Bust and Beyond
Failure is a part of life and business, and I experienced the failure of a business in 2015 that my father had started in 1969. The effect it had on me emotionally was huge, yet the outside world knew nothing. I kept it to myself. I learnt so much from that failure, and it made me determined to support other business owners in the construction industry to avoid failure and flourish.
As I started to speak to business owners about failure, I learnt just how many had suffered from mental health issues and harmful thoughts. This drove me to start my podcast to educate and let people know how to avoid failure and know if they are going through failure, they are not alone, but more importantly, there is life and success after the failure of your business.
Bust and Beyond
E35 Kevin Palmieri
What if your toughest struggles could become your greatest triumphs? Join us for an inspiring conversation with Kevin Palmieri, the founder and host of Next Level University, as he shares his journey from working at a gas station to becoming a successful podcaster and coach. Kevin's candid discussion on overcoming self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and the relentless pursuit of self-improvement offers valuable insights for anyone facing adversity. Additionally, I open up about my own battles with imposter syndrome and how they've shaped my life and career.
Have you ever felt that outward success doesn't always bring inner happiness? We tackle this profound topic by sharing a journey that starts with disappointment at not getting a warehouse job, moves through various careers as a truck driver, firefighter, and weatherization expert, and eventually leads to increased anxiety and depression despite financial success. Reflecting on personal struggles, failed relationships, and the realization that true fulfillment lies beyond material gains, we offer a nuanced perspective on the importance of mental well-being and genuine connections.
Success and failure, two sides of the same coin, deeply influence our lives in ways we often overlook. Through personal anecdotes and meaningful reflections, we explore the contrast between my own struggles with motivation and my business partner's ease in achieving goals but difficulty in maintaining relationships. We also touch on the impact of personal loss on empathy, the significance of celebrating small victories, and moving past failures quickly. From the story of Tom from MySpace finding fulfillment as a photographer to the joy of giving and societal judgments tied to money, this episode is a heartfelt exploration of life's complexities and the pursuit of genuine happiness.
Hello and welcome to Bustin' Beyond with your host, robin Hayhurst. In this podcast, robin will introduce guests that have known failure and want to share their story about how they got through it and what happened next. This will make you learn how to see things from a new perspective and avoid making the same mistakes. Please welcome Robin Hayhurst.
Speaker 2:Hello everybody and welcome to Bust and Beyond Podcast. So I am joined today by Kevin Palmieri, who is an absolute scream already in the pre-conversation. So let's see where this one's going to go, Hello Kevin.
Speaker 3:Robin what's?
Speaker 2:happening. My friend, I'm really well. Thank you, yeah, and it's a bit rainy over here. We'll start with the weather. That's the English way.
Speaker 3:Same over here. I feel like that's kind of that's how you ease into the conversation.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well. It's not just that, it changes every 10 minutes, so there's always plenty to talk about and we always moan about it. It's either too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry.
Speaker 3:So it's one of those things. It's the same over here, my friend.
Speaker 2:I'm the same, so tell us a little bit about you and what you do.
Speaker 3:I am the founder and the host of Next Level University. It is a global top 100 podcast with 1,812 episodes or, something as of today, over a million listens and listeners in 170 plus countries. So I'm a full-time podcaster, entrepreneur, speaker and coach, and that's what I get to do every day now, which I'm very grateful for. You say you're a coach.
Speaker 2:I mean podcast. I'm in awe. We're nowhere near those figures and we've only got 34 episodes. But I do it because I love it, so I enjoy speaking to people. It's a good excuse. I don't get out a lot nowadays, Same yeah, so the podcast is fantastic. What do you coach? What is your kind of subject? What kind of people do you look after?
Speaker 3:Man. It started out as fitness because I was a bodybuilder, and then it went into mindset and peak performance and then eventually people started asking me about podcasting. When I was like three or 400 episodes in, people asked how did you do what you're doing? So now I almost exclusively coach podcasters, speakers and coaches. That's really my gig now. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely that makes sense. I've just started training for a marathon. I'm running the Brighton Marathon, which is quite a long way from me, I don't know. Actually I'm doing it because my daughter's running it and she invited me to run with her. So I've started a little Instagram TikTok thing just my training runs, which are getting no traction at all. But I'm doing it again because I just enjoy it and I'm hoping I'm counting the runs. I'm on run three now, so I'll start that with doing run four. I'm hoping there's gonna be a bit of traction and people can enjoy kind of seeing me change and get fitter and because I'm not fit at the moment definitely wouldn't be called a bodybuilder, so fantastic. So you've got the podcast, you're doing the coaching, so we're busting beyond. So we talk about lessons learned from failure. You weren't born a bodybuilder. How did you kind of grow up and kind of what brought you into, what was your journey, into what you're doing now?
