Why Fear & Horror Feels Kinda Good - MrBallen (4K)

Mr Bolan welcome to the show thank you for having me how does a Navy SEAL end up telling scary stories on the internet I still don't even know uh yeah I I kind of fell backwards into it actually um the the short version is I was experimenting with social media content after I was out of the military just because it was interesting to me I saw there were all these new brands and people kind of blowing up on social media and I was kind of struggling to find my way as a civilian again and so I was like oh just I'll try social media and I I uh I tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work very cringey you know like attempts at comedy and and all these different things um and then I I remember I had these I had these two documents on my computer of of ideas for for Tik toks at the time is what I was doing this is like uh early 2020 and I had this one document that I had exhausted all these different you know ideas for Tik toks ranging from sketch comedy to all these goofy things that didn't work and I had this document and it just said deat laav pass on it and so me personally John Allen the person I like to watch and consume strange dark and mysterious content you know spooky you know non-fiction content and the deat LA of pass is this story about these hikers who go missing in the 1950s and it's this famous unsolved case basically these nine hikers vanish and they're found again and they're they're in different stages of Decay and their bodies are radioactive and their clothes are half on and half off and it's and there's these totally unsettling pictures and I I was like well I've tried all these different things on this side this this document has been exhausted and didn't didn't work I guess I'll take a shot in the dark on this totally random like departure from any other type of content I had ever tried and it was a total like I just don't care how it goes I I'm clearly not able to hit the mark on social media I'm just going to do the one thing that I personally enjoy and I was at this water park in Pennsylvania This indoor water park uh called Great Wolf Lodge in Pennsylvania with my wife my three kids and I I shoot this 60-second deat La pass Tik Tok where there it was crappily made you know I'm kind of like winging it telling the story 60 seconds long and I post it because I'm going to the indoor water park I didn't want to have my phone so I just left it in the room and went to the water park and then when I came back a couple hours later my phone was basically not working because it was getting so many notifications there was like 5 million views on this video after after only a few hours and for for reference i' I had never gone even close to viral before in any way it was like you know 10,000 views over a year was a really big deal and now you know it's the internet has tuned in and admittedly I didn't think I I wasn't like oh here's a career now but I was like that was pretty fun that was pretty cool and I like making those those stories and I I just went on a tear making content having no idea where it would go and it turned into Mr Ballin where did the name come from I used to have a username that was John B Allen 416 but but no punctuation and so if you glanced at it it looks like joh B not you wouldn't think oh that's John Allen and there was a time when I was doing my cringy attempts at social media content that was not working uh but I was talking about being a seal to some degree being a Navy SEAL and the thing about Special Operations is the people that want to become special operators it's very common for them to reach out to either active duty or retired special operators just to get the lay of the land you know tell me what what it was like to what you do to train you know what was training like and so I had all these kids messaging me on Instagram on my John B Allen 416 username but they were like so respectful because they're talking to what they want to do and it I'd get these DMS that would say Dear Mr Ballin I have a question about being an ABC and I I I stopped correcting them and just went with it like yep I'm Mr PA and and then actually uh early in 2020 right before I posted that dla past story on Tik Tok I I had been using John B Allen on Tik Tok and it got shadowbanned I think my I would post something and even though my content was failing it was like zero views and I'm like there could be a problem here so I I made a new account and I thought what better than than Mr ballet why do you think so many people have a morbid obsession with real life gruesome stories I don't know but it's definitely pretty Universal um at least from my from my end you know I see comments constantly of people saying saying you know I don't know why this is such a comforting thing for me to watch these gruesome stories um but that's just the way people are and I I think that the way we've we've thought about it is there's there's real enjoyment out of being scared I mean just as a as a person now you don't want to be scared and also be in like a dangerous situation that's not fun that's that's fear because you might get hurt or something but fear when you're in a controlled environment like a really immersive story where your brain actually begins to inhal at that story and you begin to feel the real feelings that the people in the story might that's thrilling and you have the same type of physiological reaction that you would in real life but you have the safety and I come off I believe like a like a really comforting host because I'm the former Navy SEAL so I got you know I can protect you but I'm also a father you know and I I you know I'm I I don't try to we were talking before the show about Hamming up you know the my delivery I don't go out of my way to make it like really spooky it's just like your buddy telling you a story I'm I talk like this I'm covering stories that are dark but I sound conversational and so I think it's like a relatability and you know security to a degree even though I think it's funny that with fear yeah with fear and I think that so your question was more about the the genre I turned it into why do they like me no I I I I I think both of those things I mean you are how many eight million Subs something on YouTube now big deal with Amazon Buck coming out soon merch line animation Studios all of the things right it's a big deal uh and I think the fastest growing category of podcasts maybe over the last few years has all been true crime in one form or another yeah crime junkie I mean think about serial what was like it was the first big podcast that broke through um and you know you even look at things like I think it was Project Manhunt which is about the unibomber I loved that it was really well researched it was more like a documentary style thing but it's immersive like people want to learn about it's all of the good things about a fiction story with the additional high stakes of it actually having happened very true very true it's my belief that uh military stories are for dudes what true crime is for chicks yeah that's probably true um but there seems to be a particular degree of uh love and Obsession um for women for this kind of sort of True Crime genre I wonder whether I spoke to an evolutionary psychology friend about this um they think maybe at least part of it is women kind of learning what to look out for it's almost like a a protectionist strategy cautionary T yeah yeah precisely if I know what might happen then it's maybe less likely that it's going to happen and I'm I'm I'm kept a little bit protected well I guess we're in the right place for it which is a very spooky house yeah have you got a story that suits the surroundings I do I do I actually there's a story um that I think is one of the best ones I've ever told so I'm s s some pretty high stakes here but uh for reference I I told this one live last year in Texas to a soldout crowd at the Paramount Theater and this story had a a big reaction to it because the twist at the end is something else and it's house themed so uh in 2004 there was this guy named Mitch who was going to a university in Louisiana and he's a senior and there's this girl in his class named Kayla who's also a senior and he just loves this girl he he wants to date her more than anything and you know he's tried several times to to you know woo her but she's not that interested you know she's kind of playing hard to get but she he could tell there was something there maybe maybe she likes him and uh eventually she does kind of acques and say okay you know like let's go on a date you know and they hit it off you know Mitch and Kayla hit it off you know they're an item and they end up graduating and after graduation they get married and by 2006 Mitch and Kayla have bought their actual you know white picket fence Dream Home in Louisiana and you know life was great you know they they loved their careers they both of them were very intentional about spending time together on the weekends and really making you know their time together as a couple very important and then by 2007 so they've lived in this new home for a year now they have they welcome their first child uh their daughter and then two years after that which puts us in 2009 they have their son and then then they're done at that point they got their girl they got their boy and it's like life couldn't be better you know Mitch loves his job his wife loves her job they they had this this thing where every morning the the dad would uh he would sneak into the kids' bedroom and he'd like spook them to wake them up you know it was a playful thing and they always had you know family game nights on the weekend and and and the Mitch and Kayla made a point to still have those romantic dates you know anytime they could they always got babysitter to to spend time together so this is like a it's the American dream in many ways you have this this this young family living high school sweetheart white picky fence idea two and a half kids dog that's it so it's 2009 and uh Mitch is at this this little dream home and he's watching football he's sitting on the couch watching football and you know it's just like any other day and as he's watching the game there's this lamp that's in the back right corner of the room this this nisre you know you know Target lamp you know it's a red lamp and Mitch he's he's seen this lamp a million times it's in his house and he's watching football but at some point he he notices something odd about this lamp and he looks over at it and for some reason the lamp itself not the light bulb but the actual physical lamp like the base was blurry the rest of the room is in Focus there's plenty of light in the room but the lamp is blurry and so Mitch he's he's you know he's looking at the lamp he he's rubbing his eyes to see if there's something in his eyes but still the lamp is is blurry he goes back to the TV not blurry you know Mitch has good eyesight this doesn't make any sense and so Mitch finally you know he's he's worried about this you know is there something wrong with me and he stands up and he walks over to the lamp and as soon as he gets up to it it's still blurry and he touches it so blurry and he's like okay I don't know what this is about but he does the typical you know kind of dude reaction like whatever the male denial of medical problems yeah it's like I'm probably having a stroke but you know whatever uh he he turns around and he goes back to the couch and just does his best to ignore the still blurry lamp and so he's watching the game he's watching the game he's glancing periodically but he's mostly focused on the game and then at some point towards the end of the football game the lamp changes it remains blurry but you know out of the corner of his eye he sees it moving around and he looks and the lamp with having not been interact no one's touched the lamp at this point but the lamp has now turned upside down which is you know it's not possible it's flipped upside down and now it's blurry and so now now Mitch is he's looking at this lamp thinking okay huge problems here there's something wrong I I I might very well be having some sort of medical emergency but for some reason that Mitch just could not place he couldn't bring himself to call the doctor I mean this is a this is a situation where you call the doctor there's something wrong and he knew it but he didn't do it instead he just could not stop looking at this lamp he's he's not watching the TV he's just staring at this upside down blurry lamp and at some point that day or that evening uh his wife Kayla and his two kids they come home and the the second she comes in you know Mitch kind of breaks out of his his his fixation and he thinks I should tell Kayla about this lamp I'm having a medical emergency I should tell her but again he doesn't and in fact he quickly thinks to himself I can't tell her I'm I'm going to pretend this didn't happen he kind of forgets about the lamp and he goes and he sees his wife and his kids and it's a normal night she she is none the wiser that he spent the day staring at a lamp that's blurry and upside down and you know when Kayla came in the lamp was not blurry and upside down she's not experiencing this so that night regular night you know they put the kids to bed and you know Kayla and Mitch they go to bed too but then after Kayla had fallen asleep Mitch is wide awake you know you can't sleep and there's something telling him to go down and look at that lamp and so Mitch gets up and he sneaks downstairs and he goes to the couch and you know the light is not even on at this point but even in the darkness he can tell it's still blurry it's still upside down and he sits on the couch and he just stares at the lamp and all night Mitch sits on this couch and stares at this lamp in absolute silence and then in the morning Kayla gets up she comes down it's it's you know during the week so it's a work day she comes down and she she finds Mitch on the couch and she's like what are you doing and he kind of breaks out of it and he's like oh you know I wasn't feeling well last night you know he's lying to her I wasn't feeling well so I came down here and in fact he tells her you know what I I feel so sick I I can't go to work today and Kayla's like you've never taken a day off from work ever and you don't you don't seem sick to me like what's happening and he's like no I just just not feeling up for it and so Kayla's like okay but she's she's thinking there's there's a there's a red flag here you know but she doesn't know what it is and so ultimately Kayla and the kids they leave for the day and Mitch stays home and he just stares at this lamp all day he is staring at this lamp and by the evening when Kayla comes home this is like 8 10 hours later when she walks in the house all the lights are still off ex except for the red lamp and she sees her husband who now is not breaking out of his trance he's sitting on the couch and he is absolutely focused on this l and when she walks in she's like what's going on with you no reaction Mitch is fully locked in on this lamp he's completely unresponsive and so Kayla is like putting it together that oh my God something's obviously wrong and so she she grabs the phone and she calls the doctor to be like what do I do about this and she's at the same time kind of yelling for Mitch on the couch there's no reaction she's shwing her kids away you know go upstairs you know we'll deal with this and so as this is happening Mitch who can kind of tell you know his wife is on the phone with the doctor eventually he can't even hear her anymore she disappears completely and he's left with just this lamp and the lamp begins to change for a second time now in addition to being upside down and blurry the lamp begins to grow inside the room and so as it's growing it's taking up more and more of this field of vision until this lamp is so big he now is basically consumed by the lamp and it's at this point that he begins to feel this blinding pain in his head and he doesn't know where it's coming from and then he hears a ringing in his ears and then all he hears is just people screaming everywhere and it's total darkness the lamp is gone and then he opens his eyes and he looks around and he's surrounded by a sea of people that are all looking at him and he's on the ground it's broad daylight he's not at his house anymore and he's looking around at this crowd of what looks like college kids and he's looking for his wife and his kids he can't see them and he stands up and he's he doesn't know what's going on and as he's yelling for his wife and kids Kaya was yelling for his wife and kids a police officer comes charging through the circle and he grabs Mitch and without saying anything he lifts him up a grown man and just runs with him to his police car and the whole time Mitch is like I don't know what's going on here his head's still like you know he's still got pain in his head he has no idea where he is physically he has no idea where he is and he gets thrown in the back of this police car obviously there's some emergency happening right now and and the cop without saying anything he hops in the driver's seat and they they start speeding down the road and as they're driving Mitch just starts saying Where's My Wife and Kids what's going on and the police officer was like sir you just hit your head I'm bringing you to the hospital and so ultimately the police officer brings Mitch to the hospital and they end up you know he gets treated by the doctors and nurses but he discovers what's actually happened Mitch was a senior in college and he got tackled by a football player and he hit his head on the ground and he was unconscious for a fraction of a second like 10 seconds or something and in those 10 seconds his brain constructed an entire life with a wife with kids with the white picket fence the house none of it existed he never had a wife he never had his kids they they're not real and so he realized what had happened when he was at the hospital and he had to grieve the loss of people who never existed and it wrecked his life he did this huge Reddit post this ask me anything where he tried to tell people what it's like to have basically lost your entire family who don't exist and he said to this day he still has dreams where his little son will come running around the corner and he's perpetually 5 years old he you know and then that was his life and so it it wrecked his life and it never existed it was just a figment of his imagination dude pretty crazy right wow yeah have you reached out to this guy given that you've had some you've given this story so much attention yeah and what's he like no he doesn't want to talk about it he did his AMA and that's it the dude wants to disappear he goes to therapy for this I mean he basically gave permission but doesn't want to be a part of it I mean he's trying to cope and he'll be about our age now or something maybe mhm yeah I mean for him I mean h how do you go about dealing with something like that because the to other people it's like well it never really happened you know come on but for him it was like years that in his brain was implanted like an entire history an entire family I mean that's real loss in other news this episode is brought to you by momentous if you've been struggling to fall asleep on a night time their sleep packs are absolutely fantastic it's got an Evidence back blend of magnesium al38 appenine and Eline that will help you fall asleep more quickly stay asleep throughout the night and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning I use them every single night and they are super convenient to take on the road also they are NSF certified which means even Olympic athletes can use them and Dr Andrew hubman is the scientific adviser so if you've ever wondered what supplements Andrew hubman takes or what he would create if he could this is the answer also there is a 30-day money back guarantee so you can buy them try them and see if it impacts your sleep for 30 days and if you do not like it they will give you your money back plus they ship internationally right now you can get a 20% discount off everything sitewide by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to liv.com wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's Liv m m n us.com wisdom and modern wisdom for 20% off do you know who Paul Evans is no so so uh Paul Evans is one of the directors of a big um Leisure company out in Dubai he came on the podcast about four years ago he wrote a book called when I woke up so Paul was a party boy professional party boy after my own heart and he was involved in the Arab Spring twice I think he was in Egypt while there were all of the revolts that were going on and he was partying and he was kind of sort of fast and loose with his risks and stuff and he was ended up in Dubai with pancreatitis and it was so bad this is from drinking and partying and stuff like that his pancreatitis was so bad that he was put into an induced coma oh wow while he was in the induced coma he lived an entire life in Singapore boy he could tell you the brand of toothpaste that he used every morning the colors of the ties that he needed to wear he could tell you the root that he drove to work and while he was at work he was part of a team that was building out a new virtual reality game so he would enter a virtual reality game in this thing and he could tell you everything every single detail it's in his book and tell you all of the details about how his life unfolded in Singapore the the car that he drove where he went for dinner on an evening time and this is while he's in this induced coma so his family goes out to see him in the real world and they're looking at him in the hospital bed now in his life in Singapore his father dies so he buries his father in his dream world and in the real world his father is looking at his son laid in his hospital bed and there was one day where his dad was looking at him and he could see that his son was crying his son was weeping whilst in a coma they think that that was his actual father watching real Paul cry because the dream version of him was burying his father in the dream world it's like some Matrix stuff going on and then he continues to work he's got his life he goes through there's some complications with the virtual reality world that he's getting into and they're really trying to push the limits of of what they can do with this technology and one day he gets trapped inside the simulation so this is like Inception this is like he's two levels deep now Inception yes so he's two he's two levels deep and he's trapped inside and all of the people outside of the in the dream outside of the virtual reality world trying to get him out and he says it was like being inside of a membrane and he could feel his hands he was sort of running his hands across this membrane trying to find a way to get out and he said this went on for days he was locked inside of this thing for days then eventually he managed to find a tiny little seam a crease and he could sort of pull his hands through and when he did that he woke up from his coma in the real world but the weird thing and I spoke to him about this I was like you do know that you're going to have to bury your dad twice yeah wow you know you lost so this is the opposite story of what you've just told this is a guy who lost a person who they really had yeah in a dream and then came back to find them still alive wow but you're now going to have to go through this again at some point his father's older than him and he's going to have to go through that and that this near-death