Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Fri, 16 May 2025
Ben Nemtin was an athlete in university with a bright future until crippling mental health struggles blindsided him and forced him to drop out of college. But through that darkness, he found purpose: a list of 100 dreams and a pact with three friends to help others pursue theirs too. Ben believes building a bucket list saved his life and living your “Buried Life” is essential for profiting in life. In this episode, Ben shares his battle with mental health, how bucket lists became his path to purpose, and how entrepreneurs can take control of their own happiness, one bold goal at a time. In this episode, Hala and Ben will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (06:12) Ben’s struggle with depression (13:47) Origin of The Buried Life and Bucket List Concept (23:47) The Ripple Effect of Purpose and Helping Others (27:51) Why Personal Goals Aren’t Selfish (33:06) Legendary bucket‑list wins: Playing with Obama (40:56) Red Carpet Escapades: Asking Out Celebrities (48:11) Unfinished Bucket List Items and Future Plans (50:00) How Death Can Be Life’s Greatest Motivator Ben Nemtin is a #1 New York Times best-selling author, keynote speaker, and co-founder of The Buried Life movement. He gained global recognition through the hit MTV show The Buried Life, where he and his friends pursued an epic bucket list while helping strangers do the same. Ben now ranks among the World’s Top Organizational Culture Thought Leaders and Top Motivational Speakers despite struggling with mental health. He has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, CNN, NBC, FOX, ABC, CBS, and more, spreading his message of mental wellness, self-improvement, and the radical possibility of dream-chasing. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/profitingIndeed Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Microsoft Teams - Stop paying for tools. Get everything you need, for free at aka.ms/profiting Mercury - Streamline your banking and finances in one place. Learn more at mercury.com/profiting LinkedIn Marketing Solutions - Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at linkedin.com/profiting Bilt - Start paying rent through Bilt and take advantage of your Neighborhood Benefits™ by going to joinbilt.com/PROFITING. Airbnb - Find yourself a co-host at airbnb.com/host Resources Mentioned: Ben’s Book: What Do You Want To Do Before You Die?: https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Want-Before-Die/dp/1579654762 Ben’s Website: https://www.bennemtin.com/ Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services - yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset, Mental Health, Health, Psychology, Wellness, Biohacking, Motivation, Mindset, Manifestation, Brain Health, Life Balance, Self-Healing, Positivity, Happiness, Sleep, Diet
Chapter 1: What inspired Ben Nemtin's bucket list journey?
Whatever it is, my guest today is here to show you that your wildest dreams are more achievable than you think. In this Yap Classic episode from 2022, I spoke with Ben Nemtin, the motivational speaker, bestselling author, and star of MTV's hit reality documentary, The Buried Life. Ben didn't just dream big. He made it happen.
He crossed off incredible bucket list items like playing basketball with President Obama, throwing the first pitch at a Major League Baseball game, and even sharing a beer with Prince Harry. But what truly sets him apart is his mission to help thousands of others turn their dreams into a reality too.
In this conversation, Ben shared with me how one small decision can completely change the course of your life. He also broke down the key steps to crafting your own bucket list, including what to add, what to leave out, and most importantly, how to actually make your dream goals happen. If you're ready to stop waiting and start doing, this episode is for you, so let's get right into it.
Hey, Ben, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
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Chapter 2: How did mental health challenges shape Ben's path?
I can't wait for my listeners to hear all of your bucket list advice and all of your life changing stories. But before we get into it, I did want to touch on your upbringing and talk about mental health for a moment because you are an expert on this topic. You grew up in Canada and I read that when you were younger, you were always traveling with your parents.
So let's talk about your upbringing and how that influenced your adventurous spirit that you have today.
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
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Chapter 3: What is the origin of The Buried Life and its mission?
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, I think it's pretty crazy how one decision can change the trajectory of your life. I mean, you've been on this mission for what it seems to be like 15 years now.
Yeah, and I think that that's a really empowering idea because it means that you can change your life at any time.
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
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Chapter 4: Why are personal goals important for mental health?
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.
And then they started to email us and they looked at our list and they said, hey, I can help you cross off, ride a boat. I can help you cross off, get up on a hot air balloon. I can help you cross off, make a toast to a stranger's wedding. And then they would send us their dreams asking for our help.
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Chapter 5: How do small actions create a ripple effect?
and so we struck this nerve and we just thought let's keep doing this and so this two-week road trip ended up lasting over 10 years and then the list items that we had written down in the beginning that we were convinced were completely unattainable over time they ended up falling off the list and so
we also realized that helping other people achieve their dreams meant even more than doing the big things on our list. And then along the way, like built this passion for like figuring out why do some people achieve their goals and go after them? But most people don't like,
Why are 76% of the people on the planet reaching their deathbed and regretting the things they didn't do, not the things they did? And so that's why I started to speak because I was like, okay, we need to get more people in that minority of the population that actually go after the things and be true to yourself. And really a bucket list is just a reflection of your true self.