Speaker 3:I was raised by my mom and my grandmother. I didn't know my dad. I didn't meet my dad until I was 27. So obviously that has played a role in everything that I've done, and we definitely grew up lower middle class. We didn't have a lot of money. Oftentimes I heard conversations about how we're going to be able to pay rent. My mom and grandmother shared a car.
Speaker 3:Money was never our strong suit, and the interesting thing is now I'm all about learning and self-improvement, but I never valued education. So when I was in middle school and high school I knew I did not want to go to college. It just didn't make sense to me to go accrue a bunch of debt and then try to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. It just didn't resonate with me. So after high school all my friends went away to college and I got my first full-time job at the local gas station and I pumped gas from six in the morning till two in the afternoon. Then I'd go to the gym after, and that, ultimately, was my life for a few years. And then a lot of my struggles, robin, have been the I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'll never be successful, I'm not competent. So I left the gas station because I was getting judged a lot by the people that I knew. Everybody else had gone away to college and got degrees and I'm working. I'm kind of like the townie.
Speaker 3:I still live at the same place, I think we call it imposter syndrome. I had a lot of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, and I've had oodles of that. And it's strange enough when you look back in life. Like you, I didn't go to university, not to begin with, not until I was about 28. I just failed at every bit of college I did. I know they're different words. Yeah, college means different things here, but I just wasn't a great kid at school. I don't know, I was bored. I suppose I was bored. Yeah, it wasn't really relevant. Then I also had terrible imposter syndrome, so I didn't think that I could ever go to university. I ended up on a part-time university course by accident, so totally understand that.
Speaker 3:Well, I still I'm happy to talk more about imposter syndrome, because it's still something I deal with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think most people do. I. What I say to people is if you meet someone without imposter syndrome, please stay away from them. They're completely nuts. I think we all have it. I have it every time I do a workshop or do a big live or something like that. I always feel a bit like that until I get into it I realized I was working, laboring on building sites so my industry construction. But also I worked at Safeways. I know you have Safeways. We did have Safeways in America. They've disappeared from the UK now, but I worked on the tilt.
Speaker 3:Did you find that the struggle that I had was I always went from a job. It was always for me what is the next career that I'm actually capable of doing? It was always that. So it was gas station to personal trainer, to truck driver, to forklift operator, cleaning bathroom floors in hospitals. My lack of self-belief stopped me from being able to take more opportunities and more shots.
Speaker 2:Strangely, you're making me think now, and what was going?
Speaker 3:through my mind.
Speaker 2:And I knew where I wanted to go. I think I knew that my father ran a development and construction company. I knew that's what I wanted to do, never thought I'd make it there and didn't have a clue how to get there. So I kind of lived in the moment, so working on site. I worked on site, working in safe ways. I worked in safe ways. It was just I didn't think where my next job was coming from in that way and I've had some really lovely people come into my life that were fantastic mentors. Despite the time I didn't realize it yeah that the thing.
Speaker 2:There's a chap called Paul Leach who had a massive impact on my life, but not in person. He employed me in a company. He had other people nurture me. He put me through a training which was unbelievable it's just unheard of nowadays where I went in every single department and I wasn't Employee of the Month by a long way, but he was really supportive. Unfortunately he's passed away now. But he also introduced me to my wife accidentally again not in person. She happened to know someone at the company so we were introduced via the company I was working for.
Speaker 2:So I've come across these kind of people and I but even then I didn't really I was ambitious for money and I've come across these kind of people, but even then I didn't really I was ambitious for money and I was ambitious because cars was always a stage symbol for me for some reason. I've gone back on that a little bit. I remember there was a Fiesta we called them XR2s in the car park and no one had their eye on it because someone had left and I was driving a normal Fiesta and I was trying to work out a deal where I could get this XR2 as part of my package. I did fail to get it. I think I ended up getting an extra gallon of petrol a month.
