Kevin Palmieri
Mr. Kevin Palmieri
Host of Top 100 Global Podcast “Next Level University” -900+ Episodes, Listeners In Over 120 Countries.
Some people find rock bottom… I found out that rock bottom has a basement.
In my mid 20’s… I had it all. A beautiful girlfriend, a high-paying job, a sports car, my dream body… but I still ended up sitting on the edge of a bed debating suicide… several times.
After my rock bottom moment, I went all in on self-improvement; I was determined to overcome my anxiety to overcome my depression.
Years later, I host a podcast with hundreds of thousands of downloads in over a hundred countries, I’ve grown the podcast into a multi-six-figure business, and I’ve recorded over 700 episodes. I’ve given nearly 100 speeches and had the opportunity to do hundreds of coaching calls.
The main thing that changed was ME. I focused on learning what I didn’t know (and unlearning a lot, too), and my life started to shift.
It’s my purpose to help other people get unstuck and get to the next level of their lives!
I love talking about Consistency, Commitment, Habits, Mindset, Confidence, Fear, Relationships, and Limiting Beliefs. We talk about so many pieces of self-improvement, so I’m happy to explore many topics!
@neverquitkid
Audio Episode
Video Episode
Transcript
Kevin Palmieri
[00:00:00] Ed Watters: To overcome you must educate. Educate not only yourself, but educate anyone seeking to learn. We are all Dead America, we can all learn something. To learn, we must challenge what we already understand, the way we do that is through conversation. Sometimes we have conversations with others, however, some of the best conversations happen
[00:00:42] with ourself.
[00:00:45] Reach out and challenge yourself. Let’s dive in and learn something right now.
[00:00:57] Today we are with Kevin Palmieri, Kevin is the cohost or the host, whichever way you wanna put it, of the Next Level University podcast. He is also a podcast consultant coach. Kevin, could you please introduce yourself? Let people know just a little more about
[00:01:19] you please?
[00:01:19] Kevin Palmieri: Yes, Ed. Thank you so very much for having me, as Ed said, uh, I am the co-founder/ co-host and CFO of Next Level University.
[00:01:28] We are a podcast that’s focused on bringing holistic self-improvement to entrepreneurs and people in general. We do seven episodes a week because we want to be in your pocket every day to help you get to the next level of your life. That is my, my passion and my purpose in this world, so I’m grateful to be able to do that.
[00:01:48] Ed Watters: You know, it’s hard to find passion and purpose in this world sometimes, Kevin. Uh, what, what brought you to podcasting?
[00:01:56] Kevin Palmieri: So it’s interesting. I actually got interviewed on a podcast and after I was interviewed, I said, so there was, my two friends interviewed me and afterwards one of my friends went to the bathroom and the other one and myself were talking.
[00:02:11] And I said, imagine if you could do that for a living, that would be wild. And my buddy said, you know, you can, right? And something in my mind shifted there forever. And I went out and bought all the equipment I needed and figured out how to post it, and video edit, and audio edit, and all that happy jazz.
[00:02:28] And, and then obviously there was a journey I didn’t, we didn’t get to 900 episodes overnight. That’s been a, that’s been a thing, but that’s what it was. I, I got on and there wasn’t a microphone at the time, but I got in front of a microphone and a camera and had a conversation and it was like, wow. That doesn’t feel like work, that could never feel like work.
[00:02:48] And I was hooked, I was hooked ever since that first time.
[00:02:52] Ed Watters: Yeah. I know that bug myself, you know, I, I started podcasting just kind of being mad and, you know, disenfranchised from the rest of the world in my own mind. And putting that all back together, podcasting was kind of therapy for me and meeting different people like yourself and having such a wide variety of people’s stories.
[00:03:20] That’s what helped change me and bring me out of my depressive episode, if
[00:03:26] you will.
[00:03:27] Kevin Palmieri: Yeah. Likewise, my, my second episode ever was with a friend of mine, who I went to high school with. And one day when we were in high school, he went into the bathroom and planned his suicide. He was planning on how he was gonna take his own life and he ended up calling me later that day
[00:03:46] and said, Hey, will you come to the hospital with me? I’m having these thoughts. And I went to the hospital with him and we went through the whole thing and he got the help he needed.
[00:03:53] Ed Watters: Thank you, Kevin.
[00:03:54] Kevin Palmieri: Of course,
[00:03:55] of course, of course. And he ended up coming on the podcast and we talked about that. And it was one of those moments of, there’s not a lot of people that are willing to have that
[00:04:05] conversation live with the intention of giving it out to people to listen to and add value to their lives. And that for me was like, this is, it’s deeper than, it’s deeper, and bigger, and more important than me, it’s not about me. It’s about the impact, it’s about the people listening. And I think that, with anything in life, you’ll be way more successful if you’re doing it for a purpose greater than yourself.
[00:04:31] And I know you said Ed in the beginning, that’s, it’s hard to find, it’s hard to find purpose and passion.
[00:04:35] Ed Watters: Yeah. You know, it didn’t come easy for me, I know. I, I wanted to quit podcasting so many times, but there was this passion inside of me to figure out how to tell my story and make sure people understand you don’t have to go there.
[00:04:53] There’s wisdom in that and to share that is not only admirable for [00:05:00] people like yourself and me, I, I found a clarity to life through conversations. Uh, what, what helped you, because in the notes it says that you not only understand there was rock bottom, but you found out rock bottom had a basement.
[00:05:25] And that’s that dark area where people don’t even like to go. How did you get out of
[00:05:32] that?
[00:05:33] Kevin Palmieri: Uh, yeah. Let me give you a little context. I, when everybody in my reference circle went to college after high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I knew I didn’t want to go to college, so I didn’t go to college.
[00:05:48] I worked at the gas station, I worked at a hospital cleaning floors and, and rooms, I was a forklift operator, truck driver, personal trainer, I was many, many different things. And I ended up getting this opportunity that, it’s called weatherization, but just think of it as construction. And I got this job in construction weatherization and I went from making, I don’t know, $15 an hour at my previous job to starting out making $50 an hour.
[00:06:16] And at that point in my life, if you walked into my life, you would’ve said, oh my goodness, Kevin is unreasonably successful. And I did this job for a few years and I ended up meeting somebody. And then even more, it was like, oh, Kevin is really successful, high paying job, sports car, beautiful girlfriend.
[00:06:36] We ended up moving in together, you know, a nice apartment, body of my dreams cause I just did a body building show. Quite literally health, wealth, and love, I had all the things that anybody could want but I wasn’t a happy individual. And my girlfriend one day said to me, She said, I wanna move across the country and I wanna chase my dreams,
[00:06:54] I wanna move to California. We lived in New Hampshire at the time and I said, Uhuh, no, no, can’t do that, here’s a list of reasons why you’re gonna fail. And my girlfriend at the time, my ex-girlfriend, she ended up leaving me, best thing she ever did. That’s what she should have done, she made the right choice.
[00:07:11] And when she left me Ed, I had to look in the mirror and say, okay, what happened here? What happened? I thought I was on top of the world, but I think I was lying to myself. I was really, really lying to myself and that was my initial rock bottom. Now, when I hit that rock bottom, That’s the first time I started self-improvement, I started personal development, and I started reading books, and I started doing these positive affirmations.
