INTERVIEW | Make Money Building Boring Businesses with Marketing Legend Neil Patel

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Travis Makes Money — Interview with Neil Patel

Episode: INTERVIEW | Make Money Building Boring Businesses with Marketing Legend Neil Patel
Host: Travis Chappell
Guest: Neil Patel
Date: February 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode, Travis Chappell sits down with digital marketing legend Neil Patel, co-founder of NP Digital and widely recognized as one of the most influential marketers in the world. They explore Neil’s journey from a teenage SEO consultant to running a nine-figure marketing agency, the realities of building "boring" yet lucrative businesses, and what it really takes to create lasting financial success and happiness. Neil and Travis dig into the entrepreneurial mindset, lifestyle choices, and actionable advice for those wanting to make more money without falling into the trap of chasing hollow status symbols.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Neil’s Entrepreneurial Origin Story (01:01–04:52)

• First Big Win: At 16, Neil was paid $100–$200/hr by Elpac Electronics to teach SEO, which evolved into a $5,000/month retainer and referrals, quickly adding up to $20,000/month at age 16.

  • Quote — Neil: “That was life-changing. It’s a lot of money. It’s even a lot of money today.” (01:52)

• Neil emphasized his initial drive was financial, not necessarily about entrepreneurship or escaping poverty:

  • Quote — Neil: “I wanted the nicer things in life, and the only way to get that is money.” (03:32)

• Education & Hacking the System: Neil attended college, found it a waste, switched majors, and confessed that his sister finished online classes for him just to get the degree.

  • Quote — Neil: “It was a mistake... a waste of five and a half years.” (04:09)

Early Realizations About Business & Work (04:59–08:08)

• Realized he wasn’t built for corporate life, disliked bureaucracy, and preferred direct action over protocol.

  • Quote — Neil: “I’m not good at working for other people as I am working for myself... I struggle with the bureaucracy.” (05:16)

• Learned that performance (not image) should drive business decisions, often clashing with corporate authority.

Scaling an Agency vs. Chasing Tech Trends (08:08–12:54)

• Neil explains why he continues growing an agency business when most view software/AI as the “sexy” route:
  • Agencies are “ugly” and “boring” but have big markets and are less competitive than venture-backed software.
  • Quote — Neil: “I tend to do the boring, ugly stuff because it’s easier to scale for me, easier to generate revenue.” (08:28)

Finding the Right Opportunity and Passion (12:54–16:35)

• Advice to new entrepreneurs:

  • You don’t need a revolutionary idea or to chase the hottest sector—pick anything that genuinely interests you or that you’re good at, and “try a lot of different stuff.”
  • Rejects the cliché “riches are in the niches” for beginners—start broader to find your station, then narrow in.
  • Quote — Neil: “The riches are not in the niches. The riches are in big, broad markets... Don’t do something just for the money.” (15:24)

• Warns that chasing big exits/Billion-dollar valuations is often a trap; smaller, controlled businesses can be more lucrative and fulfilling:

  • Quote — Neil: “There’s a lot of lifestyle businesses that are run where founders make millions of dollars... and come out making more money because they didn’t raise any investor capital.” (17:52)

The Importance of Patience & Long-Term Thinking (19:04–21:18)

• Neil relates business skills to parenting:
  • Negotiating with children teaches patience and creative problem-solving.
  • The best returns (in both parenting and business) come only after years of consistent investment and effort, not in the “cute” early stages.
  • Quote — Neil: “If you can figure out how to negotiate with children... That’s a win.” (19:13)
  • Quote — Neil: “People don’t ever think about, ‘If I do it for ten years, where will I be at?’” (21:10)

Redefining Success & Avoiding Lifestyle Creep (23:20–28:38)

• Both host and guest decry the “status game”—overspending on cars, houses, or luxury goods leads to stress, not fulfillment.

  • Quote — Neil: “How about just live a chiller life and drive a... Honda Odyssey?” (23:40)
  • Quote — Neil: “My wife has the sickest purse ever. It’s called my pocket.” (27:01)

• The real danger isn’t a daily coffee—it’s letting your expenses rise faster than your freedom.

