three lined up for today. I try to chunk things on my calendar, but to leave it open as much as possible.
Andrew Wilkinson: And what app do you use?
Nick Gray: I use Google Calendar for my stuff. I have a team similar to you who manages my stuff in the database of contacts. I use airtable because they have a sendgrid integration that allows me to mass mail people. And I use that for when I am inviting people to events so that I can send a personalized message and I can go through my list. I can check off, I can see the list of all these people tagged. And so another example is, I believe in good ratios at a party. I don’t want to have a party with all guys, and in our worlds of tech and software, that’s very easy to do. So I will do tags to make sure that I have enough women or different groups at my parties for things that I want to invite. But that’s how I do. Some of these invites for the party is I have a CRM, but I don’t use that CRM. A lot of people are like, what’s your CRM? I don’t. Maybe I use that once a month, but I’m constantly building and sort of adding names to it, new cities. I also find that’s a primary reason for a CRM for people like you and I, who travel a lot, I don’t have a good way to tag, and I wish superhuman would let us add tags into a CRM. But that is a primary reason why I need a CRM is to tag people and label them for what city they’re in.
Andrew Wilkinson: That’s, like, my number one pet peeve is I go to New York, and then I realized there’s someone I’ve been texting that I’ve been meaning to meet, and I’ve just left. I only go to New York, like, twice a year or something like that. That drives me crazy. A lot of this stuff, I think will be solved by AI.
Nick Gray: Yeah. Yes. There used to be a thing on Twitter where you could see your followers in cities. I wish we had that.
Andrew Wilkinson: What’s the next level down of this funnel? So then you get into. Maybe you’ve deepened the relationship. You’ve become actual close friends with these people. Are you doing anything special for those people, for your closest five or 15 friends?
Nick Gray: For someone listening to this, if you wanted to replicate, here’s the advice that I would give someone else. It’s not necessarily what I do because I think I’m so far deep into it, but here’s what I would do is, number one, I would host these sort of open casting call happy hours that potentially could be at a bar or a hotel lobby bar. Hotel lobby bars are often much better places than a crowded bar. Pro tip. You don’t want to host your meetup at the most popular, coolest place. It’s too loud, it’s too crowded. It’s a nightmare. Hotel lobbies seem nice. They’re a little more sophisticated. They’re much less empty, and it’s a little nicer. So I would host sort of an open casting call at that event to start to build up your list, and then I would be noticing each time who were my favorite guests. You need to do this immediately after the event or during the event. Who are the good people here that have good vibes that I would want to see again later? Now, if you are using these events to build your network and you truly want to meet somebody for coffee, you need to ask them for the coffee at the party itself. At the party itself, you can’t think, oh, they came to my event. I’ll follow up in a few days and schedule. No, it doesn’t matter how good your event was. Their life goes on, and you are no longer a priority. So I will, at my event, if I want to see you, for example, I’ll make sure I’m hosting a good event. I’ll make sure you’re having a good time, and then about an hour, and I’ll say, andrew, I would really love to just chat. May I call you tomorrow for 15 minutes? Let’s get it on our calendar right now, because you know how it is. Scheduling with you is a nightmare. Back and forth. Put it in. It’s not a priority, blah blah blah versus if you’re in front of me, then that’s what I will do. So I tell people that if you’re using these events for lead generation or making new friends, whatever, schedule the next follow up meeting at the event itself. So your next question is, what goes down in the funnel now that I know who the good people are, who I want to kind of connect with potentially, then you could do a five person dinner, maybe like out at a restaurant. And you should know hosting dinners is an art and so you should think a little bit about that. But then you could host something like a dinner for five people. Generally, though, I find that a good way to keep and build relationships is just to invite people to things. Maybe there’s a movie that’s out right now that you want to go to. Well, now you have a list of people who you can invite to go see that movie. Maybe it’s an art show, maybe it’s a gathering, maybe it’s something fun. Just keep inviting people to things and that will keep you top of mind on their list that maybe they will then invite you to something. That’s the best advice that I have as far as how you would build good relationships. I’ll use that as an example with Sam. Sam Parr. When I wanted to build a relationship with Sam, there’s a million people trying to get into Sam’s calendar. I know New York very well. And so I made it a point to invite him to things that he would think were cool and interesting so that I could build a relationship with him.
Andrew Wilkinson: That’s really cool. And what about people that say no? So one thing ive observed is theres kind of a magic ratio with friends where if you invite somebody five times, you kind of want them to say yes, three to four. And I noticed that when somebody says yes one out of five times, I just stop inviting them. Would you keep inviting them to things if they say no a lot?
Nick Gray: Ive thought a lot about this and I go different ways. At the end of the day, I think its a me problem and not a them problem. That the reality for someone like you is that you are incredibly busy. And I have texted you and you have not written me back. And I don’t take that personally. I know that that is, maybe I just didn’t send you an interesting message. Maybe it wasn’t clear exactly what I was asking for. I think you have to give up a little bit of your ego, and there’s no cost to a new network builder to invite people. So I will generally invite people who I want to connect with until they say, no, stop inviting me because the risk reward is so small. It costs me nothing to invite you. And maybe one time it will work out and you will come.
Andrew Wilkinson: I died a bit inside when I heard. I didn’t respond because, like, I’m a major people pleaser and I pride myself on, like, I go through text.com every single day and make sure no one’s unreada, which probably causes me to get way more texts than I should. But I hate that I did that to you. I’m sorry.
