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Travis Makes Money
SOLO | Make Money by Letting Go of Ego - Lessons from my Josh Peck interview
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Narrator
Where is Daredevil A minor. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again.
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Commercial Announcer
I feel liberated.
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Travis (Podcast Host)
We're gonna take this city back over
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Narrator
medicated in an all new season. Now streaming only on Disney plus.
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I can work with them.
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Narrator
Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again now streaming only on Disney.
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Podcast Intro Announcer
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.
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Travis (Podcast Host)
What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to their episode of the show. Today it is just me, you and the mic and this cup of nitro cold brew coffee from Cumulus Coffee. It's not a sponsorship, but, hmm, I might as well be. They were kind enough to send me a free machine. So I feel like I gotta talk about it and I love it. So I would talk about it even if they didn't send it to me for free. But I had the founder on and afterwards he's like, do you drink cold brew coffee? And I was like, I will now. So yeah, you send me one of those babies, I'll fire that thing up. So that literally makes it uses nitrogen from the air to make nitro cold brew coffee from home, which I used to think was impossible. I was like, oh, I gotta go get a tap. Now I just gotta get nitro Guinness tap in a machine without having to like install a whole thing, you know what I mean? Like countertop Guinness tap and sign me up. Anyway, on this episode of the show, what I really wanted to do is I did this sort of off the, off the dome, if you will, a couple of days ago where I just went over some of the lessons that I've learned from some people that have been on the show in the past. And then I was like, you know what? I have so much rich value driven entertaining content from the past nine years and 1750 plus episodes of the show. And for the first time ever, I have the world's most brilliant research assistant at my fingertips. So I engaged Perplexity Computer, which is a really cool tool in Perplexity. So if you, I think you have to subscribe to a certainty or whatever to get access to Perplexity Computer. But it's incredible. It does some really, really great research. And so this morning before I left for the gym I went in and I copy and pasted a bunch of YouTube links from 30, 40 past interviews on my show. And it went through, pulled all the transcriptions, and then gave me a ton of information about each one of those interviews. And so what I want to do is kind of turn this into a series, a solo show series that could probably be its own podcast, to be honest with you, where I just go over some of the key lessons and takeaways that I've gotten from some of the people that I've had on the show in the past. There is, there is no shortage of conversations that I've had. And, and frankly, when, when you've done as many episodes I've done now, you forget how many guests you've had. So, you know, like, if people are like, oh, some. Who are some of the guests? Like, you know, I name a few people off the top of my head and it sort of just starts becoming like the same few people over and over again. And so what I did this time was I was going through and actually like looking at all of them and it was like, oh my gosh, I forgot I interviewed this person. Oh, wow, that's a good one. Oh yeah, that's a really good. I was actually surprised at the depth of my own work. Go figure. So on this episode, I'm going to be talking a little bit about some of the lessons that I learned from Josh Peck. Now, if you are a millennial, that name immediately rings a bell with you, and probably for Gen Z, too, because Josh has done a great job reinventing himself in this portion of his career, where he's still doing a lot of acting and things like that in Hollywood, but he also has his own bona fide creator.