  • Quote — Neil: “Lifestyle creep... makes it harder on the business side and puts more pressure. And you don’t need the fanciest car.” (23:20)

• Ultimately, happiness and money come from focusing on what you love and not being shackled by appearances.

Mindset Shifts for Modern Entrepreneurship (16:33–18:19, 28:12–29:45)

• The future is in “fractionalized entrepreneurship”: people running lean, automated, profitable businesses for themselves—not building empires for outside investors.
• True flexibility, fulfillment, and wealth come from controlling your lifestyle, pursuing your unique path, and focusing on intrinsic motivation.
  • Quote — Neil: “The last thing you want to do is work on something you hate. You want to spend your time on stuff you love...” (28:25)

The Enduring Power of Podcasting (28:38–29:39)

• Podcasting as a business and branding platform is “wide open”; most creators quit before episode 50, so consistency alone is a huge competitive edge.
  • Quote — Neil: “If you can just do it consistently, you’ll crush it... It’s a wide open ocean. It's not that competitive.” (29:28)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

First Life-Changing Money

• “That was life-changing. It’s a lot of money. It’s even a lot of money today.”
  — Neil Patel (01:52)

On Building “Boring” Businesses

• “I tend to do the boring, ugly stuff because it’s easier to scale for me, easier to generate revenue.”
  — Neil Patel (08:28)

Passion vs. Chasing Niches

• “The riches are not in the niches. The riches are in big broad markets... Don’t do something just for the money.”
  — Neil Patel (15:24)

After Ten Years

• “People don’t think about, ‘If I do it for ten years, where will I be at?’ And that is game changing.”
  — Neil Patel (21:10)

Status Symbols vs. Real Wealth

• “How about just live a chiller life and drive a... Honda Odyssey?”
  — Neil Patel (23:40)
• “My wife has the sickest purse ever. Right? It’s called my pocket.”
  — Neil Patel (27:01)

On Consistency in Podcasting

• “If you can just do it consistently, you’ll crush it... It’s a wide open ocean. It’s not that competitive.”
  — Neil Patel (29:28)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:01–04:52 — Neil’s first major entrepreneurial experiences
• 05:16–06:42 — Realizing corporate life wasn’t for him
• 08:08–12:54 — Scaling NP Digital and the value of “boring” agencies
• 14:06–16:35 — Advice for finding your path and the myth of “riches in the niches”
• 19:04–21:18 — What parenting taught Neil about business
• 23:20–25:32 — Lifestyle creep, spending, and the perils of status
• 28:38–29:39 — The opportunity in podcasting today

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Final Thoughts

This episode delivers an honest, practical roadmap for anyone looking to build lasting financial success without sacrificing happiness, health, or personal values. Neil Patel’s perspective is a valuable counterpoint to the hyped-up, hustle-driven myths of online entrepreneurship—reminding listeners that fulfillment comes from aligning business, lifestyle, and genuine personal development.

Recommended for: Aspiring entrepreneurs, agency owners, and anyone reevaluating what their “dream life” looks like in the age of AI, automation, and endless online opportunity.

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Transcript

[A]

You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by GoHighLevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis. What is happening everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's a mission to help you make more money. Today on the show, I am talking to a new friend of mine. His name is Neil Patel. Neil is the co founder of NP Digital. Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web. Forbes says he's one of the top 10 marketers in Entrepreneur. Magaz says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age Of 35 by the United Nations. This is, this is. This one's a long time coming, guys. I'm not gonna lie to you. There's a bunch of mutual friends that Neil and I have in the space and I've been an admirer of what he's been doing over the past decade or so for quite some time. So, Neil, what's up man? Welcome to the show.

[B]

Thanks for having me.

[A]

So let's go back in time here, man. I'm very curious how you made your first, the first dollar that you ever made that got you really excited where you, it was like an unlock where you're like, I can't believe this is possible.

[B]

The first dollar I ever made was. That really made me excited. I was 16ish at the time. There was a company called Elpac Power Supplies or Elpac Electronics, I think, and they sold power supplies. It was a long time ago. And they paid me, I think it was a hundred and something or 200 and something an hour to help teach them about SEO. At that time, ranking on Google was new. And then from there 16 and then from there they're like, can you just do it for us? We'll give you like five grand a month. I was really excited and that client referred me to three more that paid five grand a month. So total was around 20 grand a month when I was 16. And that was life changing. It's a lot of money. It's even a lot of money today.