experience is it a way that the the brain I asked him a lot about the science behind this which I get it's kind of like a near-death it's like an nde kind of thing right MH um it seems like at least for the induced coma and maybe for head trauma stuff as well it's the brain trying to cope and protect what's happening um but yeah that story of your man it's does not surprise me it it's seems completely unreal and yet I've got uh like firsthand evidence of a guy that went through the same thing it's wild I really want to dig into your style and art yeah of Storytelling mhm so how would you describe your style like where did it come from how did it originate what did you do to develop this particular and and how would you categorize it um so I think that there's some necessary context I I grew up around professional writers and storytellers my my father is a piter priz winning journalist he worked at the Boston Globe he ran the spotlight team which there was a movie made called Spotlight with Michael Keaton um that's that's like the type of investigative journalism he was doing so you know my dad is this very high-speed journalist my my mother is also professional writer radio host you know when she was younger um incredible writer my older sister is a two-time Pulitzer winner also a journalist the Boston Globe uh and my younger sister is a u a scientist she's a about to defend her dissertation get her PhD to be a b scientist so I say all that because I was not like a big time academic I was like you know fairely scraping by and honestly did horrible as a student and uh but but growing up I was I was surrounded by people that were incredibly good writers and storytellers and almost you know unintentionally I learned how to speak you know I learned how to tell stories you know just through osmosis and some genetic raw material as well perh it's almost like you I yeah yeah basically and um so I think that that is a big part of why I think I'm able to tell a story well is just being around really good storytellers um but I think in terms of my specific style which I would categorize as you know not deception but telling a story where I'm holding off details not to to make the story not accurate but rather uh using perspectives you know inhabiting certain perspectives in a story that allow you to effectively tell an angle of the story where you are knowingly omitting a portion of the story that's going to come in later that will actually answer questions the audience is going to have it's like I'm I'm setting you up for an incomplete story that I absolutely fill in every single Gap but in a way that's not like and then I'm going to explain it to you it just it happens where we've we've left all these holes and it gets filled in at the end for a big powerful reveal you use the story that we just went through sure explain to me how you've constructed that tell me what's going on so it's really important to understand if you're going to tell a really good story that it has less to do with the story and much more to do with the delivery of the person telling it now that's not entirely true because there are some stories that are so outrageous they carry the day but most of the time if you're going to tell a story it's your delivery that's going to have the biggest impact on the audience and so for this you know I'm actually telling that that lamp story with only you in mind I'm not thinking about anybody else here I'm really just gauging your reaction to the story and so as a Storyteller I'm constantly trying to size up how my audience is reacting to what I'm saying um but in terms of that specific story I know that I'm building to a place where I'm going to tell you that everything that happened in the story didn't happen that's going to that's going to be the reveal but the best way to set that up is to not flag that there is anything unusual about the beginning of the story because it wrecks the reveal if there's any language whatsoever in the first 90% of that story that tips the audience that this might not really be happening it wrecks the story what would be an example of that he was in he was in school and hit and fell on the floor no it actually it's it's devices that a lot of storytellers use that I think hurts their stories for example I could say uh go back going back to the lamp story you know he's first noticed the lamp right and so he's he sees a blurry lamp and so Mitch he see sees the lamp it's blurry can't make sense of it but what he didn't know is this lamp was going to ruin his life life right yeah yeah now that's that's an overt example but there are little things that people think are are are good transitions between the story you know like leading the audience to get ready something Big's going to happen but if you Telegraph too much early in the story that you know get ready something Big's coming the audience will just start guessing what it's going to be and a lot of times it's fairly obvious that there's some element of the story that you know is going to be revealed to be different in the end so I would also say there's just Nuance to it when I'm for example I I added something into that story it's part of the story but I usually don't add it in which is when uh Kayla came back in the house when Mitch is now unresponsive and he's staring at the lamp and he's not even reacting to her whereas the day before he was I made a point of saying that Kayla ushered her kids out of the room it's a small detail but it gives it a a level of reality that if you're the parent you've come in and the parent unresponsive that little detail reminds you that this is a real human having a real interaction if I don't include it it likely has no impact it doesn't matter that I you know whether Kayla did or did not sh her kids away because of this crisis it doesn't really matter but adding that in and delivering it not as like a I said it as if it absolutely happened like it's factual she shed the kids away and then she dealt with her husband that's telling you here it is this is happening like engage with the story this is really happening but I'm doing it I want that I want it to feel as real as possible in the beginning so that the reveal actually has impact and that's why I added little kind of almost the they had game family game nights right that they really did but that's an important detail to the beginning of the story because I'm going to tell you it's all fake so it's like layering in things that create authenticity in the beginning of that story is really important because the way that the way that story often gets told is people will start with here's a story about a guy who hit his head and he imagined his whole life and then it was taken away from him way yeah he was in his house and he saw this lamp and it was blurry but it turns out that was the beginning of the otic break he was having but it's like the audience there's no there's that's the thing is when I'm when I'm telling a story it's all about stick around because you're going to learn something that you you were not expecting there's going to be a plot twist there's going to be a reveal I'm instead of telling you that the way I tell a story always includes a payoff always there you I I guarantee you you can you can look at every single story I've ever put on the internet ever and there's a payoff at the end that is absolutely intentional and so your audience begins to believe begins to know that's what they get yeah there's loads of details and I'm not really sure where this is going but if I stick around something big is going to happen and I did that without even telling you it it's just the way I tell the story so are you adding stakes in the beginning as well it seemed like that as you're saying um they were in love and they do the the family thing and and it's the white picket fence and it's the American dream and they they make sure that they look after each other with date night and is the things that they do that's adding a degree of of stakes and I guess you're invested like you you like these people like you want to know what's going to happen to them absolutely I mean that that the deal is is for this particular story I need the first part of the story to just feel like it happened which seems like a pretty easy charge but when Mitch describes what happens he does not spend a lot of time talking about whether or not you know Kayla shooted the kids away when she walked in the house or whether they had game night those are little details that definitely happened but for him the story is the trauma itself the fact that this didn't really happen that's what he wants to talk or that's the the questions that he's answering are going to be about the trauma side and so what I do is I recognize that in this case if I'm going to tell it I have to find all those small details to reassure the audience that oh this is real it's definitely happened but I don't need to tell you that I'm adding those little bits of just normal human life and thoughts that remind you without you even realizing it oh this happened that's not part of the story of course this happened I'm going to see what happens next you don't realize that like none of this happened but I have to make it authentic playing with the chronological order of events as well I imagine is something that you have to do and also this uh purposeful omission of certain details yeah actually a good example of that purposeful Omission would be take a a crime a murder let's say there's a pretty good chance that the person who commits the murder is going to do something to get people to not think it's them they're going to lie they're going to they're going to misrepresent what happened if if you know if people are ask asking questions they're not going to be like oh I did it some people do but a lot of people don't they're going to try to protect themselves with lies we'll tell a story where we will take the perspective of let's say the killer but I haven't told you it's the killer I'm I'm just introducing this person into the story and I'm using their perspective and if their perspective includes absolute lies but they're selling it as truth and you don't know that the're killer and you don't know they're lying I can I can very honestly tell you something that this person said that was a lie but I can tell it to you as truth because I'm you you know I'm inhabiting that person's perspective so yes it's a lie but in the the framework of that story if I'm saying soand so said this thing and here's how they said it and to this person and here you know here's the outcome of that that what they said it's not a lie it winds up being a lie but if I'm telling it from their perspective it allows me to mislead you but using real things that happened that's a very powerful tool for the podcast which is mostly True Crime where looking to find perspectives that allow us to basically lie but using someone's real lie that was part of the story that makes sense yeah what do you see when you look at other people telling stories this can be as part of presentations this can be true crime it can be whatever you want what are the biggest mistakes what do people get wrong when it comes to telling a good story honestly it's it's pretty straightforward and it is giving away too much at the beginning if if if you think about it you know in the in the True Crime world let's say or in this kind of strange dark and Mysterious World there's loads of mysterious stories where you know there's there's some element of of mystery surrounding it but in in True Crime you know the uh what was the question again I just space on that how do other people get it wrong so even if a story is not inherently a mystery like any random story you tell your friend people people are are listening to a story and they're invested in a story if there's some kind of payoff meaning a mystery is solved or they want something to come out of the story they want some some sort of they want yeah they want a mystery to be solved if you will and if you open a story with the conclusion even if it's just some nonsense story like the person who's listening might not be that invested in it anymore you know so I think that opening with your conclusion in the journalistic in in in journalism that's what you actually do if you read a newspaper yeah headline here's what happened and now it's it down but from an engaging storytelling perspective doing the opposite is absolutely the way where you don't give away the ending until the ending yeah I read uh this is for the people who maybe intend on reading the silent patient by Andrew michaeles uh jump forward by about one minute um I read this book it's kind of going everywhere at the moment psychological Thriller it is a woman who appears to have killed her partner and a psychotherapist that's working with her she's completely silent she won't speak she's not unresponsive and he is trying to work out and and unfold what happened with her and it's the whole story is just this tension his life's kind of falling apart lots of unnecessary detail all of this stuff and it's like it's a full book and it's the penultimate chapter chapter before and it turns out the woman that she was so scared of all along that she's writing about in her diary turns out to be the therapist that's them working with her afterward he's got this strange obsession with her and his wife was cheating on him with her husband so her life's all been intertwined over and over again and he's kind of in this weird Fugue state but the reveal comes through a diary I've got the I've got dude Goosebumps it's so good there's this one line where you realize he's put this balac clav on and he's walking in behind her and you go th this is the guy that she's been writing about yeah so it's so satisfying that payoff and you know to break the fourth wall around anyone that's watched a Mr Beast video Mr Beast does these uh videos where it'll be like um I'm going to stay in a $1 Hotel all the way up to a $100,000 hotel or whatever it might be the reason that you do that is that the biggest payoff is at the end and one of the things that first off from a like dope and energic perspective you like drag it out that's why we'll we will release at least two clips from this episode before the actual episode is available guess what like it's a [ __ ] tease sorry sue me um and Mr Beast does the same thing so I want to see yeah like the $1 thing is kind of fun but I really want to see the $100,000 room like that's really what we're here for but you protract that out and I guess you could probably lay a good amount of the success and the growth of your channel to the fact that built into what you do no one can skip ahead yeah in your content to be like I just want to find out what happens at the end because the whole point of finding out what happens at the end is to get the payoff from what's happened before the end yeah it won't be satisfying if you go to the end built in to the content so I guess yeah that's such an interesting uh like neurological psychological algorithmic uh vend diagram right in the middle of all of those things so watch time nice and high engagement nice and high uh what happens when you tell that lamp story to a room of 1500 people a lot of gasping because when I when I told that one live I think I did I did such a good job like I had a really dramatic pause before I said what happened and I I remember looking out and it was probably the first time in the show where I really took stock of the people there cuz before I'm this my first ever live show and I'm like blacked out I'm so nervous but I looked out and not a soul was on their phone they were just like waiting for this big reveal that they they sat here and they're waiting for the payoff and then when I said you know it didn't happen it was all fictional it was like and it was like wow I did it like that was cool that's something thing see uh watching a comedy special on your own in your house yeah um you if it's really funny or if you're prone to laughter you laugh but if you're on your own usually I find it kind of hard it needs to be an insane comedy special to do that and if it's you and a couple of your boys like if one of them starts then you'll maybe have a little giggle yourself and then if you're at a live comedy show it's more and then if you're in a big theater it's probably even more than that but and you also get I guess at um at live music gigs like the DJ drops some insane song and the crowd gives her oh like you know the hands in the air the lasers come on all that stuff one of the things that I've I don't think I've ever seen live is like psychological satisfaction do you know what I mean like that like re realization yeah live um maybe in the cinema you know when I'm reading the silent patient it's not like I've just 1,499 other people all reading it in tandem with me and all arriving at the same line with the same reveal at the end along with me um it's a really do you know what Collective eff Essence is no so Collective eff Essence is um a how a group of people come together in the same sort of energy it's why the music causes everyone to put their hands in the air at the same time it's this sort of sense that the group is part of the individual Collective eff of essence interes and um it kind of amplifies many of the emotions and realize it's why we laugh more when we're in a group together it's why you know you put your hands in the air more what it precisely it's Vibe it's VI it's a group Vibe um but yeah the gas like a room full of people with this massive int like the pressure gets lowered because they just yeah that must be satisfying to see there's that actually if you don't mind I'll tell another quick story let's do it I got another one that that this one so somebody bootleg like filmed a portion of this live show I did last year which is fine I'm not going to do anything about it um because anyway so there's a portion they film where I got to see on this video the actual reaction to this one particular reveal um and and it was like so much it was way more than the lamp frankly this one because it's so weird anyways I haven't prepped this one but I know it really well so I can get it close hit it all right so it was in 2011 and there's this woman named Ellie Lobel she's 42 years old and she decided I think it was December 11th 2011 she decided enough is enough it's time for me to die so Ellie her back ground was she was brilliant I mean she went to an IV League school I think it was she she had her PhD by 18 and then she got into I think Consulting I forget what her job was but it was like a hyper successful woman like hyper successful killing it like crazy salary but she came down with this mysterious illness sometime in her I want to say her 30s I think early 30s so she's 42 it was late 20 she comes down with this illness and she's she's married she's got kids she lives in Southern California and it wasn't like the ill the do doctors didn't even know what the illness was she was just like fatigued and you know she didn't feel that good but there was nothing specific and so every time she would go to the doctor the doctors would run a battery of tests and basically say oh you know you're low on this vitamin or you need more sunlight or you need this you need that like there wasn't anything specific it was just kind of this malaise she had where she just always felt kind of down but for years and years she just always felt terrible and it started affecting her career and she just stepped back from her career and then actually she got this like divorce with our husband who frankly if I'm being candid sounds like he was kind of a jerk because he immediately was like all I'm out of here now that you're sick so they split up and so she's you know she's raising her kids on her own she's got this chronic illness and and it's getting worse you know not not in Leaps and Bounds but it's definitely not improving she's becoming more and more ill she's spending more days in bed um and so finally come December 11th 2011 uh by this point her kids have moved out of the house they are you know successful they're in their 20s you know they they have their Partners they have their jobs and you know she's still single and she's just at the end of her ability to cope with whatever was going on with her and she decided you know what I'm done I I want to go die and so she actually hired an end of Life Care person I forget the title I forget specifically what this job is but you can hire people to basically be with you while you die like you end your life um and for what it's worth it's important to note that by this point in 2011 doctors had told her that like your organs are actually starting to shut down and frankly if you were to kind of mentally let go there's a pretty good chance your body would shut down like it's kind of on you at this point to keep going and so she thought I'll just go to I'll go to an Airbnb in a beautiful part of California and I will literally just stay in the house until I die like not going to get water not going to get food I'm going to just stay in my bed till I die with this person yes she didn't tell her family this was like and she was it she's just miserable you know she just wants it to be over and so she didn't tell her family she like left him a note or something and so she goes to this little Airbnb in this random town and it's Southern California I forget where and you know she she arrives at the house she doesn't explore the town or anything you know she's met up with her end of Life Care person and they go in this house and Ellie just clim she can't even walk you know the end of care person is helping her walk she gets in bed and she's like okay I'm going to I'm going to die now um for three days she laid in that bed and she didn't die and she felt horrible and she felt like things are getting worse but she's she's not dying and she decided you know what I'm just going to go take a quick walk and then come back and die like it's pretty pretty bizarre you know it's a usual Tuesday yeah exactly and so she asks her end of Life Care person to come with her on a walk cuz she actually had not even seen the town she was in you know she basically just went into her bed and so they they leave this house it's a beautiful sunny day and you know she's holding on to her end of care end of Life Care person and you See's this really big guy and they're walking down the sidewalk and on their side is this beautiful field of flowers and you know there's a little wood rail post fence between them and the field and it's like just beautiful and sunny and and for a second you know Ellie is she stops and just stares out at this field and she's taken with just how beautiful it is now this did not Inspire her to to want to live because she she still wants it to end but she's you know she's struck by this moment you for the first time in a while I'm seeing something truly beautiful and that's all it's like wonderful but as she's staring at this field she begins to hear a buzzing sound and she looks above her and she sees there's a bee over her head which is not caused for concern bees everywhere you know so be it but this bee was not a normal bee this bee was an African killer bee so it's like a huge hornet and when she Dawn when it dawned on her that this is like I should probably get away from this thing it came down and began stinging her and she's practically immobile and at the same time she's like screaming her end of Life Care person just turns and starts running like left her on the side of the road she can't even walk and this was not just one bee there was a whole horde