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Travis (Podcast Host)
seen a lot of people successfully do. Like there's a lot of people that I grew up watching that have massive followings on social, but they just kind of post from time to time or maybe do a story here and there. But Josh is just a really funny creator now. He's, he's like, like carved this niche for himself in the creator world and has remained really relevant to this day online. And I have a lot of respect for him and for the journey that he went through, the ups and downs. But he was the co star of the hit show Drake and Josh back in the day, which was out of all of the Nickelodeon shows that I watched growing up, I probably watched Drake and Josh the most. I'm trying to think if there would be any that would compete with that. I really, I really don't think that there is. Drake and Josh was, was like my, was like growing up. And so it was a really cool full circle moment to be able to have Josh on the show. So let's go ahead, let's go ahead and dive in. This episode was about rejection, letting go of your ego and then his social media career. And then of course we talked a little bit about Oppenheimer, which was the Christopher Nolan film that he had a role in. He was the person who pressed the button to launch the nuclear bomb and he did a great job in that. But anyway, here's a few of the key lessons and takeaways from my conversation with Josh Peck. Number one, vulnerability is a strategy, not a weakness. Josh grew up in a generation, which is my generation, where public figures kept everything polished and curated. Everything was ran through layers of PR and media teams. And this wasn't allowed to go to print and this wasn't allowed to be said. And you had to be this super polished individual on, on, on camera all the time. And he could have kept that mask on forever. He could have, he could have just hid behind PR teams for the rest of his life. But instead he chose to be honest, chose to be vulnerable, transparent. Because the people been honest with him were the ones who actually helped him. And he realized, well, if I want to go help other people, then I should probably be honest with them. So transparency stopped being a liability once you realized the alternative was just maintaining a performance that nobody fully believed anyway. And I cannot resonate resonate more with this message. The word authenticity gets thrown around a lot these days and I think that authenticity is required. But, but it's, but it's not from a position of I want to be authentic so I can grow my brand. It's just that if you're doing a ton of content all the time, and this is one reason, again, why I love podcasting or long form content so much, if you're doing that type of content, you can't help but have yourself come out at some point. And so the sooner you do that, the better. Because if you build an audience of a bunch of people and you're holding back huge parts of yourself from them, then at some point they're going to realize who you and a lot of those people are going to stop following you or they're going to try to cancel you or whatever. And so it's really important to be authentic as you're, as you're growing the brand, as you're creating content. Now, does that mean that you have to share all of your political views and all of your hardcore religious stances and things like that? No, it doesn't necessarily mean that. It just means that what you're going to share, share it from a place of authenticity and be honest and transparent about it. So vulnerability is a strategy, it's not a weakness. Number two, ego death is a prerequisite for a second act. I loved this part of the conversation. Josh spent three years not getting the roles he wanted while his YouTube career was at its peak. So he was doing really well with YouTube, but at the same time, he wasn't getting any roles in Hollywood that he wanted to get. But he didn't collapse. He went back to acting class. So somebody who grew up acting like he was on, you know, the Amanda show, and he was on, I think he did stuff on all that. And then him and Drake got Drake and Josh. And he was a paid professional actor, a famous actor by all intents and purposes, especially for people in my generation. But he, when he was going to get these roles in Hollywood, he had directors that were like, you're like, you're just not good enough. Like that child star Nickelodeon. Acting doesn't cut it here for this film project. So instead of being like, oh, well, how dare you tell me that I'm not a good actor, I'm a famous actor. What are you talking about? Instead of doing that, he stripped away the vanity, let go of his ego, and then literally went to acting class. He started taking acting classes again and then even shaved off a head of hair. He lost a bunch of weight. He literally became a different version of himself. And that act of letting go was, in retrospect, the thing that unlocked everything that came after, including getting cast in a blockbuster Christopher Nolan film. So you cannot get to the next version of yourself without shedding the prior version of yourself. And that shedding process is extremely uncomfortable to go through, which is why most people don't do it. And I was, I was thrilled to talk to him about this part because it was just like it could. It would have been so easy for him to just take this position of ego rather than take this position of okay, I hear you. I now have some things to learn. Let me go do that. Number three, don't wait until you've made it to share the story. So he's 35, mid career verdict still out on if he's going to be able to, you know, maintain relevancy. And he wrote a book anyway. He wrote Happy People are Annoying, which was the book that we were talking about on this episode. And his point was if you wait until you're at the top, you're writing it from a place that most people can't relate to. So the value of his story was that he was still in the story, he was still grinding, still auditioning. And that honesty is precisely what made the book land and turned it into a bestseller. So do not wait till you are at this perceived level of success to start sharing some of the stuff that you're coming up against. Because there could be two. Like the information that you're sharing when you're on the journey can actually be more practical and helpful for a lot of people who are 12 steps behind you in that journey versus getting all the way to the top