[A]

It's a lot of money for grown adults today. For most grown adults today. Why SEO? This was fairly early on in SEO world, but this is something that you liked to geek out on. You just were Studying it a bunch and then realized it was a skill all of a sudden. How did that even come to fruition?

[B]

No, When I was 15 and a half, I started my own website and the website was a job board. I was looking for a high paying job, couldn't find one. I noticed that the job board, like Monster Career Builder back then, I don't think they're as well used today. I think it's more like LinkedIn indeed, etc. They were making millions and millions and even hundreds of millions. I was like, well, if I create one of these and I make 1% of what they do, I'll be rich. I'll be a millionaire. So I created a job board. No one came to it. I had to learn marketing, didn't have tons of money, did a lot of research, learned SEO, and I was a book nerd. So my first college class was speech 101 and I took that at community college when I was 16 in high school. So I was doing nighttime community college classes, daytime high school, and someone in there worked at elpac Electronics and they got me a gig.

[A]

Did you want to be in entrepreneurship? Was it like a need to make more money? Like what? What sort of like got you along that line of thinking?

[B]

I originally started out because I wanted money. I wanted to make a lot that.

[A]

Was only real because there was a void of money in life or you just liked the game of making money.

[B]

No, I didn't grow up poor, I didn't grow up rich. I would say middle class. My parents worked really hard and I wanted the nicer things in life and the only way to get that is money. Being 16, it's too hard to get a really big corporate job that pays well. And I didn't have a college degree. And back then people really did care about college degrees, right? Compared to now. So I had to figure out how to do it through the entrepreneurship route.

[A]

So did you end up going to college?

[B]

I did. It was a mistake, but I. What?

[A]

Why was it a mistake?

[B]

Waste of five and a half years.

[A]

Five and a half years. Did you go for business?

[B]

I originally studied computer science. You had to take more classes though, for some reason, and they were longer because of labs and stuff. And then I eventually switched to marketing and I had enough college credits when I finished high school, where I should have graduated in two and a half years but I had a business going so it took me five and a half. And this sounds bad, but I didn't even care to graduate and I didn't finish a lot of my classes. So my sister started taking online classes for me and that's how I ended up with the degree. I know it sounds bad. They may take away my degree if they hear that.

[A]

Yeah. I'm not. I'm not sure that you're super worried about them taking away your degree at this point.

[B]

Where did you graduation or even pick it up? My dad didn't believe I graduated, so he went to the school and picked up the degree.

[A]

That's hilarious. So obviously was not something that you were super concerned about at that time even. Was that. Did you. Did you have. Were you trying to go like, I got some job interviews lined up. I can finally go get that high paying job. Or was it kind of like I've already made so much money doing this SEO thing. Why don't I just keep pursuing that on my own?

[B]

I kept going. Yeah. I quickly realized I'm not a nine to fiver. A nine to fiver. I'm specifically. It's not about the hours. I'm not good at working for other people as I am working for myself. And I've tried working for other people. I struggle with the bureaucracy.

[A]

Right. Exactly.

[B]

What's right? Like I've had people tell me, you know, when I want to make changes to a website. I worked at Jane Street. I understand ab testing. I was a qua. And I'm like, but I just made a change. And it increased onboarding by almost 50%.

[A]

That's worth more.

[B]

I don't care where you went from. You graduated from Harvard or mit. I think they got from one of those two. And he's like, I worked at this. Look at my jobs. And I'm like. And he's like, the change you made doesn't look ugly. How bad is it to the. He didn't say it doesn't look. He said that he's like, it looks ugly. And his bigger gripe wasn't the looks. Cause it actually was done by the same designer that designed the previous flow. His biggest. His bigger gripe was the people. The team just worked months releasing a new version. You just came in here, you shitted on it and you released a new version three weeks after we released ours. And what kind of message does that send to the team? I'm like, who cares what kind of message. Improvements to the bottom line, revenue and profit.

[A]

It sends the message that we care about things that perform.

[B]

Yeah. And then that's when I quickly realized. I'm like, this is not.