[00:07:35] And every night before I went to bed, I would say, I’m talented, I’m worthy, I’m handsome, and this year I’m gonna make the most money I’ve ever made but I really leaned into that last one as a band-aid. The next year starts, I got a promotion. So I’m now a foreman at this company, which is awesome because I start the job and I, I finish the job,
[00:07:54] I’m on the job for the entire, the entire progression. And fast forward to the end of that year and I had been on the road for 10 months out of the 12 months. So I was living in hotels every single week, every single day, six hours from home is basically where I was living. I was living in New Jersey, I lived in New Hampshire and you know, the money was great and I was making a lot of money
[00:08:21] and I remember the final pay stub I opened. I was standing at my kitchen table, cuz my girlfriend, my ex-girlfriend took the chairs cuz they were her chairs and I was never home, so I never bought new ones, didn’t matter. And I made a hundred thousand dollars at 26 with no college degree. But the same thing happened, Ed, I felt the same way I did when she left.
[00:08:41] I said, oh, I did it again, I put all of this emphasis into something external and I haven’t been working on myself. I said I was gonna work on me, I worked more on my bank account than I did myself as a human being. And shortly thereafter, that’s when I started the podcast. And when I started the podcast, I stopped caring about my job,
[00:09:02] I stopped caring about the money, I started showing up late, I started calling out, I started leaving early. It would get to the point where I had to be in New Jersey, which was six hours from where I lived, for seven o’clock in the morning, I would sleep in my bed from 10:00 PM until midnight- 1:00 AM, wake up and drive straight to the job site, and work an eight hour day,
[00:09:25] and then I would go to the gym. And then on Fridays, it was the opposite. I was staying up for days on end, uh, occasionally, and it just kept getting worse, and worse, and worse. And my rock bottom basement moment, Ed, I was in New Jersey, it was a cold winter morning and my alarm goes off at five 15. And I have a coworker in the bed next to me, the, the separate bed next to me.
[00:09:49] And I sit up, I scoot to the edge of the bed. I’m lacing up my work boots and the best way to explain it is there’s 10 televisions on in my head at the same time and every single one is on a different station. And [00:10:00] one is saying, you’re stuck here forever, one is saying, you’ll never find another job where you make a hundred thousand dollars a year,
[00:10:07] it will not happen. You’ve got lucky here what will your friends think? What will your family think? And the loudest one Ed was, do you really think you can be a successful podcaster? And in that moment, I felt like if I took my life, I would take my problems with me. Now that is the rock bottom basement where there is nowhere else to go from there.
[00:10:28] Luckily, I have a very good support system around me. I texted my co-host/ co-founder business partner, best friend, and I said, Hey, I’m, I’m going through it here. I don’t know what to do I need some advice. And he said, Kev, so much has changed for you over the last few years, but your environment hasn’t, I think it’s time for you to change your environment.
[00:10:47] I ended up leaving that job three or four months later and I went full time into what we’re doing today. And that’s usually where people’s stories end, I was broke for the next three years trying to figure it out as an entrepreneur. So it has been a, definitely a humbling experience, a humbling challenge, but that was the rock bottom basement for me.
[00:11:06] I just, I felt hopeless, I felt helpless, I felt directionless. I didn’t know what I wanted and I didn’t like who I was. And I’m blessed now because one of my goals is to, I don’t wanna say prevent people from getting there because I don’t know that I can prevent it, but inspire them to take a new thought, or to take a new action, and maybe pivot somewhere where it, it sends them one degree different and they don’t end up in the same position I ended up in.
[00:11:33] That’s my, that’s really my goal, my passion. I wanna be the person I needed when I was there, that’s my goal.
[00:11:38] Ed Watters: Yeah,
[00:11:39] yeah. That’s inspirational for sure. You know, in chasing that dream, that’s hard in life because when we’re young, that fancy car, the big house, Lots of money is the dream. And as we acquire this, it, it means nothing.
[00:12:03] It, it turns into what we thought was garbage in the first place. So when we find something that we’re passionate about, it’s very hard to start it sometimes because of all of the failures, the misconceptions of life. How, how did you get the courage inside to take that first step into saying, Hey, I can be what I want to be?
[00:12:41] Kevin Palmieri: I, I’m very blessed because I borrowed the belief of the people around me and I, it’s, it took me a long time to be humble enough or humble slash secure enough to admit the amount of help I’ve had in this journey. I’m very blessed, I have amazing people around me, my fiance is the most supportive human on the planet,
[00:13:00] my business partner is unreasonably intelligent. So I think I had a little bit of, I don’t wanna say a head start or anything like that, but I had people around me who believed in me. And one of the things I always talk about is that, I talk about your reference group. Are the people in your life the best from your past or the best for your future?
[00:13:21] Do you spend time with the people you spend time with because you used to spend time with them and that’s just what you do now? Did you go to college with them and you think you owe it to them to be friends still? And okay, it’s okay if that’s the truth. Really take a look at this introspectively, or are these people the people that are gonna help you accomplish your goals in life?
[00:13:41] If they’re not, maybe it’s time to look in that mirror and say, Hmm, should I change things? I believe the, the level of relationship is based on the level of vulnerability within that relationship. And if you can’t tell the people in your life what you really want out of life, I don’t think you have that great of friends.
[00:13:59] And I understand that’s somewhat hardcore, but that’s just from my experience. So I think that I took the, or had the courage to take that chance, number one, because I was all the way at hell, no. And when you’re at hell, no, you’re willing to take a shot for hell, yes. That, And then I think the other part was I felt supported and I wasn’t doing it alone,
[00:14:21] I made sure I wasn’t doing it alone. And this is the last part, Ed, I think people, human beings must have three beliefs to take a new action. They must believe it is possible. So, is it possible for me to have a successful business? Yeah, I mean, it, it is as long as I can get over my limiting beliefs and ask the right questions,
[00:14:42] right? Is it humanly possible, is it possible for me? Yes. Is it humanly possible? I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of successful businesses, so it’s humanly possible. The third one I think is where people really get hung up, will it be worth it? See, I never questioned that this would be worth it, uh, you know, [00:15:00] being broke and all that.
[00:15:01] I knew that if we made it, it would all be worth it. I’ve had that belief and I think a lot of people, they, it’s not that they don’t have the courage, they don’t have the foresight to say, oh, you know what? If I actually make it, it will be so, so, so worth it. And they might not have the belief to, to think they can do it,
[00:15:20] I do think that’s a big bottleneck. But I was blessed, I had a lot of good people around me who helped me believe in myself. And, and I always believed that if, if we made it, then it would be way more than worth it.
[00:15:33] Ed Watters: Yeah. You know, it’s so important what you outline there. The people around you, you know, if we do not change the people around us, we’ll never change ourselves because we’re stuck in this cesspool of limited belief factors that we’re used to.
[00:15:55] So stepping out of the box is not only important, it’s very, how do you say it? Rewarding. Uh, so how, how do you take the steps to change not only what you think you already know, but the people and the places that you put
[00:16:18] yourself in?
[00:16:20] Kevin Palmieri: That’s a great question and let me just throw this out there too.
[00:16:23] So, and I want people to, to really think about this, I don’t believe that the people in your life are necessarily quote, unquote negative or toxic. What I do think is they want you to stay safe, and they don’t wanna see you fail, and they might not have the same aspirations, or they’re afraid of being left behind.