Speaker 1:That was it.
Speaker 2:But I totally get what you're talking about. But yeah, that made me think actually you're saying that you kind of jobs that you thought you were capable of doing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I never really got the next. I remember I applied to work at the Dunkin' Donuts warehouse and it was like a really big pay raise for me and I didn't even get a call back. They didn't even give me a call back. So I always felt like I wasn't good enough, I was never going to be successful and eventually I was working. So I was working as a truck driver and a forklift operator and one of the guys I worked with, him and I were having conversations and we talked about life. Pretty often that's kind of a through line of my life and I was like I don't know if I want to do this anymore. Man, this kind of sucks.
Speaker 2:This job kind of sucks.
Speaker 3:And he said what do you want to do? And I said I don't know. I feel like being a firefighter would be really cool. And he said all right, we'll go down to your town fire station and figure out if they're doing on-call stuff. So I ended up going through the fire academy through my town, which is really cool.
Speaker 3:But after that, everything kind of connected. I got a job in an industry called weatherization. All that means is we go into large buildings and we make them more energy efficient. Most of the buildings we worked on were state owned, so I got paid through government or state contracts. So I went from making 15 US dollars an hour to anywhere from 60 to 120 US dollars an hour. So my income went up very quickly and I fell in love with his job because I was convinced, now that I'm making money, I can buy the car and I'll attract a partner that'll love me and they'll be successful and it's going to be perfect. And that was the beginning. Unfortunately, that was the beginning of my downfall, because you don't know what you don't know yet.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes, you definitely don't know what you don't know. I use that a lot. Yeah, no, I again I really get that. But I think I chased money a little bit, but not in the big way. I mean I couldn't have. I never dreamt that I could earn really good money. Good money to me then was 20 pounds. Well, 15 pound I remember earning. I remember thinking one day I'd earn 10,000 pounds a year. I'm thinking, wow, you know so I wasn't, despite the fact and I'll be honest, I had a upbringing where I kind of was born with a silver spoon in my mouth.
Speaker 2:My parents were multimillionaires and my father built quite a big company, but they were quite good at keeping me grounded. I wouldn't say that was true of company, but they were quite good at keeping me grounded. I wouldn't say that was true of my siblings, but they were quite good at keeping me grounded. But you say you went to the fire department. I had a dalliance with the police force and went for a few interviews and a few bits and pieces and I even went on a three-day induction with them, but I never saw it. I don't know. I never saw it as a career.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I wanted it to be. But then when I graduated and I realized if you're not a paramedic or you don't have a military background, it's very hard to do it and I was so broke at that point I had zero dollars. So the fact that I just got an opportunity to make potentially six figures blew my mind and I was all in on that. And I did that for the next few years. And if you looked at me when I was 25, you would see somebody who had a high paying job. I was competing in a bodybuilding show, so I was quite literally in the best shape I will ever be.
Speaker 3:My girlfriend at the time was a model a sports car, new apartment. I had all of this stuff. All of the external stuff and I know this is a cliche and there's so many stories like this but internally I was miserable. I was miserable, I was depressed, I was anxious, I was insecure, I was afraid of being left behind. All of that stuff is what was running me. And then my girlfriend ended up leaving me because I was so depressed and so anxious and so insecure, and all of that stuff and that kind of became the rock bottom, the next piece of the journey. That was kind of the rock bottom. Who is Kevin? Who could ever love this version of Kevin? How do I do this? How do I get better? How do I make more money? But I think the issue is I fell back into the same pattern of well, I'll work on me later, I need to work on my bank account more now and then, unfortunately, the cycle kind of perpetuates.
Speaker 2:Oh it does. Yeah, I mean you can chase money A bit like you. I had a girlfriend who was an air hostess so I saw what's after this, so sauce after. But she was actually the first girlfriend I really felt liked me, for me, rather than that I had a wealthy background. So I married her and we're still married 33 years later. So it's most probably the one thing I did in my life apart from having two girls. It was absolutely perfect and the right thing to do. But yeah, I kind of really relate to some of the stuff you're saying.