[A]

Yeah. This is not for me. Yeah. I jokingly define the Entrepreneurial itch throughout my, throughout my life as the desire to make more money combined with the inability to listen to authority was like always how it was for, for me anyway. It was just like, I, I, I don't know exactly how I'm gonna figure this out over here, but I do know that I can't stand having that person tell me if I can sit down or can't sit down or when I can go on a fre bathroom break or whatever. It was just like, this is, this is not gonna work. I'm gonna figure something else out here. Well, plenty of people, Neil, have started some sort of a marketing agency, had some early success and then continued, you know, building in that space. Very few have gotten to the point where you've gotten to now. Last numbers I heard is close to a thousand. Now enterprise level SEO clients that you guys have at NP Digital and you're doing a bunch of different other marketing services for those clients. To run an agency that can scale to that type of volume without completely screwing up the customer experience seems from the outside, from my outsider's perspective, like a really difficult undertaking. Why the agency? Why is this the method you continue to scale through? And I know obviously you have your hands in a lot of different pots now. You have Multiple softwares and SaaS companies and different platform services and you monetize media and things like that as well. But, but why the, why the agency? Why so long?

[B]

So going back to the enterprise comment, I don't know how many enterprise clients we have. I don't think it's a thousand. We have quite a bit of headcount and I know we've scaled it to a good size. We've been at, you know, over nine figures in revenue for a while and we bootstrapped the whole thing. But the reason I went into the agency is one, I kind of had a somewhat of a brand in that space. But more importantly than that, most of my career I spent on software and software is very competitive. You're going against a ton of venture funded companies. Agencies are competitive too. But agencies considered an ugly business. Considered compared to software. And in today's world, if you're not an AI, then everything else is ugly. I tend to do the boring, ugly stuff because it's easier to scale for me, easier to generate revenue. And it's a really massive tam, which is total addressable market for anyone Listening to what I found is in software. Software companies burn tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars before they get profitability. And a lot of them raise venture Capital. It's a slog. And running an agency or any kind of business is a slog. But I rather compete.

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

Yeah, yeah, that's a fair point. I didn't think of it from that perspective. What other where's the gray area right now? Where's the open spaces of opportunities? Because you guys obviously have invested a ton in blogging and SEO content over the years. But then you also have the marketing school podcast with a mutual friend, Eric Hsu. And then you have, you know, the the answer the public that you acquire that you acquired under your ubersuggest kind of parent company there you're working on, you know, multiple different projects right now. Where is like the space in between these things? Where if you were like, hey, if I had more time right now, or if I didn't already. If I weren't already doing these six other things, I probably would be going full steam ahead into this one area right now. Who would that be?

[B]

Are you talking about specific service or business unit of mine or.

[A]

Yeah, like, like podcasting versus AI versus marketing versus, you know, like what, what are. What's sort of like the, the path that you would encourage a young person or somebody just getting started in business to really think about. If they're like, I know I want to do something. Not exactly sure what I want to do. Where is there. Where is their blue, blue ocean left?

[B]

So I look at it as a little bit different.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

There's a lot of. There's a lot of money to be made in a lot of different industries, whether it's food or whether it's water or whether it's furniture or marketing services or software, AI. There's money in everything, right? You can probably name a big agriculture company, big furniture company. The list goes on and on. You know, I know someone who makes hundreds of millions a year in profit, not revenue. Selling light posts. Light posts like we see on the street. All right, There literally is money and a lot of stuff. The first thing I would tell someone is what are you passionate about? Some people know right away, some people don't. If you work on stuff that you're not passionate about, you're not going to put in the time and energy to actually succeed because it's not easy, and you're going to get burnt out because you're not making enough progress and you're not seeing the results. But when you're passionate, you can keep going longer before you get that feeling right? The second thing is, the first one would be focus on your passion. But the second one, because most people don't know their passion is the way you tend to figure it out is you try a lot of different stuff for a day, literally for a few hours in a day. You try something. If you think you like it, try it more. If you don't, then don't do it again. And you're just eliminating what you don't like. What you'll find is you tend to like the stuff that you're kind of naturally already good at. And when you double down on that, you'll start finding your passion and you'll get good at it. Then third, from there is within whatever you're good at. Try to find an angle or a market that you can go after. Not a niche. The riches are not in the niches. The riches are in big Broad markets and then go after it and push hard. And remember, you don't have to make millions of dollars to do well. You can do something that you're passionate about and make hundreds and thousands. Just control your lifestyle. It's not worth making millions of dollars and being miserable. I actually know people who are on the Forbes list who are billionaires. The wife has affairs with them, the husband has affairs with the wife or you know, they're both cheating. Then the kids don't want to talk to the dad who's working all the time. The dad's miserable and overweight and unhealthy. And then you have in the hospital all the time and they'd be like, look how much money have. What good is the money you have Terrible family, barely have any friends, terrible health. Like I wouldn't want that life.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I think that's.