[00:16:40] So it is a, it’s not just that, you know, these people, um, are bad for you, it’s, that’s not necessarily what it is. It’s more of like, If you become successful, Ed, you and I are such good friends, if you become successful, you’re gonna forget about me cuz I don’t wanna be as successful as you. You’re gonna, you’re gonna forget about me, and you’re gonna have to make room for other people, and completely understandable
[00:16:59] I’ve lived my life a, a lot like that. I think that you have to start telling the truth. So, this is my, my best analogy, my best story for this, I had a buddy one time and he was a, a really good friend of mine. And he used to come up to my house and he would bring his laundry and he would do his laundry at my house.
[00:17:22] And sometimes he would just, and he wouldn’t ask, he would just expect the fact that like, well, I’m gonna come up and I’m gonna do my laundry. And, you know, he would take food outta my, my drawers and my cupboards and never ask. And he would leave his towel on the floor after he showered and he would never pick it up.
[00:17:39] This is the problem, I never told him how frustrated I got. I never told him how much it bothered me. I never gave him a little bit of feedback so he could make a course correction. If you fast forward three or four years later, I was at the point where I was resenting this person. And I ended up, I didn’t talk to him anymore.
[00:17:58] I just let him glide out of my life because at that point, the contrast was too big, the behavior never had the opportunity to shift. I think you gotta start telling the truth, whatever your truth is. I had a friend reach out to me and he said, Kev, can you be the person that you used to be for me? And this was the person who I went to the hospital with, and I said, I sent an audio message.
[00:18:26] I got, I was angry, but I also understood. But I was angry, my ego flared and I said, all right, let me take a second here and think about this. And I sent this person an audio message and I said, Hey, I don’t want to come off as rude or angry, but I don’t think you understand, I’m doing six podcast episodes a week at the time,
[00:18:43] um, I am going to the gym six times a week, I have a business, I’m $30,000 in debt, uh, I have a girlfriend at the time, I’m doing all these things, I can barely stay afloat. Like you don’t know how much I’m struggling right now, you don’t know how much I’m struggling. I said, I can’t be that person for you because I’m trying to be that person for the world.
[00:19:05] Now this is the capacity I can be a friend to you if that’s in alignment, let me know, but that’s the best I can do. I told the truth, I told the hard but necessary truth. And I realized that sometimes the most difficult thing and the right thing are the same thing. And I think people have to really do that. A lot of the people in your life don’t even know the real you if you’ve never told them. They don’t really, they might not know what your dreams are,
[00:19:32] they might not know that you don’t wanna go to the bar. They might not know that you have a dream in this, this thing inside you saying, Hey, I want you to go start a dog shelter, hey, I want you to go start a podcast. Like if they don’t know what you want, they can’t really help you to the, the highest level that they could if they did.
[00:19:50] And I think it all starts with telling the truth, Ed, I really do. With yourself first and then with the people around you after.
[00:19:57] Ed Watters: Yeah. And when it comes to [00:20:00] truth, you also learn to set good boundaries. And, and you touched on that so well right there, Kevin, it’s one of the things that I love to talk about is setting boundaries and making sure you adhere to those boundaries. Because if you don’t adhere to those boundaries, you’re already lost.
[00:20:22] So you really have to make good acquaintances and try to educate yourself. I mean, every day, try to learn something new. Uh, what, what inspires you to teach people new things in life?
[00:20:45] Kevin Palmieri: I think that the root, the root belief that I have, the through line of my belief is that if more people focused on self-awareness and self-improvement then a lot of things that happened to me when I was younger, never would’ve happened.
[00:21:04] So I think that, I grew up in a single parent household, I was raised by my mom and my grandmother, I didn’t meet my dad until I was 27. And I believe that, I know my family did the best they could. It’s, it’s, wasn’t like a terrible childhood or anything, but we didn’t have a lot of money. And, you know, there were drugs early in my childhood, and a lot of my family got arrested, and DUIs and all that.
[00:21:27] But imagine if there was a podcast that they listened to that talked about the importance of self-awareness, that talked about the importance of ego. I believe that it’s twofold, Ed, one, I want to help people unlearn as much as I want to help people learn. I think of it like when you’re, when you’re young, You’re a seed and you’re planted in soil that you don’t get to choose
[00:21:51] and maybe that soil is toxic. Fast forward 5, 10, 15, 20 years and you’re doing all this work, and you’re reading all these books, and you’re thinking, I don’t know, I feel like I should, I feel like I should be further along. I don’t know what’s going on. I think what a lot of people are doing is they’re pouring this very nutritious new soil on top of old potentially toxic soil.
[00:22:12] When you gotta dig to the actual seed, uncover it, and then replant it. And I think that’s the process of unlearning, unconditioning, facing past traumas, whatever, whatever phrase you wanna use there. So I am just as passionate about that as I am about teaching people things, because my bottleneck for success was always lack of awareness.
[00:22:35] I’m really good at executing, like you tell me to do something, I’ll do it. But more often than not, I never knew what to do. So I think that a lot of people are hungry for the knowledge, and they’re hungry for the success, and the fulfillment. They just need a, a little bit of a hint of what to do. And I think that’s, that’s one of my favorite things in the world is to try to take something that’s very complex and it might be very difficult to understand,
[00:23:01] and break it down to something simple. I, that’s why I tell a lot of stories because stories are just, it’s simple to, to ride the wave of a story and say, oh yeah, that makes sense. Rather than going into the science behind it, I, I just think stories are better. So unlearning then relearning, I think is the, the unlock to the future that people desire to have.
[00:23:23] Ed Watters: Yeah. You know, finding that passion when you come out of a background like that, it’s incredible in the first place. I, I come from that background, that setting myself, you know, I’ve got a brother in prison still, I’ve got two on, you know, parole. Uh, yeah. I, I just could never really put my head around the why to all of that.
[00:23:51] And, uh, you know, I, I love my family, it, it taught me a lot. It was hard, but understanding each person has their unique hardships and what they’re thinking inside, we really never truly know. We may think we understand them, but you really never know what’s going on in a person’s life. So finding out that you can better yourself through these programs and self-awareness centers
[00:24:24] and all of that is not a bad thing. And taking that first step, sometimes it’s the hardest because you love your family and you don’t want to lose your family. I often feel like I’m, I’m abridged from my family and we’re not as close as we used to, because I took that step of awareness. That step saying, no, I don’t want that in my life.
[00:24:54] And now that I’m an adult, I have the power to change [00:25:00] that,
[00:25:00] Kevin Palmieri: It’s so powerful.
[00:25:02] Ed Watters: Was that is, yeah, was that so difficult for you also to throw away what, you know, because I, I felt losing my family would be horrific, but at the same time, if they don’t understand who I am and where I’m coming from, are they truly my family?
[00:25:28] What, what, what are your thoughts on that?
[00:25:31] Kevin Palmieri: I’m very blessed and, and I’ll be, uh, transparent in this. I’m very blessed because my family’s very supportive of what I do. Like unreasonably, surprisingly that, where my mom always says, like, I just want you to be happy, as long as you’re happy, you know, if, oh, you don’t, you don’t wanna have kids, like whatever, you know, as long as you’re happy.
