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Hey podcast listeners. It's Sameer and today on the Colin and Samir show, I'm really excited to bring you a conversation with my good friend Ben Hampton, a little background on Ben. Ben created and starred in a tv show called The buried Life. The show got its name from Ben's realization that the things that he truly wanted to do in life, we're getting buried by work school and just other day to day tasks. So Ben and his friends asked themselves a question, what did they want to do before they died? That led them to creating a bucket list, a list that they checked off while filming a documentary tv show. Some of the items on that list were writing a new york times bestseller, which they did playing basketball with President Obama which they did, having a conversation with Oprah and delivering a baby, all those things they did and you'll hear more of those stories and how those stories actually came to life on this episode. What's funny is that some of these ideas feel so similar to what's getting produced on Youtube today, but at the time that Ben and his friends made this show,

it was before Youtube even existed today. Ben is a world renowned public speaker and he shares his story with groups all over the world. We had him on the show to talk about his journey with mental health, especially as a creator. We also talked about how to prioritize the goals that are most important to you and how you can write your own list. Actually, Ben just released a new book called the bucket list Journal. If you want to check that out. We put the link in our description of this podcast, it's at right your list dot com. It's a book that helps you write your own bucket list, which I imagine after listening to this episode, you'll all be really inspired to do. Alright. I'm honestly just so excited to bring this conversation to you guys, so please enjoy our conversation with Bennington.

Alright, Ben, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here man. We've had so many great conversations over the years. I'm glad that we get to record this one. Um the first time we ever met was actually in the Yes theory office here in venice. I don't remember that. I do remember that we were deep in editing the Wim Hoff piece, which you know, in classic Yes Theory fashion. We had four days to edit a movie together. Yeah, it was ages for Yes theory. But we met then and I remember the guys positioning it to me, like,

you know, this is the guy that that inspired um Yes theory. Like what he did, and that's kind of when I went back and I was like, oh wait, this is all familiar to me, um with the buried life and kind of all this stuff that was before its time. Um, so I'm just curious for you to give, how do you give your background, like, how do you tell your story in a condensed way, I've been trying to do that, you know, it's, it starts I'm Canadian.

So I grew up in victoria Bc and ironically the whole journey for me started in a place that was pretty dark, pretty dark in the sense that like I went through my first mental health crisis before I started buried life and I was, I was playing pretty high level rugby, I was on the under 19 national rugby team and I was just put a lot of pressure on myself. I don't really know why like my parents didn't put pressure on me, I just was always wanting to do well and so I was, but I like I was kind of living the dream quote unquote, like I made the national rugby team and that was a big deal where I grew up, it's like football in the south is rugby on the west coast of Canada. I had an academic scholarship, like all my pals were going to school at, at the school I was going to and I was, I was really, I was what I thought I was living the dream, but then I started to get anxiety around the World Cup because I played this high pressure position, I was like field goal kicker and I was also calling the play,

so I was the fly half and so and in high school, at the end of our season, at the end of the last game, I I missed a kick that could have won us the game and I was like, okay, can't happen at the World Cup, like this is this is my shot and you know, when you're at that age where you don't have any perspective, there's no context is to like, little things feel like it's earth shattering and that missed that kick was earth shattering for me and I couldn't even imagine missing a kick at the World Cup. Like, this was my is what I've been working for, this is my identity, This was like, this was everything. So I would,

so I practice every day, I practice my kicks and then I started to think about at night what if I miss a kick, like what if I blow this opportunity and this anxiety would just sort of build over time and I would worry about my kicks, I I started lose sleep because I couldn't sleep, I was thinking about this and all of this lack of sleep, this pressure, I started slide into a depression and I don't even know what this was like. I just started, slowly started to get more and more debilitated by these feelings of anxiety, depression, to the point where I was unable to really like make decisions in the sense that I was like stuck in this indecision, so I drive to school but I couldn't get out the car, so I just sit in the car and then I drive back home and I dropped out of school and then I couldn't go to rugby practice. Like I get my gear, I stand in my parent's hallway before I got in the car and I just couldn't get myself to go to practice. And so eventually coaches like,

well, you know, I got cut from the team and I just like blamed it on an injury and I wasn't talking about it to any of my friends, I was just like slowly going downhill. I didn't even really notice what was happening. What did people think when like you got cut from the team? Like what was the, your peers and your family? What were they like? I mean, my family knew what was going on, they were trying to help and they were like trying to get me to talk with a therapist and I was just hesitant to do. So I I know I just didn't know that other people were struggling with something like that. I just thought I was broken so I didn't understand why. So that that was the worst part, curious like,

did you even have a vocabulary for how you were feeling? No, this and this was like before people were talking about mental health in a like as a national conversation, I mean this was, you know, this is 2000, you know, early two thousand's being in sports. Was there any element of your mind that was like, come on Ben, suck it up totally. Yeah, because at least for me growing up playing sports, like that was so present, right? Like any time I felt adversity,

it's like, come on man or any, like personal, you know, even just barriers, it's like come on man, like suck it up, and that's that's like a voice in my head, right? Just conditioning from coaches or Exactly, yeah, and that's the only kind of leadership you have at that time that you respect as your coach, you're not listening to your teachers, really, you're not even your parents, you're doing the opposite of what they say a lot of the times,

just because of that dynamic as a, as a team, so your coaches are your your mentors, so all you hear from them is like push through, suck it up and then as a guy too, you just don't have that awareness at that age, that this type of thing can never happen and how the tools to deal with it, so I had no idea how to grapple with this, I just thought I just kind of thought it was over, like, I just thought like I've worked hard for all this stuff and now it's gone and now and that's what I would think about at night, so it's this self perpetuating downward spiral and so luckily at the end of the semester my that I dropped out of my friends literally pulled me out of the house, they just rallied me and took me to a new town that they were going to to work for the summer. So they bring me to this new town and now I'm forced to do things that I have been just not forced to do, like I have to get a job because I have to make some money, so I start to slowly feel some self worth and some confidence because I'm doing something right.

So I start to be like, okay, I can actually like go and be out in a normal world and do a job. And then I started to slowly talk about what I was going through to my, to my friends and eventually a therapist, which is was the biggest thing and I started understand like, okay, my friends have been through this type of thing, maybe not exactly this thing, but they've been through some stuff, so like maybe I'm not totally crazy, like maybe I'm not, you know, I realized I wasn't alone and then that really helped. And then the biggest thing was in high school, you have this Petri dish of friends where you don't really understand that there's a full world out there of different types of people and a lot of times you're not gonna find your crew in high school,

sometimes you will, but and I had great friends in high school, but they were all pointing in this direction of rugby, you know, all of this, this, this path that I thought I wanted, but I started meeting different types of kids and they were doing different creative things and they were doing things like starting their own businesses and they had traveled and I realized that they were giving me energy, so I felt energized by being around these new people and I started understand like, okay, some people give me energy and I start to have the awareness that some people draw energy from me, so I'm gonna lean into these relationships with people that give me energy and I decided to try and only surround myself with people that inspired me and that totally changed my life, like that is the one decision that completely shifted if I look back, you know, it's like, there's a one little shift that ultimately in the long run totally changes your path,

that was it, who were some of those people in the early days that inspired you and what was it about them? So the first kid that inspired me was the guy that I knew from high school, but he wasn't um I didn't know him too well, he was a couple years younger than me and he started a clothing line out of nowhere and I was just like, I saw the website and I was like, dude, how did you do this? Like, you don't have any experience in fashion, you don't have any money, you just started this really dope clothing line and he was like, what do you mean? I just like borrowed some money and I, and I did it, I was like,

well can I help? Like, I just wanted to get involved. And so I ended up helping him get on this blog. Remember like the cool hunting days when like, they're just blogs of people that just so there's this blog called josh spear dot com and he was like, he post stuff that he thought was cool and it just ended up getting a lot of traction. So we sent him his clothing and I'd like found his contact and emailed him and and so anyways, we got him on this blog and I was just like, wow, I can't believe I did that. Like that was easier than I thought. I was like, if he made a clothing line, like, I wonder what I could do.

And deep down, I'd always wanted to like make a movie with my friends or make a tv show with my friends and there was only one kid that I could think of that was doing this and he was from my neighborhood and his name is johnny and johnny made videos in the summers. He made summer videos and at the end of the summer he would screen them, it was all the friends and he also was making movies, like at McGill in his first year. And so yeah, University of Montreal and he would film his friends in there. They would have this frosh week in the beginning, it was sort of like the olympics of drinking and he made this video was kinda like Jackass meets like it was like an inspirational party video and I was just like, it made you just want to go out and have fun with your friends. I was like, I called him up and took me like a couple of times to get a hold of him cause he didn't know me really like, he actually took my sister prompts so he sort of like, we knew each other but not really and I was like johnny, you make movies, I want to make a movie,

let's make a movie. He was like, I was just traveling cuba with my friend Dave and I was like, I know Dave you two years younger than me in high school. I was like you call Dave, I'll call your older brother Duncan because serendipitously Duncan had come up to me in the bar one night and be like, hey, we should do something. I was like, I just talked to your brother, I was like we should make a movie. So we all started talking about making this film, this is 2006 by the way. And so that's how it all began. And ironically the whole premise came from a poem that johnny was assigned to an english class, like about a month after we started talking about this film,

because we didn't know what the film was gonna be about and we were coming up with all these ideas and we realized what was one of the worst ideas uh dr I think it's probably to drive a dump truck across Canada and collect pennies in the back of trying to fill it up. Uh yeah, we wanted to sail a pirate ship around the world, That's another, that's another yeah, that's good. And so skydiver sharks. Uh and so we, so johnny gets to send this poem, we're we we keep coming up with this is like our first time ever experience a creative roadblock because we're doing, we realize we're trying to we're coming up with a lot of these ideas of a film we think we should make, you know, um and we hadn't got to the cool ideas like the dump truck idea that we were starting to think about a traditional documentary, what's a story we can tell and help someone. And we realized like, Okay,

what if we just could make anything. Um and we had all like, like money was no object. So we're trying to have this this conversation and Johnny gets assigned this poem called the buried life buried life uh written by a poet and Matthew Arnold 1850 250 years ago john reads his poem because his homework and he sends the poem to us. He's like guys read this poem. This poet is talking about the same thing we're talking about right now. And it's that we have these things that we want to do all these dreams and were inspired to go after them. But then they get buried by the day to day and we push them and we never do them, we talk about them, but we never do them. And we're like, Okay, this guy talked about this in 1852, were not the first people to feel like this, let's borrow this name for the film will call the film the buried life. And the next thing was to make a list of all those buried dreams and the way we did that was actually by thinking about death,

ironically we came up this question, what do you want to do before you die? Because when we thought about death, it made us think about life, it made us understand that our time was limited. It cut through all the bs and we're like, okay, we're gonna die, what do we want to do? And the answer to that question became the bucket list. Our bucket list grew out of thinking about if we had all the money in the world, if we had the ability to do anything and remember that you're gonna die. So whatever it is you want to do, you can do it. And that's where the list came from. And so that's and we wrote it collectively.

and is this list that I'm looking at in front of me that list. Yeah, that's pretty much the pretty much the original, there's a couple things on there that I have done personally, but that is effectively the list. So I'm gonna read a couple of these because I think what's fascinating to me every time I've looked at this list of yours, um, is there's some that are pretty wild, right? Um, yell in court. You want the truth? You can't handle the truth, which you haven't done yet. That one's not cross play, play basketball with President Obama.

