Ben Nemtin
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Ben Nemtin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
So my dad was actually a clown and he was like a theatrical clown. So he played music and he wasn't necessarily the clown that like does balloons and parties and stuff. He would do theater shows.
So we would travel around to different kids festivals or different cities and he would do a show and it would either be in some sort of exotic location like in Africa or somewhere like Sweden or it would be on a ski mountain. So we had this really interesting relationship upbringing where we would kind of travel with him to these cool locations. He played music.
So what he would also do is like when my mom and my dad met, they would travel Greece and they would play music in the tavernas for a free room upstairs. So in Greece, you have the bar and then you have a couple of rooms above it. So they would play music, pass around the hat and their payment would be free room and board. And so my parents have been to Greece 15, 16 times.
It's their favorite place to go. So when I was two years old, they brought me to Greece for the first time and they still would do that thing where they would play music in the taverna and travel around like that. And so they would just bring me with them and they would sit me on the bar as a two-year-old and then they would
leave and play music in the corner and they would just leave me on the bar and I would hang out. And then at the end of the night, they kind of picked me up and off we'd go. And they put me in between them on their Vespa with a little hockey helmet and kind of travel around Greece. So I think from them, I learned that there really wasn't any rules around how you had to live your life.
I think subconsciously, we either absorb that There's this expected route that we have to go on and we feel like that's what we should do. It doesn't need to be pressure from our parents. It's sort of pressure from society. I think at an early age, subconsciously, I learned from then there really were no rules and you could create your own life
based on what made you happy and they never really made very much money we didn't have a lot of money growing up it's not like we were scraping by but we he was a performer and my mom was kind of an independent business coach for women and then did this and that so but what they their life was so rich and they still to this day live like that and they have we had a west valia van where we travel around and camp and to this day they drive down to mexico every year in the van and play music
and meet people. And they had this very rich life. And so it's, yeah, that's definitely what I learned from them growing up.
I put so much pressure on myself to succeed in school, in athletics. I really wanted people to like me. Like I just kind of, for whatever reason, I put, I've always put a lot of pressure on myself. I was on the under 19 national rugby team and we were training for the World Cup and I was worried about missing a kick because I played fly half.
So that's like a field goal kicker and you're the quarterback kind of, so there's a lot of pressure on that position. And so I started worrying about, oh, crap, what if I miss an easy kick at the World Cup? And what if I blow this opportunity? And I had missed a kick in the end of our championship game in high school. And so I really didn't want that to happen again.
And, you know, at that age, everything is so black and white and so life or death, you know, whether your friends like you or you don't, you're living in this little bubble of high school. So you really don't know that there's so much more out there and that they're
these things that you think are such a big deal when you're younger in your high school years or early college years you realize well i'm not even going to remember that this happened on my deathbed like there's just no way i'm going to remember that this was something that i worried about but at that point i was so worried about doing well on this team and so i would worry about it at night and i felt this anxiety and this anxiety caused me to have trouble sleeping and so
this lack of sleep, this anxiety, this constant pressure, it all built up. And I started to not be able to go to school. And I started to not be able to go to rugby practice. And then I couldn't leave the house. And so it just compounded. I never experienced anything like this where all of a sudden I was crippled by this anxiety and depression. And I was a very happy-go-lucky guy.
And I was at a really, I was A-type. I had a lot of friends that were also very supportive and high energy. But I really wasn't talking about what was going on at all. So I was internalizing it and I just went down and down and down and it got really, really scary.
And it ultimately, my friends actually kind of pulled me out of the house and convinced me and rallied me to come work with them in a new town for the summer. after I dropped out of school. And I was forced to get a job. I was forced to start to kind of do things on my own. I've sort of built a little bit of confidence. I started talking about what I was going through.
I started to find different types of people that were inspiring, right? Like, as I said, when you're in high school or even college, you have this Petri dish of friends, but you don't realize that if they're not your people, there are your people out there. It just takes time to find it. And so that was something that took a bit of time for me to realize.
And I started finding these people that I realized gave me energy. These new groups of friends, they inspired me and they were doing all these cool things. They had already traveled. They had started businesses. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to try and only surround myself with people that inspire me. almost by necessity, because I needed that energy.
And that single decision completely changed my life. And it would lead me down this path that would ultimately bring me here, speaking to you. I mean, I wouldn't be doing the things I am doing now if I hadn't consciously decided to try and only surround myself with people that inspire me.
Yeah, and I think that that's a really empowering idea because it means that you can change your life at any time.
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