[00:25:50] Oh, you wanna be a podcaster? Yeah. Okay. As, as long as you’re happy, I’m very blessed in that. Uh, but I do think a lot of that comes from the fact that, you know, I was 24 years old, still living at home. And I ended up getting this job where I was traveling up and down the east coast of the United States.
[00:26:09] And I just said, I’m, I’m doing this, this is what I’m doing. There is no, there’s no conversation, I’m gonna go do this because this is what I wanna do. And I think that that helped create respect and it helped create, okay, Kevin’s responsible enough to be traveling up and down the east coast, and driving six hours, and running job sites,
[00:26:31] I think he probably knows what’s best for him. So I’m very blessed in that, but this is what I always say, and this is, our brand is heart driven. I mean it with all the love in the world, but no BS, I want to tell you what really matters and what I really believe will help. I had a client one time and she said, my family does not understand what I’m doing, or why I’m doing it,
[00:26:53] and I don’t know what to do. And I said, the only advice I can give you is this, and you do with it what you choose. I said, I said blank, I, I said, this person’s name, the stats are, the odds are that your family is most likely going to pass away before you do. So you either start doing what you wanna do now
[00:27:15] or you wait until they pass away and then you, then you start doing it. Either way, eventually you’re going to regret not doing what you’re, what you wanna do, what you feel pulled to, what your passion is, that’s up to you. You have to understand that your family doesn’t necessarily understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.
[00:27:35] They just wanna keep you safe, that’s their job. They, they want you to, to stay with them, they wanna keep you safe, they don’t wanna see you fail, they don’t wanna see you in pain. That’s not something I struggled with, but I see a ton and I just think it’s one of those things of, you have to keep expressing your truth.
[00:27:50] And to your point, Ed, I know that they’re blood, I know that you’re supposed to, supposed to have some sort of relationship. I think the relationship with yourself is more important than any relationship on the planet. And I know that’s not a popular thought or maybe a, an attainable thought for many people, but I do believe that.
[00:28:11] I mean, going back to the friend thing, it’s, it’s very similar.
[00:28:16] Ed Watters: Yeah. Yeah. That, that’s very powerful right there, you know, you’ve gotta think about you before you can think about anybody else. Yeah. We’re, you know, I wanna be respectful of our time, we’re coming to a time where we have to stop talking,
[00:28:32] I could talk with you for hours. Tell, tell people about your services and what Next Level University offers people.
[00:28:44] Kevin Palmieri: Sure. So number one off the top, the main thing is the podcast. We do seven episodes a week, every single day, personal development in your pocket from anywhere in the world for free. So we’re on all the major podcast platforms and a bunch of the, the minor ones.
[00:28:58] If you search us, you’ll find us. And then all of our episodes are also on YouTube. If you like to watch personal development on the TV, so we have that as well. Um, and then if you wanna reach out to me, I’m @neverquitkid, I answer all my DM’s. But I think the main thing for us is, just like our brand is Next Level,
[00:29:17] we set it up where if you can’t afford one-on-one coaching or group coaching, we have a free course. If you go through the free course and you say I’d like a little more, we have group coaching, that’s $147 a month. Then after that is like one on one coaching and we have a Next Level Podcast Solutions where we help podcasters.
[00:29:38] We do all the audio editing and video editing for them and help them grow the show. But I think at the end of the day, it’s just, no matter where you are, there is a next level for you in self-improvement, and in success, and in love, and health, and all those things. And we have built our business around that.
[00:29:54] We understand not everybody can afford $147 a month. So get the free course or [00:30:00] listen to the podcast, we have a lot of things. One-on-one coaching, group coaching, but the podcast is the main thing. And if you’re listening to this, I would quite, quite literally rather you go listen to the podcast than come and, and try to give us money. Because I think the podcast is a great place to start and, and get a lot of value there for free.
[00:30:18] Ed Watters: So, you know, can you let us know, how did you and Alan form your partnership to get started to help so many people?
[00:30:27] Kevin Palmieri: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:30:28] Alan and I were friends in middle school. I actually played spin the bottle with Alan, myself, one of the popular, one of the other popular guys, and then three of the most popular girls in our grade.
[00:30:42] And, uh, that was, that was one of my first memories with Alan and we were pretty good friends in middle school. In high school we drifted apart, Alan is very logical, very math brained, I was very emotionally driven, very insecure, and we just didn’t get along very well. And then I saw him at a party in my early twenties, early mid twenties, and we caught up. And then Alan had me on his podcast, Ed, that was the first podcast I ever went on.
[00:31:12] Alan had a podcast, he had me on, and then that was kind of the beginning of us rebuilding the relationship. And then Alan started by mentoring me really. And he had his podcast, I had my podcast, we ended up saying, okay, we’re both doing a podcast, why don’t we just join forces and do it together? It’ll be easier.
[00:31:32] And it, honestly, it took probably like a year until we realized, okay, we have the same core aspirations, I was raised without a father, Alan’s father passed away in a car accident when Alan was two. And we believe that if the world had more positivity, more self-improvement, more self-awareness, it would be a better place.
[00:31:52] So we just have the same mission and it’s wonderful because his strengths are my weaknesses and his weaknesses or my strengths. And we’ve worked so incredibly hard on removing the ego that we have with each other and at the end of the day, we just want to make the world a better place. And whether he’s right or I’m right in a scenario, doesn’t matter, as long as we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing.
[00:32:14] So I’m very blessed because we have a wonderful partnership and we’ve been told by many mentors, look, you guys won’t make it as business partners. And it’s like, you just don’t know what you’re talking about. I, I’m not worried about it, that’s the, the least of my worries I know we’re gonna be just fine,
[00:32:27] we’re, we’re in it for the right reasons.
[00:32:30] Ed Watters: Yeah, well, that matters right there, being in it for the right reasons and over, overlooking our own ambitions, our egos, all of the animosities that we might hold against past things. It, it’s life , you know, it is what it is. So do you have a call to action for our listeners today?
[00:32:53] Kevin Palmieri: Um, I would say, ask yourself a couple questions. I would say, ask yourself are the people in my life the best from my past or the best for my future? That’s one. And then one of my favorite quotes is, your reality becomes the parts of your imagination you hold onto the longest. After this episode, if you feel inspired, if you feel motivated, sit down and write out what you actually want your future to look like.
[00:33:17] Not what you’re afraid it’ll be, what you aspire for it to be and get around people who believe in you and believe in more and believe in better. And I think those couple things can really help and if you’re looking for some help, download our free course it’s on our website totally free. And it’s not like a PDF or an ebook,
[00:33:36] it’s an hour and a half course of Alan and I in our studio, just trying to drop as much value as possible. I guarantee it’s worth every $0 that it costs.
[00:33:46] Ed Watters: Powerful. Kevin, could you tell people how to get ahold of you and hook up with you, please?
[00:33:51] Kevin Palmieri: Yeah.
[00:33:51] Uh, you can send me an email, kevin@nextleveluniverse.com is my email. And then reach out to me directly on Instagram @neverquitkid.
[00:34:00] I get back to all my DM’s, so I will send you a video, custom video if you gimme a follow and any questions you have, I’m happy to answer.