Speaker 3:I feel like you and I are very similar, other than that I thought you were going to say the first person that liked me not for my money, and then you messed it up. I expected that, but the fact that you're still thriving makes me very happy. So we're different.
Speaker 2:I think she's really patient. So, I've earned a lot of money. I've lost a lot of money. What I'm doing now is a bit weird and wacky, really, I suppose, in comparison to most people's idea of a job. I help construction companies and developers. I help people in property. I podcast. I keep on forgetting that, that I podcast because it's just a hobby. I enjoy it. I've spoken to the most interesting people, but do you edit your own podcasts?
Speaker 3:No, we have a team.
Speaker 2:Okay, do you actually listen to them again, because I very rarely re-listen to my podcasts that I've done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there was a point where I was pretty much. We do one every day and that would be one of my habits is I would listen to our latest episode. It helps a ton, but it also sucks a lot as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the things I have noticed being very honest to the audience here is sometimes I feel I talk too much.
Speaker 3:I think it depends on the guest. Yeah, yeah, I like this. I'm weird with certain. When I go on certain shows, it's different because I, when I'm intrigued by the host, I like to ask questions and explore as well. I don't care if it's not about me, that's not, I don't, whatever.
Speaker 2:Well, this podcast is conversation, and what I want people who are listening to get is to get some kind of oh yeah, I never thought it like that, that would help me. And we all hit rock bottom and I think until you hit rock bottom some ways, you haven't got the right perspective on life. You can't really get on with life. And I hit rock bottom quite late in life because I had lots of support, lots of things around me that stopped me from hitting rock bottom, and I never worried about money because I always thought, well, I can get it from somewhere. And when I hit rock bottom in 2015, so not that long ago it scared the willies out of me and I also realized how much I didn't know. But then it took me ages to learn again how much I did know. So it's been a real. I mean, what a journey. The last nine years have been just amazing as a journey no-transcript.
Speaker 3:Do you wish you hit rock bottom sooner?
Speaker 2:Kind, not maybe rock bottom. I wish I'd had a wake-up call sooner. Money was always easy for me to get one way or another and I thought I could carry on getting money and when we went through liquidation I made the conscious decision not to fund my way through it because there was too much risk involved with me and the people lending the money. Maybe we could have, maybe we couldn't have. So, yeah, my worry, I suppose and very deep here, kevin, very deep my worry is that I've had a bloody good life, but I'd hate to be on the downward cycle now, you know, because all the best stuff's gone. I hope not. I've got lots of plans and I am really ambitious and really, yeah, and my ambition is completely different now to what it was. So it's not just around money, it's around helping people have an impact and other much higher virtues.
Speaker 3:It's so interesting that the thing that comes easy to you is eventually potentially the thing that sabotages you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Totally agree with that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and again you don't have to answer that. I am so intrigued by you. What didn't come easy for you?
Speaker 2:Hard work always didn't come easy for me. Hard work for me has been we'll have to just copy this, make it your podcast. Hard work for me has always been difficult to gauge, because when I'm really enjoying something, I don't see it's work. So I think I have spent some of my life feeling guilty for not working hard enough, and some of some of that time has been absolutely true I have not worked hard enough. But some of that time when I've been feeling guilty, I've been working my bollocks off, as we say in the UK, but I have enjoyed it, so I haven't seen it as work. So I think most probably that kind of consistent get up and go and I get it in waves, and when I get it I can move mountains, and when I don't, it's difficult. Okay, most probably that. What about?
Speaker 3:you. Oh man, I think success always felt very hard to get for me. External achievement, especially monetarily. What came easy to me was, I would say, deeply meaningful relationships. I'm really good with the people that I love and that love me and I don't. Really I don't know if I was, I don't know. I think there was times in life I was worried about being alone, but it was more out of choice than anything. I think that always came easier. I have a truly magnificent relationship. I am so, so, so grateful to have an amazing wife and behind the scenes my relationship is probably better than anybody would guess. Honestly, a lot of my external success.
Speaker 3:I have a business partner who is a genius and I owe a lot of my quote unquote success to him. I've had a mentor every day for the last seven years so he's taught me so much about reverse engineering, finish lines and numbers and money, and so that stuff did not come easily to me at all, but for him it was the opposite. He is weird, robin. He'll say, okay, I'm going to go do this, and then he just goes and does it. I'm going to get 30 clients, and then he just goes and gets 30 clients and then he just does whatever he says he's going to do. But his relationships were his challenge, because every time he would grow and evolve and become more, people would villainize him.