[B]

I want some money though, but not the life.

[A]

Exactly. I think that's sort of almost the future of work as I see it is more like fractionalized entrepreneurship where it's not a bunch of people starting companies for the purpose of building a hundred person, 100 headcount team and having the next billion dollar exit. It's sort of these like what you just suggested where they make $430,000 a year top line and $310,000 a year profit because it's just a lean operating machine. They mostly use AI. They have a couple vas and they are just doing this one unique service for a, you know, multiple types of people instead of trading hours for dollars and doing something similar to that and making 70 grand a year working for another company. And it's it. The more that these like especially the white collar jobs get more and more replaced by AI workforces and especially agentic AI. I think, I think it's going to encourage a lot more people to like sort of step out on your own but with the intention of creating this lifestyle rather than building the next, you know, billion dollar enterprise value company. I'm curious Neil, you, you clearly are somebody who continues working on yourself.

[B]

I totally agree with you but one point that I want to double down. For anyone listening, those companies who are selling for a billion plus dollars, most of them are largely owned by investors and most of them tend to. Most startups fail and don't get to that stage. There's a lot of lifestyle businesses that are run where founders make millions of dollars. They're not worth billion enterprise value but the founders come out making more money because they didn't raise any investor Capital.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, they own 100. Like, the dream that's been painted is not necessarily what you think it is. You know, like you might think you're stepping into the actual scene of the painting, but it really is just a painting on the wall. It's all facade, you know? Yeah. So don't over glorify these things like they've been over glorified over the past couple of decades. I'm curious what field that is. Not in the business field, exactly. That's a field of study that you've found to be most applicable or helpful in the business field. So whether it's philosophy, for psychology, for history, biographies, things like that. So it's not necessarily like reading a business book or learning exactly this marketing tactic. What are some of these other fields that you've studied that have been helpful in the way that you think about entrepreneurship?

[B]

Yeah, so there's one field and I haven't really studied it, but that's taught me more about. Or that that's taught me quite a bit of business skills than anything else, and that is dealing with children. So imagine having to negotiate with kids. They're not logical. You got to figure out a win, win scenario. You know, you can tell them a certain amount, they go up, and it's tough to get what you want. If you can figure out how to negotiate with children, if you can figure out how to get what you want while making them happy, that's a win. Think of that like doing that with your employees. And the third is if you can figure out patience, because you have to have patience with kids, especially younger ones. Those three things really help out. And the fourth with kids is you can't just get up and leave. Yeah, probably can, but you shouldn't.

[A]

Yeah, it's. It's frowned upon by most people.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, you shouldn't get up and leave. Right. So you got to just deal with your kids and make it happen. You didn't want to deal with them, don't have them right in the first place, or don't get, you know, don't try to have kids. So when you think about it from that perspective, in business, a lot of people want to give up and quit. And if you can just learn to, like, just push through and stick it out. Because like, with kids, the reason people have kids isn't because, oh, kids are going to be a headache and I got to negotiate and deal with them. The reason they have kids is, oh, I don't want to be lonely when I'm older. I can't Wait for my kids to have kids and have conversations and have more companionship and a family. People don't look at the early years, right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I've never heard any of my friends who have kids being like so amazing to have a four year old or a five year old. No, they're just like, they're like, oh, babies are cute. And then oh, I'm so happy my kids are grown up. The conversations, the stuff we can do. They're gonna have kids. Can't wait for those days. It's patience. You gotta keep investing in it for many, many years. The same goes with your business. People don't do a business for 10 years. Everyone always wonders, how am I gonna make more? Not how when am I going to make money. I want to make money now. I want to make money in year two, year three at the latest. No one ever thinks about it. If I do it for 10 years, where will I be at?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And that is game changing.