Nick Gray: No, no, no. That’s totally fine. And in fact, there’s no specific moment. And to your credit, you’ve always been good when I have a specific thing and a question, but you have to give up a little bit of your ego to think like, oh, this person doesn’t like me. Or this. I’ll give one small example of that. When I’m going viral on Twitter, I cannot see all of my replies. It is just physically impossible. There’s no good way. You probably know this as well, that we miss these replies. Maybe we’re standing in line and we try to check our replies that says, 20 plus, you click, and then now. Now you can make your order at the coffee shop, and you smooth, and you move your phone away. Now I’ve lost all these other messages and replies, and in the past, I would think, oh, man, I wrote the best reply to this person. Why didn’t they write back? They didn’t even like that message. The rat is, these people are just very, very, very busy. Yeah, I think you just have to keep showing up.
Andrew Wilkinson: Earlier I was talking about how when you’re the host, I can relax. Who are you around? Who’s the host for you? When can you relax?
Nick Gray: Wow, what a great question. I find those moments where I get to be really playful. Just have fun. I went out with my friend Cody Sanchez the other night, and she and I have a very nice friendship, and we get to joke and we make to laugh. Who is it for me that hosts that I get to unplug? Ben Casnoka, by chance, do you know.
Andrew Wilkinson: Ben no, I don’t.
Nick Gray: Ben runs Village Global, which is a venture capital firm with Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn. Ben and I show up to our meetings with each other. Our meetings, they’re just like friend hangouts, and we both have a list of agenda things. And he’ll be like, who wants to start? I’ll be like, you go for this one. And he’s got boom, boom, boom. He has all these topics. Ben hosts an event himself, and whenever I’ll move anything to go to one of his events, he is very, very good.
Andrew Wilkinson: It’s so funny, because all the things you talk about, like name tags and timer timers and all this stuff, it sounds really cold. But I’ve been part of. I was originally part of entrepreneurs organization and did forum, and they structure these conversations. So when you go to the meeting, it’s like there’s a timer, there’s a moderator. You’ll be cut off. You’re not allowed to speak in a certain way. There’s an agenda. All those things I find actually enhance conversations so, so much. And I’ve been in, you know, I’ve had friends that I’ll have known for ten years, and then I join a structured conversation with them, like forum or something with an agenda, and I learn all these things about their life that I would just never have asked. Do you have any kind of strategy for that? When you’re meeting someone, do you actually make an agenda or something? Like, let’s say you’re meeting me for coffee. I remember when we met, we both. I remember it’s kind of like this conversation. I have, like, a hundred things in my brain that I want to ask you about, and vice versa. But do you actually prepare? Do you have a method for that?
Nick Gray: I do. I do prepare. And I write down notes occasionally I’ll make a slideshow. I don’t know if I made a slideshow for you.
Andrew Wilkinson: I think you did. You did. And I was like. Like, I loved it. And then the guy I was with was like, who the fuck is this guy? Like, he was like, what is this? This is. Is this guy, like, selling me something?
Nick Gray: Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s just making a slideshow for those things. I will make a little bit. I mean, it’s so hard because this works for me, and, like, this is on brand for me. I would hesitate to give this advice for somebody else. This, to me, feels natural. This is how I like to share. It’s kind of like love languages, maybe, in that we give in the way that we want to receive, and my love language is acts of service, and it’s the way that I show up for people, and it’s the way that I like them to show up for me. But, yes, I am intentional at people who I want to build a relationship with to try to add value to them, and I think of overwhelmingly trying to add value.
Andrew Wilkinson: Can you speak a little bit of. One of the things I find so interesting about you is you will drive people to the airport. So when Chris and I were in town, you said, oh, hey, don’t call an Uber. I’ll take you guys to the airport, and I want to take you to Barton Springs for a swim before that. And so me and Chris were like, okay, sweet. And so we ended up going and hanging out at Barton Springs, and you drove us to the airport. And I just thought it was such a lovely act of service and a nice thing to do and a way for us to connect that would otherwise just be dead time. You know, we would have been sitting in the back of an Uber with a air freshener in our face otherwise. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it was such a unique thing that you do.
Nick Gray: So that is one specific example where the act that I can do is probably ten x better than the alternative. And what I’m competing with is a cold, faceless, sort of uber ride. I think about the same thing as those museum tours that I created a business around. I was competing with a volunteer docenthe largely retired senior citizen who wanted to talk about art and not how people wanted to engage. I truly felt that my tours were ten x better than the alternative. And so those moments when I can show up and be of service to somebody, I’m looking for those moments that I can be ten x better than what their alternative is. And then I will push and I will fight for it. One example is going to Barton Springs, which is a natural spring fed water pool situation that’s here in Austin, Texas. I have fought for people that are celebrities, that are famous. I’ve said, you must go to this. And I’ve been kind of annoying in getting them to go because I think you remember it kind of is a very unique Austin only situation where you’re like, wow, this is really cool. And I know, and I have such confidence in that experience. So for somebody listening to this, you can’t fight to get somebody to meet you for coffee if you’re not going to give them an awesome experience. I think you have to remember that. You have to be really proud of what you deliver. And I tell people in building a business, my advice is build a business that the product or service that you sell, you would be so proud for your friends to be your customers, because it is so good that you want. This was probably the same thing with you, with Metalab. You knew that you guys were amazing designers, that you made such good product that it wasn’t hard for you to go out and sell it. And so I think about that with. With experiences, with those opportunities that I can create for people what is going to be sort of the extra mile and more fun. It’s even as simple as just, like, snacks and packing snacks for people.
