My First Million: Life Hacks from Nick Gray

Last updated: October 2, 2024

I was interviewed on the famous business podcast My First Million in September 2024.

You can watch and listen to my episode here. I’ll also tell you some of my favorite parts, additional info, and show you a behind-the-scenes video from a live MFM recording.

Watch & Listen

• YouTube: Nick Gray on My First Million
• Spotify: Nick Gray on My First Million
• Apple Podcast: Nick Gray on My First Million
• Overcast, Castro, More here on MFM Episode Page

Show Notes

Here are the official show notes, with additional commentary added by me.

(0:00) Intro

(4:12) If you had $10M, how would you live?

We talked about this blog post that I wrote many years ago. It’s a great exercise that you should do! But I think my number is a big higher than $10M now.

(10:11) Find who your heroes follow

(13:29) Speedrun of Nick Gray’s career

Including Flight Display Systems and Museum Hack.

(22:15) Idea: White label enterprise sales

Building a good B2B sales team is very hard. I propose that someone should do a startup where you just build an enterprise sales team, and then hope to get acquired for the team.

(26:08) Idea: Millionaire Matchmaker

If you’re rich and want me to find you a partner on a contingency basis, contact me.

(37:22) Idea: web-hosting services

In the 1990s I ran a web hosting company called vs3 Web Services. Today I still think this is one of the easiest businesses to start and sell. You would be reselling bulk web hosting, simple security, and maintenance for website clients you can find locally.

(45:00) Idea: Airbnb Experiences

As a side hustle or easy small business, I proposed that people should start giving tours in their local town. I am sad to report that Airbnb has disabled new hosts from offering experiences, but I posted to Brian Chesky to ask when they’ll open it back up.

(48:55) Idea: Geek Squad as a service

Boost the WiFi coverage, tweak some phone settings, clean people’s screens, etc. Simple stuff goes a long way! I’ll link to the tools soon that I got to clean my friends laptops in a new article soon.

(55:00) Idea: VHS to digital conversion as a service

(58:58) Idea: Bring blogging back

I write a lot on my personal blog. Take a look at some of my best articles here. I also have a blog about party tips and tricks here that not many people know about.

(1:04:05) The persuasion of liking

(1:09:14) How to throw a Nick Gray party 

Featuring the NICK method.

Other Notes

The My First Million podcast is hosted by my friends, Samantha Parr and Shaan Puri.

I acted as the Master of Ceremonies for one of their live, in-person podcast recordings in April 2023. Watch the behind-the-scenes video I made of that here on YouTube:

Thanks to Sam, Shaan, and the whole MFM team for having me on. Also thanks to Jack Smith who gave me good advice before the interview.

See my April 2024 Life Recap featuring some My First Million shoutouts.

Transcript

Sam Parr: All right, Nick, are you ready?

Nick Gray: Well, I’m late because I had to go to party city.

Shaan Puri: You are party city, dude. You’re the human party city.

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

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

Shaan Puri: Do you show up to, like, lunches.

Sam Parr: Like this with agendas?

Nick Gray: 100% with agendas, and sometimes even my own keynote presentations and.

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Gray: Oh, you did it. So I hope to give actionable takeaways for your listeners. Listeners, this is an actionable takeaway for you in that you can do this with your friends, with your spouse, with your loved ones. To ask them, if you had $10 million, how would you live your life differently? And get specific. Don’t just say, I want to eat better. What does that exactly mean? Now, Shaan may know this. This is a Tony Robbins exercise that he’s done either at business mastery or UPW. And the gist I’ll forward you to the end is that the vast majority of things we say that we would do differently at $10 million, actually, you only need a million dollars to get there. The vast majority, if you think, oh, if my life was a billionaire, this is what I would do, you actually maybe only need 1020, $50 million. And I say, actually, that’s still a lot of money. But it helps you to realize that, for example, for a lot of people, oh, if I had a billion dollars, of course I would have a private chef. So they say, okay, well, let’s track that out. What does that exactly mean for you to have a private chef? You want to have meals that are set up in your fridge. You want to have a full time person, etcetera. And it was a very helpful exercise to me to think that in the past, if I wanted $500 million, well, actually, the vast majority of the things that I wanted, I could do for much less without sacrificing all that time, money, energy to get to that level.