Um, make a toast at a stranger's wedding. These are, these are some of these, I'm not gonna reveal which ones you've done, but you've done a lot of these do a sketch with Will Ferrell and then on the other side of it, you know, there's donate blood, plant a tree, run a marathon, fall in love. How did you guys come up with this list? Like where does this list come from? Because I think for me when I think of bucket list, what's so interesting, I think of the craziest things.

Right? And there are some things on this list that are the craziest things, but you also boil down some really simple things like fall in love and I think when I think about the day to day, especially being an entrepreneur of being a creator, it is incredibly easy to bury these tasks, even like make quality time to call my mom is something that I would put like and after reading this list list, I would put it on my like the goals for this year, right, is like quality time with my parents and it's something that is so easy for me to bury in my day to day of actually, you know what what's more important is I progress this thing and work or you know, do this thing, it's easy to bury even if you are on the phone with your mom, I was thinking about this, I was on the phone with my mom yesterday but it was in the middle of the workday and I was barely there. I realized in the conversation, I was barely even listening to her and I said goodbye and it was one of the weirdest experiences of that is something I want to prioritize when it came to me.

I wasn't even there for it, you know, so it is something you do have to think about as a creator and just as an entrepreneur like yeah, especially when you think about the, the real regrets that people have at the end of their life and that is one of the five top regrets of the dying is it's around relationships and so brawny wear who's was a palliative care nurse wrote a book called the top five regrets of the dying and one of the top five regrets is I wish I would have stayed in contact with friends. So that's around relationships. I think that also connects. What you talk about is, you know, connecting with your parents and with people that you love in meaningful ways. Also is one of the other regrets. I wish I would have had the courage to express my feelings. And so both these don't cost any money. Both of these are so easy to put off. But when you think about if you are, if you die and they're calling you die and Samir is doing your eulogy.

You know, he's gonna talk about, he's not gonna talk about how much money you made, He's going to talk about maybe he's gonna talk about how you were there for him when you when he needed you. He's gonna talk about how what type of person you were, your your your values, your your your character, um and how in your impact probably on him and on everyone else. And so that's why we stumbled into this idea of thinking about death. But it was it's such an important thing because it actually puts it frames your life in real perspective and it's those moments with the people that you love that you're going to value the most and even having the awareness. It's it's human nature for this stuff to creep in. Like this is the biggest regret that we have in our life is I wish I would have lived for me versus what other people want or the, you know what other people expect of me. And so I think a lot of these regrets come out of subconsciously putting things, these things off, even if we don't realize that we're doing them because I've been the same way I I talked with my mom 50% of the time.

I'm just kind of trying to get off the phone because I have stuff to do and I'm never gonna remember the stuff that I'm doing. Like if I zoom out and go five years, 10 years down the road, even later that day, I won't even remember what I did after I got on that phone because I was so eager to just get the stuff done. But that time of that relationship with your someone you love you are going to value and remember and when we when we wrote the list, the one thing that we did that I think was important is we there was just no rules. Like I I think usually when you think about a list, you think like adventure travel, but we were like, if you can do anything and if you had all the money, like what's everything that's important to you and the thing that was so important or that was so liberating for me at that time was to actually say what I wanted because up to that point I was living the high school dream, but it wasn't my dream and I didn't even know it and for the first time in my life I was writing down what I truly wanted and they were stupid things like grow a mustache or drive a dump truck across the country, collecting pennies and they were meaningful things like pay off my parents mortgage and fall in love and crazy things like go to space, you know, sit with Oprah or make a tv show but it didn't even matter that we were never gonna actually do them.

Like we we didn't think we would ever do them. That that was not the point. The point was that it was gonna be fucking fun to try and we're just gonna go and and give it a shot and do it. And then what we, what I realize now in in looking back is by writing down those goals. That was funny enough, the very first step to achieving them. And it felt like, you know, we were just doing for fun, but it actually started the process and the next piece of that process was just taking action. We had no idea how we're gonna do any of them. We we were laughing when we wrote some of these things down like play basketball with Obama and that was the most impossible thing we could ever think of. But we're like, we're gonna go on a two week road trip, we're gonna figure it out,

even if we have to bike on this road trip, we're gonna go do it? We're gonna go after our list. We're gonna cross off as many as we can and then we're gonna help other people with their list and we're gonna ask them, what do you want to do before you die? And if we can help them then we will and that's gonna be our documentary and it'll be a two week road trip, will show the film to our friends at the end of summer and that will be it. And so we just started to hustle to get this road trip off the ground like it was it was it was at the end of the summer of 2006. So we worked jobs throughout the school, throughout this summer we would cold call companies on the phone book. We pretended we had a production company and just try and get through to the ceo of the company. A local juice company paid for our gas. Um It was actually, it was like the scariest phone call I ever made was like the first cold call and I got right through the Ceo was like my name is Ben, I'm producing a documentary and I'd like to talk with your Ceo. I think it's a great opportunity.

And so what was the opportunity just to have like like well it's a good question because this is like it this is pretty social. I mean facebook was at at universities twitter had just launched. But yeah, where were you going to distribute this film? Like some packed highways and your logo on the side of it? Yeah, I've seen the billboards. A lot of people see those. This was like we built a sponsorship deck and it was like you'll be on our website, you'll we'll talk about you in the news, right? We'll go on radio, we'll go on local tv and NBC. We're making t shirts, your logos on the t shirt, We're giving those t shirts away maybe 10.

We're gonna give away. We're gonna put you on the side of the bus, the RV which was a 1977 something dodge coachman. We got like and they're like, please associate my brand. Yeah, exactly. And but the ceo like I get through this guy and I got so lucky because he was like an ex hippie and he just I went through the whole idea, I was like we're going after our dreams and we're helping other people and we're making a documentary. I was so nervous and he goes at the end after I finally stopped my pitch and he goes, dude, a lot of people are gonna tell you can't do this, I'm telling you you're sitting on a gold nugget. And he's like, well help you out, we're gonna send you juices,

we're gonna pay for you. Like we'll give you give us like two grand and that's like that's great. Two grand from this company to pay for our gas. We literally sent juices to like five cities so we can pick them up in coolers along the way. We got Red bull gave us red bulls, a granola bar company gave us granola bars, we lived off those three things and we got a second hand camera on Ebay, we built a website and we start throwing parties to as fundraiser, which was was was when I started to like actually have that first taste of being like an entrepreneur was throwing a party. They were so fun, we made a bunch of cash and so, you know, a bunch of cash, we probably saved up like five. Okay, the whole thing probably cost us like seven K.

We took out a $2000 loan from Dave's dad, we had to pay back and uh, and we're like, let's go end of 2006. And at the last two weeks of august, we hit the road and we almost didn't go because the mechanic told the RV wasn't gonna make it back and didn't have enough money to tow the RV back and it wasn't our RV, but we put on the side of the RV, we from a local skate shop that we call them vehicles in Canada, you call them, Yeah, yeah innovators innovators. So we sit on the side of the bus, the RV one film, four guys, 100 things to do before you die logo, sponsors and we took off what was the first,

the first, the first, it was be a night for a day. Got a full suit of armor with chain mail sword and everything. I was working as a beer rap at the time. So I worked for Molson so I would do my rounds at the counts during the morning and then in the afternoon I would cold call and try and get sponsors. So I was able to trade some beers to my friend that managed a restaurant for a gift certificate. The restaurant that I could trade to. This woman who rented this suit of armor usually by the day for free for two hours. I had it. So I, I, we bring it back to the RV, it's very heavy and I mean it's really like if you walked into a castle and you saw like a night standing, that's what this was. Full helmet,

full chain mail, full sort go downtown. Of course we call all the local media and we're like, we're doing a giant stunt. Our first ideas were gonna skydive into the press launch. Then first of all, I don't know how to skydive. Second of all, don't even realize you can't do that. Like you have to clear airspace like, so we had sort of pitched this skydive idea and they're like, what? Okay, so press comes down and here I am dressed up in this Jianqing nice outfit and we pull up to the RV and I'm like, this is a terrible idea, like,

I I don't know what I'm gonna do out there, and the guy's like, well, you're a night, Ben, you can you figure it out, it's like, all right, step out of the RV, just awkward silence. But as I step out, there's a six year old boy walking with his mom holding his mom's hand, his other hand, he's holding a plastic sword, he sees this night walk onto the street and he's just like, eyes go wide,

he drops his mom's hand, he runs over to me with his sword and he's like, goes down on one knee and bows his head right in front of me. So I'm like, two options are either like, off with his head or write a went for the ladder like we got, so I night them and then these other kids start coming around and all these kids around me, I'm knighting all these kids, of course the news is there and I'm walking all these kids across the street and next day we leave for the road trip and we're like, great, we already crossed off be a night and we pick up the newspaper and we crossed off make the front page of the newspaper that same day, and was the news there because you called them? Yeah, we asked them and they thought it was gonna be much better. I think that's that's an unbelievable lesson for creators of all types. You know,

I think some of the best artists today, like little Nas X, you know like when one of their songs goes viral, they often say this isn't an accident because I was reaching out to people, I was posting on reddit threads about the fact that I was going to do this. You know that I think like if you want people to talk about what you're doing, the first thing you can do is ask people to talk about what you're doing, which is you're touching on the probably the biggest barrier that stops people from achieving their their goals. And I think as creators, it's it's very consistent, which is the fear of what other people think or fear of failure. So you don't know how this is going to be received. Therefore you don't want to put yourself in that vulnerable position to look like a failure. And that is a human fear. That is something that we all feel and it's you never conquer that fear. You have to push through.