That's the way I look at it. It's just a list of all the things that are going to bring you joy and happiness. So it's not just skydive and go to Europe. That's one of 10 categories of your life. So you want to think about your adventure travel goals, but you also want to think about your mental health goals, your physical health goals.
You want to think about how do you want to give back, your relationship goals, intellectual, what do you want to learn, financial, professional. And so that's what a full bucket list is. But When we were on that road trip, we had no idea of any of that. We were just going out to tackle our dreams and help other people. And it sparked this lifelong learning journey.
Yeah, it's so beautiful. And one thing that I really connected with with your story was this idea that people went out of their way to help you. And that's because you guys had really good intentions and you were just trying to be of service to the world. You're trying to make the world a better place. And I can relate because when I started Young and Profiting Podcasts,
I had no intentions to make money. All I was trying to do is just help people listen, learn and profit. And by month two, I had 10 volunteers who were just working for me for free and a Slack channel helping with the movement. And it's just funny how when you want to do good for the world, you just become magnetic and people want to help because there are good people out there.
So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
The only way that we cross things off our list is through the help of other people. I just want to be very clear on that. We had no business or no ability to achieve any of the things that we have achieved, but people always stepped up to help us in unexpected ways because we shared our goals. And I think that you had the idea for this podcast. 99% of people will have the idea.
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Chapter 6: What are the benefits of sharing your goals with others?
You don't need to know the second step. You'll figure out the second step after the first. It's a momentum. And so the journal is designed to create inspiration through action, to create accountability, and then to identify real fear and imagine fear.
Yeah, I love what you're saying right now. It reminds me of something that Jeff Hayden talked to us about the podcast called the motivation feedback loop. And basically what it means is that, like you said, you got to take action. And once you get those little wins, you get that little bit of motivation to take the next step, a little bit of motivation to take the next step.
But it all starts with action. You have to go out and do something to your point. You can't just sit there and plan and think you've got to take those first steps.
Absolutely. That's what most people don't because the fear stops you from that first step.
Yeah. Okay. I want to get into some story time because you've got some really incredible stories. You've been doing this for many, many years. You've helped a lot of people. So one story that really stuck out to me was about this guy named Brent who told you that he wanted to deliver pizzas to a homeless shelter. I don't want to give away the story. So can you tell us about that?
No, it's great because I met you at a speaking engagement. So you were able to see the talk. And so some of the, you should know my story, which is cool. So Brent was the very first person that we ever helped back in 2006. So take you back. We're leaving Vancouver Island in Canada. We're heading to the mainland and we start to get in this RV and travel.
Now there's some news starting to talk about, we would just camp out at radio stations and we wouldn't leave until they put us on the air. So emails started coming in. And we got this email from this guy named Brent. And Brent says, hey guys, I'm 24. Before I die, I want to bring pizzas down to the homeless shelter. And so we're thinking, finally, someone we can help.
Like we don't have much money, but we can buy pizzas. So let's go interview Brent. And so we talk with him and we find out the reason why he wants to bring pizzas down to the homeless shelters because he had lived in that homeless shelter for a couple of years.
But he said when people came in with food to the homeless shelter, it felt like the best day because it felt like someone actually cared about him in a world where nobody really cared about him. And we found that he'd actually pulled himself out of this homeless shelter by starting his own landscaping business.
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Chapter 7: How can you create your own bucket list?
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Hiring Indeed is all you need. I wanna touch on this point because I really, really resonate with it. I always tell my listeners and when I'm getting interviewed on other podcasts, people are like, what is your secret to life? How did you become successful? And I always say like, you have to believe that life is limitless.
And I feel like once I really believe that, that's when everything started to happen. once you really believe that there's no limits to your life. And so that's really awesome that you had that mindset shift. And I'm sure that's helped you achieve more and more of these goals. So tell us another one of your stories. And then I want to hear what's still on your list.
What have you not yet accomplished?
Okay. One quick story is we tried to streak a field and get away. We didn't get away. We ended up spending the night in jail, but spend a night in jail is on the list. So that was, at least we crossed off one.
A double whammy.
One of the things on the list was ask out the girl of your dreams. At the time, the girl of my dreams was Megan Fox. This was back in the Transformer movie days. I snuck onto the red carpet at the premiere of the Transformers film, pretending that I was working for Us Weekly. So I had a spot on the red carpet. I had a microphone and the cord of the microphone was just going into my pocket.
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