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, you did that with us. And then you also stopped. You said, are you guys hungry? There’s a great burger place right around the corner. And you took us to the burger place. Just everything hit. It’s interesting, they say that with dating, you don’t want to go for dinner. You don’t want to be sitting. You want to go and do an adventure, and you want your. You want people to have, like a. Almost like a parasympathetic response, like a fight or flight response. You want your adrenaline pumping, and then they will essentially associate that with you. And I know a lot of people do this with dating, where they’ll be like, let’s go on a roller coaster, let’s go on a hike, whatever. But you’ve actually done this with friends, which I thought is interesting, because I remember we went and we went to Barton Springs, and it’s really freaking cold, so it’s a amazing hot day, and then we jump in this ice cold spring water, and it was this peak experience. And now I associate that peak experience with you. Right. It’s really interesting.
Nick Gray: Plus, we had. I’ll give a little bit of color for people. Plus, do you remember that my car almost got towed when we were there? I’m not gonna go into the incriminating situation, but it was very exciting. It was a whirlwind of emotions as we were doing that for me as well. May I share a story that I just thought about? This is one I’ve never shared before. When I was traveling in Asia, I knew a legitimate Forbes 400 billionaire, and I wanted to hang out with them. And I knew that there was nothing that I could add that would make it more worthwhile to them than it would be for me. And I really racked my brain to think, how can I make this a unique experience? And I remembered that this person had an art collection, and I know a little bit about art. And I said, hey, why don’t we hang out and I will help you document some of the pieces that you’ve collected. You talk and I’ll type and we’ll just walk through your house and let me help you start to document this because I don’t think that you have this yet. And they were like, oh my God, that would be fantastic. And you know what? I ended up hanging out at their house for like 7 hours. We had lunch, other people came over and at the end of it they thanked me profusely. Now, that took me time to figure out, how can I add value? How can I really add value? I mean, I was racking my head and that turned out to be a really good example. I think that is a specific example where I for extremely in demand people, you have to realize that it’s nothing against you, that you are competing with a million other calendar invites to them. And at the end of the day, everybody is interested in themselves.
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah. If you want to instant delete in my inbox, just say the word. 15 minutes, call or pick your brain or what do you think of my idea or any of those things? And I look back at myself because I remember times where I would do that. I’d be like, oh, I’m going to shoot my shot. What’s the harm? But you realize there’s no value. What’s the offer here? And I know that sounds kind of calculated, but at the same time it’s like if you think about it, just you and me being friends, it’s like, what’s your offer? Well, obviously all these activities, all this other stuff, but actually the offer is, oh, a kindred spirit. You and I think the same and we like nerding out. We talk about the same stuff and investing and software and systems and all this stuff. That’s your offer. In the same vein, for anyone you meet, you have to have an offer. Maybe the person’s into baseball. Okay, that’s your offer. I’m also into baseball. And let’s talk baseball. Or for the billionaire, it might be, let me help you organize your art collection or invite you to this crazy cliff jumping seminar, whatever it is. I love that way of thinking about it because that’s something I’ve also done as well. I’m going if before I meet someone who’s influential, I’ll often listen to a few hours of them on podcasts and I’ll see where do they light up and what do they like to talk about and what’s something that people don’t usually ask them. And I find that same thing of just, like, having a reason. In what way are you benefiting them?
Nick Gray: Yeah, this happened very recently. Remember the guy who you hired for the storytelling advice? I needed to get him on the phone for something about two or three weeks ago, and I happened to read one of his blog posts where he had questions about substacks. And I researched through, and I was like, look, this is the thing that you’re thinking with Subzac. This is not the case. Here’s why you should use it. Would love to hire you immediately. Please. Blah, blah, blah. Long story short, I got him on the call. We had an amazing call. Thank you for setting that up. It was very, very helpful. What a smart guy.
Andrew Wilkinson: By the way, there’s just a note. We’re talking about Matthew Dix, who’s a world storytelling champion for the mosque, who is absolutely incredible. You gotta just google him. Matthew Dix. I’ve never seen somebody who can bring a tear to your eye in, like, less than five minutes, no matter what. And he’s just this unassuming teacher. I think he’s from New Jersey. Incredible guy. And he’s got a great book called Story Worthy.
Nick Gray: Story worthy. I said I didn’t want to talk about books on this podcast, but I will recommend his book story worthy as one that was incredibly helpful to me to think about how we tell those stories.
Andrew Wilkinson: So you’ve got this really interesting social life. Let’s talk about experiences. Because the other way in which I’m jealous of you, I think my social life is not as rich as yours. But I’m pretty. I feel like my cup is quite full there. But where my cup is not full is experiences. I’m very much the kind of person who likes routine. The day to day. I don’t like travel. There’s that great Joseph Campbell quote. The treasure you seek is in the cave you fear to enter, which is probably, for me, going on adventures. You are an adventurer. I feel like every month I get an email from you saying, you’re whisking off somewhere in the world. You’re doing something crazy. Let’s talk about this thing of going on adventures. How do you go about doing that? How do you find ideas? How do you plan them? And then how do you have balance and routine?