I mean talk about yesterday seek discomfort. That's the whole idea is like you're actually that is not a negative feeling. It makes you feel anxious and nervous doesn't mean it's bad. That's actually means you're growing so that discomfort that you push through when you feel that you know when I was in that RV, I could have very easily been like guys, this is a dumb idea. Like I don't want to do this. Let's do something else. This is my hometown. I'm in front of news. Like it's, it's hard enough for we didn't even tell people what we were doing, let alone like, and now we're in this position where we're broadcasting to, you know, everyone this like I'm gonna walk out what the funk am I gonna do?

You know? And I could have just turned, we couldn't turn around and done something else or just gone out there as a unit plus me on my own. You know, so, but I did it and when you put yourself in that position, when you are vulnerable, even if it's not the outcome that you think that you want something good will come of it. At the very least you learn something about yourself and you grow. But when I look back, we put ourselves on the line so many times. By the way, the only way that I did that was because I had three other guys that were pushing me to do it. And the other piece that's missing when it comes to these personal passions and if you're a creator and you're on your own, sometimes it's hard to continue to push yourself. You need an accountability buddy,

you need someone beside you. You guys can speak to this when you talk about like how close you were to not continuing with Colin Samir I was there, it was razor thin. I mean tipped over to the other edge where it was over. You were you were there, you were like I was talking to you a lot. Exactly. And and that's something that I think is really interesting to talk about it and we can talk about now. We talked about in a minute but you know, just coming back to that moment of putting all of us putting ourselves out there and it led to the front page of our local newspaper which lead to the front page of our provincial newspaper which led to national news and all of a sudden we're on this road trip and the whole country is talking about it and we start to get emails coming through our website and people like, hey I saw your list online. I saw number eight rideable. My uncle has a bull ranch, you know in in outside of Calgary he can get you on a bull where I saw make a toast to a stranger's wedding, My best friend's getting married, I'm the best man dude,

I can get you in. We got invited to 12 weddings in two weeks to come make toasts and then people started sending us their dreams asking for our help. So we start to get all of these dreams come in. You know I've always dreamed of like like kicking a field goal at at an NFL game. I've always dreamed of flying a fighter jet. I've always dreamed of riding a horse through a drive through. And we had this moment where we're like holy sh it like what's going on? Check our inbox. It's just and we come back from that two week road trip, like I think we gotta keep doing, keep doing this. And one of the emails that came in was a producer. He's like, hey guys, I saw you on the news, I wanna help you cross off to list items.

Number one, give away $100 bill, I'm gonna send you $100 bill number to make a tv show. And those were both list items, give away $100 bill and number 54 make a tv show. And he was a big producer in Canada. So we met him on our way back from the, in two weeks, we come back, do this little loop, come back through Vancouver, we meet him for breakfast at a fancy hotel in Vancouver and he was like, I think this could be a really meaningful show. I think we should go to Toronto and talk with networks there. And and we're like, all right,

so we come back, we're like, whoa boys, we gotta keep going here. And so we Went back to school, but and Johnny cut a short trailer and we put on YouTube and it made the front page of YouTube, it's 2006. And so and coincidentally that lined up with our trip to Toronto and we started to meet with production companies and and uh and networks and so we basically ended up getting offered a show in Canada by MTV Canada 2007. We get the deal and the deal is we own the show, we own the buried life. You guys are talent, you guys get um nominal talent fee but it's uh but you get you get to do it. So MTV just to be clear, MTV Canada owns the show owns the the buried life of the buried life and you guys are talent which essentially means they can turn it into the real world model and this is the real world world. This is yeah and this is the era and they're so basically it's like their their premise and their thought is probably like this is the first cast of the buried life and we can have another cast. Yeah and and and I don't and we weren't executive producers.

I think we were like interesting maybe co E. P. S. Or something. Was it just so appealing to you at the time though? Like what was your initial reaction was just like holy sh it MTV is offering us a show. I mean this is my dream of course make friends like and how old are you at the time? Like 2022. Yeah that's crazy. There's no better place to land at this time. And so we're like okay and we start to go through it and we start to read this stuff and we're just like you know what really what we want is to keep doing this like that feeling that we had on that road trip, it was magic. Like stuff just happened for the first time in my life. I was actually starting to feel a sense of who I was and sense of purpose and we all were having the time of our lives, you know, we could feel we knew it was something special.

We knew that if we just stuck to this feeling and what we were doing that we could continue to build it and and and honestly the big dream was MTV like the US right and we just thought you know, and we were making a documentary and we're like our whole filter, this is so funny thinking about this. The only thing that we stuck to was what would our friends think is cool, What would our friends like would this inspire our friends because our goal was to inspire our friends to do things that we knew they wanted to do but weren't doing them like one body was going to medical school knew he wanted to open a restaurant like all and so we're like how can we show people and not tell them how to live their life but show them how much fun it is and then the hope was that they would get fomo but not for missing a party but from missing out on life. And that was the feeling that we were trying to convey and we knew that was gonna be if we weren't in control of the show that was not gonna happen. So we knew that if we're gonna do a show we had to be executive producers. We and we're like We respectfully passed on the TV show, we're like we're making the doc and that was our vehicle at this point. And so we went back to school, we fundraise throughout the year. Dude, we raised a significant amount of money in 2007 from Levi's. We came down to San Francisco as we pitched Levi's in their headquarters. Palm pilot at the time. Yeah,

of course I yeah, but I haven't heard those two words together since 2007 pilot being the blackberry looking phone with the stylist. That's right, yeah, because we put them out of business. So so we, you know, we raised maybe like 350 K. and maybe another 250 k. and 50 K. And in kind we got like so we bought the this purple transit bus that we got from a nudist in Vancouver who had changed the whole insides and like retrofitted it was all purple we got and then we put all of our money into a crew from L. A. Director, two videographers sound guy, they followed us in another RV for two months. So this is the second tour.

We're going big and we're going after bigger list items and so that's where all the money went. We didn't take a dime. Put it all into permits. You know, we had no clue what we were doing. You know, we had to get visas to come down to us and film, you know, expensive to put a crew up and pay their ella salaries for two months and put them up in hotels and the RV and gas and stuff. So We're doubling down and we just now take off for two months go straight to burning man 2007 and we're like, tell our director, meet us at Burning man. No idea that you, there's no cell service. We don't see him for the first two days. He finally finds are purple spots.

He's like, guys, okay, it's not a good start. I've been here for two days sleeping random people's places because like like this, this is the beginning of the end. And so and we take off and we were we sing the national anthem at a sonics game. We're rideable. We help kids that are have cancer going shopping spree. We helped this guy named Mark who had cancer who didn't have was living in a sleeping on a blow up mattress in his apartment, went to a local church, the church congregation. All the people from the church just brought like lamps and and beds and all this stuff and then we furnished his room and we have this, you know, and I know now more press and everything's building and more and more get back home, we're fired up.

You know, it's been like now it's global news and uh, we're like, ok, let's, let's, let's make this doc. Now we realize, hey, post production is expensive. We spent all of our money, we have no money left. And now it's just like nose dive. I go back, I can't say I go back to work in a bar. I've never worked in a bar.

I have to pretend I know how to bar tend to work in a bar. I will start working in this crappy bar. I'm like, okay, we just turned down the opportunity of our lifetime a tv show, we spent all of our money on this film. We didn't pay ourselves a dime and we're never going to make this film, like no one's giving us any more money. We no one is ever gonna see this like all this whole thing, we can't even explain to our friends what we just did. You know, and now it's not gonna happen. And as I started getting depressed again, you know, and I go to Mexico with my parents because they are in the baja, their friends have a place.

So christmas break going to Mexico there, they meet this, this this couple, they have a daughter, she's older than me, I'm chatting, she's like what do you do? I'm like I don't know like I'm I'm trying to bartender keep getting fired because I know how to bartender, like someone asked me how to make a martini. I was like how do you make that? Like I went on a couple road trips once. Yeah I was like yeah I went I went on this road trip doing this thing, I showed her the trailer that johnny made it. She's like wow this is really good. Like if you think about doing a tv show in Canada like you should think about doing in the U. S.

I'm like yeah she's like I know a couple of people you know classic L. A. Like you know someone in production cut to, she ends up flying me down on a buddy pass to meet some of her friends. So it's a free ticket. I didn't have enough money to make if I start meeting people come back and like guys like a lot of people are excited about this idea. Little I know that like in L. A. That's happened all the time but just how people communicate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah and so we but I started doing trips down to L. A. By myself and I push off school. I mean I made it into business school finally was like I gotta get it together. Like I'm going back to business school.

Uh But I put it off start doing tricks I learned, okay, you need to, you need an agent, start meeting with agents, you need oppression. And I'm like johnny, we need uh, we need to make a pilot. So this is like the pilot that we make in 2007 right after burning man, we go to um, Vegas because we want to crash the MTV VMS. This is 2007 Britney Spears is coming back and you don't have a relationship with MTV America. You're just like, we're going to crash the VMS, we're gonna crash the VMS,

we're gonna drive our bus and we're just gonna bum rush the VMS and so we go down the VMS at this time. I just, I'm just, I'm cautious that people don't know what the VMS are because at this time the VMS were the big, that was the Oscars for young people, right? Like video music awards is what it stands for. And Samir and I were graduating from high school at the time, 2007, you said you were graduated not miss video music. We did not miss the V. M. A. S. Going to the VMS was the biggest deal. Yeah,

this is where pop culture was made. It was this generation's version of just, if you got to let me know if you got to live inside the Tiktok for you page or something like that. I don't know that's like going there for a night. Yeah. Like every year something would happen that if you didn't see like that was going to be people talking about. Yeah. And by the way, this is Britney Spears coming back, remember that? And this is Vegas. So there's, and so we go, we don't have enough money to stay in a hotel. So we're living in our purple bus at the circus circus trailer park. So there's a trailer park area as a place to park your RVs at circus circus.

So yes. And we're coming out of the and burning man were covered in dust. We're showering from a hose outside of our V how are we gonna do this? There's a lot of police over at the palms were the, but we go scope it out. We noticed that like as we get to the day of the awards, there's this line of black cars going in the back and everyone's giving a pink card to security. Okay, that's the V. I. P entrance, that's where we should go in. So our plan is we're gonna go because we, the only thing we have in our favor is we have a film crew so we look like we're doing something important. So we're like, let's pretend we're filming a pilot for MTV and we will craft an email from the head of MTV was judy McGrath who has been an MTV for years.

