Transcriber: Kaoru Suzuki

Reviewer: Denise RQ

I hate museums.

I think they are boring.

The paintings have nothing to do with me.

My feet hurt.

(Laughter)

Get me out of here.

That's how I felt

until about four years ago

when I had an amazing experience.

A woman brought me
to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

on a romantic date.

(Applause)

Thank you very much.

True story. It was our third date.

This is The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A lot of you have probably been there.

It's the most popular museum

in all of America.

It's the second most popular museum

in the entire world,

and yet, to me and my friends

in New York City,

this place, this museum,

is just a tourist attraction.

This is the type of place you go

when your parents are in town.

I didn't have a relationship

with it until that night.

She said, "Let's go

to the museum," and we went.

It was the middle of December

on a Saturday night.
The museums open late
on Friday and Saturday nights.

It looked something like this.

As we walked around,

she began to give me a private tour

showing me things she liked.

I saw paintings, and sculptures,

Egyptian artifacts, and furniture.

I don't know if it was the very romantic

mood lighting that night,

or maybe it was the snow

falling down in Central Park,

or maybe it was just having

a very attractive woman talk to me.

(Laughter)

But something magic happened,

and that night I fell in love

with the museum.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

I'm not joking. I really fell in love

with the museum.

I started going there

every single weekend.

I became obsessed.

It unlocked within me
a sense of curiosity about history and art

that I never knew that I had.

I worked during the week.

I sold electrical equipment for planes.

But during the weekend,

this became my new hobby.

I did audio tours. I followed docents.

I looked things up on Wikipedia.

I found YouTube videos.
I loved it so much that I started doing
free tours for my friends.

These are some photos of those tours:

me showing my friends around the museum,

my favorite things.

It's helpful to keep in mind

that I was a business major in college.

I've never taken an art history class.

These were not very sophisticated tours.

They were basically

ten cool things I found,

and three things that I wanted to steal.

(Laughter)

On my tours, I would bring

my friends to an object like this.

This is a Goa stone case

made in the early 1700s

on the west coast of India

meant to house a Goa stone.

This was a ball

about the size of a pool ball

that the Jesuit priests believed

had magical mystical properties.

It was worth way

more than its weight in gold.

They thought that you could shave off

a piece of a Goa stone

and put it into a cup of tea,

and it would cure any type of poison.

They thought that you could drop

a Goa stone into the well,

and it would cure the plague

for a 100 miles around.

These cases were incredible.

During my tours, we would get down

on our hands and knees

and press our faces up to the glass.

We would look --

(Laughter)

We would look at the craftsmanship.

I would ask my friends, I would say,

"Think about this. What would you put

inside of it if you stole it?"

(Laughter)

Their answer, by the way,

was usually chocolate or drugs.

(Laughter)

So those were my museum tours.

My friends told their friends,

and their friends told their friends.

It became like the go-to thing

to do on a Friday or Saturday night

in New York City.

We did birthday parties

that looked like this.

(Laughter)

A blog wrote about my tours,

and the next day,

1,000 people emailed me

wanting to join one of the tours.

It was becoming a very full-time hobby.

(Laughter)

I started to recruit my friends

to help me out.

I'm happy to tell you today

that two years ago, I quit my job,

and I have spent every day since then

trying to reimagine
the adult museum experience.

The name of my company is--

- Thank you! -

(Applause)
The name of my company is Museum Hack.

I'm going to tell you what we do

that is different from most museum tours

and why I think this matters.

Three main things that make us different:

guides, games, and gossip.

(Laughter)

Let's start with guides

because tour guides are

the heart and soul of our business.

They are the reason

why visitors love us,

come back to us, and tell their friends.

We hire people from a diverse set

of backgrounds.

We hire scientists, art history majors,

we hire actors, and educators.

We hire people like this guy.

His name is Miles.

Miles loves the American wing,

and he does this amazing

"Washington crossing the Delaware."

We hire people like this guy.

This is Ethan.

He is an educator.

(Laughter)

Ethan likes this painting.

(Laughter)

Here's the thing.

When we hire our tour guides,

we think that storytelling

is more important than art history.

(Applause)
Today's audiences have to be entertained
before they can be educated.

So we start with passion first.

Our guides write all of their own routes.

They come up with their whole tour

because they have to talk about things

that they are very, very excited about.

You can imagine they have a lot to share.

On the average Museum Hack tour,

you see two to three times

as many objects as most museum tours.

With us, you see 10, 15,

sometimes 20 objects.

We move so fast in fact

that every single tour starts with a game.

The guide says, "Listen. Before we begin,

I need everybody to huddle up

and put your hands in the middle."

It's really how all of our tours start.

The guide says,

"We need to move very quickly today.

We have to act as a team.

We're going to start off

with little cheer.

we're going to say 'MUSEUM,'

and we're going inside."

(Laughter)

That's really how all the tours start.

They go MU-SE-UM,
and they hustle inside

to begin.

We are selling museum adventures

not museum tours.

Have you ever been at an art gallery?

You are looking at the art,

and instead of feeling inspired
or excited, you start yawning.

(Laughter)

You feel tired and overwhelmed.

This is a real thing that happens.

It is called gallery fatigue.