Nick Gray: So first, let me ask the bounce and routine on the adventures, because that is very helpful for me. And I will talk tactically regarding sleep. I now travel with my own pillow, so I had a custom buckwheat pillow made. Buckwheat is my favorite preferred type of pillow, and I had a custom one made that is small enough to relatively easy throw into a suitcase. Somebody once mentioned to me, they said strange pillows make strange dreams. I heard, by the way, that a very famous billionaire who I think you and I both know has around the world. Have you heard this story? He has around the world mattresses of the type of mattress that he likes. And when he is going to a hotel, his advance team will bring the mattress to the hotel to remove the variables because he knows if he’s going into a big meeting, he better have a good night’s sleep, and they will just nail that down, which I thought was absolutely incredible.
Andrew Wilkinson: I don’t know that exact story, but you’re talking to a guy who I travel with two suitcases usually. So I have my clothes and everything, and then I have a smaller second suitcase with a pillow, my preferred cotton blanket, and all my sleep white noise machine, all that stuff because. Which sounds ridiculous and nerdy, but like a bad sleep, bad life, dude.
Nick Gray: And it’s not that expensive to send a weighted blanket. Have you slept with weighted blankets? Do you like them or you don’t like them?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, I find them too hot. Maybe I haven’t tried the right one, though.
Nick Gray: Fair enough. You could experiment with various weights, but I have found it’s actually not that expensive to send a weighted blanket ahead to a hotel that I will be staying at for a couple days. They’re dollar 40 on Amazon prime, and then I donated afterwards. And if I’m at that hotel for three days, what? I’m paying $12, $13 a night to have this weighted blanket that makes me so happy. My adventures. I do have, like, a very good mobile office setup, right? I have a keyboard stand. I have my keyboard. I have the mouse that I like. I have good headphones. I have a lot of kit and gear that I travel with, which allows me to have a semblance of home away from home. I’ve found that I am too old now to only spend one night at a hotel. I think in the past, I used to love staying one night each at new hotels and new cities to experience new neighborhoods. I can no longer do that, I think, with the adventures, your question is just, like, how or why do you do stuff? And I’m lucky to have the schedule flexibility that allows me to just sort of cancel my stuff to go and do things. One example is about a year ago, we got heavy rains here in Austin, and I knew a friend who said, dude, the creek is flooding right now. Let’s go take our kayaks and let’s go run down the creek in the kayaks. And I was like, that sounds ridiculous. We had to wear helmets and everything, but I was able to kind of clear my whole schedule and cancel it. That is because I was successful in a past life. I don’t know if this advice really applies to somebody that’s grinding on their startup because I tell you, in those days that I was grinding on my startup, I was not going on a lot of adventures.
Andrew Wilkinson: Let’s talk about local versus global adventures. So local would be like, oh, hey, your buddies doing kayaks. What kind of adventures are you doing? Are you doing just hikes and random activities and stuff like that? And id be really curious. Do you have a repository of this? Do you have a big list of ideas? I keep on my apple notes, kid activities, for example, to do with my sons or things I want to do as a date idea with my girlfriend. And I think a lot of people are a bit lost with this stuff. Do you have a big list?
Nick Gray: I do have a list of interesting things that I want to try within my town. I’ll give you one example that I’ve taken at the party that you were at. Was Ali Abdall there?
Andrew Wilkinson: No, but I actually just did his podcast and he’s awesome. I love him.
Nick Gray: He came to visit and he was at a party that I hosted and I happened to be going later that night to this adult skate night. Many towns have skating rinks and they will have adult skate night. So I knew which nights that was and I was like, let’s go to adult skate night. That’s a very sort of americana style experience. So I do know certain things that are kind of interesting. A hack that I would offer that most people probably have not tried is if you live in a relatively large city. So I would say for Andrew, Vancouver and not Victoria, look on Airbnb and it by default it’s in the lodging, but you can click the button to go to Airbnb experiences. Have you ever done Airbnb experiences, Andrew?
Andrew Wilkinson: No, but I know what they are. I didn’t know that had taken off.
Nick Gray: Yeah, it’s actually very good. And look to see what Airbnb experiences are in your town and it’s worth paying the $100 or whatever it is to go on one of them and sort of to experience another pro tip with those is there is a little bit of grade and score inflation. So I will only book the Airbnb experiences that are like 4.95 and above.
Andrew Wilkinson: So basically like being a tourist in your own town and then getting out nature sports. I know you rented at a water park at one point.
Nick Gray: Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God, that was so much fun.
Andrew Wilkinson: So, like, just doing random stuff and having new experiences. And my understanding is, because the science and psychology of time is such that if you do different things a lot, you’ll actually experience your time as being longer. So I assume that really benefits you from that perspective. Like, I’m astounded by the number of new things you might do in a year versus me.
Nick Gray: I think it’s different. I have a lot more freedom and flexibility. I don’t want to make you feel bad, but I don’t have kids. I have a lot more flexibility and schedule for my time. Recently, I’ve started writing recaps of my month prior, and it’s been very eye opening to me at times how much stuff I really am doing. And so I am thankful, as close as I am to this experience, while I’m like, I really don’t do that much. When I do the month recap, I’m like, oh, my God, I did a lot that month.