[A]

Because the beautiful thing about business is that it's not a zero sum game. It's not we, I win or I lose. It's not I build the $10 million business or I make $0. You know what I mean? It's like it only takes one. Like I, I love the analogy of, of standing up to the plate and another at bat. I love like you sw the first time you suck. You can't hit the pitch. Nothing's good about it, but you get up and keep doing it. The only problem with that analogy is that it fails to, to properly frame what it means to hit a home run in business. Right. It's, it's not, it doesn't equate to one single run. It doesn't equate to one point on the scoreboard. That home run could be a thousand points and you might have scored zero points the previous 50 at bats. You know, but if you just keep getting up, you keep taking more swings, you get better at it over time, eventually you crank one out of the park and then that's it. You've, you've now created a life that you no longer want to escape from, but one that you can really enjoy. And that's the power of framing things in that 10 year timeframe rather than thinking about it over the course of the next 12 months. It's been a powerful reframe to, to imagine what is possible in business versus all these other different career paths where it is a zero sum game. It's like you can pursue playing professional sp. That's an option. But if you don't make it, you're going to get paid like $26,000 a year to get to play overseas or be on like a coaching staff of a junior college somewhere or something like that. There's a massive delta between what success is and where it. Where the statistics say you will likely end up. Whereas in business, that's. That's that that plot is scattered across these earning levels, from a quarter million all the way up to a quarter billion. You know what I mean? In rare cases, a quarter trillion, now that we're seeing some people actually accompl. But that's what's really cool to me about that space, is that it's your scoreboard and you get to decide what a win is. You just have to figure out what that means for you.

[B]

Exactly. And I always tell people, control your lifestyle, creep. It makes it harder on the business side and puts more pressure. And you don't need the fanciest car. You know, the other day a realtor was looking at my house and he's like, dude, do you want to sell it? Get you another house in another area pulls up an electric Rolls Royce. All right, so I'm pulling up, and I'm pulling up in a Honda Odyssey, right? That's every single day he's driving electric Rolls Royce. Keep in mind, this is the guy that sold me the house, right? He's just like, you should sell it. I can make you a killing. And I'm talking. I'm like, dude, do you want to buy the car? He's like, what do you mean? I'm like, you're the one with the fancy car. I'm like, I can't afford that kind of car. And I Google how much that car costs while we're there. Car was like around 4 or 500, $600,000. They gave a range on Google, right? Let's call it the middle ground. $500,000 for a car. And I was like, dude, what are you doing with this car? And he's just like, dude, I got to keep up an image. What kind of image you need to keep up that's worth $500,000. How about just live a chiller life and drive a. I don't know what my Honda Odyssey costs. You know, they cost more now, but call it, I paid in the 30s for it, right? It's like, life is chill. And then his car is always in the shop and has problems. I'm like, honda doesn't have problems. They make so many of them. And they made so many of them. For years, probably millions of them. They figured out all the kinks.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Yeah. Just, we actually just now for the first time, got our, bought my, my, my wife Alexis for Christmas. But it was because we had a 2007 Tundra, which has 260, 000 miles on it. And we have a 2015 Camry that had almost 200, 000 miles on it. And the Camry was like, it started to have a ton of problems, so we had to go get something. And I was like, all right, well, we'll finally like, allow ourselves this purchase. But it was after a decade of saying no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And now it's like, well, now it doesn't matter. We buy, you know, buy the Lexus. And again, Alexis is not half a million dollar car.

[B]

No, but it's still, it's still a nice car. And same with mine. My car only has like 50, 60,000 miles on it. Yeah, I'll take till 200, 300. Whenever it starts clunking out and having too many problems, that's when I'll go and get a new car.