So we don't know if I should talk about this. But no, they know that we did this, We made her a gmail or like an email address for her, sent us an email from judy McGrath saying, boys can't wait to see in the awards. Remember no one knows about this pilot. Your tickets are inside. Okay? We go to a savers thrift store, we get matching suits, women's power suit, blue green, red pinstripe, don't even do up. And we're like,

okay, let's bum rush these back entrance. We'll say that we've lost our card but our director will act as our publicist. We'll make a bunch of like a ship storm of activity. Be like, we're late for the cardboard. Like we got to get in and we'll just try and cause confusion and get in the awards. Right? So we clean our bus with our hose, we getting our suits, we go to the back entrance and we creep up to the front were like buried life. Guys were late. We gotta go in. He's like, what? Like what are you talking about?

You're not let me radio in. We're like, we just started yelling, we're trying to act like assholes and trying to, he's like, we show the email were like, you're gonna lose your job if we don't get in there. We're just trying to do anything all of a sudden. He's like, like guys, no, like just get out of the way, just go over there for a second like there's a whole bunch of people trying to get in. He's like his mistake was he said just go that way so we just keep driving into the throngs of people were honking the horn now it's like we're outside the entrance, people are like, what's,

who's this Hong kong, open the door, we're like first camera go out, second camera guy audio go out, we go out and we just rushed, we put our like jackets over our faces and like we're late for the carpet, we're late for the carpet, red ropes, just start open start. I think people thought we were the plain white tees. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What was their song? Yeah,

great track. Um So anyways, we're just bulldozing through right onto the red carpet and we're like, oh we're on the red carpet, I get into the press room with a camera and I'm interviewing celebs. Perez Hilton who is like the king queen at the time comes up to me, he's like, he's like, where'd you get that suit? Like his vintage, I didn't show him that I didn't have the button. Uh johnny gets in the awards with a camera, like a full over the shoulder camera and he's like eating the shrimp cocktail cruising around, we get out of the awards, No one knows that we're in there and cut to back to, I'm gonna do like johnny,

we need a, we need a pilot like let's make the pilot about the secret pilot, johnny cuts that together. We also do a story of helping someone else we got We street performed to make money so we could buy a bunch of computers for a classroom in in watts and and gave it to them so they could you know this is like 2006. So johnny cash the pilot and I start going around and show people and everyone's like this is really good and we're trying to get to a production company that we love. We can't our agents can't even get us a meeting. We found our own meeting to them, we partner with them and then we start pitching networks and abc and MTV both wanted to do the show and The reason why we went to MTV because the head of MTV at the time, a guy named Tony DeSanto who started MTV as an intern 18 years ago is legendary. There he was like guys the only way we can suck this up is by stopping what you're already doing. He gave us executive producer credits, he gave us creative control. We maintain ownership of the I. P. And we drove our purple nudist bus down to L. A.

in 2009 and we just went just hot into exactly producing our first television show which is like a complete total different world from what we're used to I think yeah I mean you're a Youtuber, you're making videos with your friends all of a sudden you're now making it with 60 people on the road and there's lawyers involved and you can't go anywhere without sign off and you can't do and all of a sudden, jesus christ, this is how many people are you actually traveling with at least 30 at least 30 30. And and we, we are just, we're going rogue. Like we just have to be like, we're out of here. We're going with three people, like one camera guy, one audio, one producer, so that we can actually get releases. There's also like the safety of being a creative meaning like where how do you feel Safe as being like the loosest version of yourself? You know,

it's not with 30 people watching you. It's not at all. Like if you need to like that is a different type of discomfort than the discomfort. You're building into the show of getting like doing something totally new and crossing something off your list. But then having all these people just standing there with like walkies watching you, you're like this, I don't feel safe or they'll be like, oh one second stop for one second calling. Could you say that? But reference it like it's two days ago because we're gonna need to fit that into, you know, you're like, what the, you know? And so like the best part about this show is that it's real. Exactly.

And that's what we were trying to and they're like, well if we're so we do things, you know, we're want to like break into places, streak a field, you know, do all these things that if they know we're doing it, it defeats the whole purpose. And so we have to fight to make this real, this show hasn't been made. Shows aren't really made. Like this is like, I mean that stuff created reality. Yeah. That stuff is now made on Youtube meaning like, it's so funny to hear you talking about sneaking in to the V.

M. A. S. Right? Because that is still a format on Youtube today. I just watched a video last week of this guy Zack, um, a slop, How do you say his last name? J yeah. In London sneaking into Glastonbury. That was the whole premise of the video, right? It's like sneaking into the biggest music festival in London and like that is still a format that happens regularly on YouTube today. Um, and that generates a lot of attention and viewership and it's still interesting to watch.

Um, so it's so interesting that a lot of these things you were doing back then are absolutely the formats that today in 2022 and probably next year will still carry on. Right? Like these streaking a field that happens on Youtube now, right? That's like these are things that are happening. Um, Yeah. And if the camera isn't shaky and may be far from the subject, you won't believe it. Yeah, exactly. So we started filming the show on flip cams. Remember of course you could buy those at like a CVS, the Kodak um flip. Yeah,

I had one of those. There was also, and then there was the actual flip cam was the brand that looked like it had a little camera on it, but you can kind of play it off like a cell phone so we would film pretending that you're on your phone. But the other thing was, was was tricky was that this, you know, we knew that the most, there was there was two purposes of the show. I want to show that these things were possible and how much fun they were to actually to do and to, to live this way, but also how meaningful it was to help someone else do something that they wanted to do. And this was a very delicate, like a fine line to walk when it came to producing. And, and actually the final product because we had to lead with the fun,

the cool, the crazy, you know, ask out the girl your dreams trying to ask out Megan fox or taylor swift survive on a deserted island. You know, all these things that would get people interested in watching. But the real meat of the show was then when we met someone and help them accomplish their thing and being able to one produce that and create those stories and in a real way and that was when we really had to figure out, okay, how are we shooting this long lens? How are we making ourselves, like, how are we just, this is we have one shot at this. You know, we're reuniting a father and son after 17 years, there's one moment that we have to capture,

you know, um we're helping a girl find her mom's grave, that she had her mom died. She didn't know where she was buried. You know, these, like, these stories that were very real. And how do we pair that with streaking a field? You know, and so this, but we knew that that was actually the because through our experience in in in in in living this when we had experienced those stories, we immediately got uh something back from it. Like, it was like, it wasn't like,

you know, give and like it'll come back to you because I think when you give without expectation, there's an instantaneous, you get it right back. And so it's like when you give a gift to someone that you're so excited for them to receive it, you're not giving the gift to get a good gift on your birthday, You know, it's like you're giving them a gift because you receive just as they receive. And so that was something that we, you know, that like real raw, uh, those real raw moments, um, was we had to fight with the network a lot too, so interesting to see how much of that was because they wanted to market it.

And what was remarkable was not those emotional stories and there just wasn't stuff like that really wasn't that stuff wasn't on MTV. You know, it just wasn't really the concept of giving a gift is something that came up this week actually from thomas Bragg from Yes theory. We, you know, just to actually swing back a little bit to the accountability. Um we are now part of a group of creators that meets once a week. It's moderated by someone um and it's serious, like you, you have to, they send a prompt, you have to respond to the prompt before and and fill it out before the meeting. You have to come prepared. You have goals that you have to say out loud that then they, the moderator, then the week after says,

did you do that goal? Like, this is the specific thing you said you were gonna do last week, did you do it? And you're a no show multiple times in a row, You get, you get kicked out. You also, if you don't tell people, I'm not going to be there and you just don't show up a couple times in a row. It's like, you're out, you also pay to be a part of this group, right? It's it's incredible. But we started talking about crossing a million subscribers,

which is something that at this moment we're getting we're closing in on and having ideas around it and a lot of our ideas when we said them out loud thomas actually said back to us like, you know, you're asking a lot from the audience, like this process of being a creative is like giving, like, what's the gift? Right? And recognizing, I think that in the, in the world of like Gamification or commercialization of creativity a lot of times the framework starts to shift, especially in a network like that of like, how do we, how do we make this thing, make money, It's what it has to do, right?

How do we make this thing work rather than just sitting in the place of like, what's the best gift we could deliver to people creatively. And I think the thing that I've realized is the really what this whole journey has been for me is self discovery, like what, who am I and what is that truest version of myself, and anytime I get away from that truest version of myself, I literally start to get depressed, you know, and I'm not saying that that's what everyone's experiences, but this is my experience and it's not as simple as just that, and then I can fix that, and that makes me feel better. There are many things that I said therapy, you know, I have, like this toolkit of stuff that I think helped me get out of stress or troubled water,

but there definitely is a consistent feeling that when I start to feel low something in my life is not in alignment, it's either what I'm doing as my work, it's a relationship perhaps it's like just something that I'm focusing on that is not, and and when I change that and come back to who I truly am, then life starts to click and I start to feel energy and I think that as a creator, I mean for me personally, once I'm really honest with myself about who I am and I can express that in a real way, then I feel like it's creating the biggest impact and I think you create your best impact when you are true to yourself and that how you do it changes like you can recycle the way that you are projecting what that expression is like for me, it went from documentary to television to books and now it's live events. Like, I mean speaking basically, and I get I have to get re inspired by the, this the medium and also the way that I'm expressing it. And so it's just really hard to do though, because as you said, like,

you have to make money, right, you're looking at what's working you, it becomes a commodity, It becomes a business and sometimes you have to do certain things just to run the business and make it successful. But if that's the case you need to carve out time and protect time for those things that make you feel truly alive and that's what your list is. It's identifying those things that make you feel like your true self because the problem is and this is the biggest problem Is that most people die regretting not being themselves. So this is the biggest problem on earth and it's not just a problem now. This has been a problem for hundreds of years. That's why the poem was written over 150 years ago, talked about this exact same thing and it's getting worse and will continue to get worse as we get buried by social media as we get disconnected from people in having less and less interaction. So you need to stop and take time to make sure that you are on your true course and the buried life had this amazing poem. I started this amazing uh it's like eight lines and it's in the bucket list journal, but it's effectively talking about tracking your true original course and I think as creators, that's what we're trying to do is we're just, we're just,

we're just trying to figure out who we are and when you have the audacity to be that person and to follow that path and not care what other people think and just go for it. That is what people want to see and that is timeless. You know, people are drawn to that courage, people are drawn to you are the only person on earth who is you. So like that's a competitive advantage. Just don't be other people be who you are. And the trouble is sometimes it's hard to figure out what that is. That what I found is helpful is like breaking down those little it's like it's not your purpose, these are like mini purposes, that's what your list is. So you write down those things that are going to give you that, that excitement, that sense of joy. And it's not just the creative pursuits. We're talking like what are your goals,

Your physical health goals, your mental health goals, your relationship goals, your intellectual goals, what you want to learn, professional, financial, all these things, you know, this is my road map. These are the things that this is who I am, that's what your list is. It's it's like you're turning yourself inside out and putting it on a piece of paper and now you've identified what those are the next step. As you said. It's just build accountability. Yeah.