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

Sam Parr: Yeah. The problem with that is, like, on my list, it’s like, influence. Politicians overthrow governments, you know, like bribe officials. And you need a lot more money than just $10 million for that.

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

Sam Parr: I’m joking. Joking. Okay, but go ahead.

Nick Gray: You’re on the record as a lobbyist. Okay. Yeah.

Shaan Puri: Say what? Would you even lobby for free?

Sam Parr: Zen for all? I don’t.

Shaan Puri: Okay, we have a proposal here for, like, larger serving size of bubblegum, I guess. Sure. It’s all good.

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

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

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

Nick Gray: Gosh, I had a website since 1996. Yeah, yeah.

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

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

Sam Parr: Why do they follow you?

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

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

Sam Parr: Yes.

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

Shaan Puri: Did you do anything to be the discovered one or literally. Was it lucky?

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

Shaan Puri: So you’re in high school, and that helped pay for college, as I understand. So what did you kind of roughly make on that business?

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

Sam Parr: One of them was in Boston. He beat you.

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

Sam Parr: You got that equation wrong. You answered yourself like, if it’s like x plus y, you put yourself in the wrong variable.

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

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

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

Shaan Puri: Harmonica lesson, you think?

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

Shaan Puri: Right.

Nick Gray: So consider that there’s a tip within a tip. Why’d I move to India? Yeah, it just. At the time, it seemed like the future. It did seem like a piece of the future. There was all this news about BPO and outsourcing and everything. WiPro moving over to India, you had.

Shaan Puri: Said your college roommates were the one or the guys who created CollegeHumor and Vimeo. Were you involved in that? Or you just kind of sitting by and they were doing it right next to you? What was that like?

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

Sam Parr: And then if you fast forward, I think you’re like, the first time that you kind of. You said you’ve made money like, two or three times. The first time was after that India trip with you and your father, right?

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

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

Sam Parr: They made them. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Sam Parr: This is a good business idea, Nick. What makes you special? And Shaan experienced it because you guys hung out, and I don’t think that he fully understood like, that this is the type of stuff that Nick Gray does. It’s the weirdest, quirkiest stuff. But when he decides to be quirky and weird. It’s pretty authentic to him. And he goes, like, a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

Sam Parr: Do you get lonely?

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

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

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

Shaan Puri: Is the retainer refundable?

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

Sam Parr: Like, I don’t have time to color. There’s no type of color. We can’t call her today.

Shaan Puri: Color me on this note with this plan.

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

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

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

Sam Parr: There’s a huge range.

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

Sam Parr: Yeah. And in advance. You get like a PDF. Like, I’ve helped some of my buddies, like, review some of them. You get like a PDF of like five different people. And they, it’s crazy. It says, like, lives in Jackson hole but willing to relocate, that it, like, does a profile on them, and you kind of pick and choose.

Shaan Puri: And how much better is this PDF than just a, if I went to somebody’s tinder profile and right click save as PDF, what would I be getting that’s different in this?

Nick Gray: Oh, my God. Well, the next piece of advice for listeners is you need to delete your dating apps. You guys need to get off of the dating apps because you are not going to be able to make a difference. Nobody cares about you unless you’re above six foot. You’re devilishly attractive. The vast majority of men need to delete their dating apps.

Sam Parr: Please.

Nick Gray: And I’ll give you one tip. You need to join a sports club. Specifically, consider joining a kickball league. Now, why kickball? Kickball has the largest number of teams, so the team size is larger than any other sport. And generally both teams go out for drinks afterwards. Now, you’ve heard other things like join a run club, go to yoga classes, things like that. If you do those things, you basically can talk to two people at each one. You can talk to somebody before and you can talk to somebody afterwards. But if you’re trying to ping pong around this run club to get numbers, it’s going to be very, very low signal, and you’re not going to look good. Think about that. Start a matchmaker.

Sam Parr: You got to get to answer Shaan’s questions.

Shaan Puri: You have to run, which sucks. Okay.

Nick Gray: Shaan’s question was, how much more details do you get from a matchmaker? The one that I worked was a different way, and so I would not get these detailed advanced prep sheets for the $5,000 date ones. They are checking to make sure that the things that are important to you are important to them as well.

Sam Parr: And sometimes they do. They do background checks on everyone.

Nick Gray: They do? Yes, they do.