Speaker 2:But I'm also guessing he's got a single focus, which is why he goes and does things and just does them. And I've noticed that in life I have lost a little bit of my empathy. I always proud myself on having empathy and I think I've gone through so much in the last few years with losing my father and other family things that I've lost a little bit of my empathy. And I think my wife notices, because I tend to ignore her a lot now. So I think it can be, but at the same time if I'm going to do something, I get out there and do it, but I don't. And we're talking about failures and we're talking about kind of what makes you fail.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things I don't do right is I don't celebrate success. So I go out and I decide to run a workshop First ever workshop I ever ran in my life. Right, I get 15 people sign up to this workshop and I run this workshop. None of them knew I'd never done one before. I knew I was absolutely terrified. I might as well have been going out on stage with 10,000 people in the crowd.
Speaker 2:At one stage I got a small panic attack where I just thought I can't do this and I was actually in mid-flow of the sentence but I'm sure it didn't come over. But I set out and did that and it happened and I now run workshops. I never really kind of went well done, robin. That was really outside your comfort zone. You did that, never thought that. I just moved on to the next thing, moved on to right bigger workshops, this workshops, the whole Tony Robbins approach of doing things. He he's obviously got it so right in so many ways that you need to take time to think about what you're doing and to actually realize how much success you've had.
Speaker 3:I'm the opposite, where I'm really good at celebrating wins, but I'm also really good at ruminating over losses and failures. Do you move quickly from when you make a failure? Do you just wipe the slate clean?
Speaker 2:Yeah, pretty quickly. Actually it comes from sport. I've always been pretty average at sport. Love playing Soccer, you call it football Loved it, absolutely love playing. Getting out on a Sunday morning or Saturday morning playing, but I was rubbish. I think I scored two goals in my whole life. So I had to enjoy not the win or losing because my team generally lost. I had to enjoy taking part yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:So to me, a win would be a good tackle, or getting the ball or passing it to someone, actually getting it the right place, things like that. So I think that's helped me move on quickly. And there's a few other things. I mean, I did a and I think I might mention this in my podcast before, so if you've heard this before people, I'm tough, I'm going to say it again. But I went to a thing called Outerbound, which is it was Outerbound was designed for sailors.
Speaker 2:In the First World War, young sailors were taken to lifeboats after their ships were being torpedoed and the young ones were dying and the old ones weren't, and they came to the conclusion that they were just giving up. So they invented a course for them, an out-of-bound course, which really gave them an opportunity to realize their potential, to understand that. And one of the things on the out-of-bound course I had to do it was at a lake called Oswald in the Lake District, very deep, very cold. I can tell you that Every morning we'd get up about six o'clock and you'd run down to the lake and you'd run to the end of the pier and you'd jump in and I can't tell you how cold it was and I was there for my longest outbound course was four weeks and I was there four weeks and we did it almost every day and you used to worry about it All night. You'd be awake worrying about it, thinking how you can get out of it, thinking how you can get around it. And they had this rule if one of your members of the team, whatever reason, didn't go down, then one of you had to jump in twice.
Speaker 2:One thing jumping once is bad, jumping twice is pretty bad. And after about a week or so you just got up and did it. You didn't think about it, didn't worry about it because it was not nice. You ran back up, had a nice hot shower if you were at the base and then had breakfast. So it taught me that something terrible could happen tomorrow. But don't worry about it, it's just going to happen. And then you kind of get on with it. Really good life lesson. And in fact, when I left the out-of-bound course to come home, I missed the wake up. I still can't wake up very well in the mornings.
Speaker 3:We need to send you out to nature.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, I was a boy scout for a long time, so I'm kind of used to that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's such a challenging thing. I don't know. This whole journey is a weird thing, no-transcript. Why I think the way I think I fell in love with podcasting, fell out of love with my job because I don't want the money anymore, and then I ended up sitting on the edge of a bed the next year contemplating suicide because I just felt so stuck and so trapped. And if you told me when I was 15 years old that eventually you'd be sitting on the edge of a bed contemplating suicide, there's no way I would possibly believe that.