I think that we can save years of our life by taking minutes or hours of our day to write, just write down things like Colin and I when we first started finding success, one question I asked Colin and that I was pondering myself is what's enough, what's enough for us, What's enough money, what's enough viewership? What's enough content right? Like what what how do we come up with a system where we know we're doing enough because otherwise this whole world is infinite. The world of creativity, especially on the internet is completely infinite. Right now, we could be posting something, right? And that could actually generate viewership new audience revenue at any given moment. Every creator right now has infinite possibility. And that is a really,

incredibly overwhelming thing. And then you, you take that and just think about your life and it's like in some respects, that's also the case, you just could be doing anything. So if you don't write frameworks down of like, well what is the thing I'm trying to do, then I think it can become debilitating to a point where actually we had an experience where we were really struggling. This is like the depths of creative output, no direction and no, no money. And we went to whole foods as one does as one does. It's yeah, that's where you go. If you live in Los Angeles when you're down, it's actually this is necessary.

But it was for me, I was looking at a situation where I had recognized where we had gotten to um this, this is 2017 2018 2018, probably closer to 2019 2019 when we eventually sort of stopped. But basically we had gone so many different directions. Uh one after another, after another in such a short amount of time that it became very confusing if there was any direction that we should be going because we felt like we had tried so many and they just weren't working layer on top of that as an editor. You know, people always say, don't, don't worry about what other people think, but as an editor, like that's actually your job to sit there and do that. And then when you're the subject of what's being edited and you're editing, I'm making 1000 decisions in an hour about myself showing up in this timeline and I had a little bit of decision fatigue after months of making decisions that didn't feel like they were they were panning out, we went to whole foods for lunch and I'm sitting looking at the buffet bar and I'm just paralyzed.

I mean it was so unexplainable. It was inexplicable to me why I couldn't just decide if I wanted broccoli and chicken or if I wanted soup or if I wanted to go over and get pizza and I was just standing there just paralyzed and I thought I was about to cry. I just lived on the floor. Yeah. And again, wouldn't move for me looking at that scenario and being like, oh man, we have no idea. And it reminded me of the beginning of the story of what you told us that you would like grab your stuff to go to practice and just stop. And I think we we didn't say it to each other, that we were mentally not well because of how we were like our our um path to, trying to figure out how this worked was just to work more to create more, not to, we didn't write down a list ever of like, what are we trying to do? It was just try something again tomorrow.

And I think there's some value to that, but just coming back to this concept of writing, like, what was the goal of that week or that day, or, you know, and some of it, some of that goal could be spend time outside. We didn't do that. We were like, no, we need to sit at this computer longer because this is what's not working. And I think the conversation of enough didn't lead to, okay, let's come up with metrics that we need to hit. It wasn't like I need this many subscribers,

we need this many views or we need to make this much money. It really came down to more so uh daily process and how we were enjoying our days where we're feeling individually fulfilled um is ultimately what it came down to, which is a good thing too. And we've talked about this before, it's like, well, what is success, you know, can you define what success is to you? And for me, what I realized is success is sleeping through the night because when I sleep through the night, I'm not stressed about something and I'm typically someone who has trouble sleeping because I'm worried about stuff and because what that means is when I'm sleeping through the night, then the next day I feel like myself and then I can tackle anything, so that's one goal the other is am I doing, am I doing things daily that energized me that that make me feel alive? Because like what else are we trying to do here?

Like we're just trying to feel great and feel alive and feel, I mean fulfilled, like makes you feel alive, you know, like the creative expression makes you feel like meaningful relationships, make you feel alive, being active, makes you feel alive. So so one of those things that make me feel alive and a lot of times I don't have time for those things because I'm working on something that you know that that may not funnel into those two metrics now, can you define what those things are and then protect time for those things and that's the trick as we get busier and busier, you know, and as you have a family and as you start to have more responsibilities, you also have this feeling that it's selfish to do things for yourself and I really believe that its service and you have to take care of yourself in order to help other people and and that's you know when you're true to yourself and you're able to express who that is and you can you can have that impact, but you can also be the friend that you need to be, you can be the father, the mother,

you know the person in the world that you need to be because you are being that full expression of of your and capable of being that person and it's just so easy to get swept up on the treadmill, like and so you literally need people to be like, yo you're getting kicked out, like we like that group that you talked about, like you're out dude cause you are not doing what you say you're gonna do, like we need that for life, like something like, hey listen, like you're gone bro, you're, you said that this is important to sleep and energizing, you're not doing it like whack, like smacking on the back of the head, like you need that accountability and so that's why writing your list is important because you, that creates accountability cause all of a sudden these things that you think about that are important to you now, they're real now you have a reminder that they exist.

That's what you talk about what the goals are. Because when you share your goals, you feel accountable to people, you share that, you tell your whole audience. Guys and girls were writing a book, that's our next thing. We're writing a book, we're gonna finish it this year, we're gonna come back and and release it next year, you guys are writing that book because you said you would and everyone's gonna be like, hey guys, how's the book coming? You're like, damn it, We got to write this book.

That used to stress me out because we would like, we'd make announcements all the time about things we were doing and then be like, how's that going to be? Like, it's not going, not going, yeah, I want to come back to your list um because we're at the point now, you're, you know, you're making this tv show. Um and again, like I'm always so fascinated by this because it's like plant a Tree is on this as at number seven and number eight is play basketball with President Obama, some of them one of the most possible things to do and one of the most impossible things to do. And I'm wondering if you could tell us the story of number eight because as I'm looking at it, it's crossed off.

You don't want the Tree story. The story is much longer story. Next, next. Yeah, I'll get you guys to do a documentary story tomorrow to do a long form. Um so the short version of the Obama story, because I could tell that story in an hour and a half. Um So Obama gets elected, johnny calls me up 2008 pre MTV show, he's like Benny, we should put play basketball with Obama on the list. And I laughed. I was like, johnny, I think that's hilarious.

That's the most impossible thing we can think of. He's like, yep, but how amazing would it be. And I'm like true wrote it down. I never thought we would accomplish it. Come the television show, we're like okay, we have to go after the biggest list items and obviously there's nothing bigger than play ball with Obama. This is 2010 MTV is like, no way sorry guys, like the chances of that actually happening is so slim. Like we're just we can't do it. And we're like, well were executive producers. So we're doing it.

So we drive to D. C. We start asking people literally on the street if they know any politicians, people in the White House, like obviously don't get very far here. And so and we started to hear about these secret basketball games that happened. And and then we heard about like the personal aide of the president was a guy named Reggie Love and he played ball at Duke. And so he was actually the gatekeeper. He would send a text to select few senior officials the day of the game. And this is how these games happened. So you want to get on this text threat and everyone's trying to kind of jockey to get on the threat. And so like okay, we gotta get ahold of Reggie love. And we had already met with like anyone that we could meet with in in Vegas Vegas. And yeah, that was our first,

we went to Vegas, we're like this feels right, but this is the wrong idea. We go to and we meet with like, just politicians and we're just like, hey, we're trying to prove that anything is possible. And people are sending emails in the White House and we start to meet with their boss and their boss and we get up to the Secretary of transportation, maybe we get a meeting because we drive a transit bus and he calls the White House while we're in the room and he's like, I want, you know, meeting with the buried life gentleman like, uh not really got my office, but uh I assure you they will cause no embarrassment to the president. And we get right away, get an email from the White House and if they're like,

sorry guys not gonna happen. And we're like, so we keep getting these like, we're getting official knows like all the time at this point, has an episode of the show come out on MTV at all? Or is this all still like, where are we in? No, no, this season one. Season one. Yeah, no, no show. Um And so we um we actually found this is kind of interesting. I don't think I've ever talked about this publicly.

We get Reggie's um we we get interviewed by an ESPN writer who had interviewed Reggie after he became the person of the president. And at the end of the interview, like, hey, do you think we could have Reggie's email and he's like, no, like, come on, he's like, all right, well, I don't know if this is still active but like, okay, don't tell me when I give you this. So we have this email, we don't even know if it's still active.

So we start sending these emails were like, Reggie, you and the president versus us tonight. 7 30 at the Y. M. C. A. B. There, show up at the Y you know, obviously no president, but we did it for a week straight and we're showing up at the Y also at five AM because we heard Reggie works out there. I see Tim Geitner, who's the Secretary of Treasury? Go in? I'm like,

oh my God, Secretary Treasury. I follow him into the bathroom into the changing rooms and he's already in a suit and down into the pool area. I'm like uh I just get a towel and take off my clothes and just have my boxers and my towel. And I go to the pool deck and I'm just sort of pretending to stretch and like, he comes up for air like mr Gardner uh sort of kneel down awkwardly as I like, he comes up. Mr we're trying to play basketball. The President, He's like, what are you what are you doing? Like? Like sure, here's my assistant's email. I look up. I'm like,

I see Secret Service in the window, just I email like, okay, I better get out of here, send an email to his assistant. No response. So just like no no no. Uh We're sending the emails were picking outside, we have like signs outside of the White House wearing basketball universe reforms from the seventies. No one's meeting with us, we leave D. C. We're done. We've tried were like okay we go to new york to try and uh tell a joke on late night was the next list item. We go to camp outside Letterman, I get a block call coming to my phone and all I hear is what's this I hear about?

You wanted to play basketball against the president and I and it's Reggie love calling me. I mean, I remember clear as day I'm on the streets of new york, I step into like a Tiffany's to take the call. I'm like yes sir. And I explained to him why and he's like, you know what, I like this, I really like this, I think I make it, I can make it happen, give me two weeks, I gotta run it by the press team, right, press team, they got to sign off on everything,

but you know, give it two weeks or so. I'll call back. I feel good about this, calls me back two weeks later, he's like gentlemen talk with the press team, it's not gonna happen now another now and we're like and he was like he literally wanted it to happen and he's like sorry boys like uh if you ever back in D. C. Let me know maybe I can give you like a personal tour of the White house. Three months later we're back in D. C. Um Reggie love gives us a tour and we're like in the west wing and we're walking around nick next to the oval office and down to the basketball courts and just pristine basketball courts like manicured hedges presidential seal on the tube and there's a presidential basketball with Obama logo we're shooting around and uh Obama was out of town because he had to some trip overseas so we were just like not thinking anything. And then I hear johnny go oh my god oh my god it's the president and we whip around and president Obama strolls on the court, he's like hey boys heard you're in town, that's the least I could do is shoot a basket with you. And we're like what the and then we were just shooting hoops with Obama for 15 minutes and the White house photographer was there and we're all of a sudden you immediately forget he's the president cause he's the coolest man on earth.