[00:34:09] Ed Watters: Thank you sir, for what you do and especially for being here with us today and sharing your wisdom with us. Kevin, you’re an awesome person. Enjoy your
[00:34:20] day, sir.
[00:34:21] Kevin Palmieri: Thank you, Ed, I appreciate you
[00:34:22] my friend, keep doing the thing.
[00:34:25] Ed Watters: Oh, yes.
[00:34:29] Thank you for joining us today. If you found this podcast enlightening, entertaining, educational in any way, please share, like, subscribe, and join us right back here next week for another great episode of Dead America podcast. I’m Ed Watters your host, enjoy your afternoon wherever you may be.[00:35:00]
[00:00:00] Ed Watters: To overcome you must educate. Educate not only yourself, but educate anyone seeking to learn. We are all Dead America, we can all learn something. To learn, we must challenge what we already understand, the way we do that is through conversation. Sometimes we have conversations with others, however, some of the best conversations happen
[00:00:42] with ourself.
[00:00:45] Reach out and challenge yourself. Let’s dive in and learn something right now.
[00:00:57] Today we are with Kevin Palmieri, Kevin is the cohost or the host, whichever way you wanna put it, of the Next Level University podcast. He is also a podcast consultant coach. Kevin, could you please introduce yourself? Let people know just a little more about
[00:01:19] you please?
[00:01:19] Kevin Palmieri: Yes, Ed. Thank you so very much for having me, as Ed said, uh, I am the co-founder/ co-host and CFO of Next Level University.
[00:01:28] We are a podcast that’s focused on bringing holistic self-improvement to entrepreneurs and people in general. We do seven episodes a week because we want to be in your pocket every day to help you get to the next level of your life. That is my, my passion and my purpose in this world, so I’m grateful to be able to do that.
[00:01:48] Ed Watters: You know, it’s hard to find passion and purpose in this world sometimes, Kevin. Uh, what, what brought you to podcasting?
[00:01:56] Kevin Palmieri: So it’s interesting. I actually got interviewed on a podcast and after I was interviewed, I said, so there was, my two friends interviewed me and afterwards one of my friends went to the bathroom and the other one and myself were talking.
[00:02:11] And I said, imagine if you could do that for a living, that would be wild. And my buddy said, you know, you can, right? And something in my mind shifted there forever. And I went out and bought all the equipment I needed and figured out how to post it, and video edit, and audio edit, and all that happy jazz.
[00:02:28] And, and then obviously there was a journey I didn’t, we didn’t get to 900 episodes overnight. That’s been a, that’s been a thing, but that’s what it was. I, I got on and there wasn’t a microphone at the time, but I got in front of a microphone and a camera and had a conversation and it was like, wow. That doesn’t feel like work, that could never feel like work.
[00:02:48] And I was hooked, I was hooked ever since that first time.
[00:02:52] Ed Watters: Yeah. I know that bug myself, you know, I, I started podcasting just kind of being mad and, you know, disenfranchised from the rest of the world in my own mind. And putting that all back together, podcasting was kind of therapy for me and meeting different people like yourself and having such a wide variety of people’s stories.
[00:03:20] That’s what helped change me and bring me out of my depressive episode, if
[00:03:26] you will.
[00:03:27] Kevin Palmieri: Yeah. Likewise, my, my second episode ever was with a friend of mine, who I went to high school with. And one day when we were in high school, he went into the bathroom and planned his suicide. He was planning on how he was gonna take his own life and he ended up calling me later that day
[00:03:46] and said, Hey, will you come to the hospital with me? I’m having these thoughts. And I went to the hospital with him and we went through the whole thing and he got the help he needed.
[00:03:53] Ed Watters: Thank you, Kevin.
[00:03:54] Kevin Palmieri: Of course,
[00:03:55] of course, of course. And he ended up coming on the podcast and we talked about that. And it was one of those moments of, there’s not a lot of people that are willing to have that
[00:04:05] conversation live with the intention of giving it out to people to listen to and add value to their lives. And that for me was like, this is, it’s deeper than, it’s deeper, and bigger, and more important than me, it’s not about me. It’s about the impact, it’s about the people listening. And I think that, with anything in life, you’ll be way more successful if you’re doing it for a purpose greater than yourself.
[00:04:31] And I know you said Ed in the beginning, that’s, it’s hard to find, it’s hard to find purpose and passion.
[00:04:35] Ed Watters: Yeah. You know, it didn’t come easy for me, I know. I, I wanted to quit podcasting so many times, but there was this passion inside of me to figure out how to tell my story and make sure people understand you don’t have to go there.
[00:04:53] There’s wisdom in that and to share that is not only admirable for [00:05:00] people like yourself and me, I, I found a clarity to life through conversations. Uh, what, what helped you, because in the notes it says that you not only understand there was rock bottom, but you found out rock bottom had a basement.
[00:05:25] And that’s that dark area where people don’t even like to go. How did you get out of
[00:05:32] that?
[00:05:33] Kevin Palmieri: Uh, yeah. Let me give you a little context. I, when everybody in my reference circle went to college after high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I knew I didn’t want to go to college, so I didn’t go to college.
[00:05:48] I worked at the gas station, I worked at a hospital cleaning floors and, and rooms, I was a forklift operator, truck driver, personal trainer, I was many, many different things. And I ended up getting this opportunity that, it’s called weatherization, but just think of it as construction. And I got this job in construction weatherization and I went from making, I don’t know, $15 an hour at my previous job to starting out making $50 an hour.
[00:06:16] And at that point in my life, if you walked into my life, you would’ve said, oh my goodness, Kevin is unreasonably successful. And I did this job for a few years and I ended up meeting somebody. And then even more, it was like, oh, Kevin is really successful, high paying job, sports car, beautiful girlfriend.
[00:06:36] We ended up moving in together, you know, a nice apartment, body of my dreams cause I just did a body building show. Quite literally health, wealth, and love, I had all the things that anybody could want but I wasn’t a happy individual. And my girlfriend one day said to me, She said, I wanna move across the country and I wanna chase my dreams,
[00:06:54] I wanna move to California. We lived in New Hampshire at the time and I said, Uhuh, no, no, can’t do that, here’s a list of reasons why you’re gonna fail. And my girlfriend at the time, my ex-girlfriend, she ended up leaving me, best thing she ever did. That’s what she should have done, she made the right choice.
[00:07:11] And when she left me Ed, I had to look in the mirror and say, okay, what happened here? What happened? I thought I was on top of the world, but I think I was lying to myself. I was really, really lying to myself and that was my initial rock bottom. Now, when I hit that rock bottom, That’s the first time I started self-improvement, I started personal development, and I started reading books, and I started doing these positive affirmations.
[00:07:35] And every night before I went to bed, I would say, I’m talented, I’m worthy, I’m handsome, and this year I’m gonna make the most money I’ve ever made but I really leaned into that last one as a band-aid. The next year starts, I got a promotion. So I’m now a foreman at this company, which is awesome because I start the job and I, I finish the job,
[00:07:54] I’m on the job for the entire, the entire progression. And fast forward to the end of that year and I had been on the road for 10 months out of the 12 months. So I was living in hotels every single week, every single day, six hours from home is basically where I was living. I was living in New Jersey, I lived in New Hampshire and you know, the money was great and I was making a lot of money
[00:08:21] and I remember the final pay stub I opened. I was standing at my kitchen table, cuz my girlfriend, my ex-girlfriend took the chairs cuz they were her chairs and I was never home, so I never bought new ones, didn’t matter. And I made a hundred thousand dollars at 26 with no college degree. But the same thing happened, Ed, I felt the same way I did when she left.