Speaker 2:Well, that's come up a lot really in this podcast, because people who see their company failing or sometimes their life, you know, not going the way they want it Often suicide is something that they do contemplate. Not very many people follow through or attempt it, but yeah, they do and I think it's quite a serious thing. But if you go back to money, money is just validation. I mean, that's what I realised. Once you kind of get the things you want in life and I'm not talking about fast cars and stuff like that I'm really privileged. I've got friends who've got fast cars and I can go in them when I want, and they're great.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad for their success. They can afford what their passion is. It's not my passion, but just a bit of gap from me with my family when I wanted to afford that's my passion, that's great. So once you get to that point, what's money? Well, money is just validation. It means that you're doing something right. It makes you feel better because you feel successful. I think feeling successful is something that is missing from so many people's lives and often it's just perspective, that's all.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's fulfillment that's missing. I think the success, the definition of success, I think, for most people is external progress. I think where we miss it is the fulfillment aspect of, like you said earlier, if you love, if you can design a life that you actually love. I'm not saying it's easy. My life is harder than it's ever been, but it's hard in a positive direction. And I'm under more pressure than I've ever been, but it's privileged pressure because I have the opportunity to choose the pressure that I'm under. But I'm the most fulfilled I've ever been, but I'm also the most externally successful I've ever been.
Speaker 3:I'm curious if you took the podcast away, robin, I don't think I'd be fulfilled. And I don't think I'd be fulfilled and I don't think I'd want any of the external success I have. I'd want this more. I'd want to come back and say take the car, I want a podcast again. I miss having conversations. I think that fulfillment piece is such a valuable thing that I just never understood. I couldn't define it, I didn't know what it meant and it's really hard to describe what it feels like until you felt it yeah, I totally get that.
Speaker 2:Totally get that fulfillment. So I mean it's in maslow's triangle. Have you heard of maslow's triangle? So hierarchy of needs. If you look at someone like richard branson, why does he risk his life or he used to, I think he got a big wake-up call risk his life, ballooning and stuff like that, when he's he's so successful and I think his success is he's so successful and I think his success is he's failed so many times. That's the other thing. And he has succeeded at certain things and we see him as a success. We see him as a nice guy, and I'm sure he is. I'm sure he's also got his other side to him. But he's always the example I get when you look at fulfillment, because he is after that fulfillment bit. He's not a money bit, he's not trying to make himself richer. He's in his seventies, he's still starting new companies and it's fulfillment yeah.
Speaker 3:Have you ever heard of MySpace? Yes, I believe, and again, don't quote me on the specifics because I don't know the numbers, but whoever Tom from MySpace. He sold MySpace for some ridiculous amount of money and then he just disappeared and nobody knows, like where he went and he doesn't do interviews or anything and he became like a photographer and I bet you he is unreasonably fulfilled that he gets to do what he loves every day. I think all fulfillment is a recognition of what's deeply meaningful to you, what is deeply meaningful to you and your existence. And if you can chase that and then I think you're willing to go through more failures because you know that there's fulfillment on the other side of it. It just makes life feel more connected.
Speaker 2:And also striving towards something is really important. I've always had this belief. We have the lottery in the UK. I know you've got one in America as well. We don't get taxed on our winnings, by the way, in the UK Interesting we get taxed on everything else, not lottery winnings Not as far as I know. Anyway. We have a couple of lotteries. So one is you can have 30 years of having £10,000 a month and the rest are win 5 million, 10 million, 100 million. So other lotteries, and I can tell you now, if I won 100 million it would have a very negative impact on my life. I would feel so unfulfilled because what would I strive for? What I'd have to read to be successful? I'd have to completely redesign myself, whereas I've always said if I won the £10,000 a month, it's just enough to pay all the bills and it means that I could just do what I love. But anything I did, I'd still have that success for money because it gave me that extra income.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I ponder these kind of things because I'm a bit like that. I I love helping people. I love helping people. I am definitely a giver. I absolutely get a buzz out of it. You know, christmas for me is about buying presents for other people, never about receiving presents. And my wife often says to me that I'm not good because I can't buy her what I really want to buy her. I don't buy her anything, so it's a strange thing, but I love giving and solving people's problems. I really enjoy that and I think that if I did win a lot of money, I would have to set myself up to just help people.