He's so disarming. And so we're just shooting shots trash talking each other and just shooting around for 1520 minutes he just rolled down from the office like in his collar shirt and We just shot around with him for 15:20 minutes talked with him and all of a sudden we were just like what just happened? Like I remember writing that down, that was impossible. It just happened and there was proof that impossible is possible because I've just seen it with my own eyes, like so from that moment on I had no choice but to believe that anyone can do anything because I was like, well how could I think that something's impossible if I prove to myself that it was? And I think everyone has the ability to prove to themselves that those things are possible. You know, after a few of those bigger dominoes fall, like if you guys think about like, you know, these big milestones that you hit after a while, you're like, whoa, I guess there's no limit,

you know, like we're the limiting factor and I I I think each and every creator, each and every person has the ability because that's what you're trying to do is you're not trying to prove other people, you're trying to prove to yourself because once you prove to yourself then it's like your decision making changes. You don't go and and and and face a challenge thinking, can I do this? You think, do I want to do this? Does this align with who I am. I know it's gonna take a lot of work, I prepared to do the work and does it align with what I want to do and so that moment changed my core belief system and uh I think it changes my core belief system. I remember watching you like speak at yes live and tell this story with visuals. Oh my God it hits so hard. Yeah I was, I was waiting for the moment where we were going to erupt but it just wasn't the right context here on the podcast. That's right,

that's right. Yeah, but it is an insane story and it really is one of those stories of persistence of manifestation of like what you mentioned of that that limitations are these like that they are part of that journey of self discovery. It is part of learning like your own limitations of your mind and this conversation you're having with your mind around what is possible and what isn't and uh it's such a great story and I think even just you know looking at the list. I know there's so many other good stories here too that you know that you can, you can just set your mind set an intention and work towards that no matter if it's plant a tree or play ball with President Obama and I think the persistence is just, it's often overlooked and we see people that are successful and if you look at like the creator that you look up to the most and you watch them do their thing and you're like whoa they're good like and what you're saying is like they're better than me, they're smarter than me. They're more talented you know But you don't you don't realize that they were where you are right now like 99% of time sure some people are given a platform and they can run with it, but they get lucky, but for most it's brick by brick and they are building that career and a lot of times you don't even know what's possible until you're doing it. And I think that's why a lot of people give up because you can almost not imagine yourself doing that. Like I couldn't imagine us playing ball with Obama, like we were just like we were just doing it because like it was so exhilarating just to like go and try and I didn't believe it until it actually was was in front of me and then I had no choice. And so most people give up, they just do,

it's just too much work. It just, it's too you you have to continually just be adamant and and persistent and a lot of times we get stuck in the planning, right? Like we over planned and then we forget that action is the plan and when I get stuck, I sometimes think I just need to act, it's not gonna work, I'm gonna learn, I don't look at this as a failure. I look at it as an experiment, like this is something I'm gonna try and if it checks two boxes if it works and people like it and if I like it because I might try it and I might not like it and I've done that before we started production company after we did the tv show, we started making television shows. It was successful. We sold some shows but I was unhappy and I realized I I wasn't you know, being true to what I really wanted. So alright,

I need to pivot and that's when I started speaking. But it was a very difficult thing because we were getting investment and it was like I built this thing with my friends and I was like walking away. But I mean you guys can speak to persistence because you were so close to stopping like I'm you guys were stopping like imagine how different your life would be if you decided to really throw in the towel maybe two weeks earlier. Right? And you know, earlier when Colin was on the floor of the whole foods, that was the time. If there was a time, I can't believe there were so many moments that it would have been way easier to walk away then. Yeah. Then when we did, you know, I can't, I actually the other night had to go back and just watch our channel like go back and watch from different years because I was like, how did we have the wherewithal? And just to just keep doing this.

And and and like I remember some of these memories and I'm like, oh we were having fun too and it was so hard and and you know, I'm curious about to go back to just zoom in on that season one of the buried life. Was it a success? Like was the show a success? And did it feel like a true representation of the experience? Because it's one thing to live it, it's another to try and capture it and present it. We almost killed ourselves over making that show. Um something we're proud of. Like, dude, we would, the episodes were getting locked while we were on the road, so like, this is our first experience of like the production cycle.

So we're on the road filming and they're sending the footage back from episode one and we're filming episode four by the time episode, you know, one is in like fine cut, landlocked cut and we're sending notes on the road. But we're like, guys, this is terrible like when we don't have the time because we're filming, we're trying to like, you know, survive on a desert island notes. Like and and and but MTV was happy with it. And the production company just wanted to wrap it because sooner they wrapped the more money they made and we started like, oh the production company is making money by getting the printing these quickly right? Like the longer we shoot the less money they make and they're making money in the margin. They're getting 300 K. An episode it's costing them 200 K.

But if it costs 1 50 but if it costs over 300 you know so that's the game and we're always pushing for more time which is more money. So we're always so these episodes getting locked, we're coming, we come back from our tour, we're exhausted. And like guys these episodes suck. Like this feels like a reality show, like the music is terrible and they're like well guys, MTV is happy with them, They actually literally happy with them and they're like well we want to re edit them, like we're not gonna react them. Like one thing they're happy with them to like council money three, like what? We're gonna send them another one. Like they already and we paid editors out of our own pocket to re edit the episode, sent them directly to the president of MTV Tony santo and Tony was like yep,

these are great, you guys have the creative autonomy. We broke dude. Yeah unbelievable. We broke open all the episodes again, we re edit them, we would call artists to get music, you know, we had coldplay in our intro, you know like for the premiere like that costs like 100 grand or something. Like we We went through, it was really cool because MTV used to have this prolific music library and at that point they had whittled it down, whittled it down but there still was this music that was free that they like had license to from like 90s hip hop like really cool so we like combed through all that and yeah, I mean we use like Justice when Justice was coming like busy p. We had like chrome E. O.

We had unfortunately now you watch it and it's you we only had that for the air in the U. S. Like so when you watch it on Itunes or amazon, I think it's on paramount plus now if you got paramount plus. Um so it's the international music but we had bangers in the we were so like it was so interesting because our show came out the same year the Jersey Shore came out. So we went to new york um for the premiere. It was really funny actually cause they were like guys come to come to new york for uh the ball drop and we're like great, we're going to like first time and we've been to new york to pitch but it was like first time for the, you know, New Year's, we go, we're in Sun Valley skiing and we go to this thrift shop called, it's called. And we all get like eighties ski gear. And we're going to new york and we go to Times Square where the Viacom building is and we're dressing are crazy gear and we get there and we're like we're like we thought they were going to meet all the executives. Well turns out we were doing the live ball drop on live television.

Like Alright guys, the plan is we're gonna walk you out, there's thousands of people. This is also like the era where times square ball drop like, so there's all, every network has a stage in the middle of Times Square and there's just people as far as you can see just surrounding all the stages. They're like, guys, you're doing the, we're gonna, we're gonna do the live countdown. Like what we're doing the like on live like yes. And we're like, okay, all of a sudden you're getting whisked through all the people. I gotta show you this clip man.

It's so funny. So we're in the Yeah. And we do the live countdown. Uh and the show hasn't come out yet. Everyone's like, who are these? But anyways, the point of the story is that Jersey Shore, all the cast of Jersey Shore was there. They they're epics for episode one is premiering that night and they're watching it on TV and they're all glued to the TV and our show came out before after. I mean I'm not quite sure, but it was I think that was that night too. And they're watching and they're like, oh my God. And they're laughing and they're like, and we're like guys,

but have you looked like you guys like haven't seen this before. Like we haven't, this is the first time we're watching it. We're like, what? Like we didn't even watch our episode because we're so sick of it because we watched it 1000 times. We would watch when our episodes as we watched twitter to see people's reaction and we started to realize like how rare this was that like we had made this like our way and we actually had our hands on it. And I think that ultimately, that's what, like if you say like what was a success, success, success for us because we, we're proud of it. You know, I mean this came out in Jersey Shore came out and it was the biggest rating show of empty history was Jersey Shore. So Jersey Shore is getting eight million viewers and an episode I'm real and we're getting a million.

Which like if you go back a couple of years, a million viewers is a, is a big success. So we're now struggling with like, oh, fun. Like we're not, we got to get more viewers. But like people were like the people that saw it, they got it And I still to this day, like all the time have people come up and be like, Hey, I saw your show and like I decided to go travel Australia. I met my husband and I live in Australia with my kids and like each other or like, you know, I was going down this path and I and I changed and now they're like professionals,

you know? And so and a lot of people that I'm speaking to that are like Fortune 500 companies saw the show when they were in high school and it just was that, I don't think that type of show had been on air before. It definitely was no show that had was named after a poem written in the 18 hundreds. It's cool to think about the impact that that show had on specifically the guys from Yes theory where it was at a time when they could see that on television and the Youtube had changed so much. The landscape of Youtube had changed so that guys like them could see that show and say to themselves, we don't want a tv show. We just want to do what they did something similar and they had access to just immediately upload it to Youtube. Like by the time they were watching the barriers had kind of been ripped off. I mean their first, you know, go at it was Project 30 which was making a list of things to do in 30 days. They had never done. It's incredibly inspired by it. And uh, even when you look again ahead as they started taking more to Youtube sneaking into movie premieres was a big part of it.