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

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

Shaan Puri: I’m a believer in? If you said, and I’ve actually told.

Nick Gray: Seven figures, I’m like, you should set.

Shaan Puri: Up a bounty, which is that if you introduce me to somebody that I fall in love with or get engaged or get married to, like, why would you not put up a million dollars, $2 million for that? For them? It would make such a huge difference in their life. It’s the best thing money could buy for those people.

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

Shaan Puri: Dude. Babe the Bounty Hunter. That’s a good moniker. You can have your own TV show with us, Sam. Nick is so funny. Because when we hung out, he was the only person I’ve ever met in my life who calls people babes. But not like he calls people a turbo babe. Yeah. He’s just like, I was hanging out with these two babes, and I was like. I started laughing. I’ve just never heard someone say that. He’s like, yeah, they were. It was cool. Okay, so you’re babe the bounty hunter. Million dollar contingency fee. Sell to private equity. I kind of love this idea. You know, I don’t know if you’re raising for this, but I’m interested. We could get you some distribution on the pod. We could do some special episodes. Once a month, we talk about our suitor here.

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

Sam Parr: Do you know a lot of single, wealthy men, Shaan? Yeah, I know so many of them. I call them Peter Pans. Like, I’ve got.

Nick Gray: I’ve got a second.

Sam Parr: Yeah. Sorry, Nick. You’re a Peter Pan. Um, and what’s crazy to me is Nick’s not one of these guys, typically. I would have thought you’d be good at some type of public speaking, whether even if you just have a team of ten people, like, you could talk to them in front of them. There’s a lot of attributes that you would think would translate to women. Not the case. Not the case with a lot of friends, and I. That has always boggled my mind. You know what I mean? Do you have friends like that, Shaan? And doesn’t that seem kind of crazy?

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

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

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

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

Nick Gray: Yeah. Oh, what are you doing over there, Johnny? Listen to this guy in the harmonica talk about how to find your life partner.

Sam Parr: Oh, he must be very successful.

Nick Gray: Is he married with kids? No, he’s single.

Sam Parr: What was. What was your other idea? Do you have another idea?

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

Shaan Puri: I got a cool twist on this which is the why now or what you could do differently now I have a friend whos doing this right now. I wont give away the category because I dont want them to feel like I invited competition for them but they found a specific category so a specific type of business. Its not pest control but lets just pretend it was pest control for a second. So they picked a category and then they were like cool if I hired a fancy New York design agency to make an awesome website for this company. It doesn’t have to look super, super slick but like much slicker than what they have by default and checks all the boxes of what a company like that needs. Oh they need to immediately be able to request a quote. They need to be able to do XYZ cool, got the requirements, got five design templates made and then what they did was they were like cool. You know AI is actually amazing at this. So they told the AI, they were like AI go find every, let’s just use pest control as an example. Every pest control business in New York right now that you can find on the online easy to do, it crawls, it gives you a spreadsheet of all the names of the companies and their URL’s says great. Then it created another AI agent that said take their existing website, pull out the info and then apply it to one of these five templates. And it did that. And then he said another AI agent was draft a cold email to this list of prospects and include in a mock up an attachment that was made by agent two that redid their website. And so they’re getting this crazy response rate because they’re going to these businesses and they’re saying, hey, I was checking out your site. Just so you know, I’m a web developer. I help companies like you. I actually made a mockup of your, I made a mockup of your website like of what I think I could do with it. If you think this looks cool, I’d be happy to do it for you for this monthly fee. And they’re doing lead Gen. They’re getting amazing lead gen because they’re coming with a hyper personalized offer which is not just, hey, do you need a website? Or hey, I make websites for companies like you. But hey, I looked at your site, I thought I could improve it. Here’s what it looks like, improved. Do you want it? And that is just that. Makeover can now be automated with AI, which again, I don’t think you need to make your idea successful, but it does add a turbo juice that didn’t exist before that now can work.

Sam Parr: What do you use for that? I mean, that outbound seems amazing for everything.

Shaan Puri: It is amazing. It’s the AI go to market idea, which I think right now the people who are going to make the most money in AI are the people who the AI tool providers. But then the second one is going to be people who can string together AI tools to turbocharge sales.

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

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

Sam Parr: That’s crazy. That is crazy. God damn.