of African killer bees that were just over the field and I guess they signaled to come over and a whole swarm came over to Ellie and they stung her over and hundreds of times she can't go anywhere so basically when they stopped stinging mostly her face for about 5 10 minutes they flew off and she's just laying on the ground and she's alive but in excruciating pain and by this point Her endof Life Care person who has completely abandoned her now he comes back and he Scoops her up and and as as he's running with her all she thinks to say is don't take me to the hospital hospital cuz at this point she's like this will kill me you know the beasting will kill me and so he runs her all the way back to the house and and says fine I'm not going to I'm not going to bring you to the hospital even though you've been horribly stung and I'm at least partially to blame uh and so Ellie climbs back in bed and now she's thinking I'm gonna die now now it's either it's it's whatever's going on with me or the Beast stinks but three more days go by and she doesn't die and in fact she actually begins to feel better for the first time in like 15 years Ellie LEL can sit up on her own well not she could sit up 15 years earlier but of of late she couldn't even sit up now she can sit up and she can get on her feet she can walk around on her own she's like what's going on here now Ellie is she was an incredibly smart woman very you know pragmatic and she did not think oh I'm cured everything's right now she's like there's there's something going on I want to I want to research this you know what happened necessary context so here's a quick break to understand what happens next so right before Ellie got sick so 15 years earlier when she began to feel this this feeling she was getting she had gone out for a hike and you know near her house and she'd come back and she had noticed she had this little Mark on the inside of her thigh she figured it was a bug bite didn't think much of it but you know she knew she got bit by something but hadn't really registered if it had anything to do with her Illness but it turned out she got bit by a tick and a tick a deer tick that had Lyme disease and when they bite you they leave a very distinctive mark on your on wherever they bit you it looks like a bullseye and it stood out to her at the time that she had this kind of Bullseye looking mark on her leg but she just didn't put it together it would turn out she had Lyme disease that was the thing that was affecting her for those 15 years and Lyme disease if you catch it early and you treat it early it's very it's totally curable if you wait and you you let it develop it's very is not something that can necessarily be cured and in rare cases it can absolutely be fatal and she's 15 years in she's she's deeply immersed in ly disease and so she actually came to know that around the time she got to the house in California she was aware that she had Lyme disease right so I'm filling in some gaps here for you so she knows she has lyme disease she knows there's nothing she can do about it she's now been stung by a bunch of bees and she's feeling pretty good she hops online and she does some research about bee stinks and she discovered an obscure study done in the 1990s in Australia about the effects of the toxin in African killer bees and other types of bees and its effects on Lyme disease patients and they made they they guessed they made this hypothesis that a certain amount of bee stings from African Killer Bees in theory could cure Lyme disease but it was an unethical study and they couldn't do it because it would involve swarming killer bees on a critically ill Lyme disease patient but Ellie Lobel unintentionally conducted the experiment on herself and it completely cured her Lyme disease 100% healthy now she TS the world like talking about the the positive effects of of getting stung by beats dude crazy right wow that's insane I mean first off whoever that end of Life Care person come on you didn't do aw too committed to it here's an interesting question was it ethical or unethical to leave her given that by leaving her she ended up being her life was saved I mean if she had been pulled away after one sting it would not have worked so I'm sure she's like thanks it's a mixed bag probably not going to invite them to and save someone from a burning building but yeah that is crazy so when you watch the the video of that there I have this pause where I know I'm about to say the big she was cured completely and it was like the audience was so stoked it was like the coolest moment of the show and it was captured on film so was very cool and other news this episode is brought to you by element you have heard me talking about element an awful lot over the last few months and that's because I start my day every single morning with it you might not be tired you might not need more caffeine you might just be dehydrated an element contains a science packed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium that helps to curb Cravings regulate your appetite and improve your brain function stop having caffeine first thing in the morning your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day but your adrenal system is and salt acts on your adrenal system best of all it tastes phenomenal it's a beautiful sweet salty drink and the orange version is my favorite also there is a no BS no questions asked refund policy so you can buy it 100% risk-free And if you do not like it for any reason they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box that's how confident they are that you'll love it you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drink lnt.com wisdom that's drink LM nt.com modern wisdom where are you finding most of your story presumably everywhere uh but um what are the places that you're going to especially given that you know these stories are accessible to everybody yeah how are you finding stories that other people aren't well actually that's that's an interesting question because we we cover a lot of stories that other people do um and it's just the way we frame them out that separates us and and you'll notice or it I notice because I read the comments many times when we cover a story that's let's say a well trodden story that lots of people have covered we'll see comments that are like oh dude I didn't even know it was that story until the end yes I've heard this before yeah but it's so different and so I think that we and honestly a big part of that is because and I'll answer your question in a second but a big part of it is when you look at True Crime even though that's not the only thing we talk about but let's just use True Crime as an example many many many times if you're if you're consuming any content on a True Crime you know medium YouTube channel TV show whatever the the emphasis is on the killer or the or the the perpetrator and it's also on the gore and the kind of shock value of the story this is a broad sweeping generalization but it is it's like it's the lazy way in my opinion of doing content around kind of these tragic events is just focus on how much pain she was in her face was disfigured these African kbes are unbelievably blah blah blah blah exactly y the way we do it is we don't even need to highlight just how bad it is to be killed by somebody that's pretty bad instead we will highlight how relatable the victim was but not in a way that feels contrived in a way that we've mapped out ways to talk about this person that feel real they feel authentic this feels like a three-dimensional person so that when the terrible thing happens to that person the audience is like connected to that person it hurts when that happens to them that's a more profound feeling than me telling you about the pool of blood in the hall you're like okay that's not enough that's not enough to elicit some sort of emotional reaction all it is at best is gruesome you know and that that doesn't do much if you want your audience to genuinely connect with a story you need to make your characters three-dimensional and in True Crime usually the threedimensional characters are The Killers we make the three-dimensional characters The non-k Killers the victims and the and the kind of Supporting Cast and you don't really notice it as the audience because it's it's just a normal story that results in tragedy versus this is a dark story here's the blood and G and so um so I would say that we do do stories that are very well trotten but we just kind of change the angle of how we tell them and then I mean in the early days it was just me and Google you know looking for stories uh and I would say that the difficult part of of doing this is you need permission to tell a lot of people's stories unless it's public Source information what does that mean if I'm going to tell your personal experience of that time you went camping and somebody attacked you and you know let's say you wrote a book about it right and I want to tell your story if I tell your story and don't attribute it to you like that's your story and I could absolutely have a copyright claim against me okay so it's just like it it has to do with only when it's someone's own story that they own that's not being reported on by like the news those types of stories like I I did I did one um from this guy named Mike who was in the Twin tow he was in one of the towers when it collapsed and so I told his story of being in the Twin Towers and it's it's an intense story obviously but I mean I absolutely needed his permission he would have 100% told me to take that down this is a very sensitive topic but I reached out to him and I explained how I was going to do it and and and he was fine with it but there are other stories we cover like you know if we covered you know some seral killer let's say I mean there's loads of news articles you can pull from and so you're not seeking permission you're just operating within the facts that you can find online I wonder what it would be like to speak to serial killers to get their license for their stories because I imagine that many may want the Accolade you especially if they're in prison that would be something that would uh that would kind of amp them up a little bit and you must have a legal team of some kind whatever Outreach team licensing copyright people well actually I would say that candidly we try to find stories that don't require permission just from an efficiency yeah that's it but we we do proactively re honestly when I find a story that I really like that feels that like it could be somebody's personal story that I can't just use even if I don't know if I'm going to use it I'll I'll personally reach out from my account and just say hey I'm thinking about it I'd love to talk to you and see if you're interested in sharing the story and a lot of people say no actually really yeah and it's not disrespectful it's people just saying I'm not comfortable with this being has there ever been one or is there some that stick in your mind is like damn it like I really wish we had that yeah there have been uh there was one and I I can tell it in generalities you know there was the story about this kid who so there's there's some golden stories on Reddit a lot of them are not true so there's a little bit of diligence to make sure they're true but there are a few that are just like harrowing firstperson experiences that people will share that don't even really get that much traction like if you if you if you're searching for key words and Reddit you can find a lot of these things but I found the story that really didn't have all that many upvotes but I read it and I'm like how this is like profound this kid when he was a teenager snuck into an abandoned hospital and he wound up basically maneuvering his way like through the all these lock he found ways to get down to the next level even though they were locked uh and he finally goes to the bottom floor and he finds that underneath the ground is like this water source like there's a pond under or there's like an under under water or an underground ocean or something ocean like water there's like a well a huge well and there's animals in it and like so he goes into the basement and he he hears like splashing water and it's this dark like basement of this abandoned Hospital you know four levels down probably what it was is like the lowest level flooded or something and it like reached the hole in the floor and so it just looked like you have this underground sea of water um but he went you have this really intense moment where he knows there's something in the water there's like this Big C back in the ground you can look down and so I could tell imagine if I told the story where I've I've got you down there you're in this dark basement you know you know who this kid is you you you get it and I'm I'm going to have him walk all the way up to the edge and stick his head out over the water to wait and it winds up being an alligator or crocodile that's that's that's become it it's home it's in this water and it charges up and nearly bites him and he like backs away and it's like that's the most incredible story ever so I guess I basically told it totally fails well I mean it totally fails to me in this in this environment like that's what could could end up for the people that are just listening by the way we're currently in kind of like what is this like a like a swamp yeah like a swamp there's a there's a canoe next to us it's raining it's kind of sort of a little bit miserable and and dark and gloomy um but yeah I it must be the operations behind the scene to get these have you ever thought about just going straight fiction and just being like ah I pull the gloves off we don't need to do real life stories yes uh however we I am very in tune with the fact that a big Allure to these stories is that they're true um but you know there have been some stories where granted it was the earliest days of the channel where I did tell I told this one uh it's it's a famous fake story but it's a great story and I'm not going to tell it because it's fake but it's it's called the Russian sleep experiment it's on the no sleep oh yeah they stay alive they pumped the gas in and they said please give me the gas yeah you have these guys who are it's a human experience that goes horribly wrong and and I told it as if it was real but then at the end I had this full disclaimer that just so you know this whole story is fake um but some people watch it now now that they found the channel and they're kind of going through the a lot of people will kind of watch old stories and they don't like the story ends because there's definitely like this defining moment the story ends and they click off the video and they don't get the this was all fake and so they'll go to the comments and be like I know this is fake you are lying you're misrepresent and so I think that if we do fiction it would need to be upfront this is fictional maybe even a separate Channel I think that's right yeah I mean we we had this whole strategic meeting last year to go over like what are some other series we could try and fiction is definitely one that we haven't tapped into at least in a meaningful way but at some point I think we will but it's it would be very intentional because if we didn't make it intentional it would call into question every story I've ever told cuz wait a minute this is fiction is everything fiction yeah and what we were talking about before the stakes a big part of this right like the investment is because it's real yes right and I suppose you know that silent patient thing that I just finished um the reason that you have stakes in a non-real story is that you've spent four hours reading and becoming intimate with these characters and learning the minations of their mind and so on and so forth so from the outside now you look like a peaceful well put together disciplined Family Guy Storyteller all the rest of it who were you before you joined the seals yeah uh I was like a troublemaker that was a lot of the things that I I am I am the opposite of what I am now when when I was younger I I so I grew up in a town called quinsey Massachusetts it's just south of Boston maybe 10 minutes south and it's this you know Blue Collar fiercely um very very Irish Catholic uh you know a lot of a lot of the the fathers you know that I was were you know steel workers and you know the Pipe Fitters union and the Elevator Union like kind of like tough guys you know and there was this culture in in quiny which still exists today of young men feeling there's this well street fighting I'll just make it really simple street fighting was a really big thing in Quincy where the way you kind of become a man at least in the circle of people that I was around was you you bleed yeah exactly and it became it was so pervasive in in in my childhood that it it felt normal that all the time every weekend there was and no one this is not to Serious injury this is like you know some bare knuckle boxing that ends and they shake hands a lot of time but that was what I grew up around and I was around people getting in fights all the time and and I I definitely identified as you know a tough guy even though kind of ironically I I I was not I was my friends were very tough they were like the real tough guys and I was the guy that was around those guys um but uh that combined with the fact that I kind I I looked at my my father my sister my I looked at my family and they're all these really accomplished academics if you will it's like a number of pullet surprises I think amongst amongst your family they're just they're just like so accomplished academically you know and that was definitely the thing that was not pushed on us at all but that was what success was you know that getting a good job you know having a going to a good school all that that's that's that success and I kind of didn't like that I i' I've always had uh this is another irony of my story I've always had a big issue with authority which is why I joined the military uh but I had a big issue with authority and and the way I kind of rebelled against my family was by being a bad student which is a poor way to Rebel because you're just kind of shooting yourself in the leg so I was a bad student kind of on purpose and I was getting in lots of fights and stuff and just being kind of a jerk like you know just underage drinking and being a Ruffian out on the road um and so you know I I was just kind of a a troublemaker you know it wasn't until I I I got into college I went to the University of Massachusetts out in uh western Mass at Amherst and I only got in cuz my mom who's this amazing writer uh wrote my college essay and and my my grades were so abysmal at at my high school that UMass contacted me after I submitted my application my my mom's application to be like you're not somebody we would normally accept on your grades they're they're legitim and I'm in Massachusetts I'm an Inu I'm an inst State student I should be allowed into the school but they're like it's so low we we can't get you in but your essay was so good welcome to the school well done mom so yeah and so I I got I I effectively flunked out and got in lots of trouble in one semester didn't go to class you know I and so after a semester I'm I'm back home after totally failing college and I'm in my mom's basement my parents are separated so my mom's living there it's just me I'm in the basement I'm 19 years old and you know it's funny now I look back and I was like God I was such an idiot like you of course you're in your mom's basement like with no Direction but when I got home I actually was really resentful of my parents because they made me come home I could have stayed for another semester at UMass I didn't technically fail out I could had one more semester in there you know but it's just immaturity I was like this idiot who had just kept getting in trouble all through high school I had this great opportunity to go to college because my mom did my essay and I blow it out the water and here I am back home and again my first reaction was how dare my parents you know not allow me to stay the lack of accountability oh my God I was just insufferable I was an insuff able kid um but where did that entitlement come from I I don't even know I mean I you could make the case that you know my parents got split up when I was 13 you know I'm sure that had an effect on me but I had already set in motion when I was like 12 going out in the streets and getting in fights so it isn't like I was a great kid and then that happened I changed I I've always been like highly impulsive um kind of obsessed with the thing I'm doing if even if it's a bad like when I start to like something whether it's good or bad for me I can only do that thing if I like a song I'm GNA listen to that song 56 million times in a row until I hate the song like that's the person I am and so I just got in these tracks of just like chasing dopamine but in the in the in the wrong places but when I was in my mom's basement you know pissed at my parents it like suddenly clicked that I was the [ __ ] I'm the guy that's really screwed up all the stuff that's effectively been handed to me I mean going to college that was handed to me I'm not even paying for it my parents are and they had just scrape the money together for that and it like just really suddenly hit me that I was really screwing up my life and I just decided you know what I'm going to go to college and I'm going to pay for it I'm going to get a job I'm I'm going to be an adult you know if nothing else to just stop being such an embarrassment for my my parents who are trying to explain why their son is living at home again and so I got a job at the local YMCA that I used to ride my 10-speed Huffy to at 4 in the morning to scan people's badges in and then I would take the the red line the subway into Boston and I went to UMass Boston so a satellite camp campus where you can basically get in for free so I got to that campus and I would go to classes all day and then I would come home and I you know I'd work out and stuff and go to bed and it was just a very stoic life of just work and school but it was unbelievably rewarding and it and it really opened my eyes to what it felt like to be an adult you know I'm going to do these things and then actually doing the things you say that was new to me I was used to just like doing whatever the f I wanted and being an idiot and now I'm being an adult and I just became kind of addicted to being I don't know uh competent as a human mhm and uh so I did three semesters at that school just the whole time I'm just minding my PS and q's doing my my job scanning badges in getting good grades again but I needed like a new goal because it was just at the time you know just get your life together go to school have a job whatever but I needed something bigger the ball was set quite low yeah it's yeah exactly and because I'm now seeing how good it feels to be disciplined and be an adult I just wanted to have something else Beyond school work and I began thinking about what's life on on the end of college going to look like and I I had told my family I was thinking about law school and really that was only because I I I had I took a liking to philosophy and to English just in my classes and those oftentimes are Majors that those pursuing law school will will major in because philosophy teaches you how to think and English teaches you how to write two things that are really important to being a lawyer and so I figured if I like those things I'd be a great lawyer but I didn't want to be a lawyer it just was the thing I told my parents I wanted to do