Right? So it's like, it's such an interesting um, thing to watch the way that you guys, you know, impacted people's lives impacted creators and then now those creators are impacting creators. I mean I'd say the s theory guys have impacted us a lot, you know, and like how this, uh, as you call it, the ripple effect is taking place. And and there's probably tons of people that you don't even know who are doing something based on something they saw on that show. Like how powerful media is and filmmaking is why I even entertain the concept of, of doing this. Because I was I was in college and I was taking Econ,

I was an economics major and a film minor and I watched a movie in one of our film classes, a french movie called 400 blows. And at the end of the film, I started crying and then I went to my economics class and I was learning about money and I was like, and you started crying and I was like, wait, someone made this up, You know, like economics is yes, it exists. But it's made up like someone came up with this game that we play and in film, I can't explain to anyone why I just cried. It's just a human experience that you told me a story. And I cried. And I called my mom right after and I told her I was I was a very, you know,

young angsty kid. But I was like, mom, I'm dropping my economics major. I'm going all in on film because it's real. The other thing isn't real. It's made up, this is real. And she couldn't understand what I was talking about, but yeah, she was like, you're, you probably just did some acid or something, but um I think that's something that has always attracted me to these stories, right? And being able to tell stories for a living is because you know,

there's someone on the other side who similar to to myself, I hear stories every day that changed the trajectory of how I'm, you know, and yeah, that's and it's such a powerful, important idea that's so easily forgotten because we're so wrapped up in the analytics and so, but it's just, you just don't know who you are impacting, but because every action has a reaction, a smile creates a ripple, a compliment to a stranger, it doesn't need to be this huge magnum opus, right? And whether you have 1000 followers or 100 million followers, like you can save someone's life, you literally can change someone's life and not know it just by doing what you love and that's an incredible thing because it's a win win,

you get to do what you love, you get to inspire other people to do what they love and if I think back, you know this kid that I knew from high school, if he hadn't started that clothing line, we wouldn't have done buried life yesterday wouldn't exist, you know, I mean Shawn Mendez was watched the buried life, just like we get like Jared goff, all these people that come out of the woodwork, like oh yeah, I saw the show and it sort of made me think like yeah, I can do it, I can do the thing but and now you hang out with Shawn Mendez, that's correct. I was wondering when we're gonna get to that, but the thing that's like so cool to think about is that if he hadn't,

my friend Aaron hadn't started this clothing line, none of this would have happened and the clothing line wasn't even a success, like just taking action, it was a failure, it was a failure, it doesn't exist anymore. It didn't succeed. And if if you look at that, like how everyone looks at those types of successes and failures, you would say like oh that was a waste but he created this ripple and that it's like, it just was like the first domino, small domino just to fall but it hit ours and then we kept doing it and so you know, everyone has the power to create that impact and you may not know what the reaction is, you may not know how you actually impact the people, but it doesn't mean it's not real. So you have to remember that intangible invisible ripple because that's the whole idea behind like kindness is contagious is like when you're kind,

when you're positive you and act more kindness and more positivity because of this this ripple and so you know, you think about that when you're when you're making something, you know, you know, you gotta like make money and you got to get people to see it, but that's not the only marker of success. Like how can you remember that? This is also why you're doing what you're doing because if you if you have that as part of your, why you're just gonna be more resilient, you're just gonna be able to overcome the ups and downs in the and you may not if you're just thinking I'm doing this because it's my job and that's the problem when you're a creator is that your passion becomes your job and sometimes that fucking sucks because you lose the joy because it becomes a business. And so you either need to figure out a way how to keep part of that true to the original reason why you started this or carve out time outside of that to now do more things that you love. It's really a crazy thing that happens. Um for sure. I think I'm I'm feeling it right now where the pressure of the business, it almost makes you forget the other part, you know,

like, and the game of the business is also a fun game because it has the most tangible metrics that game gives you the answer to what does validation mean? What does a reward mean? It's not intangible, it's tangible numbers on a screen are those numbers going up or not and you have certain inputs that make those numbers go up and certain inputs that make those numbers go down, and you just get to play a very simple minded game, right? And I think as we're approaching this milestone, I've had to start to take a step back and be like, what does this milestone mean? What does it mean that we're we've achieved this success? Like, why does it matter? Um you know, why? Why does?

And again, that's like deep into this self discovery, like, why did we were just talking about this the other day, like, the amount that we had to sacrifice To do this is significant time with our friends, time relationships, right? Like, we we really have spent the past 12 years just together in a room making stuff, you know, like, and that's and hard, Like, hard things to do. And it was amazing looking back at some of our old videos and,

you know, they may have 5000 views, which was like, at the time was exciting, and I look back now and there's 12 comments, which is a true indicator actually, of, like, the impact that we were kind of having. It's interesting and you jumped in there, a few people were speaking back to us, you know, it was, but we just found enjoyment in it and just kept going. Yeah, and it's I do I do spend a lot of time trying to uncover why,

because there's so many different paths in life, and when you come from a place of you know, a certain situation where you do have options. You know of what you can do in life. There's a lot of options and this option was really hard and is really hard and there's, there was an option even when you know we sold the company and were employed by another company that to be honest, we were extremely successful employees at this company that probably could have just stayed and had a very comfortable scenario. That was becoming hard because it felt uncomfortable. We had to adjust and get out of that scenario too. But that's what I'm saying is like I have tried to uncover like why was that? Why did I feel discomfort in that setting? Why did I, why did we throw ourselves back into the wild of just like uncertainty and creativity? Um, I felt like it was a capped potential. Like everything was to known when we had a salary and got a job.

I knew exactly what we were doing every day, what was going to happen. And you know, the second we stepped out of that, We always call YouTube a ticket to the extraordinary. But really what that means is that we put out a video and even though 5000 people might see it and 12 people comment one of the people could send us an email and invite us to go here or meet them and that's the feeling that I think I wanted to have again of let's put things out and see what comes back to us, right and see like you think about the last six years of this channel for us has been just meeting different people. It's just been you included. Like everyone who sits in this chair that we speak with is just someone who most likely saw one of our videos and reached out. It's exciting that we then get to spend time with them and learn about Yeah. Yeah. And I think to the reason why you felt the discomfort in that job that you're in is because you were starting to feel capped because you weren't being able to be your true expression and once you pivoted into an environment that encourage you to be that true version of yourself, then you started to have more fun, started to thrive, start to make a bigger impact. And that's the feeling that I think people need to pay attention to because it doesn't mean by the way that you need to go and do creative things and be a creator like this.

All the majority of people out there are feeling like their true self in that type of structure and that's and that's totally fine. In fact it's great like that's where you should be, like you need to be wherever you feel most alive and feel like you are being most true to yourself. The key is checking yourself to make sure that you're in the spot for the right reasons like you actually are because a lot of times we're living this life that we think we're being true to ourselves, but it's actually what we've been conditioned to be or or we, we feel like it's successful because we've been told that we need to continue to go up the ladder. By the way, I'm not just saying like go up the corporate ladder, go up the creator ladder, like get more followers, you know, make more money, you know, and that's like the metric of success, get the blue check and so is that what you truly want and if it is great but also understand that it's trade off like you know know where you're going to talk with people that are successful creators and understand that it's amazing. But it's also really hard because like you burn yourself out.

Like it's very hard to not burn yourself out as a creator because as you said, there's infinite possibility and that's also very angsty. E you know, you start to feel like this low level anxiety like, well because I can post, I should be posting, oh look they're posting, we don't have MTV or a network whose like we ordered 10 episodes of the colonists mere show right? It's just us saying we make the Colin and Samir show we are we are the so when does it stop? Are there breaks? I actually do miss times when we were more of a production company than a Youtube channel because we would work project to project and there is a start and an end and you just do the best that you can within those terms. I know you spent time as a production company after the buried life but for you That did start to feel uncomfortable, right? Like you weren't your true self and what I what I really hated about it was that we had a lot of good ideas and 99% of our ideas no one ever heard about and then we'd see them pop up as shows, you know, like not that they were stealing them,

but that happened but they probably were but that happens. We we had some experience like that in Hollywood, right? And like I think it's it's a really strange experience when you get into this world of like mainstream production and mainstream entertainment where first you recognize like all the best stuff doesn't get made or seen period and insane and then you know, and it's because what you recognize is the people who are financing or at the top their job is to mitigate risk, right? Like that's it, their job is to mitigate risk. Their job is to not get fired. So it's like it's actually worse for them to create a a flop than it is for them to create a hit. Like I mean like there's more negative consequences, then there's upside for a hit, right? Because they what they how they win is consistently sort of like hitting their shows and then hopefully one day they'll they'll get a hit, but if they do, if they produce a dud,

you know, there's really little experimentation, like I always say in this context, like there's a reason why there's so many Spider Man's like, that's a low risk format, Let's make another Spider Man, let's make another batman movie, let's work. Um so yeah, that that's a really interesting thing that happens at the at the highest level of Yeah, and then, so then you realize like, oh, like that's the beauty of creating when you have these any platform is that you do your expression, and that's what you don't have in in in mainstream. And so,

but I think too, it's just, you know, if if you say like, what's the biggest problem now for creators, what is it? I think it's uh it's that on this like, infinite world of of creation and um the Gamification of success versus purpose. So I think I think a lot of creators are entering into Youtube saying there's an equation that works, there's an algorithm that I'm playing into, and at some point, you're like, am I essentially doing a math equation with my creativity, right? And that's that's kind of what happens? And then the purpose question comes into play,

why I'm doing this isn't this a creative outlet? And there's some creators who we've met, who are very honest. And they're like, I'm not a creative person. I'm here because I found something that from a business perspective works and I'd rather do something creative than something, not creative, but I'm an entrepreneur and we've met people like that who are just honest about it. It's completely fine. You know, they're like, it just so happens. My product is media. But you know, I figured this out and it's like, I make media.

But I think the creatives who enter into the field, I think get very bogged down by looking around like our failures on Youtube, our public. Our numbers are public, Right? If we have an underperforming video, it's public. And oftentimes in the comments, it's talked about his video is not performing that well. Huh? I saw someone comment on our last video. They're like, this video is not performing well, they're going to change the thumbnail. I'm here before the thumbnail change and I was like, that's so interesting that you're aware that we're struggling to find viewership on this video,

right? Like the awareness of the public on what's going on with your creativity. Like you knew a million people watching buried life. Other people didn't know that, right? You knew eight million people watching Jersey Shore. Other people didn't know that? But every creator has that number just boom, right there. How many people are watching you? How many people are subscribed to? How many people care about. What we have to do is take a step back and look at our videos no matter how they perform and say, do we feel like this was valuable for the people we're trying to serve. Right. And I think you know,

the biggest problem is I agree like wall of purpose running into that of like why am I doing this? Is it the numbers that matter? Is it that you know, is it amalgamation of all these things that matter? But I think the question of what matters to me about this is the question that goes unanswered and creates burnout and creates confusion And creates a very short careers in our space. We're entering into this world where no one knows what it means to have a 10 or 15 year YouTube career. What does that mean? What does it mean to go for that long? Is it okay to reinvent? Is it okay for a channel to look completely different? Five years from now? Is it okay if on our channel, you know five years ago look different right now? We do this show and in three years does it look completely different. Are we doing a completely different show? Like is that okay?