Andrew Wilkinson: So, yeah, and then global adventures. So I remember when we met in Victoria, you were with your friend Tynan, and you were like, yeah, we’re on a cruise show. We love cruising. That’s something we do many times a year. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Nick Gray: You know, I realize all these experiences I’m talking about the kayaking with friends, the cruise ship with friends. Both of those were things that friends sort of invited and got me into, and both of those people I met through events. So my friend Tynan, I met by hosting my museum tours. My friend Aaron, who invited me to go kayaking, I met when I was speaking at an event that I was invited to because of the museum things that I used to do. So doing these events helps to figure out those friends and that funnel, and then hopefully, you surround yourself and get invited to some other cool things. Yeah, we do cruises. I mean, I think cruises amongst people our age are looked down upon, but we do them in our own way. We don’t drink, we don’t gamble. We sometimes try to read a book a day. We write. We’re productive on these cruises, and we use it as a very cheap, mobile hotel that happens to be on the ocean. So we think about it a little differently. Not like vacation, but as like, life.
Andrew Wilkinson: Plus, how do you look at travel? What are you trying to get out of? Travel.
Nick Gray: I look at travel to be able to play a city like an instrument. To be able to feel like I am a little more in the driver’s seat, like I can get what I want out of it. I’m booking a trip right now where I have to go to Bali in a couple weeks and I need to do a layover. And I have the choice to either do a layover in Tokyo or in Taipei. And I think I might go to Tokyo so that I can get a little deeper on my knowledge and experience of the city. The ability to travel last minute with one way tickets has perhaps been the greatest life hack that I can recommend for travel. I never book round trip. I only book one way. It is not that much more expensive. And the feeling and freedom to leave when you are bored or to stay as long as you want is absolutely incredible. So that is one thing that has changed the way that I think about travel. And then one last thing. If you’re listening to this and you’re like, oh, that works for Nick because he sold his business for this much money. I mean, it sounds cliche, but playing the credit card miles game is a good way for somebody just starting out to be able to travel like a billionaire, or not like a billionaire, but like a multimillionaire. To rack up and accumulate those miles from the bonuses from your credit cards.
Andrew Wilkinson: What’s the best website or place to learn about that?
Nick Gray: I use a service. It’s a concierge service. That’s one or $2,000 a year called Mile Method. There are plenty of other ones online that you can find for this guy. I pay him like $1,500 a year or $2,000, and he tells me exactly which three credit cards to sign up for per quarter. It doesn’t ding your credit score. I’ve accumulated over 2 million mile. I use those miles, by the way, because I was in Singapore visiting my friend Nir and I needed to get home. And the only flight was 180,000 miles, which is ridiculous. That’s like a $9,000 worth of points, whatever. But because I had spent all this time to build up the miles, I was able to just pull the trigger and not feel bad about it. And I flew business class from Singapore back to LA, back to Phoenix. It was beautiful. It was great.
Andrew Wilkinson: It’s awesome. Can you talk about what it was like to go to Tokyo and have a blind date there?
Nick Gray: Yeah, I’ll talk a little bit about it. I don’t want to talk too much about the aftermath to give that some space, but I will say that what was underappreciated by people was how well this went. And it went even better than I wrote about that. Frankly, Andrew, like, I think if you and I traveled for five days together, by the end of five days with just each other, we would be a little bit tired of each other. I don’t know, maybe. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but I’m a hard person to travel with. We each want our own space. And I was very lucky to find someone, and someone found me who we were able to spend a lot of time together and not get really mad at each other. And so that was really nice, and that was exciting during the early days, it was pretty overwhelming. I almost said, I’m canceling this. I’m not doing it. This is too much, too stressful. There was just too much response, and I just felt like I was getting these beautiful messages from people, these, like, 55 year old widowed women that had found my post and wanted sort of a trip of a lifetime and sending me the most beautiful, amazing emails. And the reality is, with so much inbound, I couldn’t write back to all of them. And I felt like I was. I just set myself up for something that I couldn’t deliver on.
Andrew Wilkinson: So it went totally viral. And I’m assuming you’re gonna share. I think you posted an addendum and stuff, but when you say, oh, I’m still. You’re still processing it, or what happened?
Nick Gray: I’m not still processing it. It’s just that I don’t like what happened was an amazing date. It was exactly as it happened. It was better than it happened. And yet the guy who writes story worthy said, your life experiences, you don’t wanna perfectly tie up the bow redemption all the time. And so now I tell you, I go out, I was at an event last night. Everybody’s asking me about this and this and kind of personal questions that. I live a lot of my life online, and I’ve been struggling recently with wanting to have that be private, which is ironic because it was my choice to share about it. But some of those questions, like, what’s happening with you and the girl? Are you going to see her again? Like, I wanted that story to end so I can, like, have my life afterwards.
Andrew Wilkinson: Totally. You guys aren’t like, some bachelor contestants or something? And now everyone’s staring and seeing, you know, are you guys gonna break up or not? I totally get that. That makes a lot of sense.
Nick Gray: Students, speaking of the bachelor stuff, hold on. I’ll just say one last thing. Is that 400 applicants, you know, at some point, it got down to about five or ten, and I had some really beautiful conversations with some of these incredible women who I really wanted to invite. And for one reason or another, it didn’t work out. And I had to sort of break up with them and tell them that they weren’t gonna go. And it’s like, oh, cry me a fiddle. Nick Gray has to break up with these beautiful women. But it was really kind of emotional, actually. I was like, oh, my gosh, how do people do this? It’s not for me.