um but I had always had this desire to be in the military to some degree mostly because I was you know I graduated high school in 2006 and a lot of my classmates you know at 18 years old and listed in the Marine Corps and went to Iraq and Afghanistan and so my personal closest friends are all serving and I had a desire to and I brought that up to my mom halfway through college and she was like oh you should talk to to Dave and Pete uh who are you know family friends actually so my mom's best friend it's her two brothers and so I knew her best friend Susan and she's like an aunt to me and I knew who her brothers were but I didn't know anything about them I just knew they existed well it turns out they were Navy Seals who were retiring out of the the SEAL Teams and that those were the only military people my mom knew and she was like if you're thinking about the military talk to them and when I did it was like oh my God like the Navy Seals are the coolest people in the world you know and and the thing that stuck that stuck with me when I met with them is uh they were like it's a meritocracy you know going to to be to be a Navy SEAL it's just whoever can stick around till the end and if you can do that you completely reinvent yourself you know whoever you were before you were a seal is replaced with you know John Allen the Navy SEAL not John Ellen the screw up life Direction Rehabilitation absolutely to shake the ET of sketch and so it was like wait a minute I can accomplish multiple things at once here I can have a huge goal got to train like man for this thing I got to you know I got to be disciplined to to get ready for training I can serve in the military something I want it to do uh and I can frankly just continue this evolution of being a responsible adult you know and John not the the guy who screwed up but John the Navy SEAL sounded a lot better to me in other news this episode is brought to you by Shopify Shopify is the global Commerce platform that helps you to sell at every stage of your business Shopify Powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States including my drink newtonic and huge Brands like gym shark when I was 23 I launched a sportsware company 13 years later I launched a productivity drink both times I chose Shopify whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits Shopify helps you sell everywhere at every stage of your business Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting check out 36% better on average than other leading e-commerce platforms basically make more money have fewer headaches and launch your business more quickly by using Shopify plus they've got award-winning support to help your success every step of the way right now you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to shopify.com mowis all lower that shopify.com wisdom to grow your business no matter what stage you're at it seems like the hard right turn occurred before the military I'm sure that the military contributed to it and so on and so forth but the hard right turn was really that um mum's basement realizing okay time to go monk mode time to sort of sort myself out what would you say to people that are listening who feel like they are John at 19 Maybe they're older or younger than 19 but they're like I'm not fulfilling my potential I I I don't have much faith in myself I I don't really feel I feel like I'm built for more and yet I'm not doing it what would you say to them I know that for me a a big thing that was a holdup in my life is not really knowing what I wanted to do and I think that when I and this is just as an adult you know even when I was screwing off as a high school kid I I would think about the future and it just seemed so overwhelming of all the different directions I could go from a really good direction to a really bad Direction it's just like you can go any number of directions and I think that for for people that are stuck in a rut if you will I would imagine a big part of it is just not really knowing what the next step is you know they know they need to clean up their life let's say and there might be aspects of their life that are really obvious to fix like for example they're eating like crap and they put on a bunch of weight well yeah change your diet and you'll lose weight but that's not enough to have a full life that's a that's an aspect of your life you need you need purpose in your life you need direction and so just pointing to symptoms of something is not enough you need to figure out what you're going to do Beyond you know Aesthetics and I think that one of the things I've been pretty good at is not overthinking the things I'm going to try to do I have a basic outline of what I want to do I want to do things that are hard that are impressive that require hard work and once I find things that check that for me I don't question whether there was some alternative that was slightly better you know I could have easily tried out for any number of Special Operations units but I met Navy Seals who seemed really cool who had a couple things that seemed really applicable to me I want to reinvent myself that kind of thing and instead of being like well wait a minute let's do in-depth research about every military unit on Earth and see if this really is and let's also look at what are my statistical chances of getting through because you can do that and you'll get caught up in the oh is this a good idea analysis paralysis sometimes you just got to say it do it and I think that when you find something that checks enough boxes that it seems interesting you should just do it especially if you're young yeah when you're young you can explore when you're older you need to exploit a little bit more there's an idea in behavioral economics a difference between uh satisficers and maximizers uh and satisficers does this meet the minimum threshold for me to have a degree of certainty that this is probably the right direction is and then they commit to the decision maximizers are what's the one that's got the lowest wash out rate what's the one that par is closest to me is closest to family that blah blah blah blah and the problem with being a maximizer is that it doesn't account for the time cost thought cost anxiety cost opportunity cost that going Beyond satisficing into maximizing all of that is just really unnecessary yeah and I think what you're just the like patient zero example of someone that hit the threshold of satisficing and was like seals yeah that's that's right are you tough are you a tough person how did you get through training and and selection for seals we hear about how many people wash out and these horror stories about hell week and all of this stuff what was the preparation and experience of that like um so I I think that uh an aspect of me that's been very helpful is I probably border on being a narcissist if I'm being if I'm being honest I I have like a crazy amount of confidence in my ability to just be able to do things whatever it is even if I have no experience in them I have this this belief in myself that if I apply myself to something I probably can do it maybe not the best at it but I probably can do it and so I don't question whether I'm going to be able to handle the rigors of getting good at something I just need to identify the thing I want to do and once I have that thing in mind I don't worry about well can I do it it's like no I want to do it so I'm going to give it a shot and I think I probably can and with Seal training I mean for those that don't know what SEAL training consists of it's a doozy it's just long more than anything um it's very challenging to even get a spot to try out like forget trying out just to have a chance to try out is very competitive um and that's really in large part because of the publicity around the SEAL Teams I mean following the bin Laden raid they became rock stars and you know you could say they're trending down a bit now but overall I mean that's that's a brand I mean the SEAL Teams are a brand uh so there's loads of people that want to do it and in order to just get a chance to try out you got to do all this physical screening and I mean it's relatively straightforward but it's you know there's there's some red tape there and it weeds out a lot of people that are just not prepared to sign up for a Navy contract like sign the dotted line when you don't even know how it's going to go and there's all these different things you got to do and then once you get in the door the training is basically two years long where you could make the case that about six of those six months out of those two years are like kick you in the face miserable you know over I mean like and I'm not talking for little bits of time during the day I mean your life is a living hell for those six months it's like horrible uh and so the way it works is you go to boot camp this is if you go the enlisted route there's there's the enlisted side and the officer side I was enlisted that means I didn't use my college degree to go in uh you go to boot camp which is two months in Chicago uh which is you know it's typical Navy boot camp it's not really that specialized at all for guys going to the SEAL Teams then I went through a prep school which is a Navy prep school it's another two months in Chicago where you work with Olympic athletes and and coaches and some professional athletes and it all it is is just strength training and swimming and running but it's they're not trying to screw with you they're trying to make you strong and as as ready as you can be for the next phase of training which is SEAL training how did you find the prep period amazing am take me through a typical day uh so you have you had a I think it was a six day schedule it might have been five but you have this schedule where every single day you had three major activities uh but there was four major activities available so you kind of rotated through them and it was was you know running ranging from just like short Sprint work to very long runs like like half marathons and Beyond uh swimming that was the one activity we did every single day it was Finning in a in a huge pool you know like double the size of an Olympic swimming pool I think and we would fin at least a mile a day uh just swimming with fins on that's all and it was all you know combat side stroke which is this kind of it's an efficient stroke that's pretty easy but it was these long long swims so we'd either do a run we'd definitely do a swim and then it was a uh gym workout like a really intense powerlifting usually and then there was like a wild card you know hey we're going to go do yoga on the beach or something uh but yeah it was like three of those they get chosen Monday through Friday and I think Saturday sometimes we did stuff and then there was you know usually one day a week where they would bring in an actual seal to kind of run you through a very short uh you know what it would be like to do a workout at buds which is the name of the actual seal boot camp uh Bud stands for basic underwater demolition seal school it's the six-month long famous you know right of passage that you must pass to be a seal and that's the next stop following the prep school and so you get a little taste of it with some instructors they yell at you a little bit but it's like real friendly still and then another part of prep actually that was horrible is um treading treading is horrible uh like treading in the water you know okay where you you'd go in the pool and it'd be you and maybe eight or nine other guys uh that are in this line with you you're all you know you're looking at the GU back in front of you and your instructor will give you a brick the first guy has just a brick you'd you know make a wall with and you got a fin you know and without fins on sorry you got to use your feet you know and you just pass these bricks you know one at a time back and forth your hands stay out of the water the whole time and you're just like constantly kicking and think about it like a little bit of extra weight when you're gassed and treading and if you put your hands down you that's considered quitting and so you get kicked out you have you basically it's either keep going or pass out underwater that's how you continue the evolution and they would make us do these Treads where they'd say hey this is a puking Evolution today which means you're going to sit in that water until somebody either quits or until somebody just like goes under and passes out which is called redlining which is common enough that you just hear Red Line somebody jumps in pulls you out of the water it's like and that's that's prep that's not even butts that's like the let's let's test the waters a little bit see what it's like and then you get out to buds in in in Southern California which is the six-month long actual hard stuff and it's like everything you did at prep but like ramped up dramatically it's you know it's the intimidation is so high because your instructors look terrifying I mean the the people that get chosen to be instructors look like instructors you know what I mean like they don't look like me they look like big guys and it was just like terrifying you know and and Seal training it's you could make the case that the first maybe six weeks to eight weeks of that six-month period buds is like the most physically grueling so you've done boot camp you've done prep school and then it's like the first six weeks in California first eight weeks in California is like the famous stuff that's hell week that's the 50 m underwater swim that's uh pool competency there's a couple like major test Gates that are massive wash out rate I mean hell week is five and a half days of when when they say around the-clock training it is around the-clock training you are training 24/7 they have a rotation of staff that comes in so you always have fresh instructors and you just get your ass kicked 247 for five and a half days straight and it is absolutely horrible like your legs swell to like twice the size from the chafing guys are up it's not not blood but it's like this pink frothy sputum because their lungs are filling with fluid called uh swimmer induced pulmonary edema toenails are gone you don't have toenails by the end of hell week you do take these naps during hell week they're scheduled you take one at 72 hours in and then I think you do two others but they're an hour to an hour and a half long they are I wish that you don't want to take the nap because if you've been awake for 72 hours just getting your ass kicked for 72 hours and then you fall asleep for 1 hour and you're woken up to the sound of bullhorns and told to jump in the freezing ocean in the middle of the night that's worse than sleeping and there's actually pictures they they we had a professional photographer out there for our hell week just by happen stance the Navy wanted some pictures of hell week and there's this picture that if you didn't know the context you wouldn't think anything of it but it's it's daytime it's beautiful you're looking out at the ocean and the photographers on the sand and you see all these students hellweek students running out of the water and they have their cammies on and it looks so like everyone's like slow jogging it looks like but everybody's crying most people are crying you don't realize it unless you look closely and it's because you dry off during your nap and when you make when when you jump in the water your chafe is like the Chafe you have is like hardened and salt water gets into it and it feels like acid and the worst chafing is your groin so imagine your groin suddenly has acid poured all over it it's excruciatingly painful to the point of crying we'll get back to talking to bowan in one minute but first I need to tell you about Fountain Life fountain life is the best One-Stop shop for preventative medicine that I've ever found went and got a full body MRI heart angiogram brain scan dexa scan genetic testing microbiome testing everything the wildest stat I learned that really got me to buy into preventative medicine and Fountain life in particular is that 14% of Fountain life's clients have a critical life-saving finding Fountain life provide top-of-the-line Health snapshots vetted Therapeutics and lifestyle interventions training interventions supplementation all so that you can live a longer and more healthy life I'm a massive fan I used them myself I have taken tons away from the scans that they did and I intend on flying Mom and Dad out at some point over the next year to have them do it too so if you are sick of guessing when it comes to your health head to the link in the show notes below to get $500 off the exact same scans and service that I got or go to Fountain life.com slod wisdom that's fountainlife docomond wisdom the first episode that I did on this show people can go back and listen to it was with a guy that was rowing the Atlantic solo Oh Boy and I asked Tim he he mentioned it in the gym one day and he's like uh yeah I'm going to have to get quite a lot of zinc oxide I was like why and he's like cuz I'm doing the row naked like course hang on hold up why are you doing it naked he said well because of all of the salt spray if I wear clothes the salt will land on me the water will land on me it'll evaporate the salt will crystallize and it'll cause irritation wow so if these long rows it's called the Talisa whiskey race is one of them sponsored by Talisa whiskey then there's a bunch of others as well and uh he rose on a sheep skin you like an urg like a concept to it's kind of I think it might even be the same Runner but obviously with actual all sure and um on the seat is a sheep skin a sheep skin wall uh hypoallergenic blah blah blah blah blah naked wow so there's a naked guy doing 14 million or Strokes to go from Portugal to the Caribbean how long does it take uh the the record is about uh it's less than 2 months it's like they can do it about a month uh the weird thing is you can do it in teams um so you can do it as solo you can do it as Duo you can do it as whatever but because for each additional person that you add there is the weight of them plus the weight of all of the things it's UNS most of them are unsupported um weight of them plus the weight of their food plus the weight of their water plus the weight of all of the support [ __ ] that you need to have with them six people is not really any quicker than one person no each person negates the power that they add with drag does that make sense yeah it does yeah and uh but yeah he uh he attempted it and there you know you've got a satcom phone and they do it they can only do it during certain periods of the of the Year where the you know the jet stream and and and flows and tides and storms and all this sort of stuff but it was uh that was the F the first episode I ever did on that show Morton yeah and uh I think the record will have probably been broken now but it's it's insane so take me through just what class were you uh I I started in class 289 got rolled after hell week for swimmer induced pulmonary edemas that stuff in your lungs and then I failed pool comp which is like a big it's a ter it's like a it's like a simulated drowning test that's not what it's called but that's what it some it you you have to do 20 minutes with your scuba tanks on in the pool as instructors are constantly coming down and turning your air off and like tying actual knots in your line and you need to follow the same procedure every time to fix the problem but the problems get more and more complex and you know it but you go longer and longer without air and so by the time you're fixing the hardest problems you're you're probably going about 60 seconds to 90 seconds just on a breathhold then you begin solving the 60- second long problem so it's like 2 and a half minutes which for those who don't understand what that means you are totally hypoxic which is you're you're you're damn near about to pass out and and what they're looking for is can you stay calm enough to follow this procedure when your body is saying you're dying um and it took me a number of tries to pass that test I was horrible at it cuz I was panicking that's all it was so I failed that but I I guess I had I was in good enough standing with the instructors that they said you can stick on because normally two rolls is pretty rare usually get rolled once you get to stick around getting rolled twice doesn't happen very often so I I snuck through the cracks yeah yeah in the teams uh but I I ended up graduating with class 291 so that was in September of 2012 I finished so you do buds which is six months and then you do this follow on six months of Advanced Training uh which is not as hard as Buds and then you become a seal and what was the worst element of hell week and training for you pain discomforts whatever was there a particular moment that you went through that was the worst you know I I think looking back I can I can say that overall the worst part was actually just the collective sleep sleep deprivation um you know hell week was you know five and a half days of no sleep but actually in reality that was less of a the sleep deprivation was so expected with hell week that it wasn't really the main thing that you're worried about it was just staying healthy but in the weeks leading up to hell week I mean you're doing you're working from sun up to sun down and you're just getting destroyed and then you have all these extra things you have to do after the day ends from you have to fill up the instructor's cars with gas you got to make you got to set up the coffee machine in the instructor's office so that when they walk in they just hit a button and it goes your everyone in your class you have to have at least one comic who makes a comic about the instructors every day so when they go in they they have to have a comic ready like along with their dut and coffee it's it's all these kind of extra chores that take a bunch of time you get a sh on your shoes your boots at the end of the night you got to prep your gear and so you're done let's say at 6:00 at night and you and I lived off campus cuz I was marri or off Bas because I was married that's the only way you can live off Bas and so I drive you know 40 minutes to get back to my house get back at like 7 I'd eat a burrito you know California Burritos are awesome get a burrito and then I it's like I would do extra stuff at my house shining booths sharpening my knife and before long it's like you know 10 o'cl which is not that late but it's a Monday it's 10 o'clock and I have to be back at buds at like 3:30 in the morning you know it's so you just you're perpetually genuine like for real just you have not gotten enough sleep chronic protracted sleep deprivation and what does that feel like you have no motivation motivation goes out the door and so that is what they're talking about instructors are talking about when they say you really got to want to be here because it's like when your motivation is gone what does your core want do you really want to be a seal or is it just exciting at the idea of calling yourself a seal and there really is a difference because ultimately seals like what what you're being trained to do is just withstand an enormous amount of misery because a lot of seal missions require it I mean we did a mission in Afghanistan on Christmas Day in 2013 that for real I've never been colder and I went through SEAL training like the mission itself it was so cold in Afghanistan I had every layer on you could imagine but you also need to be ready to use your weapon you can't have like mittens on you can't use your unless you're shooting like a rocket launcher or something