[00:08:41] I said, oh, I did it again, I put all of this emphasis into something external and I haven’t been working on myself. I said I was gonna work on me, I worked more on my bank account than I did myself as a human being. And shortly thereafter, that’s when I started the podcast. And when I started the podcast, I stopped caring about my job,
[00:09:02] I stopped caring about the money, I started showing up late, I started calling out, I started leaving early. It would get to the point where I had to be in New Jersey, which was six hours from where I lived, for seven o’clock in the morning, I would sleep in my bed from 10:00 PM until midnight- 1:00 AM, wake up and drive straight to the job site, and work an eight hour day,
[00:09:25] and then I would go to the gym. And then on Fridays, it was the opposite. I was staying up for days on end, uh, occasionally, and it just kept getting worse, and worse, and worse. And my rock bottom basement moment, Ed, I was in New Jersey, it was a cold winter morning and my alarm goes off at five 15. And I have a coworker in the bed next to me, the, the separate bed next to me.
[00:09:49] And I sit up, I scoot to the edge of the bed. I’m lacing up my work boots and the best way to explain it is there’s 10 televisions on in my head at the same time and every single one is on a different station. And [00:10:00] one is saying, you’re stuck here forever, one is saying, you’ll never find another job where you make a hundred thousand dollars a year,
[00:10:07] it will not happen. You’ve got lucky here what will your friends think? What will your family think? And the loudest one Ed was, do you really think you can be a successful podcaster? And in that moment, I felt like if I took my life, I would take my problems with me. Now that is the rock bottom basement where there is nowhere else to go from there.
[00:10:28] Luckily, I have a very good support system around me. I texted my co-host/ co-founder business partner, best friend, and I said, Hey, I’m, I’m going through it here. I don’t know what to do I need some advice. And he said, Kev, so much has changed for you over the last few years, but your environment hasn’t, I think it’s time for you to change your environment.
[00:10:47] I ended up leaving that job three or four months later and I went full time into what we’re doing today. And that’s usually where people’s stories end, I was broke for the next three years trying to figure it out as an entrepreneur. So it has been a, definitely a humbling experience, a humbling challenge, but that was the rock bottom basement for me.
[00:11:06] I just, I felt hopeless, I felt helpless, I felt directionless. I didn’t know what I wanted and I didn’t like who I was. And I’m blessed now because one of my goals is to, I don’t wanna say prevent people from getting there because I don’t know that I can prevent it, but inspire them to take a new thought, or to take a new action, and maybe pivot somewhere where it, it sends them one degree different and they don’t end up in the same position I ended up in.
[00:11:33] That’s my, that’s really my goal, my passion. I wanna be the person I needed when I was there, that’s my goal.
[00:11:38] Ed Watters: Yeah,
[00:11:39] yeah. That’s inspirational for sure. You know, in chasing that dream, that’s hard in life because when we’re young, that fancy car, the big house, Lots of money is the dream. And as we acquire this, it, it means nothing.
[00:12:03] It, it turns into what we thought was garbage in the first place. So when we find something that we’re passionate about, it’s very hard to start it sometimes because of all of the failures, the misconceptions of life. How, how did you get the courage inside to take that first step into saying, Hey, I can be what I want to be?
[00:12:41] Kevin Palmieri: I, I’m very blessed because I borrowed the belief of the people around me and I, it’s, it took me a long time to be humble enough or humble slash secure enough to admit the amount of help I’ve had in this journey. I’m very blessed, I have amazing people around me, my fiance is the most supportive human on the planet,
[00:13:00] my business partner is unreasonably intelligent. So I think I had a little bit of, I don’t wanna say a head start or anything like that, but I had people around me who believed in me. And one of the things I always talk about is that, I talk about your reference group. Are the people in your life the best from your past or the best for your future?
[00:13:21] Do you spend time with the people you spend time with because you used to spend time with them and that’s just what you do now? Did you go to college with them and you think you owe it to them to be friends still? And okay, it’s okay if that’s the truth. Really take a look at this introspectively, or are these people the people that are gonna help you accomplish your goals in life?
[00:13:41] If they’re not, maybe it’s time to look in that mirror and say, Hmm, should I change things? I believe the, the level of relationship is based on the level of vulnerability within that relationship. And if you can’t tell the people in your life what you really want out of life, I don’t think you have that great of friends.
[00:13:59] And I understand that’s somewhat hardcore, but that’s just from my experience. So I think that I took the, or had the courage to take that chance, number one, because I was all the way at hell, no. And when you’re at hell, no, you’re willing to take a shot for hell, yes. That, And then I think the other part was I felt supported and I wasn’t doing it alone,
[00:14:21] I made sure I wasn’t doing it alone. And this is the last part, Ed, I think people, human beings must have three beliefs to take a new action. They must believe it is possible. So, is it possible for me to have a successful business? Yeah, I mean, it, it is as long as I can get over my limiting beliefs and ask the right questions,
[00:14:42] right? Is it humanly possible, is it possible for me? Yes. Is it humanly possible? I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of successful businesses, so it’s humanly possible. The third one I think is where people really get hung up, will it be worth it? See, I never questioned that this would be worth it, uh, you know, [00:15:00] being broke and all that.
[00:15:01] I knew that if we made it, it would all be worth it. I’ve had that belief and I think a lot of people, they, it’s not that they don’t have the courage, they don’t have the foresight to say, oh, you know what? If I actually make it, it will be so, so, so worth it. And they might not have the belief to, to think they can do it,
[00:15:20] I do think that’s a big bottleneck. But I was blessed, I had a lot of good people around me who helped me believe in myself. And, and I always believed that if, if we made it, then it would be way more than worth it.
[00:15:33] Ed Watters: Yeah. You know, it’s so important what you outline there. The people around you, you know, if we do not change the people around us, we’ll never change ourselves because we’re stuck in this cesspool of limited belief factors that we’re used to.
[00:15:55] So stepping out of the box is not only important, it’s very, how do you say it? Rewarding. Uh, so how, how do you take the steps to change not only what you think you already know, but the people and the places that you put
[00:16:18] yourself in?
[00:16:20] Kevin Palmieri: That’s a great question and let me just throw this out there too.
[00:16:23] So, and I want people to, to really think about this, I don’t believe that the people in your life are necessarily quote, unquote negative or toxic. What I do think is they want you to stay safe, and they don’t wanna see you fail, and they might not have the same aspirations, or they’re afraid of being left behind.
[00:16:40] So it is a, it’s not just that, you know, these people, um, are bad for you, it’s, that’s not necessarily what it is. It’s more of like, If you become successful, Ed, you and I are such good friends, if you become successful, you’re gonna forget about me cuz I don’t wanna be as successful as you. You’re gonna, you’re gonna forget about me, and you’re gonna have to make room for other people, and completely understandable
[00:16:59] I’ve lived my life a, a lot like that. I think that you have to start telling the truth. So, this is my, my best analogy, my best story for this, I had a buddy one time and he was a, a really good friend of mine. And he used to come up to my house and he would bring his laundry and he would do his laundry at my house.
[00:17:22] And sometimes he would just, and he wouldn’t ask, he would just expect the fact that like, well, I’m gonna come up and I’m gonna do my laundry. And, you know, he would take food outta my, my drawers and my cupboards and never ask. And he would leave his towel on the floor after he showered and he would never pick it up.
[00:17:39] This is the problem, I never told him how frustrated I got. I never told him how much it bothered me. I never gave him a little bit of feedback so he could make a course correction. If you fast forward three or four years later, I was at the point where I was resenting this person. And I ended up, I didn’t talk to him anymore.
[00:17:58] I just let him glide out of my life because at that point, the contrast was too big, the behavior never had the opportunity to shift. I think you gotta start telling the truth, whatever your truth is. I had a friend reach out to me and he said, Kev, can you be the person that you used to be for me? And this was the person who I went to the hospital with, and I said, I sent an audio message.
[00:18:26] I got, I was angry, but I also understood. But I was angry, my ego flared and I said, all right, let me take a second here and think about this. And I sent this person an audio message and I said, Hey, I don’t want to come off as rude or angry, but I don’t think you understand, I’m doing six podcast episodes a week at the time,
[00:18:43] um, I am going to the gym six times a week, I have a business, I’m $30,000 in debt, uh, I have a girlfriend at the time, I’m doing all these things, I can barely stay afloat. Like you don’t know how much I’m struggling right now, you don’t know how much I’m struggling. I said, I can’t be that person for you because I’m trying to be that person for the world.
[00:19:05] Now this is the capacity I can be a friend to you if that’s in alignment, let me know, but that’s the best I can do. I told the truth, I told the hard but necessary truth. And I realized that sometimes the most difficult thing and the right thing are the same thing. And I think people have to really do that. A lot of the people in your life don’t even know the real you if you’ve never told them. They don’t really, they might not know what your dreams are,
[00:19:32] they might not know that you don’t wanna go to the bar. They might not know that you have a dream in this, this thing inside you saying, Hey, I want you to go start a dog shelter, hey, I want you to go start a podcast. Like if they don’t know what you want, they can’t really help you to the, the highest level that they could if they did.
[00:19:50] And I think it all starts with telling the truth, Ed, I really do. With yourself first and then with the people around you after.
[00:19:57] Ed Watters: Yeah. And when it comes to [00:20:00] truth, you also learn to set good boundaries. And, and you touched on that so well right there, Kevin, it’s one of the things that I love to talk about is setting boundaries and making sure you adhere to those boundaries. Because if you don’t adhere to those boundaries, you’re already lost.
[00:20:22] So you really have to make good acquaintances and try to educate yourself. I mean, every day, try to learn something new. Uh, what, what inspires you to teach people new things in life?
[00:20:45] Kevin Palmieri: I think that the root, the root belief that I have, the through line of my belief is that if more people focused on self-awareness and self-improvement then a lot of things that happened to me when I was younger, never would’ve happened.
[00:21:04] So I think that, I grew up in a single parent household, I was raised by my mom and my grandmother, I didn’t meet my dad until I was 27. And I believe that, I know my family did the best they could. It’s, it’s, wasn’t like a terrible childhood or anything, but we didn’t have a lot of money. And, you know, there were drugs early in my childhood, and a lot of my family got arrested, and DUIs and all that.
[00:21:27] But imagine if there was a podcast that they listened to that talked about the importance of self-awareness, that talked about the importance of ego. I believe that it’s twofold, Ed, one, I want to help people unlearn as much as I want to help people learn. I think of it like when you’re, when you’re young, You’re a seed and you’re planted in soil that you don’t get to choose
[00:21:51] and maybe that soil is toxic. Fast forward 5, 10, 15, 20 years and you’re doing all this work, and you’re reading all these books, and you’re thinking, I don’t know, I feel like I should, I feel like I should be further along. I don’t know what’s going on. I think what a lot of people are doing is they’re pouring this very nutritious new soil on top of old potentially toxic soil.
[00:22:12] When you gotta dig to the actual seed, uncover it, and then replant it. And I think that’s the process of unlearning, unconditioning, facing past traumas, whatever, whatever phrase you wanna use there. So I am just as passionate about that as I am about teaching people things, because my bottleneck for success was always lack of awareness.
[00:22:35] I’m really good at executing, like you tell me to do something, I’ll do it. But more often than not, I never knew what to do. So I think that a lot of people are hungry for the knowledge, and they’re hungry for the success, and the fulfillment. They just need a, a little bit of a hint of what to do. And I think that’s, that’s one of my favorite things in the world is to try to take something that’s very complex and it might be very difficult to understand,
[00:23:01] and break it down to something simple. I, that’s why I tell a lot of stories because stories are just, it’s simple to, to ride the wave of a story and say, oh yeah, that makes sense. Rather than going into the science behind it, I, I just think stories are better. So unlearning then relearning, I think is the, the unlock to the future that people desire to have.
[00:23:23] Ed Watters: Yeah. You know, finding that passion when you come out of a background like that, it’s incredible in the first place. I, I come from that background, that setting myself, you know, I’ve got a brother in prison still, I’ve got two on, you know, parole. Uh, yeah. I, I just could never really put my head around the why to all of that.
[00:23:51] And, uh, you know, I, I love my family, it, it taught me a lot. It was hard, but understanding each person has their unique hardships and what they’re thinking inside, we really never truly know. We may think we understand them, but you really never know what’s going on in a person’s life. So finding out that you can better yourself through these programs and self-awareness centers
[00:24:24] and all of that is not a bad thing. And taking that first step, sometimes it’s the hardest because you love your family and you don’t want to lose your family. I often feel like I’m, I’m abridged from my family and we’re not as close as we used to, because I took that step of awareness. That step saying, no, I don’t want that in my life.
[00:24:54] And now that I’m an adult, I have the power to change [00:25:00] that,
[00:25:00] Kevin Palmieri: It’s so powerful.
[00:25:02] Ed Watters: Was that is, yeah, was that so difficult for you also to throw away what, you know, because I, I felt losing my family would be horrific, but at the same time, if they don’t understand who I am and where I’m coming from, are they truly my family?
[00:25:28] What, what, what are your thoughts on that?
[00:25:31] Kevin Palmieri: I’m very blessed and, and I’ll be, uh, transparent in this. I’m very blessed because my family’s very supportive of what I do. Like unreasonably, surprisingly that, where my mom always says, like, I just want you to be happy, as long as you’re happy, you know, if, oh, you don’t, you don’t wanna have kids, like whatever, you know, as long as you’re happy.
[00:25:50] Oh, you wanna be a podcaster? Yeah. Okay. As, as long as you’re happy, I’m very blessed in that. Uh, but I do think a lot of that comes from the fact that, you know, I was 24 years old, still living at home. And I ended up getting this job where I was traveling up and down the east coast of the United States.