(Laughter)

We've developed a week of fatigue-fighting

exercises to combat those;

we'll do yoga in the modern

and contemporary gallery.

(Laughter)

We'll do squats in the stairwells.

We love to take pictures on our tours.

We encourage selfies.

(Laughter)

Let's be honest, by the way,

you look awesome in a museum.

We love to take pictures, we do games,

we have prizes, and we do challenges.

We are trying to attract a whole new type

of audience to the museum,

people who think

that maybe they don't like museums.

I'm so excited about what we are doing,

but my favorite part

of the tour is the gossip.

I love to tell people

the juicy back stories behind the art.

Some of my favorite visitors

who show up are people

who we lovingly refer to as finance bros.

(Laughter)

These are people who are first

in their income category,
and they are first in intelligence,

but oftentimes, the last place

they want to be is at the museum.

So they get dragged there

on a date or something.

When they come,

we welcome them to the museum.

We identify them.

(Laughter)

We say, "Tonight, we are going to start

the tour in a totally different way.

We are going to start

and go to the piece that the museum paid

the most cash money for."

(Laughter)

So we take them up the stairs

on the second floor

into a tiny, little room to show them

this tiny, little painting.

It was painted by an artist

named Duccio in the year 1300.

Duccio was a pre-Renaissance master

to put this in perspective.

Before Duccio, art was

what's called Byzantine.

It was 2D, like a comic book,

no interaction.

Duccio comes up and blows it up.

He makes this relationship

between the characters.

On our tours, we get people

to crouch down and look up at this.

It's tiny. It's about

the size of an iPad.

In the year 2004,

the Metropolitan Museum of Art

spent over 45 million dollars.
That's over a million dollars
per square inch.

We get down --

(Laughter)

We get down, and we look

at Jesus brushing aside the veil

on Virgin Mary's blue cloak.

You look at that interaction

between Mary glancing down at Jesus

with his peanut-shaped head.

(Laughter)

Duccio knew how to paint babies.

By the way, he was painting Christ

like this to signify the man child

that he was about to become.

That's why sometimes you see

baby Jesus with a six-pack.

(Laughter)

We know that we have been

successful when we talk about this piece

if afterwards, they say,

"That was really interesting.

What else do you have here

that's expensive?"

(Laughter)

It's controversial to talk about

how much things cost in an art museum.

But that's what our visitors want to hear.

We are not afraid to talk

about controversial things.

I mean, our slogan is,

"Museums are freaking awesome."

(Laughter)

Guides, games, and gossip.

But why do we do this?

Why museums?

Why does this matter?

I have to tell you about my favorite piece

of art in the entire world.

I've been to the Metropolitan Museum

now more than 300 times

in the last three years.

Every single time I see this piece,

I get butterflies in my stomach.

It's a life-size little sculpture.

It is called "Fragment of queen's face."

While it may look new to you,

this is very, very old.

It's an Egyptian artifact

over 3,000 years old.

We don't exactly know who it is.

There is a lot of mystery.

It could be Nefertiti.
It could be a woman named Queen Tey.

It's made from a material

called yellow jasper.

There are two things you need

to know about yellow jasper.

Number one: at the time this was made,

yellow jasper was incredibly rare.

It was so rare that the next largest piece

of yellow jasper in the whole museum

is no bigger than your thumbnail.

So this would've been a really big deal;

the face and the hands.

The second thing about yellow jasper

is that it is insanely hard to work with.

On the hardness scale of 1 to 10,

where diamond is a 10, marble is a 3,

yellow jasper is a solid 6 pushing a 7.

It makes marble look
like a stick of butter.

I was talking to the curator

about how much I like this piece.

He said,

"You know what's incredible?

That not only do we not know who it is;

we don't know how it was made."

This is a very hard stone.

It is a semi-precious stone.

"Beyond all of that, there are

no surviving examples of tools

which could have been used to get

the definition and polish on those lips."

This woman heard us talking,

and she stuck her head in, and she goes,

"I bet it was the aliens."

(Laughter)

She did not work

at the museum, by the way.

(Laughter)

This is my favorite piece because I look

at this, I see those lips, and I think,

"If the lips looked like this,

can you imagine what the rest of it

would have looked like?"

(Laughter)

She would have been presented

to the Pharaoh,

maybe wearing a Nubian wig

and a dress made entirely out of feathers.

I think that this is

what a great piece of art is.

Today I can see this,

and it takes my breath away.

3,000 years ago, I couldn't communicate

with the Egyptians.
I don't speak the language,
and I can't read hieroglyphics.

But today, I can see those lips,

and I can feel something.

A great piece of art

can communicate through time.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

is an encyclopedic museum

that has over 5,000 years

of human history.

The greatest compliment

that I ever got after one of our tours

came from a music video director

from Los Angels.

He said, "I've been on this tour

with you for two hours now.

I never would have been here.

I've walked through these halls,

I've seen these objects that are 100,

that are 500, and that are 1,000 yeas old.

I've seen these objects that are 100,

that are 500, and that are 1,000 yeas old,

that have withstood the test of time.

l look at my own work, and I wonder

if that will stand the test of time.

Being at this museum has made me

want to be a better creator."

My name is Nick Gray.

The name of my company is Museum Hack.

I think that the museums

are freaking awesome.

(Applause)