but you need dexterity and so I remember we we I'm not going to tell this whole story but we we walked on Target and it's this long long infill and it's Christmas Day and I'm thinking like we're going to be here for 24 hours I think that it was at least 24 hours and by the time I just got to the outskirts of the target I couldn't even move my hands and I'm like I can't use my gun that's how cold it was but truly when you're in those moments in real life you do actually look back at at Buds and Seal training and you do think well I've been through this stuff before and that's the point they want people that can like preparation suffer just unbelievably and put up with it because the job is a lot of suffering what did you learn about yourself that I can suffer really really well basically I I am someone who actually is prone to panic to to a degree which is my fight ORF flight I I'm a flight guy and it's it's it took a lot to harness that part of me and I I don't even necessarily think I've done it but that was that was something that was really challenging to work through but I would say that I'm I'm able to to withstand discomfort for a really really long period of time and it's not cuz I'm some super human it's just I don't know if it feels like if there's some worthy reason to suffer I can suffer for a really really long time um and it's actually when I think about it's funny to compare you know the military to this but when I first started making YouTube videos so not the viral Tik Tok video I did at the water park but when I transitioned about 6 months later because Tik Tok was going so well uh to making long form YouTube videos um I was a oneman band and I was putting out four or five featurelength videos a week which basically meant I was not really sleeping at all I was just spending 20 hours at a clip working on a video to get it out the door sleeping for like 3 to 6 hours Max and going right back into making another video and there were loads of times where I would actually think back about hell week it's like 4 in the morning and I'm trying to write a script and I'm so tired I can't keep my eyes open I would channel that I've struggled with things before I can do it now and I would say this is how I'm going to make it to the top I'm going to outwork other people that have had this opportunity and it worked it put me on the map out of just sheer determination and willingness to suffer people don't know how painful it is to sit in front of a camera when you're dog tired on your like ninth day of filming it's miserable yeah it's uh it's one of the most reassuring things to realize that whatever the challenges are that you're facing aren't bugs their features and that everybody else has to go through this as well yeah uh there's this stat I always throw around 90% of podcasts don't make it past episode three and of the 10% that do 90% of those don't make it past episode 20 so if you make 21 podcasts you're in the top percentile of all podcasters ever and the point being well what what is the universal selection criteria between episode zero and episode 21 it's the same thing that everybody goes through yeah my friend Alex says that that whenever I get to a low point when I ask myself why do I even bother I just remind myself that this is where most people quit and this is why they don't win yeah it's like this is a feature this isn't a book like it's it's built into it and I think that's quite reassuring what's it feel like to get hit by a grenade it feels like rocks being thrown at you at least that was my experience I uh yeah so I I I was medically evacuated from Afghanistan so I I um I did two deployments which in in the world of Navy SEALs I did the shortest tour you could do meaning my my time in service was seven years and for seals you have to sign a contract that's longer than the traditional four most people when they enlist it's a four-year deal for the seals because the training takes so long you basically add these three years on top I think mine was a little bit longer so I served the minimum and I say this because there invariably are going to be very senior Navy Seals that listen to this and are going to judge what I say here um but I I deployed the minimum I did one combat tour and that was the first tour I did and that was to Afghanistan uh and you know I we we definitely got into gunfights it was in many ways it was it was actually what I thought it would be like a lot of it was you know we you go through so much training so much prep and you get overseas and it's like you're terrified it it looks like War you know and I I'm half smiling here because it's like the it's so weird when you first get there it's so different from from your normal life does this make you feel like you're kind of back there you know this actually looks similar to uh fob shank which is so we landed at this this Base called forward operating base shank right in the middle of I think logar province in Afghanistan and it's it's this I mean it's just this obvious military stuff everywhere planes and vehicles and all around you little buds everything's moving the stuff happening crazy like when we came actually my my entry to Afghanistan when I knew like oh oh [ __ ] it's getting real is we flew from Virginia to Germany and then we stayed there for a couple of days and then we flew from Germany to Afghanistan and it's this eight hour flight and for the majority of it you're in a military transport so you're not this is not a civilian craft Belly of the Beast with a little bench seat and it's so loud and there's all this equipment in the middle of the floor um but it's it's relaxed we've taken military flights dozens of times you just hang out with your buddies you can walk around but when we got into Afghanistan airspace the pilot had to put on uh red light on the on the aircraft even though we're way above Small Arms range and frankly even RPG range or rocket L uh it's harder to see at a distance uh you know white light stands out but he was like the pilot came on and said okay we're in Afghan airspace so you know don't go near the windows although the idea that if if they're shooting up at the plane we're in a bad spot no matter where it hits but like stay away from the windows and the red light came on and then we did this really intense very quick descent because you don't want to linger too too long at a medium altitude yeah and it's like I noticed how intense The Landing was and then we get out and it's it's winter time and I'm so green I've never done anything I've only trained and I'm looking around it really looked like this but just mountains everywhere it was actually so beautiful uh which is weird because it's this really kind of dangerous place for for people like for me um but yeah no it so I was there and it was in many ways what I expected I I um when shooting starts you know the thing that stood out to me cuz I I when you get hurt you have to debrief how it went and I told my commander that the debrief point that stood out the most to me about my entire experience in Afghanistan was when the rounds started flying uh meaning when people began shooting at us it was so incredible to see your teammates just do their job because the thing about SEAL Teams and and operating in a special operations unit so much of what you're doing is is choreographed with everybody else you you don't have just like random things happening everything is just you're working in tandem all the time everything is done with a or with small teams and just seeing in this like crazy moment where like gun fires coming in and you're looking at your teammates and your teammates are so well trained that you just see this look of not Cal it isn't like they're like superheroes I mean it'sa it's chaos but you're seeing what millions and millions and millions of dollars in very specialized training looks like in real time and for a second especially when you know we get into a gunfight you you'd see that in motion and it's for lack of a better description it's beautiful we are unstoppable on the battlefield it's it's the idea that there are people that are walking around in sandals and AK-47s up against this team it just seemed unbelievably War it's it's like no wonder the seals have the reputation they do and I'm not talking from like how cool I am it's the other seals I saw that was like holy [ __ ] like this is an intense level of training so uh the confidence level's really high especially as the deployment went on you know we were just we were going out a fair amount you know what that means you feel Invincible with the guys around you in some way and and that's actually something you need to keep in in the back of your mind that you're not I am not Invincible yeah that the complacency kills uh and I actually yeah there's definitely an element of that that invincibility thing and also most of us are in our early 20s you know we're in the prim of Our Lives you can see how that would happen um but anyway so the the grenade about 5 months into the deployment we we were going into this uh this Village called zargar uh it's the the general Mission set that we had in Afghanistan was our our unit was we were tapped with trying to find suicide bombers who were destined for Kabul the big city in Afghanistan and stopping them or limiting you know their effectiveness before they got there because we were actually positioned on like the one paved Road in Afghanistan called route Utah kind of splits the whole country in half and it went right to Kabul and and we were deployed to this little out station that was right up alongside route Utah and this is not a base it didn't look like this it was like a couple Hesco barriers and some tents like a very miniature version of this and it was our job to stem the tide of these suicide bombers and across the street from Route Utah was this city if you will called zargar and so in Afghanistan it's you know mud Huts it's not sophisticated architecture at all I mean some places there is but where we were it's like you're out in the sticks and it's mud huts and very simple but zargar it was mud huts but they were built on top of each other I mean it's it's like the closest thing to an urban environment as you're going to get outside of like a Kabul I mean this is urban Afghanistan and what that meant was when you went into zargar it was just there was so many opportunities to get stuck on dead ends to have corners where you can't see around and it was covered in IEDs it was covered or there was Fighters everywhere I mean this is a highly contested place because it's actually where a lot of these suicide bombers would be kept before carrying on to uh Kabul and the thing about zargar is you would literally look into this town from you know thousand meters away we' drive around it and look in and in other parts of Afghanistan Fighters do not want to be recognized as Fighters they'll be targeted and killed by NATO these fighters in zargar are openly carrying their AK-47s and patrolling the streets they they they know that that this is a target this place and their job is yeah I'm a fighter I'm protecting the people in the in the city from NATO and so we would go in and it was like an obvious gunfight is going to occur that's why we're going in and so on just before uh Easter on uh in 2014 I think it was it was April 19th I think that's right before Easter April 19th 2014 we went into zargar we got into what would amount to be a pretty long drawn out but not the whole time like sporadic gunfire for like six hours we uh are partner for us so the Afghans that we worked with that went out the door with us a couple of them got wounded they got shot our dog got shot but everybody lived but there was like you casualties along the way and you know we're deep into our deployment it's a six-month long deployment this is five months in it's it was the fighting season so it's the springtime there's much more action if you will and you know we were pretty experienced I would guess for this deployment we were hungry and it was just very frustrating this particular day that we kept getting shot up and then they disappear it was like just over because they had these tunnels you know that ran underneath the city that they could escape and again it's like imagine being in a city that you don't know there's loads of places that people can can escape and so by the end of the night when basically we had gotten shot up a whole bunch and didn't do a whole lot of shooting back you know we we did but not effectively we were just kind of angry I guess I would say like frustrated like we're kind of getting our asses kicked what's going on there's obviously Fighters still here cuz we're still getting pot shots and um at some point a a drone overhead one of ours an unmanned uh aerial vehicle spotted a group of what we call Ms so military age males that were crouched down by this wall kind of near where we would eventually xfill when we left sargar and so there was some consideration that they could be setting up an IED or they could be getting ready to shoot at us when we leave so there's some threat with these these people but given the Rules of Engagement you can't just okay I'm going to go over there and just start shooting you can't do that you need to go see what's going on you have to identify a weapon and realistically at the time you need to get shot at first so our fire team that I was a part of which is a group of Seven Seals or six seals and a couple partner force uh we happened to be physically closest at the time when this Intel came out that hey there's these Ms over here and so our I was not in charge I'm just a typical new guy Gunner our our leader uh said let's just go and see what's going on like just get eyes on these Ms and see see what they're doing it wasn't let's go over there and get into something it was let's just go see and so it's gnarly what ends up happening because it didn't go the way we expected we um we end up walking down this Alleyway where we were anticipating that we would walk down this Alleyway this narrow little Alleyway with walls on other side of us and we would get to this wall like right ahead of you almost like a te intersection and so you walk down this this wall or this this hallway and you reach this te and our expectation was this wall right here that we're walking towards is like 6t high 7 ft high so not that tall you can kind of look over it that we would be able to look over this wall and there's a whole field that extended Beyond it and on the other side of the field where there is another wall like you know 100 meters away they were kind of crouched up against that wall so all you need to know is we're expecting we're going to go to a wall we're going to look over it and about a 100 met away on the other side of the field is going to be these M we walk down the alleyway we get to the wall we look over the wall and they're not on that side of the field they're right here they're literally less than a foot away from us they Crouch town and they didn't hear us because you know we were quiet making our way down the the the alleyway and it's one of those things where it's our team lead had to do something we had to be effectively ProActive at this point because the risk that we all intuitively understood here is best case frankly would have been to get out of there like this is not the way we want to engage with these people it's way too close way too much risk here back out like it's silly to engage them but if we turn around and begin going the way we came in our back is to them and who what's to say they haven't hurt us maybe they'll stand up and start shooting at us so it was kind of like an in the- moment decision to we got to engage and so our team lead you know he got down and tapped his leg signaling to somebody else start to engage he stepped onto our team League's leg to get his head up over the wall and and he called out they have weapons so we knew that yes these are these are combatants and a Close Quarters gunfight ensued but the at least two people I've heard as many as seven but I think it was two people on the other side of the wall it was between two and seven at least two of them were holding grenades that they had already pulled the pins on they were just holding the spoon down so as soon as they let go it would detonate a couple seconds later but they were holding them for this exact reason in case they were discovered it functions as like a suicide bomb yeah and so when we began engaging them they threw the grenades over the wall and I was not one of the guys shooting I was standing behind the guy who was shooting I'm just in this this Alleyway and it's the middle of the night run night vision and there the the Drone overhead had an infrared Spotlight that was cast down on where we were to Mark where we were and it was a flashing strobe so with infrared you can only see it on night vision so to the naked eye you it would look like Darkness but to me on night vision you know I have this blue grayscale pretty high-speed night vision and it was a very bright flash it felt like you're in a spotlight that's periodically flashing is there a reason that it's not constant I think it had to do with the fact that we were actively in an engagement and I think that this is I don't really know why because it's not supposed to that actually has more to do with targeting it's a little bit comp it's a little bit complicated why you would use a Flash versus steady but for whatever reason we're in a flashing stroke I don't think it was protocol put it that way but imagine there's like a flashlight from God straight down to the Earth that's what it looks like it's this amazing really bright IR light anyway so it's flashing and because it was so bright when those grenades came over the wall one of them came over the wall and time slowed down because immediately my brain is like there it is your death is coming here comes this grenade and it would flash the IR the r strobe would flash on and this is just a fraction of a second and I would see the grenade coming right towards me and then it would flash off and it would disappear because it's now no longer illuminated the light would come on again now the grenade is even closer I mean it it really felt that slow even though this Happ in the fraction of a second grenade comes over it hits my shoulder and it lands on the it hits your shoulder it hit my shoulder hit my shoulder and it fell to the ground and I remember when I saw it flashing and coming over the wall I actually was thinking not oh boy I can't believe I'm going to die it was more like I hope this at least detonates below my head it'll still kill me but at least my family will be able to recognize me because it will not blow my head off and so in this like time standstill moment the grenade fear what is that sounds like an oddly sort of rational it was rational there was no emotion it was just facts why I don't know I've never been in an absolute near-death experience before but what I tell people is in a weird way you're the way we are able to live so seamlessly our heart pumps you know we breathe our lungs work we walk we talk we do all these different things don't think about it that's that our our experience is being alive it happens basically automatically but you know what else happens automatically is death we just you only experience it once and your your body your your brain your mind at least in my personal experience is ready for that moment you just don't think that and so when it was time and I'm like a grenade is coming over the wall that's going to hit me it's going to kill me it was just like boy I hope my family can at least see my head and so I remember when it hit my shoulder I was thinking please don't blow up please don't blow up please don't blow up please don't blow up and I was like oh few it's going to blow me relief yeah I was like thank God and then when it made it all the way down to my legs I was thinking oh [ __ ] might just blow my legs off and I might be able to live and then when it hit the ground and I was able to slightly turn I was like oh [ __ ] this is pretty good and then uh it detonated and it it felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just like a light throw uh that hit me in the back and the back of my legs but really what it was was probably like a hundred pieces of shrapnel so the way a grenade works is there's a fuse inside of a a piece of metal and the fuse it detonates and the metal is designed to Splinter and create little razor blades that get fired off in every direction and um so those Blades of metal were sent into all of us and uh you know I I I just told the story actually kind of recently there's the what I remember which wound up not being true and then there's what actually happened and the only reason I know what actually happened is I ended up speaking to the guy who saved my life four years after I got hurt and because I I wasn't able to talk to him it was so traumatic I avoided him and Frank frankly he avoided me I'll tell you what what actually happened but we didn't talk to each other it's like I get medact and I never talk to him and then 4 years later we finally have our talk and we we debrief what happened and it and it the story was not what I recalled what did you think happened what I thought happened is I survived the grenade but I also as soon as the grenade detonated I was on the ground on my on my face and we were in the alleyway was also where sewage came through so there was like liquid and sewage and I fell into the sewage and I'm laying there and I couldn't stand up and I'm like obviously aware that you know something's hit my legs it's grenade uh I I thought I had my legs you know was pretty confident but I knew that clearly there's been a a grievous injury to my legs and so I couldn't stand up and then as I'm kind of positioning myself like this and some of this did happen by the way it was more like the timing of things I remember looking up and you know here's this tea right so we had walked down this way and then the guys were on this side they're shooting this way but at the left and right side of the tea the top of the if you will was an opening that you could walk out to the field where these guys were and I was thinking as I'm like trying to stand and there's at the time all this gunfire happening feet away from me I mean it's chaos I'm thinking someone's going to come around the wall the combatants and they're going to start shooting down the alleyway and I'm looking at it and I can't go anywhere and so I'm like well I survived the grenade but it's only a matter of time before we're overrun and somebody comes in here and finishes me off or worse I get taken hostage or something like what can I do I can't even my my my gun I remember uh I think it was the the top of the gun it got blown off by the grenade or it was it didn't work like parts of the gun had come off I never saw it again I was told that it was not working um and then and then my memory is somebody picked me up and dragged me not to cover because there really wasn't anywhere to go they just kind of took us down the base of the tea if you will to the side of this wall and my medic put tourniquets on my legs and and our jtac who calls in air strikes they called in what's called a I think it was a danger close air strike which sounds like nothing but what that really means is if you call in a danger close air strike what that really means is you're calling an air strike on your position it means you're being overrun and when you do it you have to get the initials from your commander basically saying I I approve you calling an air