[00:26:09] And I just said, I’m, I’m doing this, this is what I’m doing. There is no, there’s no conversation, I’m gonna go do this because this is what I wanna do. And I think that that helped create respect and it helped create, okay, Kevin’s responsible enough to be traveling up and down the east coast, and driving six hours, and running job sites,
[00:26:31] I think he probably knows what’s best for him. So I’m very blessed in that, but this is what I always say, and this is, our brand is heart driven. I mean it with all the love in the world, but no BS, I want to tell you what really matters and what I really believe will help. I had a client one time and she said, my family does not understand what I’m doing, or why I’m doing it,
[00:26:53] and I don’t know what to do. And I said, the only advice I can give you is this, and you do with it what you choose. I said, I said blank, I, I said, this person’s name, the stats are, the odds are that your family is most likely going to pass away before you do. So you either start doing what you wanna do now
[00:27:15] or you wait until they pass away and then you, then you start doing it. Either way, eventually you’re going to regret not doing what you’re, what you wanna do, what you feel pulled to, what your passion is, that’s up to you. You have to understand that your family doesn’t necessarily understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.
[00:27:35] They just wanna keep you safe, that’s their job. They, they want you to, to stay with them, they wanna keep you safe, they don’t wanna see you fail, they don’t wanna see you in pain. That’s not something I struggled with, but I see a ton and I just think it’s one of those things of, you have to keep expressing your truth.
[00:27:50] And to your point, Ed, I know that they’re blood, I know that you’re supposed to, supposed to have some sort of relationship. I think the relationship with yourself is more important than any relationship on the planet. And I know that’s not a popular thought or maybe a, an attainable thought for many people, but I do believe that.
[00:28:11] I mean, going back to the friend thing, it’s, it’s very similar.
[00:28:16] Ed Watters: Yeah. Yeah. That, that’s very powerful right there, you know, you’ve gotta think about you before you can think about anybody else. Yeah. We’re, you know, I wanna be respectful of our time, we’re coming to a time where we have to stop talking,
[00:28:32] I could talk with you for hours. Tell, tell people about your services and what Next Level University offers people.
[00:28:44] Kevin Palmieri: Sure. So number one off the top, the main thing is the podcast. We do seven episodes a week, every single day, personal development in your pocket from anywhere in the world for free. So we’re on all the major podcast platforms and a bunch of the, the minor ones.
[00:28:58] If you search us, you’ll find us. And then all of our episodes are also on YouTube. If you like to watch personal development on the TV, so we have that as well. Um, and then if you wanna reach out to me, I’m @neverquitkid, I answer all my DM’s. But I think the main thing for us is, just like our brand is Next Level,
[00:29:17] we set it up where if you can’t afford one-on-one coaching or group coaching, we have a free course. If you go through the free course and you say I’d like a little more, we have group coaching, that’s $147 a month. Then after that is like one on one coaching and we have a Next Level Podcast Solutions where we help podcasters.
[00:29:38] We do all the audio editing and video editing for them and help them grow the show. But I think at the end of the day, it’s just, no matter where you are, there is a next level for you in self-improvement, and in success, and in love, and health, and all those things. And we have built our business around that.
[00:29:54] We understand not everybody can afford $147 a month. So get the free course or [00:30:00] listen to the podcast, we have a lot of things. One-on-one coaching, group coaching, but the podcast is the main thing. And if you’re listening to this, I would quite, quite literally rather you go listen to the podcast than come and, and try to give us money. Because I think the podcast is a great place to start and, and get a lot of value there for free.
[00:30:18] Ed Watters: So, you know, can you let us know, how did you and Alan form your partnership to get started to help so many people?
[00:30:27] Kevin Palmieri: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:30:28] Alan and I were friends in middle school. I actually played spin the bottle with Alan, myself, one of the popular, one of the other popular guys, and then three of the most popular girls in our grade.
[00:30:42] And, uh, that was, that was one of my first memories with Alan and we were pretty good friends in middle school. In high school we drifted apart, Alan is very logical, very math brained, I was very emotionally driven, very insecure, and we just didn’t get along very well. And then I saw him at a party in my early twenties, early mid twenties, and we caught up. And then Alan had me on his podcast, Ed, that was the first podcast I ever went on.
[00:31:12] Alan had a podcast, he had me on, and then that was kind of the beginning of us rebuilding the relationship. And then Alan started by mentoring me really. And he had his podcast, I had my podcast, we ended up saying, okay, we’re both doing a podcast, why don’t we just join forces and do it together? It’ll be easier.
[00:31:32] And it, honestly, it took probably like a year until we realized, okay, we have the same core aspirations, I was raised without a father, Alan’s father passed away in a car accident when Alan was two. And we believe that if the world had more positivity, more self-improvement, more self-awareness, it would be a better place.
[00:31:52] So we just have the same mission and it’s wonderful because his strengths are my weaknesses and his weaknesses or my strengths. And we’ve worked so incredibly hard on removing the ego that we have with each other and at the end of the day, we just want to make the world a better place. And whether he’s right or I’m right in a scenario, doesn’t matter, as long as we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing.
[00:32:14] So I’m very blessed because we have a wonderful partnership and we’ve been told by many mentors, look, you guys won’t make it as business partners. And it’s like, you just don’t know what you’re talking about. I, I’m not worried about it, that’s the, the least of my worries I know we’re gonna be just fine,
[00:32:27] we’re, we’re in it for the right reasons.
[00:32:30] Ed Watters: Yeah, well, that matters right there, being in it for the right reasons and over, overlooking our own ambitions, our egos, all of the animosities that we might hold against past things. It, it’s life , you know, it is what it is. So do you have a call to action for our listeners today?
[00:32:53] Kevin Palmieri: Um, I would say, ask yourself a couple questions. I would say, ask yourself are the people in my life the best from my past or the best for my future? That’s one. And then one of my favorite quotes is, your reality becomes the parts of your imagination you hold onto the longest. After this episode, if you feel inspired, if you feel motivated, sit down and write out what you actually want your future to look like.
[00:33:17] Not what you’re afraid it’ll be, what you aspire for it to be and get around people who believe in you and believe in more and believe in better. And I think those couple things can really help and if you’re looking for some help, download our free course it’s on our website totally free. And it’s not like a PDF or an ebook,
[00:33:36] it’s an hour and a half course of Alan and I in our studio, just trying to drop as much value as possible. I guarantee it’s worth every $0 that it costs.
[00:33:46] Ed Watters: Powerful. Kevin, could you tell people how to get ahold of you and hook up with you, please?
[00:33:51] Kevin Palmieri: Yeah.
[00:33:51] Uh, you can send me an email, kevin@nextleveluniverse.com is my email. And then reach out to me directly on Instagram @neverquitkid.
[00:34:00] I get back to all my DM’s, so I will send you a video, custom video if you gimme a follow and any questions you have, I’m happy to answer.
[00:34:09] Ed Watters: Thank you sir, for what you do and especially for being here with us today and sharing your wisdom with us. Kevin, you’re an awesome person. Enjoy your
[00:34:20] day, sir.
[00:34:21] Kevin Palmieri: Thank you, Ed, I appreciate you
[00:34:22] my friend, keep doing the thing.
[00:34:25] Ed Watters: Oh, yes.
[00:34:29] Thank you for joining us today. If you found this podcast enlightening, entertaining, educational in any way, please share, like, subscribe, and join us right back here next week for another great episode of Dead America podcast. I’m Ed Watters your host, enjoy your afternoon wherever you may be.[00:35:00]
Join the newsletter