[A]

My wife and I were talking about this last night because she had a friend of hers that was, she, she had like a Gucci bag that she was like, hey, any of my friends want to buy this Gucci bag? And she was like, I looked at it, it was 800 bucks for this bag. And I was just like, I, I, I get some people that matters to them, I guess if you value that type of a thing. I just, it makes no sense to me whatsoever because this nomadic backpack that I've had for like four years is very good quality, has more utility, and was a hundred bucks, you know what I mean? Versus, like spending. And that's a used Gucci bag, means new. It's probably a couple grand. It's just, I don't. If you are actively, every, every time you make a purchase like that, you are betting against your own success. Almost like you are, you are investing in something that is actively at war with your desire to have more money. You know what I mean? Just to keep up with appearances and make other people think that you do have more money than you actually have. It's just a game that I have no interest in playing and that, that you can't ever win, by the way, because there's always another level, you know what I mean? And you know this probably better than anybody. When you get around some of your friends that are like, oh, they have this jet and that jet and they have this private island and they have that house. It's like if you play the stat, like there's no way to win the status game. It is just a deeper and deeper hole that you dig yourself into that's never going to lead any happiness. Poor fulfillment. And it's just like, why, why are you doing this?

[B]

Totally agree. My wife has a one karat ring. It's not even one carat. It's less than that. Never another one. Happy with it. And she has the sickest purse ever. Right? It's called my pocket. Puts it in my pocket when we're out. He's like, you hold it, honey. All right.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The lifestyle creep is, is probably more detrimental than most things because it limits flexibility. It's like if you, if you don't like what you're doing and you, you, you are in a job that's just like, I, I got this degree, may as well get this job. May as well like put my law degree to work and go do this thing and you get this fat salary. It's like you, you almost get sucked into that trap because, because you solve for the wrong problem at first anyway. You solve for, you solve for the making money problem. You didn't solve for the personal fulfillment problem. So now you have to, to a degree, spend all your excess cash on stuff that feels meaningful to you so you can squeeze some drop of fulfillment out of your day to day life. Because what you do for 60, 70 hours a week adds nothing, minus finances to your life, which is ultimately a loss when it's all said and done anyway. So fix that problem first and then the lagging problem will probably take care of itself after that.

[B]

You know, I'm with you on that, but that's the way people can succeed in life. Yeah. It's not about saving money on a coffee or anything like that. It's about watching the big things that limit where your options are.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And the last thing you want to do is work on something you hate. You want to spend your time on what you stuff you love. You don't know it. Try a lot of different stuff. Eventually you'll figure out what you're naturally good at and that'll fall into what you love and double down on that because that's where you're most likely to make money.

[A]

Last thing real quick before I let you go, Neil. Obviously. So this podcast has been going for eight years. We've done over 1500 episodes. I'm a big podcaster. I've done everything in the podcast space, from consulting to software to agency work, everything. I'm a big believer and fan of the podcasting space. I know that you have your own podcast as well. Can you talk about real quick? Just timing in the podcasting market? What make is, is it, Is it still a good time to start a podcast? Should you be thinking about a podcast for your brand? What, what, what, what should people be doing right now?

[B]

If you look at the last presidential election, podcasting drove more views and impressions than the TV interviews. At least this was for the US Election. Right? That's the power of podcasting. Podcasting isn't that competitive because people don't want to keep creating podcasts. Most 1500 episodes. That's amazing. Congrats.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

Most people don't even get to 50 episodes. And if you can just do it consistently, you'll crush it. It doesn't matter what space you want to release a podcast in. It's a wide open ocean. It's not that competitive.

[A]

Yeah. Neil, I appreciate you taking the time man. I know you're super busy guys, so I don't want to go up over our time here. Where can people go to get more?

[B]

Neil Patel, npdigital.com It's my ad agency.

[A]

Npdigital.com Neil's also putting out content basically in every format imaginable. And all of it is extremely well planned, well thought out, high value content. One of the people that I have continuously followed over the last decade, which is a, which is a rare compliment, Neil, I have to say, because there's been lots of people that have come up on the radar and then I see something and I go, eh, throw it away. Never mind. So you've, you've remained on that, on that list of people who I constantly look for advice in this space for a better part of a day, decade now. So I appreciate you and the work that you do in the world. Thank you for taking the time. Everybody else listening, Remember, money only solves your money problems, but it's a little bit easier to solve the rest of your problems when you got money in the bank. So let's start there here on the Traps Make Money podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace.