CO-HOST | Make Money, Find Purpose, and Let People In

0:00Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney Plus. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney Plus. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I'm the life this game. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu now streaming on Disney Plus. Brave Peachy 13. Your listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast. Hey, you're welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast. I am not your host, Travis Chapel. I am his producer, Eric. And on today's episode, I'm actually sharing a clip with all of you from Travis's appearance on the Modern Warrior podcast with Gavin Minin. In this particular episode, Travis talks a little bit about his cancer diagnosis that he got recently and don't worry if you're listening. He is in for a mission and seems to be doing just fine.

1:03But he talks about how that really scary initial moment and the process of dealing with that really helped him reframe his life in many ways. And really reexamine what struggle and hardship actually is. It's a really, really great, raw kind of conversation. I think you're really going to appreciate it. I think it might be really relevant to some of you who are listening and are struggling with some of the realities and difficulties of life sometimes. So I thought this would be a really good one to share here on the main feed. If you want to hear the full episode, of course, head over to the Modern Warrior podcast hosted by Gavin Minin and look for the episode with Travis Chapel. But for now, here's a snippet from that discussion for you to listen to. We are a very privileged society that the main problem we now are facing is anxiety, is stress, is depression. And I'm not trying to downplay those things at all.

2:03They're very real and they're and they're and they're pervasive and they steal people's happiness. But it's a luxury problem. If you go to a third world country, they don't struggle with anxiety because they're worried about where their next meal is coming from. Because they're worried about the quality of their water. They don't have access to literally the essence of life, which is good quality, like drinking water. We just take for granted here all the time because we can go to our reverse osmosis faucet on the side of our sink and grab pure life giving water. And that's something that we take for granted. And so we have all of our core problems solved. And so we assume we're built to go solve more problems. And so when we solve a problem, all it does is present a new set of problems. And that's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. If we didn't have problems to solve, then we would all just be walking around.

3:03And we think that that's neuronic. We think that that's like the goal is to not have problems. And that's not the goal. The goal is to be able to move forward in the face of problems, not to just not have them. There's a great show called The Good Place. It's kind of a not sitcom, but kind of a comedy type show written by Michael Sherer. And he produced it as well. He's the producer of Brooklyn 9.9, The Office, Parks and Rec, brilliant writer, great comedy writer. And he wrote a book called How to Be Perfect. And perfect is spelled the two T's. And the whole book is his take on philosophy and life and stuff. And so the show The Good Place is basically this mental exercise of what happens after death. And there's heaven and there's hell. And then not to spoil the entire thing. But essentially it ends up with a lot of people going to quote-unquote heaven. And in heaven nobody has any problems.

4:04And then it gets to the point where people are choosing to no longer be in paradise and to walk into non-existence. Because they can't stand being in paradise one second longer. Because there's no problems to solve. There's no things to overcome. And it leads to this sense of nothingness. And so they start longing for the nothingness. And eventually everybody makes the decision to walk through this door that allows them to basically not exist at all. When the alternative is to exist in paradise where everything's taken care of. There's no problems at all. I thought a really well done show. Because like I said, he's a great writer. And Kristen Bell is the main protagonist. And she's a great actress and everything. And I thought it was just done really well. And it's a really great perspective on what it's like to actually be in a place where no problems exist. And I don't think that that's a worthy pursuit.

5:04And I don't think that any of us would be happy if we were in that scenario. So trying to craft this life that's problem free is it's only ideal because we don't know what it's like to experience it. But I think that if we did know what it was like to experience it, we wouldn't be happy there for a long time anyway. Yeah, that's definitely a loaded area. I think in the absence of problems, your brain creates problems. And then that's probably where the anxiety and depression comes from as well. I mean, if you had a defined purpose in life, you have no time to be anxious, you know, time to be depressed. You have a mission. You have to accomplish. And that means so much more than dwelling and sitting and worrying about your problems and worrying about certain aspects of your life. And is that a place you've you've found yourself in before? What's this? The most successful business owners don't do it all themselves. They delegate. Upwork lets you build a team of highly skilled specialists for every function your business needs so that you can focus on what you do best.

6:10And that experts handle the rest. Upwork gives your business fast access to highly skilled specialists with deep expertise so you can fill critical skill gaps, launch projects faster. And scale support up or down without committing to full time headcount. I don't know how many times I've used upwork in the last, I don't know, call it decades since I've started doing stuff online. But it is many, many, many, many times. And then with business plus, you can access the top 1% of talent on upwork as well. AI powered shortlisting delivers a curated shortlist of top freelancers match to your goals and under six hours. So there's no endless searching required. It also cuts down operational hassle by handling things like contracts and payments in one place. You can spend more time running the business with over 170,000 freelancers holding five star ratings. You can hire with the confidence that comes from hiring someone with a verified track record. It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free.

7:11That is upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWORK.com. Upwork.com Star Wars, the Mandalorian and Grogo is now streaming on Disney Plus. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney Plus. This is the way our only chance is to work together. On life this game. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars, the Mandalorian and Grogo now streaming on Disney Plus. Wait, PG 13. Darkness or confusion or lack of clarity or feeling lost or bewildered in life? How am I to find your way? Absolutely. I mean, several occasions. It wasn't even just a cancer thing. That was the elephant in the room.

8:13It's like if you're sitting on a table and you have a bunch of papers spread across the table and all of these papers, you have written down different problems that you're experiencing in your life. You're trying to sort through these problems. You're trying to figure out how to solve them. You have some anxiety about those problems. You have some stress and maybe you're depressed about it. You have all these different things that you're trying to work through. Cancer is like somebody dropped a hippopotamus on the table. You know what I mean? It's like, whoa, now all of a sudden, I can't even see these other problems because this giant hippo got sat on all of my papers. I have to remove this problem before. I can even think about what all these other problems are. It just became a singular focus problem rather than erasing all the other ones. But through that, exercise, you know, it also kind of destroys the table and gets you to get up and walk around and move around and create a fresh perspective to come back to the table with when you can eventually remove the hippo.

9:15What's on that table? No, then. Now it's just all regular life problems. You know what I mean? I'm wearing this ever bull shirt. My wife and I just started a Aussie Ebola franchise here in Vegas this past weekend and just just got opened up. And so now, you know, the grand opening was great. And there's a lot of things to solve going up to them. My wife killed it and she crushed the prep and it 90% of the work to get us to the opening. And then, and then it's like, I still have my podcast. And then we have two kids. And now we have this ever bull franchise. So now it's just a matter of like juggling plates, moving schedules, figuring out what life looks like with her being in the store a lot. And me, I'm taking up, you know, more the responsibility with the kids while also running the business and the podcast. And so now it's just a bunch of regular life problems, you know what I mean? But they seem, they seem much easier to solve these days than they did six months ago. Have your values changed since that whole experience? Are you focusing more now on, on family, on children, on your wife, on things that maybe,

10:16not things that maybe, but things that matter more to you than, than the work, than the, than the business? Yeah, you know, it was actually kind of interesting to me because, like, when I was thinking that, during that time when I just didn't know what was going on, it was really easy for me to settle into this, like, hey, all this other stuff doesn't matter. But it also created this internal desire to have accomplished more for the sake of my family. You know, then it was surprising to me. So to answer that question, honestly, no, because I think I, I think I do, and a good job intentionally of like, spending time with my family, being with my kids. But when I was like, facing with that, I was just like, man, I, if this was it, I wish I would have like, done some more things to, to make a bigger impact before I leave this planet. And so it, it, it, it gave me a fresh perspective on the importance of finding purpose and meaning in your work,

11:19not just finding purpose and meaning in the, the relationships that are closest to you. So it almost had a little bit of an opposite effect for me to be honest with you. But this is coming from somebody who intentionally spent a lot of time with his family before. So I think that maybe if I were like actively only completely and continuously in the pursuit of the business or whatever, I think that a problem that it might have had that effect on me. But you know, I think that when you're faced, when you come face to face something like that, it just, it highlights your deficits. And that was a deficit for me was like, man, I'm not, like, I need to, I need to reconnect with my purpose behind the work that I do so that I can continue to push things forward and set a better example for my kids on what I want them to pursue in their life. Yeah, and it's not just that you're a great family man. Before all that happened, you had a thriving business and you have a thriving business as well. So that to look at it from the outside in, and we all look at people's lives from the outside,

12:21and we don't really know what's going on behind the scenes, but to look at your business and your model and your life seems very successful. And within that success, I know it's taken a lot of failures along the way. And as you reflect back on your journey in business, is there one failure that stands out the most that as you reflect back now, actually turned into quite a success or initiated success? I'm not 100% sure, man, that's a good question. I'd have to really think about that to give you a good answer. Honestly, I would really, I don't want to just give you a canned answer just because we're on an episode right now. I would like that something I'd like to think about a little bit more. The setbacks along the way. How have you managed those? Just in general, in terms of the business and stuff? In terms of the business and your success isn't life.

13:21Yeah, I mean, not well. I wish I would have handled them better. When you're facing a problem that you don't know how to solve, it can be really overwhelming. And you can start to get into a spiral of negative emotions. And the one thing that I wish I would have done more is allowed the people in my life to be there for me. I tend to struggle with, I don't struggle with being there for others. But I do struggle with allowing people to be there for me, which I think is potentially more selfish than the opposite. Because the people in your life that are closest to you, they want to be there for you. And they want to love you through struggle. And they want to help you do those things. And I was too selfish to let people in because I felt that it was going to show a weakness in my armor. And I think that this is something specifically that young men face, even more so than others.

14:27It's part of quote-unquote being a man is just to like, bear down and not show weakness and to show this version of you that's really strong and that doesn't have these types of struggles and things like that. And so I think that's one big lesson that I learned through the failures that I've had inside of business, the failures that I've had in life, through the cancer diagnosis that it was telling to me. That, you know what, I think I've been a selfish friend that I haven't allowed people to see me struggle, that I haven't allowed those closest to me, my audience to examine my failures alongside of me as I'm going through them. And that's something that I'm trying to get better at. And what are you there, man? Yeah. Something I would also have difficulty with. So also the sense that you don't want to burn them there with your problems. Exactly right. I literally recorded an episode on this for my podcast.

15:29I'm starting to do solo shows again. And since the show's called Travis Makes Friends, a lot of the solo shows now are going to be dedicated toward friendship, eliminating the epidemic of loneliness, building better relationships. And so I've been doing a lot of research on it. And this is literally something that's very top of mind for me because I've just put out a full episode on this. And that was one of those things that I talked about and they use that exact furbitch. Like we don't want to be a burden to those around us. So we keep our struggles inside. But that's the worst place for them to be, man. I did a post that recently. It was actually after I listened to a radio show segment. And the most successful business owners don't do it all themselves. They delegate. Upwork lets you build the team of highly skilled specialists for every function your business needs so that you can focus on what you do best. And that experts handle the rest. Upwork gives your business fast access to highly skilled specialists with deep expertise so you can fill critical skill gaps, launch projects faster, and skill support up or down without committing to full time headcount.

16:31I don't know how many times I've used upwork in the last, I don't know, call it decades since I've started doing stuff online. But it is many, many, many, many times. And then with business plus you can access the top 1% of talent on upwork as well. AI powered shortlisting delivers a curated shortlist of top freelancers match to your goals and under six hours. So there's no endless searching required. It also cuts down operational hassle by handling things like contracts and payments in one place. You can spend more time running the business with over 170,000 freelancers holding five star ratings. You can hire with the confidence that comes from hiring someone with a verified track record. It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWORK.com Upwork.com

17:54Star Wars, the Mandalorian and Grogu, now streaming on Disney Floss, Wait Pige 13. Pretty much what you said in terms of there's a loneliness epidemic out there for men. Why do you think that is? Well for men specifically, I think there's a, I think that there's a few reasons. First of all, it's not unique to our generation. A lot of people like to vilify social media and look at it as the root cause of all of this. And I'm not one of those people. I think women is, I mean the data would support it too. Loneliness has increased annually since 1976 long before social media was around. I think social media, the more insidious nature of social media is that it implies connection. The word social is literally in the phrase. So it implies that it brings us closer together when it really actually drives us further apart and creates more anxiety and does not fulfill the internal human desire for connection and building genuine real relationships with people.

19:00So that's like, that's the insidious nature of social media and I think that it's compounding things that were already existing. So it's definitely a problem not to say that it's all good and 100%. It's not the best things since sliced bread in that context. But it's not as evil I think is what most people would claim that it is. But it's certainly one of the core aspects of it, especially for this generation. And especially for the generation even coming up behind us, the Gen Z type generation that the 20 year olds right now and instead I'm 32, the 20, the 20 some things, the people and their late teens and early teens. So that generation is going to deal with it because of social media and in a way that was much worse than we dealt with it. I wasn't really on Instagram and Facebook until college. I had it a little bit in high school but wasn't really until college until those things were front and center for me. So people that are growing up on especially TikTok just because it's again, it says social but it's not really social. You think you're filling the need for you think you're filling the loneliness need by being on these platforms and you're actually making it worse by doing that.

20:05So in and I know that's a roundabout way to to start answering this question. But social media is one of those things is to say that like for for young people in general. And then you go more specifically young men there's there's an attack that's been happening on masculinity as a whole. And that's been happening for the past decade plus where masculine attributes are being vilified and and certainly. Certainly the extreme of you know of masculinity which I would not which I would no longer define as being masculine by the way is is is is also a poor example of masculinity but that's the reason the young men are looking for these answers and falling for these these traps this like and your tape level of masculinity that you know he that he preaches which I think is is not actual masculinity. They're falling for that because they they're craving acceptance of their masculine traits there they're craving acceptance of their internal natural desires to be manly.

21:08And so much of society especially if they didn't grow up with a good role model of what masculinity looks like they didn't have a dad in the house or something like that. And then although though you know the women and the thought leaders that they're looking at are being like oh not you know toxic masculinity toxic masculinity they're marrying these two terms together like it's something that exists. But in my in my mind like toxic masculinity is not a thing because as soon as you assign the word toxic to masculinity to me it's no longer masculinity like and your tastes not toxic masculinity it's just not masculinity like that's not what it means to be a man. So you're you're conflating these two things together and it's confusing an entire generation of young men who have these internal desires to be masculine to show masculine traits to be a man. But they don't have a lot of good examples what that looks like and so they're they're they're they're falling into these fringe movements of people who are exhibiting an ideal type of masculinity who were obviously hurt by women at some point in their life whether that was their mom growing up a lot of it I think would probably.

22:09Stem back to childhood with their with their mom it might have been a girlfriend or several girlfriends when they were a young man that that jaded them to the idea that women actually care about them and that they could have a good relationship with them you know there's a lot of things that go into that but I think it's it's largely due to the fact that like there's just not a lot of great examples of it and so you have these young men who are who are not in the entertain camp. Who are desperately searching for something but keep getting told that the you know whatever the competition that they are exhibiting the aggressive the aggression that they're exhibiting that these things are inherently bad things and that and if they feel these feelings masculine that's bad and you should feel guilty for that and you should apologize for that and you should engage in discourse that allows you to move away from that and to pick up more of these more feminine type qualities and it's like we all have masculine and the femininity in in a way that they're not going to be a man. I mean, in us I'm not saying that you know being in feminine state is not is a bad thing because it's not you we all need to engage in both of them at some point but to just vilify all of masculinity is is terrible and you know culture and society is going to feel of a tail whip from from these young lonely men who can't find a space to express how they really feel and if you are in a place where you can express how you really feel about things.

23:30You're going to be lonely I don't care if you're surrounded by people who quote unquote care about you surrounded by friends if you don't feel the freedom to express who you truly are you always be lonely and that's that's dangerous you know lonely young men is one of the most dangerous threats to society I think so you know I hope we can course correct from that. Hello what TJ Max dragged it. The devil wears brought a to is now streaming on Disney plus and who you're digital we're downloadable we're streamable. The fashion event of the year is certified fresh all yourself together we have work to do critics say it's smart and witty and the perfect sequel that's all. Get run away ready for the devil wears brought a to on Disney plus and who knew ready PG 13.