Speaker 2:It's a lifelong thing, that would be it.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, I'm sure that would be fulfilling too. I mean, you know how hard it would be to give away $100 million. I can guess. Or I don't know. It might be easier than I think, depending on where you go.
Speaker 2:Well, the problem with there is a lot of research going into this. I don't know it, but there's a lot of research. I've heard kind of bandied about that. Most lottery winners are unhappy because if you're a labor on a building site and you win 10 million, how do you manage that? How do you know what to? Do with it how you look after your money, how you? What about the tax? It's like running a company. So often they spend it and it makes me unhappy yeah, I think it magnifies problems.
Speaker 3:If you're insecure, you're going to be more insecure when you have a lot of money. I don't think it's going to go away. I think it's going to get worse. If you have trust issues, imagine the amount of trust issues you're going to have when somebody puts $100 million in your bank account. Yeah, it's going to perpetuate that.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, exactly, and I've seen people. There was a winner locally to me that bought a house off me when I was building houses and he was struggling because he didn't know who his real friends were. Yeah, so he second-guessed everything. So money is a problem and my family have been very dysfunctional over money, and it's a common thing. Money really isn good, and I see families around me that have got no money and they're such a productive, nurturing family.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. But it's so hard because people would look at you and say, well, how could you ever have problems, robin? You just said you can't. So potential silver spoon, I would rather have the overwhelm of that than the overwhelm of not having it. But I think one of the things you said earlier I think is kind of the through line of this entire thing is perspective. Yeah, it's. If you don't have the perspective, you don't know the pain that comes with it. Well, once you do, maybe you have a new opportunity to see it from a from a different angle.
Speaker 2:But people always think you've got money if you come from money at all times and at the moment, I'll be honest with you I haven't. And when I a few years ago, I had another kind of area when I didn't. And it's surprising the comments you hear from people who go well, you can afford it, or why don't you pay for the meal? Or well, if you want an Aston Martin, you can go and buy one. And you're sitting there thinking hold on, I've got about £2.50 in the bank. I don't think that's going to work. People just judge you, and they judge you for money and they judge you when you haven't got money.
Speaker 2:And I think one of the nice things about the village I live in in the UK we've got all types of different people here, so it is quite an elitist village. There's lots of people that have got a lot of money, but there are lots of people that are living in council houses, that are renting, that are. So you can talk down the pub which is owned by the community in in my village. You can talk to anybody and they could be a cleaner, a, a laborer, a CEO or an entrepreneur All in the same pub, and that is what life's about.
Speaker 3:I appreciate that perspective. I appreciate that perspective very much. It's always cool when I get to talk to people that are not in the US or in other places in the world because your perspective is drastically different than mine.
Speaker 2:I think it is. I mean, we've already mentioned before coming on, the Trump and the gun thing. It's the two things we can't talk about. Yes, I think every nation has a different perspective on things and what's important to them. We're very guided by films, television. If you watch, there's a film called the Holiday, I think starring I can't remember who it was, anyway. But they have a kind of typical English pub there and it's kind of like a nice kind of village environment and stuff like that. And that does exist not everywhere, not all villages are like that.
Speaker 2:So a lot of what you see say in America watching films about England. Some of it's true. We think that all your bars are like cheers and we also think that every single person in America carries a gun and you kind of get this perspective which is just wrong, a bit like, I suppose, when we had the tube bombings many years ago, people stopped coming here because they were terrified. Tube bombings many years ago, people stopped coming here because they were terrified and actually we kind of just got on with it. It was such a rare occurrence. We just kind of went well, it's not likely to happen again then, is it, and kind of got on with it. But people outside the country, typically Americans say didn't come over here for a couple of years because they were worried about things and the chance of them getting shot in America rather than blown up in the UK were much, much higher. We all have a perspective on it, don't we?
Speaker 3:We do. Was that in 2016?
Speaker 2:No, it was a long time ago. I can't remember actually I can't remember the year. I remember my wife was working in London at the time and she was traveling to work that day. But yeah, we had some suicide bombers on two tube trains I think, or maybe one, so yeah, and then of course, 9-11 happened and everything around that, but yeah, so I said, we have very different perspective on that kind of thing. What one of the things that really has kind of upset me really is that apple charge you in dollars and us in pounds exactly the same amount. If I'm buying something for 999 pounds, they'll charge you 999 dollars, so you'll get a discount.