When do we stop this show? Are their brakes? Are their seasons like because we, we call this the paradox of permission because we are in a permission less creative environment. It's beautiful that we get to just put out whatever we want and at the same time because no one's giving us permission to put stuff out. There's also no one giving us permission to take a break or to change or to, you know, and so that I think is a very long winded answer to what's wrong in our world right now. So I went through an experience that was was meant a lot to me because it was a moment that I talked about before where I started to feel burnt out and this was at the end of the run of our production company when we were quote unquote succeeding and we just got an investment and I realized this is not the end, this is the beginning. And I had spent three years with the guys building this and I realized ah this is not making me happy. And so I had to like talk with them and it's very hard to be like, guys, I don't think this is for me, like I'm really sorry, like I don't know what we're gonna do,

which is Canadian for sorry, can we get subtitles. So we I ended up having a conversation with my uncle and my uncle was a producer for his whole career. He produced documentaries for the BBC and cbc in Canada and I was like, Uncle Bill, like I don't know what to do, I feel like I'm letting everyone down and I also feel like I'm gonna have to start from the beginning and he's like you're not starting from the beginning, you're recycling your career, you're taking everything that you learned from being a producer and you're pivoting and rolling that into your next thing. And as soon as I heard that I was like, huh, that's actually interesting. Like yeah, I am kind of, I'm not starting from me, I'm just like continuing on my path and taking everything that I've learned from this experience and I'm gonna apply it to my next thing and I think it's natural to recycle your career.

Like we don't recycle our careers enough because as humans we're constantly changing so our pursuits should also change but we feel like we've invested so much and we feel like there's a big risk if we change and whether that's changing your entire career or that's just changing your format of or the way that you create. And as I said, like I've gone through these shifts where it's like documentary tv books speaking, like I don't know what the next thing is, but right now for me to be able to see people change in real time when I'm speaking and to talk with them after the keynotes and hear how that our impacted their life and then to feel that, you know like the only way we could feel that with the show is through twitter like, you know, youtube, you get comments, you get people sending you messages, but you're not sitting beside them as they're watching the show and or the, the episode of the video and then being able to talk with them after instance here, how they're going to shift their life and so I've recycled my career to fuel me to be the best expression, right? And I think there's like, obviously we keep coming back to this and I think as a,

as a creator, if you can continually, um have part of what you do, fill that that purpose and that why then you're gonna be better at everything else that you, that you do and give yourself permission to just try and do something other things, you know, because is it like if you're not enjoying it, it's become a full blown business that you don't like. You know, it's just like a job that you don't like, you just built yourself a job that you want to leave and the thing is like come back to the top five regrets of the dying. Like basically I'm trying to reverse engineer my life to not have the most common regrets and one of the regrets is I wish I didn't work so hard. So that's something we should pay attention to because we work pretty hard, you know, so top five regrets, wish I wouldn't work so hard,

I wish I would have had the courage to express my feelings, Wish I would have stayed in contact with friends, uh wish I would have let myself be happy and wish I would have lived for me for other people. And so if your list can touch on all those, I feel like you're you're winning because all we want is to not lay on our deathbed and think, oh fuck I I blew it like I didn't do these things that I actually wanted to do, I didn't make the call, I didn't tell that person how I felt. I didn't like I worked too much my whole life, like my biggest fear is that I'm so busy that like, life just is over. Like I'm not slowing down enough to actually be present, and that is pretty terrifying to think that like the days keep moving faster and faster and faster and they're gonna keep moving faster. So how do you slow down while you, like, you're,

you're you have the awareness like what's build the awareness around these things that are meaningful to you, write them down, take action, tell people about them, build accountability and move through the fear. Like just stop worrying about what other people think. Just just do it and know that they're gonna respect you for being who you truly are and whether that's pursuing that one thing that you love or it's sharing the things that you're struggling with because that's another huge thing. It's like we feel like we can't talk about these things because we're broken or like we were ashamed. But when you share your struggles, your opening the door for someone else to come to you. So as a creator, you're just opening this huge door for people to come back to you and share what they're going to give them permission to be a human being. Because the reality is we're all human beings, we have ups and downs and that's the human experience. Also it opens the door for other people to come give you a gift to help you out. Exactly.

Because again, like you said, it's like you give the gift and you immediately get the value back exactly you and and it's funny, you know, you think about when we face a problem in our life, like like any work problem, like what do you do? Like ask Samir or like you go to a mentor, you ask the Yes theory guys, you you ask your audience like you you ask for help with our personal struggles. We we go at it alone most of the time because we're too afraid to but then that just means we have a lower chance of succeeding because we're just it's just us trying to figure out versus collaborating getting help. You know? So when you talk about the things you're struggling with, you give someone else the opportunity to help you also, it's just scarier in your head. Like when you're thinking about these things,

they feel much bigger when you talk about them, you actually break them down and you sort of like ground them in reality and you realize, oh yeah, like that actually is a little bit unrealistic like this, I'm blowing this a little bit out of proportion here are like the facts of how I feel. And so you process them when you talk about them, which is important for me. What I do is I just go to the bucket list journal dot com. That's actually incorrect. But it's right. Your list dot com write your list dot com. Great. U R L. And I'm a U R. L. Guy.

I when I first met you, I do own a lot of domains to the point where go daddy sometimes calls me just to thank me because anytime I have an idea, I buy domain. It's it's yeah, it's one of my, as it as it paid off. No, not yet. They're sitting on a gold mine. Yeah, I know that one day this will be, I'll be the domain king of the internet for like juicy shorts dot com. I do have a party shirts, party shirts dot com. So if anyone's interested, that's party shirts dot com.

You can hit me up. But you do have this journey that, you know, talking about like recycling or, you know, applying the information that, you know, and putting it into a new project. Like we've been talking a lot about writing. Um, I think staring at a blank piece of paper sometimes can be overwhelming. I find that we all enjoy instruction and mentorship or guidance when it comes to tasks that feel overwhelming. Like going to the gym. It's much easier with the trainer or going to a group fitness class than going by yourself. Um, and this journal,

the thing that I really love about it um is the guidance that it gives you like even the tanja bility as you get into the journal, you tell some stories, you show your list, but you give these like 10 categories of life and prompt people to to write down some of these um items in these categories of life to develop their own list. Travel and adventure is one the biggest, sometimes the easiest to think about. That's why it's first I tried to go from like the easiest to the hardest physical health right material. So meaning like what do you want to buy like for me? I want a sauna. There you go. It's a goal of mine. I've written it down multiple times. I want to buy a sauna and that's okay. That's what it's like you want to, I want to watch great. But the cold plunge.

There you go. Uh if anyone's out there dot com dot com. But the thing too, I think with materials to make sure that you're buying it for you. Like you're not buying because you want to just tell your friends you got a sauna. No, no, I want to sit in the sauna. That's why this room, you guys can't feel it listening to this. This room is incredibly hot right now. Our A C. Is broken. Yeah. This Yeah, that's soaked.

We also deprived the guests of water as well while you're on the show until they run out of Yeah. Um creative. So creativity. You know, do you want to take a painting class, write a book, professional, um financial, intellectual, mental health relationships and, and and giving and I think, you know, putting this framework around it allows you to think about your list. Whereas again, a bucket list can feel really overwhelming. It feels like it has to be the craziest things.

The examples you give and kind of the guidance you give in this in this journal is such an interesting way for you to scale what you've learned. And even going back to that, that first list you wrote like how did that change your life? You know, how can you now impact others. So I would urge, um, you know, creators, especially in this world where we are, we are an untapped territory. We get to create and distribute by ourselves. We get to just give ourselves to the internet in a way that never was possible so that we are an untapped territory, but it all comes back to your journey of self discovery, your personal purpose, why um and being okay with reinventing and and um the most importantly,

um which is something I've learned from talking to you. And just in my own experiences, Write down why write down why you're doing this stuff? What do you want to do? What's your list? Yeah. And I think that's the that's that's why. So you you write your list into 10 categories, then you have your full list. That's a true reflection of all the things that you want. And then once you want to start one at the back of the journalism before and after page and all that before and after page, you write down what it is and then the first thing you do is why is this important to me? Yeah. And then it's all different layers of accountability. Who's my accountability buddy? What's my deadline?

What's my reward? It's important to have a reward so that you have a payoff. It's like you if you give yourself your favorite smoothie after you work out like you go to work out just to have the smoothie because you want that reward. And then the next piece is like how can you make it as easy as possible? Like what are the simplest things that you can do in the next 48 hours to create your own inspiration through action. Because if you look at the top three barriers that stop us from achieving these personal passions. This comes out of research out of Cornell. It's there's no deadlines, which is why we push them, we think we have all this time. So we got to create accountability. Second problem, there's this feeling that we are waiting to feel inspired but that inspiration just doesn't hit out of the blue or rarely. So you actually have to create your own inspiration through actions. So by taking these small steps, you build your own inspiration,

you're the architect of the inspiration by taking action and that's what I said before is like we plan too much and forget that action is the plan. Just get out there, push yourself, forget what other people think, take action, you'll learn as you go and good things will happen when you push yourself into that place of being vulnerable because at least people will respect you for just trying, you know and then the last piece is the fear, the fear of what other people think or fear of failure and this is the biggest barrier. And so it's looking at okay, the fear of what other people think is something we're all gonna feel the truth is people are just not thinking about you as much as you think. They are just like living their lives or think about what other people think about them. They're also more supportive. So like the only way that we cross things off our list is through the help of other people. Like people helped us the whole way. So people are more giving than than you might think and then this understanding that this this fear is just normal, like it's not,

it's you're gonna wait till you die if you're waiting to feel ready and you've overcome this fear like you overcome it by doing by understanding that this is actually a normal feeling, this discomfort is growth. And so I I like to actually like right down like what are the real risks? Not the fears because the fears are just like they're gonna be there. But what is at risk? Is it your livelihood? Is that your your home, is it the well being of your family? Is it your health? Like those are real risks and if those are, you know at risk, then you should probably, maybe you shouldn't do them right. But like at least I first look at what is actually at stake what's honestly at stake. Honestly not ego. Yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah. Um Ben, this was fantastic. I want to close with a quote that I love. I'm just picking a random one actually read it before, but interspersed in your bucket list journal or quotes. Um and I just really love this one. I think it represents the conversation and um you know, the spirit of this, this, this podcast, forget all the reasons why it won't work and believe the one reason why it will. I think that's that's incredibly important. This belief if you have something that you're thinking about,

that you want to happen, you know like the, well now I'm looking at the back of the book and it says impossible as possible. I should have read that one. So the first one was just the one on the way. Yeah, first of all, wow, good call back on. Um so yeah then where can they get this book again? Write your list dot com. Yeah or just search bucket list journal on amazon and it'll come up and where can you watch the buried life paramount plus paramount plus. You don't have a deal there so you're not know they own MTV. So you know, it's on paramount plus but you can get it on amazon, you just have to buck up and pay a dollar 99 per episode.

Yeah, we might get a quarter of a cent 2090 you know, legacy media. Yeah, I love it. Dude, thanks so much for telling your stories, appreciate you coming on. So fun to be here.