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
And I think we all can think back to moments where there was this pivot and it could be something very small, like something a teacher said to us or the way a teacher showed up to us before us in high school or some way a friend supported us or just happenstance when you ran into someone and then that led to your job or there's any number of things, but these little moments.
And I think it's a combination of, you have to be aware and it kind of jump on those moments sometimes. And it takes a little bit of awareness and it takes a little bit of this being proactive. And you start to go down this path that you don't know will ultimately shift your whole life. So if you think about it, if you
If anyway, as a golfer, you hit a golf ball one or two degrees off, it doesn't seem like much, but by the time that it lands could be 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 feet off center. And so this little change can be a big change over time. And that's how I look at these small little shifts that you make that you don't see them in the moment, but they can actually create this huge impact.
And I think it's an empowering idea because it means that you can also make a huge impact in someone else's life. So just by being there for someone in a moment when they need it, or by small gesture of kindness, or helping hand, or even a compliment to a stranger, all these things create ripple effects that are hard to measure, but it's very real. So it goes both ways.
Everyone has the power to create this immense change through the ripple effect, through your daily micro-interactions. But then it also means that you have the ability to change your life in any moment because really a small change can lead to a huge change. And so I think we get overwhelmed sometimes by thinking about, oh, I have to make this huge, massive shift to change my life.
And I don't think that's true. I think that you can change your life just by doing a very small thing that over time will compound and you'll ultimately make a huge shift.
Yeah, well, I'm happy you said that because I still do get depressed. And I think that that is something that is like really just a great thing to talk about that the people that you don't think struggle, struggle. You know, everybody struggles. Every human will go through some mental health crisis. crisis in their life. And that's just through the research, right?
It doesn't need to be from a mental health illness or mental illness. It can be from a divorce, stress from losing a job, bereavement from losing someone that you love. You will go through the crapper, like it's going to happen. And so I think that that's almost an empowering idea because it means that No one is alone in their struggle.
If someone is not struggling, they've been there before, they will go through it. I really believe when you speak things, they lose their power. They're much scarier when they're in your head. And so that's what I found is by talking about it, I'm able to also process it. Like I can talk about it, I can break it down when I'm talking about it in therapy or talking about it with friends.
So it's so important to talk about. So I would say if you are struggling right now, If you take anything away from this podcast, it's find someone that you trust to talk about what is going on. Ideally, it's a professional. And we can talk about therapy and we talk about the challenges with finding a good therapist and the stigma around therapy because all that is there.
But just outside of that, if you can find someone to talk to, I think it's the most important thing.
Yeah. So I came back from that summer away. You know, I was starting to feel back to myself, you know, lifting out of this depression. I was like, OK, I met these cool kids in this new town. I want to continue to surround myself with more people like that. So there's one kid that came to mind and he was a filmmaker from my neighborhood and his name was Johnny.
And I secretly had always wanted to make a movie. So I called up Johnny and I was like, let's make a movie. If you know, I didn't know him too well. I was sort of going out on a limb, reaching out to him. And we gathered two other friends. One of them was Johnny's older brother, Duncan, another friend, Dave. And we started talking about making this documentary.
We didn't know what it was going to be about though at this point. And then serendipitously, Johnny gets assigned a poem in English class at McGill University in his first year English class. The poem is called The Buried Life. So it's an old poem written in 1852, over 150 years ago. And this poem strikes a chord in Johnny. And he sends it back to us.
He says, guys, this poet is talking about the same thing we're talking about right now, which basically was this idea that we felt like we had all these dreams, but we never even tried to go after them because the day-to-day buries them. Like we knew we had things that we want to do, but why hadn't we ever done them? It's because life got in the way.
And we have these moments when we're inspired, but then we get less inspired because, the day-to-day pushes them. So we thought, okay, we're not the first people to feel like this. If this guy wrote this poem in 1852, let's take this name, let's call our film The Buried Life. And our next task was to uncover these buried dreams.
And the way we did that was through this question, what do you want to do before you die? Because for us, thinking about death actually made us think about life. And I'm a huge fan of thinking about death. I think the more we can think about death, the better. And we can talk about that, but just we stumbled into this. This was by accident. But we asked ourselves this question.
We realized, okay, we're going to die one day. So if we're going to die, which is probably the only thing we can count on in life, what do we want to do with the time left? And that's where the bucket list came from. It was our answers to the question, what do you want to do before you die? And we pretended we had all the money in the world. We pretended that we had the ability to do anything.
So our list was ambitious. It was like, make a TV show, play basketball with Obama, write a number one New York Times bestseller, sit with Oprah, have a beer with Prince Harry, pay off our parents' mortgage, go to space. streak a field and get away, ask out the girl your dreams. It was a very audacious list.
And then we thought every time we cross something off our list, let's help someone else do something on their list. And so that was the mission. We bought an RV, we bought a secondhand camera, and we planned a two-week road trip in the summer of 2006 in Victoria, BC, where we grew up in Canada. And we hit the road. And as soon as we hit the road, unexpectedly, people heard about our road trip.
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