Speaker 3:I see, I would never know that and mcdonald's.
Speaker 2:So you've got a 99 cent burger and we pay 99 pence.
Speaker 3:What about Amazon?
Speaker 2:I don't have Amazon. I haven't checked that.
Speaker 3:That's probably the most dangerous one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, amazon. I find scary anyway, because Amazon, I take it over the world at the moment because it's so convenient and even when I say I'm going to stop using them, I can't use them how do you stop?
Speaker 2:well, the trouble is, if we are a nation of shopkeepers that's what we know now and all the little shops are struggling because people just go for amazon because it's delivered quickly and everything else. The quality of the local shops, the butchers, the food shops, that not the supermarkets it's's massive. The quality is so much better and the prices aren't that much different. And we're moving away for convenience sake and we're going to so regret it Another 20 years. We're going to go oh well, we can buy from Amazon or Amazon because there's no one else around. And who's fault is that? It's ours.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and they're making it even easier. Now. They pre-ship based on your behavior. They pre-ship items that you might want, so they can deliver it same day instead of two day.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's way over my head. I don't understand it.
Speaker 2:Well, we get same day delivery here, some items by 10 o'clock at night, but yeah, and they're starting to use drones as well. So there's a town called milton kings where they're using robots around the streets to deliver I'm not ready for that robin, I'm not ready.
Speaker 3:I can't even do the supermarket robots. Yeah, there's. I don't know. That's going to be very weird, yeah self-service check houses.
Speaker 2:Really, why can't I have someone just do this?
Speaker 3:for me. Is it pretty much across the board over there, or is it almost all self-checkout?
Speaker 2:There's always the option to have someone else do it. We've never had quite the service that you do, so you don't tend to get someone scan them and pack them for you.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So our service levels aren't quite where yours are, but then you'd expect to tip someone if they packed your bags for you.
Speaker 3:Well, now you've got to tip everything, everything you tip.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we don't always tip, we do occasionally, but the tipping culture is very different. You definitely won't get looked down on if you don't tip, but the 10% tip is discretionary and it really is discretionary are very different. You definitely won't get kind of looked down on if you don't tip, but the kind of 10 tip is discretionary and it really is discretionary. I mean, you're not saying that you've had bad service because you don't tip, so it kind of it varies. But yeah, it's, it's. There is different culture around tipping, but then our kind of waitresses and waiters have a wage. They don't just live off tips. Yeah, so he's different. So, and there's loads of cultural differences between the States and here and um, but we've also got so much in common. I think that's really important to remember.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We almost speak the same language.
Speaker 3:I can understand 99% of what you're saying, so that's good.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. Well, we've got a few words, don't know fortnight.
Speaker 3:I know. Isn't that every other week? Isn't that every other week? I know that now, but I didn't a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think famously one of our kind of famous people went over and and got a car with bollocks on it.
Speaker 3:I don't think you use that word either.
Speaker 2:No, we don't use that word. I know what it is, but we don't use it. So, yeah, so it's. Yeah. I mean there's lots of similarities. I mean most of AI spells in American, so it's different spelling on lots of color, for instance.
Speaker 3:What is yours? C-o-l-o-u-r.
Speaker 2:You've just simplified it. You've mostly got it right by simplifying it.
Speaker 3:I think it helps. It definitely helps.
Speaker 2:It's more descriptive. Like we call it a pavement, you call it a sidewalk, just so. There's no way that you can't know what it is.
Speaker 3:See, I appreciate the perspective. I appreciate the perspective very much I do For me that's the through line of this conversation.
Speaker 2:Perspective Perspective is, yeah, definitely going on. Anyway, it's been fantastic speaking to you, kevin. Likewise, my friend, I really enjoyed our conversation and hopefully we've got a few bits about learning from failure in there. But I think learning from life is so important and I think being able to look at the perspective of other people, the perspective how they see things, is great. But thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I'm a huge fan. Nothing but love. Any chance to do it in the future, let me know I'd be happy to come back.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, we'll do that.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to Bustin' Beyond with Robin Hayhurst. Be sure to tune in next time and visit his website at robinhayhurstcom.