and then trying to reverse engineer once you're done with all of that, how to help people move up the ladder in that direction, you kind of forget what it was like to struggle. You forget what it was like to be in the midst of, you know, reconciling different thoughts in your mind about, well, I did this well, but I didn't do this well and I did this well, but I didn't do this well. And so if you, if you wait for some future date, not only may that, that future date may not ever come, but also the information that you're putting out there might not actually be as helpful as it would have been if you just shared along the journey. So don't wait until you've made it to share the story. Number four, money is options, not the things. The way that he views his money grew up with very little. And the surprising thing was that he only made a middle class income on Drake And Josh, not the fortune that most people assumed. So he shared with us that he made barely, like it was 100 something thousand. Like 100, 100, barely over $100,000 a year doing Drake and Josh, which in Los Angeles, in like Hollywood area is, is middle class for sure. And then when the show stopped airing, he stopped making money. Like he's not getting paid more to do Drake and Josh, from what I remember. So he didn't just, he wasn't just this child star. And then now he can just be like, all right, well that was cool. And now I can retire and just be fine if I never get anything else again. That's not how it was. So that scarcity instilled a level of discipline in him, but it also taught him to understand what money is actually used for. And so the lesson that he learned from his finance mentor was when your pregnant wife wants her preferred doctor and you have the money, that's what it's there for. It's buying you freedom of choice. It's allowing you to have options in life. It's not necessarily the end goal in and of itself because money is not a great end goal in and of itself. It's a great byproduct of reaching other goals. And when you have the money, it allows you to be able to have options, to be able to have access to really great healthcare, or to be able to buy a last minute flight even though they're crazy expensive to get across the country to see somebody before they go do this thing that they were supposed to be doing or because they're in the hospital for something. It just allows you to be able to say no to things that you don't really want to be doing or you don't think are fully within the scope of what you should be doing right now. It allows you to say no to those things because you have the money to be able to say no. So money is options. That was his core message there. Number five, control is an illusion. And the sooner you accept that, the better you work. There are things you can control, there are things you can't control. And so figure out the things that you can control, focus on those, and then hope for the best on the things that you can't control, because ultimately you can't control them. And you'll drive yourself crazy trying to control them. So Josh kept losing auditions for years. And the turning point wasn't booking more roles. It was accepting that he could only own his preparation. The only thing that he had control over was how much work and preparation that he put into the audition. Once he did it, then he had to just sit back and let the. The chips fall where they may. And it was accepting that he could only own the preparation that really helped him out. So do the work, show up, Let the outcome be someone else's problem. So the moment he genuinely internalized that, he started booking shows. And the irony tracks. You grip tighter and you lose more. The tighter your grip is, the more you're going to lose. When you let go, things start moving. So I always like the illustration of the closed fist. It's like you think that it's better to keep your fist closed because you're going to hold on, you're going to keep a tight grip. But what happens is you can't receive anything with a closed fist. You have to open up your hand and you have to be willing to give and you have to have an open energy in order to be able to receive anything as well. So let go and opportunity starts coming a little bit more. So he's one of those guests where you finish the conversation, you just feel like you talked to a real person, not the Persona of Josh Peck. So he was super honest about the money thing, which I thought was really cool. Made a comfortable living on Drake and Josh. But it's not life changing money at all. And for years people just assumed that he was set. So that gap between perception and reality really aided him for quite some time. But he kept grinding through projects that most people would see as beneath him because the bills don't care about your IMDb page. That's not a Hollywood story alone. That's everybody's story. I think that's why his book resonated, because he wrote it from the middle of the journey and not from some mountain after he'd already won or after he'd already summited that mountain. He was still in the middle of the uncertainty. He's still auditioning, still wondering. And he was honest enough to put that on paper and to talk to me about it on the show, which I really appreciated. So what I took away from this is the ego death that he went through. Going back to class, cutting his hair, stripping off the armor, losing some weight. All of that was just the work that he had to do in order to achieve the next level of success in his life. And most people quit right before that part or right in the middle of that part, but Josh walked straight through it. And so I really loved this conversation with Josh Peck. And if you have not listened into the whole thing, I'd Highly recommend going and checking out the full episode, but that's it for this episode of the show. We'll catch you guys in the next one where we'll talk about Scott Harrison, who is a former nightclub promoter who has now been the founder of Charity Water, which is the world's largest charity helping tackle the water crisis. They raised over a billion dollars. They brought clean water to over 20 million people across the globe. Very fascinating conversation. Interesting guy. And so we're going to break down some of my takeaways from that conversation on next episode of the show. Catch you next time. Peace
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Travis (Podcast Host)
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