Andrew Wilkinson: Oh, no, it’s hilarious. I actually watched the bachelor. I find it really entertaining, and I never thought it would be something that I would enjoy, but I feel like, in a way, it’s every man’s feeling fantasy. Or what you think would be where you’ve got 25 beautiful women all competing for your attention, but you realize very quickly what it really is is 25 beautiful women all dumping all their problems on you and cat fighting, and you have to deliver hard news and stuff. It actually doesn’t look like a lot of fun. So I think you got a little taste of the Bachelor, and you touched the hot stove. That’s funny. So now we’ve been actually surprisingly tactical. I think we are both systems people, so we’re a bit tactical. But I have this section of the podcast where I like to go into kind of people’s days, their routines, products, they recommend, all that kind of stuff. But before we do that, I just want to talk about investing and money. How do you invest your money today?
Nick Gray: I invest my money today mostly with decisions that I make once and then just set them and forget them. And so I make perhaps one investment decision per year. I’m 81% in the stock market, 11% in real estate, and that’s industrial real estate. I rent my own. I’m in an apartment now. My industrial real estate is like warehouses and boring things like that, and then the rest is cash or something like cash. And, yeah, I don’t have any good investing advice for people. I have typically invested in things that I know. I was an early extreme user of Amazon. Amazon stock is now 10% of my net worth. My basis on that Amazon stock is so low that you would be disgusted. I will never sell that. So that’s not an active decision that I just happened to invest in it in 2002 or four. Put a lot of money into it. Literally forgot the password to my brokerage account, so I could never sell it during the financial crisis when things were probably tanking. So I’ve made a couple of those decisions of things that I know that I have, frankly, gotten lucky about. And then occasionally once a year, I will have some cash that I need to do and invest. And I’m probably now more towards just buy vanguard index funds and sort of set it and forget it.
Andrew Wilkinson: And how do you enjoy your money? So, obviously, you go on adventures and you host events. Those cost money. What do you spend your money on? What actually brings you joyous?
Nick Gray: It’s not like it’s like it costs that much, but I’ve really been leaning into services and services such as I made the shift this year, instead of once a week to have my housekeepers come, now I have them come twice a week. That is a very small thing. That is not that expensive. I guess it adds up over time, but I would prefer to spend less on my home and more on home services. So having my housekeeper come twice a week, I’ve hired a house manager, which is more sort of advanced household support, such as, maybe I’ll go to the grocery store, but then I need that thing to be sorted into my pantry in a really nice way, or I have a ton of packages and boxes that I need help to sort of open up and return, or I need my closet, all my shirts to be lined up in a color gradient. And so my house manager, who comes once or twice a week, she helps me with those. I love paying for things like massages and physical therapy, things that make me feel better or to sort of unwind. I have almost an unlimited budget for health related things. For example, I’m going to a dentist right now that is not in network. I pay a lot of money for that, but I really like how much time she spends with me. I pay for a functional medicine doctor that will stay on the call and answer all of my questions. Those are some things that I like and that I spend my money on.
Andrew Wilkinson: What kind of dental stuff are you doing? My teeth. I grind my teeth at night and I started wearing a grind guard, and then the grind guard pushed my bottom teeth and made them all funky. And so now I’m like, I want my. I got braces before I want my beautiful teeth back. But I’m debating, have you done any weird stuff dental wise?
Nick Gray: Here’s the thing for listeners that I think might be interesting for dentists. Dentists do not make money unless they sell you services. I recently met with a woman who spent over $600,000 to go to dental school. She said I quit after six months because I had to be silently selling. And one example of that I’m not sure if this is totally accurate, but having a cavity can be on a spectrum. You can have a little cavity that doesn’t need a filling, and you can go to one dentist that will say, oh, look, you got five cavities. These five cavities need five fillings. You could go to another dentist, perhaps, that says, look, you need to be mindful of these spots. Let’s talk about changing your diet, your brushing routine, your habits. Are you noticing sensitivity with these? If you are, we can do it, but if not, we don’t have to. And so just be aware that especially amongst all these dental services that have been rolled up with PE firms, they are highly incentivized to. They don’t make money unless they book. Now, please correct me if I’m wrong. If this is not the case, and I don’t know anything about teeth, then please correct me, and I’m willing. But I had a situation where I got a crown, and the crown was a very expensive, fancy type of crown. I think the crown never was placed exactly right. We had problems putting it in. It’s never, the last two years, it’s never really adjusted. And I had it removed two weeks ago, and I’m having some situations where I might lose the tooth. Ultimately, these are just things of getting to be older. But I would say that if you’re listening to this and you don’t just like your hair, if you are not sort of actively having a tooth care routine that includes flossing and water pick and brushing your teeth for the full two minutes, that that is something that I wish I would have done sooner in my life.
Andrew Wilkinson: I have a friend who shared with me, there was an investigative reporter who went around, and they basically took somebody who had a, I think it was a minor cavity or something like that, and they took them to ten different dentists and they checked what all the dentists recommended, and then they went to a board of, I believe it was dental professors at a university or whatever, and they said they would compare. What do the dental professors say they need versus what do the dentists recommend? And almost across the board, the dentists recommended everything from a filling to crazy, you know, aesthetic surgeries and all sorts of other stuff. So I agree. You got to really think about the incentive. Ill tell you another story. A friend of mine, he was getting some crowding, and so his dentist referred him to an oral surgeon, and the oral surgeon said, oh, you should get your wisdom teeth out. Its only on the bottom. You really only need to get your bottom wisdom teeth out. But you know what? While were in there, lets get all of them out. So we do it all at once. And, you know, obviously that costs double the amount of money. And so my friend takes the advice and his upper wisdom tooth ends up getting infected and he gets a bacterial infection and he almost loses his eye. So he came within an inch of losing his eye, but fortunately was able to have surgery and the antibiotics worked. So, like, you got to be really thoughtful about listening to dentists.
Nick Gray: It’s the idea that you have to be your own advocate. And I guess I just grew up thinking, oh, this is a dentist, this is a doctor. And again, there are good dentists out there. I don’t want to slander them all, but I think I happen to have gone to one that was in a fancy office that had all the Netflix stuff. They had cold brew coffee in the lobby. And I was like, oh, this place is cool. This is a hip dentist. And I think, I wish I would have gotten maybe some more second opinions or something like that.
Andrew Wilkinson: So you spend a lot of money on medicine. Any other stuff you like to spend money on? On. What about gadgets? I feel like you always have weird recommendations for gadgets. And my happy place is researching, so it’ll be like, oh, I need to buy a new tv. What’s the best possible tv? Do you like spending money on that stuff?
Nick Gray: Yeah, yeah, I do spend money on that stuff. I always get the newest phone. I generally have a nice lightweight laptop. When the Apple vision pro came out, I was the first to buy it. I spend a lot of money on gadgets and gear, and I was influenced in my decision on phones by my friend Amit Gupta. Do you know Amit?
Andrew Wilkinson: I love Amit. He’s a great guy.
Nick Gray: Great guy. And he had leukemia many years ago. And when he came out of leukemia, he had bought, you know, we’re friends, we’ve been friends for a long time. And he had bought the brand newest, fanciest phone with the most amount of storage. And I sort of questioned him a little on that. I said, why did you buy a terabyte of stuff? What do you need a terabyte for? He said, have you ever got the message that your phone is out of space? And I said, yeah, but then it takes me ten minutes to kind of clean it up. Essentially, he said, having a near death life experience, he never wanted to even question whether he had enough space or storage or memory to capture these beautiful moments of his life. And he said, I’m never again going to worry about that. I’m happy to pay whatever it is so I never get that freaking message. Your phone is out of space or whatever. And so that has encouraged me because I’m on my phone so much. I will almost always have and will pay for the latest and greatest whatever.
Andrew Wilkinson: Let’s talk a little bit about your typical day. What does that look like?
Nick Gray: When I saw these questions on the pre interview, I was like, oh, man, I’m embarrassed. Embarrassed to say my day, but I’ll share my day to just know that there are people out there who don’t have a perfect day. Because the reality is, because a lot of my team starts to work before I do. I wake up and I do enter a largely reactive mode, but I’ll start at the very beginning. I wake up without an alarm. I’ve never used an alarm over the past five or ten years. I can’t imagine living with an alarm. I wake up when my body naturally wakes up, which is usually around 07:00 in the morning. Um, I drink a little sort of probiotic thing with water and then I have green tea. And green tea is another thing that I will spend a lot of money on because I like very fine and fancy japanese green tea. So I will make some japanese green tea and try to sip it standing outside, just to sort of wake up a little bit. Around that time, I will look at my phone and my notifications and inevitably sometimes get pulled into something. Or I’ll try to go to the gym. And I have had a lot of success over the past six months going to the gym. I’ve been trying to gain muscle. It’s very hard for me to gain muscle. And I found that even though I was working out well, I simply wasn’t eating enough. And I tracked my calories over one weekend. Every single thing I ate, I measured and I counted and I realized I just, just there was no way. It didn’t matter how hard I worked out. I couldn’t gain cause I wasn’t eating enough. And so this leads me to my next thing. I pretty much eat the same food almost every single day. I cook almost all of my meals. And so I’ll make some breakfast. I’ll go to the gym, I’ll make a smoothie afterwards.
Andrew Wilkinson: What do you have for breakfast, lunch and dinner, usually.
Nick Gray: So for breakfast, I buy these Starbucks egg bites that are circular. And I microwave them for a minute, five. Then I throw them in the air fryer to give them a little bit of crisp. And that’s an awesome breakfast. I can make in about four or five minutes. Occasionally I’ll add a little bit of rice to that. I have these microwave rice bowls. That’s an easy meal that I can make in, like, five minutes or less. For lunch, I will make this pho bowl where I take rotisserie chicken that I buy and I. I have processed and kind of chopped up in the fridge, and I can make this bowl of pho. It’s almost like ramen noodles that I then add, like, crushed up peanuts and some chicken and sprouts that I grow at home. But all of my meals I can make in ten minutes or less. And they’re very simple. They’re kind of things I’d be embarrassed to serve to friends just. Cause I’m just. I’m just trying to hit my macros, right? So I talked to a guy recently. He says he spends $6,000 a month on Doordash. And he said that, for him, is what he spends his money on. He says, I like to order food. I don’t want to cook. I like to eat delicious food. And that’s how he spends his money as a single guy is on every meal from doordash. I’m the opposite. I cook every meal at home. I have meetings and calls during the day. I’m usually trying to write an article or do a video. I’m kind of going through a content creator journey right now myself. And then I’ll try to go to an event at night or something. And I host events as well. I went to an event last night. I try to do something every night of sorts, but then, oh, it’s so nice when I don’t have anything scheduled at night. And maybe I’ll be able to get a workout in at night if I didn’t in the morning. I wind down around man. My schedule is not one to be proud of. Most nights I don’t get in bed until 1111 30. And I mounted a projector that projects YouTube or Netflix onto the ceiling because I always thought it was a little silly to sit up in bed and watch tv. I don’t like to have screens. I don’t have phones or anything in my room, but I will allow myself to watch YouTube with my blue blocker lights on the ceiling. And so I’ll watch for, like, five or 15 minutes and inevitably fall asleep.
Andrew Wilkinson: So there’s a hack where you don’t need to wear the blue blocking lights. If you’re using an Apple tv, you can triple tap the accessibility shortcuts and you can use color tint to make your screen red so it just removes all the blue. I do that every night.
Nick Gray: Wow. I had no idea that could be a game changer. Thank you very much. Huh.
Andrew Wilkinson: Okay, what about productivity? Do you have any systems or tricks for staying productive? I’d love to know you’ve got a team. I know you have a bunch of people in the Philippines. What does that team look like? What kind of software do you use and what systems do you use to work with them?
Nick Gray: Great. So I’ll talk about the team first because I. I couldn’t live my life without them. I have four people who work for me right now. One of them who’s worked with me the longest, she does special projects. Special projects include everything from my various WordPress installations. I have several websites to complicated things like maybe renewing my global entry or dealing with more advanced things. And so she helps me with those. I have one who manages my calendar and my emails and my link, and it’s more sort of administrative stuff. Then I have another who’s full time on videos and helping me with short form videos, and then a fourth one who’s sort of like a floater. And she can do a little bit of everything. And we’re working to have her train to fill in. When people have to take breaks or they’re on holidays or things like that, they help me with that. Systems I use a lot of. If you could see my desk right now, I have tons of note cards everywhere with little reminders to myself, and I have them taped up around my apartment when I’m meeting with someone, I’m writing down with a sharpie on these note cards, and I use these note cards maybe in ways that other people won’t. I always have a notebook in my back left pocket or I’m writing things down. I don’t have a good system for productivity within my team. They use Trello for managing things and things I need to review, but I don’t have a great system there.
Andrew Wilkinson: Are you good at managing systems in general, though? Like you mentioned, airtable, I’m always jealous of these people who have these. They use Asana and airtable and all these tools and they manage them. I admire systems like that, but I’m not a maintainer of them. Do you use anything like that personally? Do you do GTD or any kind of personal productivity system?
Nick Gray: I think GTD is great and I think those things are probably really good. I’ve gone through periods in my life where I’ve been very successful with them. At this point in my life. I’m more interested in having phone calls and conversations and just finding people. One thing that I do that’s unique, that maybe not a lot of people do, is I have my assistants read my email to me and I will dictate my responses and replies to them. The actual time that I’m on a computer is very little these days, and that for me, I’ll give one example at night, in order to wind down at night, I’ll do what we call on the team, a walk and talk. It’s exactly what it sounds like. I’ll go walk in the neighborhood for an hour late at night and I’ll have my team reply back to messages that I’ve labeled that we can do on a walk and talk. So I get a lot of messages that require a response from only me, and I will usually respond to them verbally. And so people will get a response from me at like 03:00 a.m. i. And that was them. Like going back over the video call to kind of type in what I said.
Andrew Wilkinson: How did you find this team in the Philippines?
Nick Gray: I originally hired with a recruiting service and then I ended up going direct because I was more interested because I’m such a weird person. I need the culture fit that’s so important. But I think there’s some very good recruiting services. If you are listening to this podcast and you want to get started with hiring a virtual assistant, I would suggest start on upwork. You do not need a full time person yet. You won’t know how to work with them. Go on upwork or a similar service. I don’t know what else is like upwork but and just hire someone for a few hours. And what I tell people is simply say I’m going to get on my computer and work and you follow along and see if there’s things that you think you can help me with along the way and do a screen share. That’s what I advise for most people to get started.
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, dude, this was so fun. I feel like we could probably talk for another 3 hours. There’s a lot of other rabbit trails we’ll go down, so we’ll have to have you back on. I’m going to see you hopefully in June. I’m coming to Austin, I think on the 10th, so we should, we should do an event or something.
Nick Gray: We should definitely do it. I think I’ll be in Bali at that time and I hope that I will see you with a certain project in your backyard in July sometime. So fingers crossed, dude.
Andrew Wilkinson: It was so good to see you and I’m looking forward to chatting more.
Nick Gray: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Andrew. And by the way, if you listen to this podcast and you thought that it was interesting, send me a tweet and tag Andrew as well. Just say, say hey to us. I’m gray news on there.
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah. So on Twitter, Nick Gray news, what about your website? You got to tell people the link and we’ll link it in the show notes. But for your excellent newsletter.
Nick Gray: Oh yeah, please, you can find that on my website at dot nickgray.net. nickgray.net. And I’m active on all the social medias. And then I have a website for my book that’s with party and hosting advice. That’s www.party.pro. So check that out.
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If you liked this episode, you might also like my appearance on the My First Million podcast. You can also read more about the article here on my blog.