Nick Gray: Help me think about this, guys. Is there something here that I want to riff on, which is that Shaan just had this great idea. Notice that my idea was go to local restaurants and try to sell them a new website. Shaan took it to the nth degree. No. Write a script. So now you can do 5000 a day and blah, blah, blah. And I want to pull listeners back to my side of the aisle.

Shaan Puri: Yes, I think. I think I mid whip memed it for you.

Nick Gray: Which is to say, like, there is beauty in the simplicity of getting started and calling and hand coding and building your business. And that has shown up for me. When I did my museum tour business, I was a tour guide, you guys. I built a multimillion dollar business out of being a tour guide. Every Friday and Saturday night, I was literally leading people at the museum. And I did that for two years before I even hired my first person.

Sam Parr: How much were you making? Just you doing that during the tour.

Nick Gray: Yes, each ticket was like $80. I would tour for ten to 20 people a night and doing it every Friday, Saturday night. So you can do that math, dude.

Sam Parr: Shaan, my. So Nick had this company called Museum Hack, where, like, was it MoMA or what museum?

Nick Gray: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The best museum in the whole world. That’s where we started.

Sam Parr: He just hijacked it. So, like, he didn’t ask them permission if he could give tours there.

Shaan Puri: You called it renegade museum of tours, right? Yeah, he’s part of their offering.

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

Nick Gray: Yeah. I like to think that some of those guarded off areas are more suggestions rather than rules, and that as long as this is a rope, not a fence. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Sam Parr: Whoa.

Nick Gray: Can’t go under it. Watch me. No, no, no. I have a lot of respect for these museums and for the art, but we would do different non traditional things. We would lay down on the floor to look at the ceiling. We would sit down to talk about the art. We would talk about how much the paintings cost, which is a very taboo thing in the art world. And we would do all these non traditional things in a museum space to really do museum tours for people who didn’t like museums. And I want to just say that again. I did tours myself as a side hustle while I was still in the family business. This was my thing, to build up enough money so I could quit the family job and start my own every Friday, Saturday night. That is why I had no dating life, because I was running this business. Which brings me to my next business idea, Airbnb experiences. If you are interested in starting a new side hustle, you can sign up on Airbnb experiences to lead a tour in your town and charge people for it. This is a way for you to immediately start to get money from people searching for cool things to do. Now, this only works in major towns where they’ve launched Airbnb experiences, but it’s generally tier one and tier two cities. Find your favorite stuff, do tours for locals, show them around to some of your great stuff, provide a great experience. Beg for five star reviews, and you can literally create a side hustle on Airbnb experiences.

Sam Parr: Dude, I love Airbnb Experiences. I’ve done probably 15 of them. I freaking love them. You ever do those, Shaan?

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

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

Sam Parr: Did you see Shaan when Nick travels? Did you, like, did he show you all the gadgets he keeps in his bags?

Shaan Puri: Yeah, he had. Well, I didn’t see it, too. He had a pillow. He had, like, an Apple Vision Pro. I don’t know what he had. Like, you know, some juggling balls. He had, like, you know, the essentials.

Nick Gray: Dude.

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

Shaan Puri: Nick, what’s up with the pillow?

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

Shaan Puri: Have you ever had these? I think I might have done it wrong. Mine is so hard.

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

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

Shaan Puri: Yeah. When the barber asks you, do you want it rounded or squared? You have an opinion, whereas I’m just like, whatever, it’s fine. You don’t have to do it. Just like, now you want the money.

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

Nick Gray: Thank you. Thanks.

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

Shaan Puri: Is there some story about, like, a billionaire who does the same thing? Nick. But not with a pillow.

Sam Parr: But Peter Theil does that with a mattress, right?

Shaan Puri: Yeah. What’s the story?

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

Shaan Puri: Sam, what does your advance team do.

Sam Parr: That? My advanced team?

Nick Gray: I’m your advanced team. I love being Sam’s advanced team at events. I love to get himself.

Shaan Puri: What’s the name for that?

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

Shaan Puri: Not usually into that.

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

Shaan Puri: A body guy’s, like, the opposite of a bodyguard. Bodyguard keeps people away. A body guy brings people to you. That’s great. I love it.

Sam Parr: He, like, created this hype. He’s like a hype man. And it was so funny.

Shaan Puri: I had the funniest, embarrassing interaction the other day. So I was. When I went to that trip in San Diego, I was wearing this hat, this hat right here. And so I was standing waiting for my tacos at the taco shack, and this guy goes, hey, I don’t want to bother you, but do you mind if I take a picture? And I was like, oh, sure, man. That’s cool. You’ve been listening for a while. He’s like, no, no, I like your hat. My friend has a company called west, and I just wanted him to see this. And I was like, oh, yeah. I just assumed that you want me. All right, you know what are you getting? Tacos? Do you want my tacos? I had no way out of that moment. By the way, Nick, cue the harmonica. I got a riff on your idea. Your geek squad thing, I think, is a simpler version of it, which is every parent I know that’s kind of like my parents age has this box in their house of just old home videos. I think an even easier one versus can I help you with your stuff? Is just to say, hey, do you guys have any home videos from your kids? Because I can convert them into stuff that you can have on your computer, on the Internet, so you’ll never lose them. They’ll live forever. Can’t even find a VHS player anymore. If you just have that box. I’ll just take the box and I’ll do it for you. Then you basically drive it to CV’s or Costco and they do this shit for you. But there’s a gap there where most people don’t. They’re not really aware of the problem or it’s on their to do list, they’ll never do it. But if a kid showed up at their door, dressed nice, million dollar smile, and said, I’d love to take care of that for you, I’m doing that for people in the neighborhood. I could take it from you right now. Just show me the closet where it is, and I’ll go grab it. I think that you can make an easy few thousand dollars in a couple months of effort there, which sounds like not that much, but at different phases of your life. A few thousand dollars is all the money. It’s all you need. And it gets you going.

Nick Gray: Knock, knock. Ma’am, can I ask you a question? How much are your memories worth? Boom. Boom. Keep your memories safe. Yeah, it’s an easy. It’s an easy sell.

Shaan Puri: Use the Wolf of Wall street. Fair enough. Close. It’s like you watch all the YouTube videos about sales and you over your complete overkill going door to door, it’s like, sam, have you seen that? That company that’s doing these nap. These nap bands, me and Nick, we’re talking about this on the plane. There’s like, you haven’t seen this on a nap band. They have this, like, device that’s like, you gotta find. It’s called element or something like that. It’s to put your mind.

Nick Gray: Send me my free. I know.

Shaan Puri: I’ve been begging these guys to try it because I’m a prolific napper, and napping is, like, part of my brand and I really.

Sam Parr: How do you spell it?

Nick Gray: Elemind. And Shaan and I can act out the skit that we’re gonna do for you.

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

Nick Gray: Okay, Deepak, I’m going to give you the new element. Why don’t you put this on and see if it’ll set you to sleep?

Shaan Puri: Just like this. Okay, that’s it.

Nick Gray: What’s up, everybody? I’m Susie, CEO of Elemind. This is Deepak Chopra.

Sam Parr: Look at that.

Nick Gray: Little bitch fell asleep in five minutes. He’s out like a light.

Shaan Puri: You can’t even hear me.

Nick Gray: What’s up, Deepak? Little bitch. Preorders open now.

Shaan Puri: Right now, they take a famous person and they just knock them out so fast, but almost to the point where they’re just drooling, and it’s like, yo.

Nick Gray: She literally puts a picture of them sleeping.

Shaan Puri: It’s like my worst nightmare. It’s like punk. It’s like a mix of eight sleep and Ashton Kutcher coming out the van. It’s amazing. It’s the best marketing campaign I’ve seen in a while.

Nick Gray: She does have that attitude. She’s like, Deepak Chopra got him.

Shaan Puri: Is this a leader of the free world right now? But watch this.

Nick Gray: Boom.

Shaan Puri: Out like a light, bitch.

Nick Gray: Yeah. Oh. Sleeping like a little baby. Little CEO needs nap time.

Sam Parr: Is this legit at all?

Nick Gray: I think it is legit. I think I would pay for this. Honestly, I want it. Yeah.

Sam Parr: This is insane. There’s no way this works, right?

Shaan Puri: No, I think it works. I’m a believer.

Nick Gray: Speaking of unique marketing strategies, can I talk about what I did on Google reviews with my Google Maps photos?

Sam Parr: Well, and by the way, the Equinox lady came up on this element thing. I want to hear the Equinox story.

Shaan Puri: Tell the Equinox story first, because I hadn’t heard that before until you texted me last night, but I have only heard what you texted me, so I don’t know the story.

Nick Gray: Great. So, first of all, the moral of this story, I’m just going to cut to it, is that listeners next experiment that you need to be doing, bring back blogging. You need to fill the AI’s and the AI’s need to have data from the public web to scrape.

Sam Parr: I’ve been saying this for a long time. Blogging needs to make a comeback.

Nick Gray: Take some of your best tweets. Put them into your blogs if you need to. You don’t have to create new content, but just put the stuff you’re sharing elsewhere into blogs. A great example of that is my own monthly recaps. If you go to nickgraynews.com, you go to the blog, you click the monthly recaps. I take some of my best posts and I put it there on the blog, on the public Internet, in order to scrape. And you need to do this for a few reasons. But one of the reasons is for nefarious purposes. I wanted to find a list of all of the equinox gyms in New York City that had swimming pools. Very hard list to find. And so I made my own list of all the Equinox gyms with swimming pools. It started to rank pretty quickly as the number one search result for other people searching for the same thing. Unfortunately, my gym started to get very crowded, and I would have to wait for the lanes to swim at my gym. And I’m getting 5100 visitors a day to this page. And so I closed my gym swimming pool, according to my blog, for maintenance for a year, so that I would have to wait for less people. And people would say, hey, they’d go there, they’d say, hey, guys, sorry, this pool’s closed for a year. You know, we’re resurfacing the bottom pavement. But these are some other nearby pools and. Yeah, so that’s really good.

Sam Parr: Listen, Google, like, Nick Gray Equinox. He has a PDF on his website. Download, download my full list of equinox gyms with pools. And you could. And if you sign up, we’ll send you the pool links for each of the New York City Equinox pools.

Nick Gray: You know, I got that lead magnet for the Friends newsletter. Brother, I’m out of here.

Sam Parr: You’re going to have just dozens of pool fans in New York who worship you.

Nick Gray: Literally, that’s my life. A dozen here, a dozen there.

Shaan Puri: SEO hacked your way into having your own pool time for free. Because you told everybody the pool is closed. That’s on them for not having better SEO. Cool.

Nick Gray: Yes. Yeah, I have a couple other stories like that.

Shaan Puri: Okay. Yeah, give us. Give us a couple other. I like these.

Sam Parr: Cool.

Shaan Puri: So, gray area. Oh, dude, the gray area. Perfect theme with your last name. All right, keep going.

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

Sam Parr: The story is basically that John must have been pro herbalife, and Ackman was anti herbalife. And so they were having a PR fight.

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

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

Sam Parr: I think it’s influence.

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

Sam Parr: That’s it. It just said, dear Shaan, I like you from cars.

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

Nick Gray: Oh.

Sam Parr: So Guy spear was up more up and coming with than Manish.

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

Sam Parr: Such a good story. That’s a great story.

Nick Gray: The surface area of serendipity. And they talk about that in a lot of different things. Right. That’s why we, we. You don’t get lucky. You put yourself in the opportunity to become lucky.

Shaan Puri: Right?

Sam Parr: You, uh, you want to hear another fun fact about Nick? I. He’s the only person who has host parties and literally five of his ex girlfriends will be there at the same time and they all love each other and they get along perfectly.

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

Shaan Puri: No, I think you should 100% do that. Just think.

Sam Parr: There’s no doubt. This idea.

Shaan Puri: I see no potential issues.

Sam Parr: Yeah, I think this is going to go wonderfully. I think that’s. I think that’s perfect. I think you nailed it. Omron.

Shaan Puri: Nick, can you talk? Can you give us the five minute crash course on how to throw a party? You know, what is the. I haven’t read your book yet. I’m sorry. I bought it, but I haven’t read it yet.

Sam Parr: How many copies have you sold, by the way?

Nick Gray: 20,000, maybe 21,000.

Shaan Puri: It’s pretty good, right?

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

Shaan Puri: But I understand you have something called the NICK method. I don’t know what the NICK method is. What is the NICK method for hosting a party?

Nick Gray: So the NICK method to host a party will absolutely level up. I’m gonna do harmonic on this because if you do this one thing, you will level up your events to be so much better. And the reason is that the bar is so low for a successful event. Think when somebody invites you to, like, a company happy hour. You’re just people standing around at an open bar. It’s, like, bad. That’s the old way. And the future can change if we bend our will to make it do that. You can do that with the nick method when you host events. N I c k. Like my name. The n stands for name tags. Fill out the name tags. First name only, big block letters. The name tags I like are the qualfac three hundreds. I also like the Avery five thousand four hundred twenty four s. The Qualfek 300s come in different colors, and you guys may know those. They discontinued the 5426s, which was really sad, actually.

Sam Parr: It’s the vintage.

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

Nick Gray: I may have got those model numbers wrong.

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

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

Sam Parr: All right.

Shaan Puri: And name tags, I’m in. I buy.

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

Shaan Puri: Great way to do that. Like, is there a better and worse way to do those intros or icebreakers, my man?

Nick Gray: Of course, dude. I’ve done more icebreakers. I live and breathe icebreakers. You have come to the right spot. Welcome to Nick Gray’s party, icebreaker therapy. Because I’ve spent a lot of my life doing icebreakers. Here’s the deal.

Sam Parr: There’s a. Do you know Stefan from SNL’s weekend update? You are Stefan right now. That is you. That is you.

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

Shaan Puri: Yes, yes. Keep going.

Nick Gray: As you continue the event, about an hour later, you want to do one more advanced round of intros. And this is what I call a value additive. Intro. Value additive means that everybody’s answer adds to the benefit of the room. And so for Sam, for example, who lives in Connecticut now, say that he was hosting this in Westchester, you would say, hey, everybody, we’re going to do our last round of icebreakers. Your question is going to be, what is one of your Westchester pro tips or life hacks or little secrets? What’s a small business you support? A dog park you like, a hiking trail you enjoy? What’s the best coffee shop in town? Tell us one great thing in town that you like and want to shine a light on. Okay, so that’s one example. One more example, if you don’t want to focus on your town, would be, hey, everybody, we’re going to do a last round of intros, and I want you to share a great piece of media that you have consumed recently. What’s a movie you watched? A documentary, a podcast, like my first million. Like and subscribe. Gentlemen’s agreement. What are some of those things that you liked and you want to share? Okay. And then you go around the room and you do that. Why does this work? It works because every answer gives somebody value. Oh, I’ve been meaning to go to that restaurant. Oh, my first million. I love those guys. Oh, I heard about that book. I want to check it out. And you do it towards the end of your event. So at the end, people get all these new ideas. They’ve met all these new people, and they leave with a feeling of value. They leave feeling that they’re better than when they showed up. That’s what a good party is.

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

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

Sam Parr: The book made you, like, the king of the introverts because I had so many introverted friends who, like, read the book, and they started hosting Nick Gray parties. And I would be, like, walking around Austin at, like, 07:00 at night. And in Austin, all the bars are outdoor bars. And I would see. I would. I swear to God, there was this one 1 mile walk through east Austin of, like, where all the bars are. And I would see multiple Nick Gray parties happening.

Shaan Puri: Harmonicas all throughout downtown Austin.

Sam Parr: No, in the night, they would be in a circle, and they would. I call them. We would call them nametag Nick. So they always had Nick’s name tags, and they would be in a circle, and I could see the person in the middle pointing exactly like he tells you to do in the book. I swear to God, on one 1 mile walk, I saw three. I saw one at Lazarus, one at Whistler’s, and one this other bar. It was three Nick Gray parties. It was insane. It’s like you were the introvert’s king for a handful of months when I would. In Austin, so many of you were doing it.

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

Sam Parr: Dude, you have so many stories. We probably should wrap up in a minute, but you got, like, so many frickin stories. I just want to. I want you just to, like, rattle off stories. I just like hearing all the most interesting things I’ve had, even without explaining.

Shaan Puri: For the completionist, can you just say what the C and the K stand for in the nick method?

Nick Gray: The N.I.C.K method. N is name tags. I as intros. C stands for cocktails or mocktails only. Do not do a dinner party. I talk about why dinner parties are a recipe for failure, for new first time hosts and K stands for kick them out at the end. This is only a two hour gathering. You want to keep it tight. You want people to leave when they’re wanting more, leave when they’re wanting more. End it when it’s going great, just like this podcast. Thanks for watching. Bye.