strike on yourself now you're not literally doing it it's often when you have no other choice like hey they're 5 feet away from us on the other side of this wall and we can't do anything try to hit them don't try to hit us so they called in a Hellfire missile when we're 15 20 ft away from where they're actually targeting and so that did hit and it and it neutralize the threat and but but also at the same time there's all these fighters in in the town that had been fighting with us all day and when all this chaos erupts it had been quiet to that point there was a lull and as soon as the shooting started people from all around the city just began arbitrarily shooting generally in that direction shooting RPGs in our Direction like they could be hitting their own people they don't care they're just shooting at us and so there was just this chaotic you know trying to suppress the threat trying to call in a metab back and you know after my medic had put the tourniquets on me he was so calm he's like it's okay you know it's all good everybody's been hurt by the way you know we have another guy whose lungs have collapsed is that mostly from grenades just from the grenades right and there was only two grenades as far as we know there was two there's there's video of it and it it does kind of looked like there was two the video of it the Drone was filming it yeah and have you seen this yeah it it's it's grainy you're not like oh there I am it's more like but you can probably pick out yeah yes how does that feel to watch your own mortal danger I will say that uh I was glad that there was a record of it in a way uh you know for for posterity or something frame put it on the wall I think that's true uh you know what initially because I didn't have my debrief I'm going to tell you the debrief here in a minute which changes the story a little bit um I I felt like you know I narrowly escaped in all of the people that I was with that were part of this this kind of horrible situation we all lived there there was out of a platoon of I think we had 25 people in the platoon seals in the platoon and I think there was eight or nine purple hearts on this deployment and for reference you get a purple heart if you're wounded in combat that's the gist and I think the stipulation is you actually have to bleed from an enemy combatant's weapon like it's you it's not just oh I bruised myself right being punched isn't enough you you have to get wounded for real and are you in pain just at this point like what's kicked in not really uh I have oh oh like in the story are you yeah are you feeling pain from the grenade cuz it seems like someone just threw rocks at the back of you it didn't there was no pain nothing yeah it had to have just been shock there was there was absolutely nothing I felt pressure where there was definite big serious holes in my leg but it didn't hurt at all the pain came you know days later as I'm recovering but um so yeah we I end up getting we we run out of this place we are under the hail of gunfire to this helicopter that took us to a uh I went to a medical tent actually at fob shank where I first landed in Afghanistan looks very similar to this and then from there I went to Germany and I was there for a week and then I was sent home I was like pushing a cart in Home Depot hobbling around seven days after being on the battlefield but the thing that really screwed with me was actually um you know I came home and I I I frankly was not prepared to to really talk about the specifics of what happened but I didn't know why I wasn't like oh boy I'm so screwed up from that it was more like I just don't really want to talk about that but four years later I end up talking to my medic who is the guy who put tourniquets on my legs cuz I would have BL to that he also didn't want to talk about it in we both without saying anything completely avoided each other we worked at the same Seal Team like we weren after when I came home from this injury I was out of my platoon the platoon was over and I was put into a new group a whole new group of guys you know so we weren't working together directly we actually I came back home and we didn't see each other but we went to the same building every day for work and we definitely waved at each other but it was like we're just not going to talk about this really big thing that we both went through what was the compulsion behind that to not to I don't know I think I think that's probably a probably a trauma response it has to be that you know I I can't think of any other reason I would was he injured too or was he okay the thing with him is he the the the deployment before that that I wasn't on I was still in training he was he was older than me uh they had had a couple of pretty pretty horrible uh injuries I think there was even a casualty as well death and and he was the medic for that deployment as well and and he worked on some really gnarly medical events if you will and so I think that he already had a little bit of Survivor baggage though yeah and I think he had a little bit of Survivor guill um coming into the and he's like the the nicest man and it's funny if you saw him you would not think this dude is a nav seal he's like kind of like me like just a typical like normal looking guy uh so nice just the kindest guy but he's like secretly a Navy SEAL sniper in medic who's just like a Savage on the battlefield but he uh he had some Survivor guilt and then when I got hurt along with the other people that I was with who a bunch of people got hurt I was one of quite a few he was actually the only one that was not really physically hurt he got concussed by the blast for sure but it was like everybody else got hurt like physically hurt the perfect guy to not be hurt exactly and he actually he he really struggled with that I didn't know about this uh so I'm close with his wife I haven't talked to her in a while but I was very close with this wife and she actually got in touch with me a few years after the fact and just said you know I think it would mean a lot if you two just talked it was almost like we knew this was going to happen at some point she's like he's really struggling just in general and I think that you're one of the very few people that can probably without even saying anything really inhabit the same mental space that he's in right now and so we agreed to just I hit I hit him up and I was and I just was like hey do you want to do you want to talk about Afghanistan and he's like yeah and so we met at this fast food joint I don't even know where we sat down and it wasn't even small talk it was just like let's talk about it as if it happened yesterday and the thing that really didn't mess with me but it has since really defined the experience for me is so the grenade comes over the wall and that was all my memory is let's say accurate you the grenade comes over it blows up it feels like rocks but what I didn't know is that immediately after the grenade went off I was either unconscious or appeared to be unconscious and was face down and had so much blood underneath me like the pool of blood underneath me that uh my medic he said that he immediately went into triage mode after everything goes off you know he's been trained and he looks around who can he actually save and he said I looked at you and I thought at first you were on a sheet of ice because there's there's this huge pool of blood under you and I'm like that's weird that's what he's telling me that's weird it's it's not cold enough for there to be ice and that's when it dawned on him that that's not ice that is a massive pool of blood under off the moon or whatever it was and when he saw that I was laying there and not moving he made the decision that I I can't work on JN I have to work on somebody else that's worth saving you got to he's a precious resource he has to use it for who he who he can save and so he he left he left me to die and I laid there dying and uh at some point he or one of the other guys who also was very badly hurt came back down and they discovered I wasn't dead and they picked me up and this is all you have to remember a Hellfire missile is being called in on us there's active shooting all this is this is not some LOL this is like an in the middle of a gunfight these people these people I say that cuz I don't know exactly who carried me out but I was carried out of the the the contact spot put down next to a wall I'm worthless I I can't get my tourniquets on I'm not in I'm not in the fight I am completely a casualty and between my my medic and my interpreter who I was also very close with because I I was the guy that did a lot of work with our partner for since I don't speak really at all far SE and so I needed an interpreter you know my medic Cal as can be puts the tourniquets on me and reminds me it's going to be fine you know he found all the places I was bleeding and patched me up and then he had to go work on somebody else and my interpreter at that point was so shaken up that I was he thought I was going to die that he laid on top of me and just prayed he doesn't have a weapon or anything he's laying on my body to protect me as rounds are coming down the alleyway he was like putting himself between me and Harm's Way and it was just I what I do recall and I I didn't know when this happened and I think it happened when I was laying in this Alleyway I had what I would consider like the the moment of near death did happen to me where I didn't have some profound you know I just didn't see Angels or anything like that it was I remember my vision going away from I can see and there's clearly something bad's happening to eyes are open and it's Darkness it's complete blindness it's a it's a blindness that I've never experienced before my sight is completely gone and then also my sound like what I was my hearing disappeared as well and it was like a helicopter sound W and it disappears and so I'm left truly in silence just Absol Ely in this void and all I was thinking about was and not in a dram not in an emotional way but in sort of like a f a kind of simple way I was wondering what the newspaper article would say in my local Hometown newspaper about Jonathan B Allen Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan and it wasn't like oh poor me it was just I wonder what it'll say I wonder what my headline will say will it say Jonathan B Allen will it say John Allen will it say I played baseball you know will it say that I was you know beloved friend of this person or that person and and I wondered you know who'd be at my funeral and just basic things because I knew I was dying I said to you before the same way we live kind of without thinking it's it's our entire existence as being alive so we don't think about it it it it it really hit home that your body is prepared to shut down really at any point and it's very simple like it it was just like yeah I'm dying and I felt myself dying I felt myself losing grip with the world and at some point Point again my my interpretation of how things happened I don't know what happened but the bleeding was stopped and I was able to kind of come back and I did get to the hospital and I was put in surgery and all that and um after I finally did recover I was told by or not when I recovered um when I was at the hospital I think when I first got to the hospital uh in Germany I was told that I was probably within about 30 seconds of dying had my medic not grabbed me put tourniquet on me and and saved my life so I was likely in the 30 seconds of of life and it was not scary at all it was kind of weirdly matter of fact and simple it's yeah this is it thought about my wife thought about you know where will she be in our house in Virginia Beach when invariably tonight probably someone's going to come to the door she's she's going to get told somehow so it's just kind of like I don't even know how to describe it it was just it was so simple it was not emotional it wasn't sad there wasn't pain it was just it just was and I I I liken it to and it's kind of a funny analogy but when I was seven I was rollerblading in Martha's Vineyard on vacation with my family and I hit a rock and I fell forward and I landed on my shoulder and I totally blew out my collar bone like compound fractured like horrible break but I'm seven and it's a weird thing but as soon as I hit the ground I immediately knew without a doubt I have broken completely not fractured but broken my collar bone as an adult that would not be some revelatory thing you broke your collar bone you'd see it but as a seven-year-old I don't even think I ever gave any thought to the word collar bone in my life I don't think I've ever thought about that bone I'm seven but it was like immediate I knew what was wrong with my body and I was right if compound fracture 100% right there it's like when serious [ __ ] happens to you it's your brain goes into this hyperfocus and you know things you you recall stuff that you just couldn't recall otherwise and and I think it's also why you have that time slowing down moment when the grenades coming over the wall it's like your brain goes into hyperdrive and everything is just so much easier to understand and I would say that with with death it was just like I knew it was happening it was not some maybe it was it's happening I'm dying and it was kind of like and then I and then I lived so but seven days after that you're hobbling around Home Depot yeah and dude the transition home was rough talk to me about the reintegration on the one hand it was amazing because I lived and it just felt so amazing to be alive and to be able to see my wife again and all those things that you know come with holy [ __ ] I'm alive um but I was they call it being in the red or at least I think that's what they call it that's what I call it when you come back from a particularly stressful deployment it usually combat but it could be anything maybe you have something bad that happened on deployment uh the military has these these transitional stops along the way you don't just go from Afghanistan like go home guys see you we'll see you next next month it's like you go from a Afghanistan to a resort in Maryland and you have you see therapists you you have like spa days you have guest speakers come in like other veterans that have been through some stuff it's it's it's designed to Hey guys you're not on the battlefield anymore it's time to like bring it down here and the way it's put to you during these these reintegration stops is you're in the red right now like if you think of it as a grade of like green to Yellow to Orange to Red you know Green is you in civilian life you are a normal functioning person red you're a killer who's been on the battlefield like you got to get out of here cuz this doesn't work in civilian life and so it's all about kind of well kind of depressurizing you a little bit and getting you to calm down but I didn't have that because there's not really a good process for guys that are wounded badly enough that they need to be like shipped out of country plenty of guys get hurt but they can stay in country like in Afghanistan and maybe get the care they need but mine was bad enough I had to leave to go to Germany and go through ex other surg IES and treatment um and so there just there wasn't really any sort of system set up I'm I'm not calling the military out cuz my guess is there was but maybe I didn't know about it or I didn't volunteer for it but either way I'm back home with with nothing I am home and I am in the red and I would describe the way I describe that is an enormous sense that everybody [ __ ] owes me something like everybody owes me something like I'm the man I was just overseas in war and I just got hurt in war so everybody owes me something that was totally my that was where I was the people in traffic the person serving you at Starbucks and I remember I was I was when I came back to the United States I actually came back to Maryland and they just took me in an ambulance to uh to Virginia and by this point I'm completely stable but I'm still like laying down in a gurnie in the in the ambulance and there was this like very nice woman who was working in the ambulance in EMT he was just like escorting me to Virginia and I couldn't stop being mean to her like I'm not a mean person everything she said I had to have some comment I didn't even know who this person was and there's there's nothing she's doing that in anyway is antagonizing me but I couldn't stop being an [ __ ] to her like the whole two hours or whatever it was and that's just that's not who I am that was the first time I noticed like wow I'm kind of an ass right now and then in traffic you know I couldn't really drive too well but when I did uh I would get so mad at everyone around me and so I was just I was just mad the funny story I within a few days of being home so we lived in in a HOA it's a homeowners association and they have rules about what you can and can't do with your property but you're you you agree to this when you move into these neighborhoods and so I I come back home and my wife is like dutifully packing my wounds periodically and we get this message or I should say my wife prompted me she said hey just you know the HOA has been in touch with us several times because our Chimney Cap is Rusted and they need us to fix it and I'm like okay whatever and then we got uh I think it was a voicemail it was a voicemail somebody called us from the HOA and like hey we sent you that that card and you still haven't changed your Chimney Cap we drove by today you got to change that and I'm like no way I pick up the phone and I called them and remember they have no idea who I am they don't know anything about me and I call and I'm like is this so and so and they're like yeah and I'm like do you have any idea what I've been doing for the past six months and she's like no like why would I know and I I turned it into like how dare you yeah ask me to change my Chimney Cap so huge level of entitlement uh feeling like I did was the most righteous and best thing in the world and no one can top that and that was really hard to get out of yeah but I would say that at some point you realize you're acting that way and suddenly you're like okay I'm back I don't want to be that guy anymore that's like embarrassing to be so egotistical and entitled even if it's warranted to some degree to be feeling that way it's so off-putting to be around people like that that once you realize you're doing that you're able to stop but it takes months it's very impressive uh you're incredibly prepared to uh display your shortcomings whether it was being close to narcissistic because of self-belief like there's a way that you can spin that so that you're not the bad guy so that you're the good guy but that's a problem and also I wanted to rebel and I wanted to do this as a kid and I didn't really care and I wasn't going to fulfill my potential and then I did this thing uh I think there's an awful lot that people can learn from uh taking a Frank assessment of your shortcomings and saying I was an [ __ ] uh people should say that more because I think when you are and when you can accept it and when you can also say and it's my job to be better that's not a comment on my selfworth as a person for the rest of time true I periodized assholey and I did it for a while yeah and then the goal was to get out of that but I think that seems psychologically healthy to me as opposed to saying well you know there was coping strategies and I was blah blah blah it's like no I was a dick I did I was a dick for a while okay so you've done that you you're you're now back civy life you're going through this thing uh physical mental emotional reintegration was there a process you went through uh not really no I I think that you know a therapy oh no I definitely saw a therapist and I I would attribute a lot of my ability to be a noral San happy person now to therapy um you know there's i' I've had to work through quite a bit uh just from that deployment and also just in general just my own life trauma uh but I think that you know having some pretty profoundly bad experiences in your life at the time are pretty awful but many times they're the most defining moments of Our Lives where you're able to really see What You're Made Of when things are going really badly and I think that I've had a couple times in my life where my life has been really really challenging whether it was in Seal training or or in combat or reintegration or trying to find my way in the civilian world uh and it's in those moments the the only way that I've been able to get better and push through is if I'm really honest about who I am and what I'm doing and I have found that it's just very effective to be honest with yourself about what you're doing well what you're not doing well and not being afraid to kind of own up to it I think that that's a good way to work through your problems it's just saying yeah I I have all these issues but it doesn't make me a bad person it just means I have shortcomings just like everybody else does so given that you've seen death y escaped death Y and you now study death yeah what have you come to believe about what constitutes a good life um I mean I would say that uh having purpose is is a big part of what brings me happiness in my life I mean it's you know in in being Mr Ballin you know my life went from being pretty comparable to what I had growing up and then now I have all these new opportunities that just come from the success of this Channel and they've been really exciting and I get to do things I never could have done before but what consistently brings me genuine happiness is not like vacations necessarily or a new car it's having a goal and working towards that goal and it's actually the act of working towards the goal that is the happy part getting to the goal means you got to find a new goal and so it quickly ends you know uh and so I think that more than you know buying stuff or or even experiences I think it's having like a core sense of why you're here at least for this period this chapter of your life and it doesn't it doesn't need to be some Grand goal either but just having something like a Target of Some Kind it really orients your life in a way that few things can that's that's when I'm I'm happy and focused and my life feels complete is when I have something hard to like aim for whether or whether or not I achieve it in many ways is kind of secondary to having it it's like you need you need the target you know what do you think happens after we die do you believe in ghosts oh man you know I would say that I probably was was more open to life after death um before I became Mr Ballin and began reading all these stories I'm not saying that I've changed my opinion on that I think that I've just read so much about death and about well death that uh I I think there's an element of things just kind of end um and I I think that and a big reason I think that is actually because of my near-death experience where it just kind of felt like things were coming to an end and it wasn't really sad or anything it just was you know I I if you think about you know before you were born let's say what year were you born 1988 89 okay so are you bummed about not being there for 1987 no you weren't there you you'd have no frame of reference it that time happened but the fact that you weren't there for it doesn't really matter you you don't have emotional baggage with oh man I wish I could have seen 1987 the same is going to be true on the on the other side there is no you to experience it and so there's nothing to feel bad about you just stop existing and I I think that because I've I was so close to to death in my opinion that it just feels like you got you got time now and take some chances because it just kind of ends at some point and then in a hundred years no one's going to know who you were it's you're gone and that's dark but it allows me to not really worry about stuff up you know I take for example um doing a live event and I know you did a whole live tour what unless you're the person doing the show what you may not realize is that for talent for the person who's who's leading the show when you go on stage to do a live performance especially for someone like me where I'm I'm doing storytelling right it's it's like a skill set can you tell the story or not you're setting yourself up for either big win or big fail if I'm billing myself as this incredible story tell her and come on down to my show and I'm going to tell you these immersive stories and oh it's going to be so great and I butcher it it's not just that that show goes badly it's that talk begins to spiral that oh no John's not really a good Storyteller he can edit really well or this is all written by somebody else and he can't really do this so you're jeopardizing your brand you're risking the brand by doing the live show but the upside is like a hundred times what you'd get by doing a digital show because doing it live demonstrates that no this guy can really do this thing this is exactly and so if you want the big payoff you got to take the big risk and a lot of people can't do that now granted it's hard to even have the opportunity to have the live show but it's like when you have opportunities in front of you that come as a Highwire type opportunities take them if you fail who cares like who cares everyone's gonna forget you in 100 yards any no one cares about you the truth is is like no one cares about you they care about themselves it's that that's that's being human a huge part of if you take any basic philosophy course a big part of it is understanding that humans are by Nature egocentric they only really care about you in in brief periods of time and really as it pertains to them they aren't really invested in what you care about they might act like they are they might ask really good questions about what you're up to but at the end of the day they don't really care that much they don't they care about themselves and so if you if you remember that and you think about the fact that in 100 years from now you'll be dead your kids will be your kids will be dead or maybe they're still alive your parents are dead your grandparents are dead and no one even knows who you are do you know who your grandfather's grandfather is no no of course you don't like that's going to be us and so if you combine it with it that's going to happen and no one really cares that much about you I mean think of all the scandals that have happened let's the first one I thought of was the the Will Smith slapping Chris Rock which is still very scandalous and maybe I've chosen the wrong thing but I think it still works for this example that was humongous news for a long time and it's still big news to a degree now but mostly people are like man whatever think about that that was like so many people saw that that's like a huge thing and it mostly has faded away and yeah it'll be a meme it'll be this or that but ultimately people have moved on because it's not them they care about themselves if they're bringing that up it's just because it's a good story it's not because they care about it and so people are too hung up on this idea that other people are invested in you there's like maybe a couple people in your life that are actually invested and it's usually your partner or it's you know your parents or it's your children but beyond that dude you're on your own and it's actually really powerful to realize that you can kind of do whatever you want and if you it up along the way no one really cares because they don't care about you and you're going to die you studied philosophy it seems like that kind of Swing for the fences things aren't as big of a deal as you think they are uh there is more there are more degrees of freedom yeah uh that you have in life more balanced than you might believe yeah uh is there anything else that you rely on when times get hard are there any other principles philosophically in terms of Life mantras that you really rely on yeah I have one in particular that I I rely on a lot and it's this notion of do things that scare you um I definitely didn't come up with this and actually ironically Will Smith is the person that I get this from it's complete happen stance he he has this amazing clip he had uh I think he was on like Oprah's talk show or something this is several years ago but he described going skydiving for the first time and how it was kind of a thing that they talked about with his buddies and he didn't think it was that serious but then they're all on vacation together and one of the guys says hey there's a skyd place you know down the road let's do it tomorrow and it was kind of like oh yeah maybe but it slowly became a thing and before long the next day they were all at the Skydive place and Will's kind of like are we really doing this cuz I don't know if I want to do this now and his friend's like a it'll be fine so they get in the plane they go up and now Will's like terrified you know he's strapped into his instructor but it's no it's not a joke anymore he kind of doesn't want to do this but his instructor is like real relaxed he's like hey I've done a thousand of these things you're going to be fine we're going to get to the door it'll be open I'll count to three we'll jump out it'll be great it's gonna be just fine and so Will's like hey calm me down it's all good and so the door slides open it's time to jump and you know his Will's Buddy goes out with his instructor and then it's Will's turn they go to the edge of the door and and the instructor's like okay one and he just jumps and so out they go and will said he's like I was so so scared until we were out the door and then it was like this profound amazing experience you know I mean have you Scot before no okay well it's it feels like the you're actually being pushed upward a little bit it does not feel like you're falling in no way well it really doesn't it feels like you're being lifted and it's just this amazing feeling and he talks about how much fun it was and he lands on the ground and he's like wow and he has this Epiphany that you know in his life the things that he was the most scared of often times were the most rewarding when he still did it and skydiving was one of those things it's like this unbelievable thing that he was so scared to do and so he said at the end of this little story he told was and so what I discovered is the best the best things in life are often on the other side of fear and I have found in my life without having coming up with such a good quote but that has definitely been true I mean I was terrified to do pull comp in second phase of SEAL training where that 20 minutes of them tying knots and stuff in your hoses because it's scary it's hard There's real danger there but finishing that test and passing that test was one of the most fulfilling moments of my life cuz it was so hard and I passed it and it changed my life because I passed it because I overcome something that a lot of people can't but I I was only able to have that experience because I pushed past the fear of doing it people quit before taking that test it's so scary it's rare because you're pretty far into buds but that's the gist it's like fear is an indication that something is worth doing indifference is an indication that it's not people think fear means don't do it it means do it obviously there are certain things that are fearful and you shouldn't do them but you get the idea and so uh you know taking we keep referencing this this live stuff that live event I did last October I was terrified to do that because of the risk to the brand you know there's all these it's me on stage with a mic as you know it's like it's all on you and I tell my kids all the time to do things that scare them and I felt like I have to live up to this your money where your mouth is and I told the kids I'm like I'm scared to do this but when you're in the audience you're going to see your dad up there and you're going to see me doing the thing I'm scared of because that's what you do when you have an opportunity to do something that scares you you do it how do you overcome the fear I think I just am willing to do it even though I'm scared I think I'm just willing to keep doing it that's it I am just I'm willing to do things even if they're scary not because I'm some hero it's just that's the way my brain works I'm I'm able to do it I don't know I think um not giving too much respect to fear yeah you know what we've tried to do what civilization has done incredibly well is reduce down most the things that we can't predict we know what the weather's going to be like next week we have air conditioning to keep us cool when it's hot and heat is to keep us warm when it's cold we have tried to bring in the guard rails or like when you go bowling bring up the those buers bumper things on the side so there's no gutters yeah and I think that in certain ways it'll have made us hypers sensitized to fear yeah that true this is a big departure from what I am used to feeling yeah and uh it's like I've done a bunch of stuff that's scared me recently and I gave way too much respect to the emotion of fear yeah way too much A lot of people do everybody does it's a matter of toning it down when you feel that way and that's that is I think the only way to do that is Con consistently putting yourself in positions where you're scared to prove to yourself that the fear isn't as big as you think it is you're never going to fear I don't think goes away I think fear will remain it's what's your fear response and I think it's something you can train because my fear response I think actually is to panic but over time I have begun to harness the fact that no if you don't do that and you just hold for a second and just keep doing the thing you're doing there's a big payoff at the end and it's allowed me to not panic and run away but push forward speaking of fear we're here in a spooky field with a a car on fire and a full moon in a weird house over the far side yeah have you got stories that fit this environment I do I do I have a really good one uh from uh out in Utah in the 1970s um this is actually one of the earliest stories that I covered actually this is one of the first ones so um we don't have the names of the people involved so I'm going to call them a man and a woman but you know they this is every bit their story we just don't use their names I think they actually didn't want their names used that's what iall so back in the 1970s there was this this young guy and girl who are the main characters of the story and they I think they met in college and they go out on this first date uh they go to a restaurant a diner and they got along fine but there wasn't any magic it was you know kind of a nothing date that they both kind of instinctively knew that this was likely not going to go anywhere Beyond this first date there's no chemistry however they both kind of intuitively noticed it and the the guy towards the end of the date when it's kind of like okay time to wrap things up now he decided to take a chance he figured what's what's what's the worst that can happen I already can tell this isn't going anywhere and he says to the to a date he says you know do you want to do something kind of unexpected you want to like go do something kind of crazy with me right now and the girl was actually like kind of taking back she okay what what do you want to do and he's like well I I often times go for walks out in Provo Canyon this beautiful Canyon that's not near that's nearby it's got this amazing Trail it brings you out to this Overlook with this incredible view of the star like it's a really cool spot and I go there you know later in the day and no one's there and it's it's pretty cool but it's you know we're hiking in the woods in the middle of the night you know what I mean and she's like okay let's do it you know it's like suddenly the date went from going nowhere to it's kind of exciting and so now there's there's chemistry that's like they're going into the unknown together and so they they quickly leave the diner they hop in his car and it's a short drive over to the parking lot where provoc Canyon is you know he pulls into the spot there's nobody there they get out and and now there really is they're they're getting along they're kind of laughing telling jokes they're holding hands and they walk right from the parking lot onto this paved trail that goes right into the forest and so it's it's nighttime you know just a very it's a this is a this is a well this is a well-used trail this is not some Goat Trail in the middle of nowhere this is a well-used trail and so they start walking into the the forest and uh after a while and this is something they would say after the fact but we know this is what was happening as they were walking their the the the feel the vibe of the night really changed as soon as they got into the woods you know they're excited the states suddenly become exciting and then they get into the forest they're on the trail they're holding hands they're walking and both of them began feeling this really intense dread as they're walking in but they don't know each other they just this is their first date they don't have the the background of a relationship to begin touching on something that's hard to point out you know neither of them turned to the other and said I feel uncomfortable instead they just kept their mouth shut and and thought okay I'll just keep on going so they stop talking they begin walking faster out of this kind of nervous energy they have now they're holding hands and and they're just walking through this Trail because they're trying to get to this Overlook basically get it out of the way and come on back but it's all unspoken they haven't said boy this is anxious they just they're feeling that way and so they're walking on this Trail again surrounded by trees there's nobody else out there and it's pretty dark they don't have a flashlight and as they're basically speed walking at this point in silence at some point they hear a rustling sound kind of off to the side and at the exact same time the guy steps on something that he described as being soft and he stepped on it and he has no idea what he's stepping on no clue it's something soft and he's heard this rustling sound and they're feeling anxious and he immediately stops because he stepped on something and the girl she's sensing okay what's going on here and without any communication they turned and walked out didn't even look down they didn't they have no idea what's going on it was like they both knew let's get the out of here I don't know what's going on out here and they practically ran back to their car totally safe they get in their car and now that they're in the safety of their car they kind of began laughing about it like yeah I wonder what that was I stepped on something out there I don't know something moving around maybe there's a big animal I don't know but that was it it was just that was the whole date and actually they wound up getting married because this date was like this kind of amazing thing where they bonded over the fear of being in this this forest and so they get married and 10 years later they're at home and the TV is on it's it's tuned to to like a DAT line type of show like a a true crime show and neither of them really watching but an an interview comes on and it's it's a journalist talking to a death row inmate it's a very famous death row inmate and he's very near his execution date and he's giving this kind of full-blown interview about you know what he did and at some point the journalist asked him was there ever a time that you almost got caught before you got caught and the serial killer is like yeah there was a time I was out in Provo Canyon and I just killed a girl and I was trying to dispose of her body and I dragged her across the trail and this young couple comes turning around the corner and they stepped on the body and I was maybe a foot away holding her looking up at them in the darkness waiting to see what they were going to do but for some reason the couple didn't look down they didn't look around they just turned and left and so that was it that was the that was the time I was got caught and so it would turn out the guy or where they had come in contact with Ted Bundy like one of the most infamous serial killers of all time who effectively said had he investigated he would have had to kill the couple it's great so they got their first date was running into Ted Bundy wow yeah oh my God and actually I there if if you're interested there's several other close calls with Ted Bundy that if you Google close calls with Ted Bundy he he came close to killing people several times and it's like I don't have the vwb till there was something with the vwb till I forget what it was unfortunately I don't remember all the anecdotes but there's quite a few that are that one is the most startling because it's so like visceral what happened but the others were you know this girl who almost went on a date with Ted Bundy but then got a bad feeling about it and canceled and it like the day later he gets arrested for being Ted Bundy um stuff like or one person who Ted Bundy randomly befriended this this woman and I think they were dating for a while and he was very close with her child and it was I mean he's like in their family while he's killing other people at the same time and then he just broke up with her and moved on like he didn't do anything to her or her family while he's actively killing all these women but there for some reason he just had this normal family happy wholesome relationship with this girl for like a year and she would find out after he was executed that she was actively dating a serial killer so it's just Ted Bundy had all these weird interactions with people that have been documented but that one to me is the most startling who are some of the most evil people that you've covered oh man I I have one for sure uh there's there's in terms I've covered people that have committed horrible crimes to to children and and just terrible like John Wayne gasy who just killed young boys but the one that stands out as just the most heartwrenching by far is um Jack and I forget their names Jack and eileene okay there this older couple they're trying to sell their boat they want to retire and go live with they want to go live next to their their child who just had their first grandson or grandchild and so in order to afford the new house that would be next to their child they wanted to sell their boat and they got this prospective buyer who wanted to buy the boat it's a very nice boat this is not a cheap purchase you know so this there's some diligence there and they asked to go and testr run the boat but with Jack and unfortunately forgetting their names their last name is Haw I think anyways they go out on the ocean with the prospective buyer and two of his like friends that came along if you will so it's like three of these people and then Jack and his his partner and uh they end up going out on the ocean at which point you know the killer they end up taking over the ship they tie up Jack and and and his partner and instead of just you know bringing them somewhere and dumping them you know and taking their boat CU all they wanted to do was steal the boat for whatever reason they decided to drive out in the middle of the ocean and they attached them to the Anchor but they tied them at the very back end of the anchor so the Anchor's here the chain runs all the way and they're tied at the The Bitter End of the anchor and they brought them out and they said at some point we're going to throw this anchor over the end over the side and you're going to drown and for hours they waited for this and then finally when they did it think about it you have all this chain link you have to wait for it to they throw the anchor over CH and apparently they were holding on everything they could and the killers were just watching as they're struggling like Fully Alive they're not wounded at all and they were pulled into the water and they were pulled underneath the water and drowned and I just can't think of a more Psych Al horrible way to die than how do you know that story it was on Dat line and the killer he did a whole expose about what happened of himself yeah he's he's he's guilty he admitted to what he did and there's a whole breakdown of the things that happened on that boat and that was it it's like a horrifying what do you think about how evil Works think people are evil what do you think shapes behavior for real extreme sort of masochism and and the Ted bundies of the world and stuff like that and how culpable are these people in your mind I don't know I mean I think that there are definitely I think some of the worst are the most culpable because it's a very intentional thing to be a serial killer I mean you're making not that I have any idea but you know it's you're making a choice to to seek out a particular target of some kind and you're doing it over and over again on some level you are aware this is not okay Behavior you know but you keep doing it people that and I'm not giving anybody a pass here but you know crimes of passion is something a little bit easier to understand it doesn't necessarily feel evil it feels like okay I I wouldn't do that but I understand feeling a sudden rage and making a terrible decision in that moment I can understand that and for those people you're still culpable for your actions but it's the people that like have a conscious choice to seek out violence over and over again not even necessarily serial serial killers but serial abusers and people like that that's evil that is seeking out pain and misery on others really because it makes you feel good and that's the only way um so I think in the in the kind of when it's a crime of passion or it's just kind of it happened out of some random thing that doesn't feel evil it just feels like a bad situation that was made worse by bad decision-making but evil comes when someone's doing a a violent activity over and over again by choice and then to me I I I think you're just not mentally well I think there's something broken with you and that thing and we call that being evil didn't you look at um skin walker Ranch as well I went down a rabbit hole about that quite a while ago what did you learn about that I haven't covered it in a long time so I don't have the details as well as I used to but so Skinwalker Ranch is is like you know it's a hot bed of potential Paranormal Activity uh you know there was at one point this non-governmental organization that went out there and did this whole really in-depth study and they came back with quite a few anomalies I don't know if anything was proven but you know there's like Paranormal Activity hot spots all over the the the livestock are found in the mornings you know with surgical in decisions and organs missing and uh you know of all the places in the world I mean this is one of the places where consistently people are saying like weird stuff happens there um and you know I don't know if it's true or not but there's enough there's enough stories of people encountering you know the the most terrifying was there was one of the people who lived on Skinwalker Ranch and one of the one of the main owners I think at some point that he described how at night he and his family stayed in this small house that was on this huge huge property Skinwalker Ranch is a massive massive property but they had this little Farmhouse that was kind of situated in the middle of the the the acreage and so there's no neighbors anywhere it's just this isolated home right in the middle of nowhere and he described he began hearing tapping sounds on the outside of his house at night like just like tapping on his house there's there's no neighbors there's nothing nearby and because of all the weird activity in the property he was too scared to investigate for the longest time just for for days and days he would just hear this tapping at night but then one time he decided to go investigate when he heard this tapping and he looked outside and there's this tall figure this dark tall figure right outside the window tapping on the glass over and like staring directly through the grass tapping at him goes outside there's nothing there comes back inside another window another figure tapping on the glass like sketchy stuff wow yeah this has become this is all part of Skunk Works and and is it aliens is it Paranormal Activity uh do you remember that period was it Tom Delong from Blink 182 was like huge in yeah uh in he actually reached out to me I spoke to oh yeah he reached out to me early on in my my Mr Ballin Journey uh and there was a time where we were talking about potentially collaborating on a show it didn't really amount to much mostly because he linked back up with blink182 when he's on tour um but yeah I think that's his calling his calling making great music not being like but he he actually is is attributed with getting the government to least classified files that are you know UFO files if you go on Wikipedia which is not exactly the most reputable Source he is the guy Tom dong the lead singer for blinkin 82 is officially the guy who got the government to say okay yep we do have footage of UFOs and it's because he would go to DC and like straight up hold meetings and pressure people to come out and say it because he's like I'm telling you I I know all sorts of people that have shown me videos and pictures and evidence he's like I'm tell I think it's real his whole life he's hooked on Aliens you know and he really he pressured the government and they listened and they released all these files because of Tom Bel long it really is because of him who knew what's My Age Again would be such an important pivotal moment in the UFO thing I remember the episode that he did on Rogan and you know Joe's big into his aliens into his UFOs and stuff like that but while he was getting up and walking around because they were headphones Joe and Jamie were able to talk to each other quietly while Tom was walking I'm sure I I don't think I'm like imagining this I'm pretty sure that this actually happened but they're saying like this guy's crazy like but they're saying it into the mic so only those two can hear and he's wandering around like trying to get videos up on his phone or something uh yeah I I have to say I did feel like listening to that episode especially the one that he did with Joe and maybe it was because it was framed Joe and Jamie as people that are usually quite ulous about this or at least Joe like was skeptical and that colored my opinion but there was a little bit of me that was like I feel like Tom could do with someone checking in a little bit this seems like but that's the thing like the line between legitimate obsession with something other people don't see and outright delusion with something that you're imagining yeah is by Design difficult for the people outside of that situation to see yeah you know if you're this you know multiplication Factor different in terms of what you're looking at and it's like you know any invention any insight about this is what's happening with the government this is what's happening with climate change this is what's happening with something big that needs to change uh the opportunity to look crazy is pretty high very correct I actually spent a lot of time a lot of things I probably have had maybe four or five meaningful conversations with Tom about this topic because we were thinking about what we wanted to do with the show and what I what I got from Tom is when I first interacted with him it was a lot like I mean he's very into UFOs and aliens and it would be easy to to make a judgment but what I found what I found with Tom was he's a guy who is not worried about what you think about him he really doesn't care he is he he cares about UFOs he cares about the existence of aliens and he does not care how he comes off and he knows that he has enough of influence in a platform that if he wants to pursue this he has the ability to do that he can get people to give him information in order to like let him learn more about the thing he loves and he's been hooked on the pursuit of alien life to some degree like I think his whole life and so I actually began to really respect that side of Tom that yeah he's this amazing alist like Rockstar but he has this very real passion that stayed True to this Obsession that he's always had and it's like that's the thing he cares about and you see it it's right there I mean he's not faking it and he's so passionate about it and I actually I I I I I really like Tom he's he's a guy that is it makes sense that he's the guy that outed the government about UFOs and it also makes sense that he was you know criticized or critiqued by Joe Rogan or whoever it was in that podcast but it's because Tom is not filtering he's like this is what I want to do yeah yeah there is something there's some sort of like innocent Purity about that I think he's a really good guy have you ever received backlash for promoting these sorts of stories um the only like well yes for sure I I told a story about and this was early days I told a story about this guy who he worked on an Apple Farm an apple orchard I guess it's called and where they stored a lot of these apples in this closed off room some chemical process was happening with the actual apples and the I guess the the chemicals they sprayed in there to keep them fresh obviously I don't know exactly what happened but they had this closed Shack where this produce was and it had turned toxic at some point again I forget the details of the story but one by one people were going into this Shack like workers there to get something and then not coming out again and with each person who went in they were going to find the other person they were going in in an attempt to say Hey where's Tom and they'd go in and they wouldn't come out oh then Mike would say hey where where' Tim just go and four people died just from going in suffocated and I I told it with respect I told it as accurately as I could but I didn't seek out any sort of permission for it it was a publicly recorded story but the mom of one of the uh victims actually her other living son contacted me and just was like you have broken her her heart to bring this up again you didn't contact us this just happened and now you know we're getting messages left and right because the video gets millions of views everybody's hitting him hey do you know Mr B covering your story hey he got this detailed wrong hey he did this he did and so our reaction was I'm taking it down I'm not this is not about oh well this is a great video I want to get my views it's like no I don't I don't want to hurt this person's feelings and so we pulled that that one down there was a couple others early on when I didn't seek out permission for someone's obvious their story and I got details wrong because it's their story that they didn't tell me that I pulled those videos down as well um but that that's the gist I mean the most backlash I got was not for the stuff I posted about you know spooky stories it was when I was I told you when I was trying to do social media content and it was not working well one of the things I was trying to use as like here's going to be my social media angle was me the Navy SEAL just talking about my experiences about training about deployments nothing classified at all but I was talking about being a seal and that actually did get a little bit a little bit of traction um not enough to spawn you know a whole livelihood off of that but it was you know getting some views and uh it it drew the criticism of the active duty seal Community because what people don't realize is that even though there are loads of seals and Military folk that are civilians now that write books and there's movies and they talk about their exploits despite that being the case many seals too I mean there's like God knows how many Navy Seals that talk about they're um motivational speakers that talk about their military experience doin the [ __ ] yeah so but even though that's true what people don't realize is the vast majority of Navy Seals in particular are totally quiet and do not talk about their experiences there's like a I think I'm right in saying that there is a a skepticism and a vigilance and a backlash against basically anyone who did seal Duty and then writes the book pivots into the motivational thing is that endemic to being a seal is that just is that kind of like an Unwritten code of some kind well if you think of it this way uh it's it's definitely not endemic to the SEAL Teams I think it's more combat units might even be just military in general that I think this happens it's Prof it's it's very profound or it's very uh it happens the most in I think Special Operations units but this take for example Navy Seals I mean when you become a Navy SEAL you get this Gody gold pin of a of an eagle holding onto a flint lock pistol and a trident and it's actually just called your Tri that's the name of this pin you wear it on your uniform and in in the Navy every other badge you wear for it's called your insignia for there's dozens of job hundreds of jobs in the Navy that are not Navy Seals and they all get their own pins they're all kind of small but the Navy SEAL Trident is like in your face five times the size of everything else and it's the thing that designates you as a seal on your uniform and if you think of it this way there have been all these men because it's only been men who have been sealed so far who have worn the Trident and died that those people they're the ones that have built the legacy of the SEAL Teams and so the the the way it is put to you when you join the SEAL Teams is this [ __ ] is not yours this is the communities you're wearing it because you're part of this community but it's not yours to to to use so to speak because men have fought and died to build what this this thing is I mean like that the SEAL Teams are super you know successful and you know regarded as this really really amazing unit not because of me but because of all the people before me who have died in in the in into getting to this point and so it's it's really about understanding that you're joining a community that relies on each other it's a team it's not an individual sport right and that's really impressed on you that when you get out you don't act like you're the Navy SEAL because it's not about that there's all these people that are not here anymore that built up the Legacy and frankly The credibility of the Trident and so it's a known thing absolutely known it's not ambiguous in the least that if you get out of the military of the SEAL Teams and you start talking about your experiences no matter how benign you will draw the ey of the active duty Community 100% of the time how would you or actually how does it make you feel as someone who didn't do many tours yeah but fought and bled and risked your life and yet the active military community has a problem with you and what you did you know the way I look at it is um I when I was in the active duty when I was active duty I would have [ __ ] all over somebody like me when I got out of the military like I I was all about doing the things that seals do I wanted to be a part of the team I wanted to be the quiet professional I wanted to be the best I could be all those things and so I remember when I was active duty we'd be sitting in our team room which is just like a little Office Space that's just for your platoon and it's like it's like a fraternity basically in there it's pingpong tables and stuff and um I remember we would talk openly about seals that were out that were very successful at least publicly very successful that we would just [ __ ] talk disparaging completely for no reason other than look at this guy talking about how great he is as a seal right but the reality is is when you get out of the military it the difference between being active and being not active is enormous when you are in an active duty Seal Team it is not just a job it is a life you your life is the teams even when when you're at the team you're you're with your teammates and you're doing seal stuff and when you're home you're not well I think technically you are on call to a degree to you know maybe you could get spun up and go that's really just some insane thing happens maybe maybe but but to a degree you know you you could be called upon to come do extra training that you weren't prepping for and so when you're home you don't really feel relaxed at all you feel like I'm going to go to work I I work the weekends half the time there's training anyways it's just a very it's an intense job takes over your whole life and there's there's a big push to really contribute to the culture of of the teams like you don't get to just be a seal who doesn't spend time with your teammates outside of work the expectation is you're not only going to work together but you're going to like Live Together full immersion what that does is it creates an incredibly cohesive team while you're on the team when you're not on the team you are not part of that Community anymore and you lose a lot of your identity and when you're in that bubble when you're in the active duty teams you don't realize how important it is that you're in a team you're in a community you have all these people around you that are just like you you are secure you your purpose is to be a seal you don't need to Market yourself you don't need to do anything you just got to be a seal right but when you leave you've left that Community you're not a part of it anymore and it's really hard to navigate what do I do now I was so am yeah you lose your identity in a big way and invariably and I see this all the time and I feel I feel a lot of empathy for these guys invariably a lot of these seals in particular they get out of the military and I and I often find myself noticing when these people get out cu I go on LinkedIn and I see transitioning Navy SEAL and I see what they're up to a lot of them start with something that looks like a good idea on paper hey I'm going to go try to be you know the finance guy or whatever it is but they end up not liking it and they kind of become an entrepreneur and they try to think about ways they can work for themselves because a lot of seals are pretty entrepreneurial and they default to the one thing that they know sells and it's I was a Navy SEAL to some degree raising your hand and telling the world that you were a Navy SEAL that gives you so much credibility in isn't it yeah it does what else do you have not to mention you also literally did that job for years and years at a time it really affects who you are and so you see these guys shift to social media and begin self-promoting and it's it's really really mild stuff you don't see guys hopping on they being like and that's when I killed this person or something it's usually like here are some things I learned from Navy SEAL training which were applicable to to you you know it's like that type of content super benign not going to hurt anybody it's not classified but all it takes is one time doing that and you will draw the attention of the active Community how much content did you make a lot and it was like you know I was not sharing classified stuff at least I I I'd be shocked if I did it was mostly like here's what it's like to not sleep for this much time you know that kind of thing but I posted a lot I kind of took the high volume approach and so I can imagine you know all of my teammates who are active duty and and I know what it feels like to be active duty I don't fault them I understand how they feel they're seeing somebody that was just like them he was part of the group he's part of the wolf pack and now it's like he couldn't be farther from us here he is Shilling the fact that he was a seal on social media and it's so cringey and all that stuff it's easy to do that when you're active because You' you're not out there yet you haven't figured figured it out yet you haven't transitioned yet but invariably what happens is you draw the attention of the teams and they're really upset with you and I would say that seals are pretty good at being confrontational they're not worried about being anonymous you'll you'll get messages from people where they want you to know who they are and they want you to know that they personally do not like you I've gotten messages from Medal of Honor recipients I've gotten messages very negative very negative messages I've gotten you know really like seriously deep cutting messages from people I served with on my team like in Afghanistan some of the people who are the my closest friends in the world I thought um but you know I knew that was going to happen but it kind of came out of a place of desperation in a way I'm trying to find my way in the world post military and nothing was working and I tried the whole let's tell people I'm a seal and see what happens and it really had intensely negative blowback and I actually left Virginia to escape the negativity which did not just live online Virginia Beach is where SE all the SEAL Teams are I would run into guys and no one was like doing anything to me but I'd get looks from people that definitely knew who I was definitely didn't like me I'm like with my family I'm out at a grocery store getting stared at by a seal who's clearly menacing like staring at me like I don't want that mostly I feel bad for my family I don't want that you know what I mean and again I don't fault these guys because I know what it's like to be active I get the culture that you hate the people that are doing what I'm doing but that's the problem with the community right now is that I'm an example of someone that that would have [ __ ] all over somebody that did the whole Navy SEAL social media thing and then what happened when I got out I did the whole Navy SEAL social media thing and I'm not an idiot I'm I'm very the result that you expected yeah exactly it's so and I'm not crazy it's it's just it's hard to transition so would you like to try and mend the relationships with the people who were in your past or are you kind of just like I think it's best that we go our own sort of separate ways I'm pausing because there's a part of me that well I'll say this so I posted a lot of the the Navy SEAL Centric look at me I'm the cool Navy SEAL guy in 2017 2018 about um and then I kind of transitioned to trying other stuff on social media that didn't work and then 2020 was Mr Balland uh there were some people that sent some stuff to me that was just uncalled for it went well beyond hey you're doing something I disagree with to saying things that are like Beyond hurtful and also somewhat threatening that I can't just ignore those people it's unforgivable it's past that but the people that simply took exception to what I was doing for all the reasons I implicitly understand when your active duty I was really mad at them but I also I understand where they're coming from and I am in some ways empathetic to the way they they are and I have actually recently spoken to some of those people um and I got some nice messages from some people recently what have you said or what would you say to the the people if you could sit down and have a coffee with them that I'm still the same guy guy that you served with you know it isn't that I you know decided I'm going to morph into this like jerk who just decided to sell out for a little bit I'm the same guy you knew but I went through an experience that you haven't yet you're still active you have not attempted to go from active duty seal to doing something completely different and it's way more challenging than you think it is it's no one's going to know what you did or why you're valuable unless you tell them that's a fundamental truth and it comes back to what I said earlier which is no one gives a about you they care about themselves and so if you want to get hired by a company you need to tell someone why you matter and why you'll help them at their company they're not going to seek you out unless there's some really compelling reason to and again it comes down to you need to tell the world what your value proposition is it's it it I used to think it's so funny I I thought this in I thought that in virtue of being an AB seal that when I got out just everybody would somehow know and I'd get a great job and I'd live happily ever after and I really believe that that there would be no work I would just step out of the team Aces I've made look at how competent I am give me the jobs give me the opportunities but the reality is is people are totally Keen to to talk to you they want to hear about your experience they do they can totally see that there's value in being a seal and you know what you did could translate to business that's definitely true but it's it's not the end all Beall you you can't just be a former seal and I think that that's also something that active seals are going to have a hard time adjusting to cuz I did being a seal is cool it's got It's amazing it's and and frankly I'm also speaking from the I only was a seal for like five minutes I think it's much harder to imagine what it would be like if you did 30 years as like a tier one Navy SEAL with like 20 combat tours I can see that's hard to separate from But ultimately you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that once you get out the fact that you were a seal is just not your identity yeah it's it doesn't it matters but it matters only in certain ways and I think that I just want I there's a part of me that always worried that people thought that I had really changed but in in know in the worse way that somehow I had you know threw to the wind everything I I knew from being a seal and just said the teams I'm going do whatever I want and post whatever I want when in reality you know I made a decision because I needed I needed something to work I I couldn't I couldn't get Traction in the civilian world because I didn't really know what I wanted to do and I didn't really know how to Market myself and social media just felt like it's such an obvious big opportunity to just get opportunities in general whether it's work or entrepreneurial endeavors that the decision I made was like I'm choosing my career and my livelihood and my civilian career and my livelihood and my family over the teams meaning I'm prepared to go this route the post about being a seal because it's the highest percentage chance that it will open doors for me that I need opened right now as a guy trying to find my way in the world I knew going into that I was going to open you know Pandora's box if you will so it didn't surprise me when I got the negativity it just surprised me at how how aggressive it was I mean I was getting text messages nearly every day from people telling me not only how they felt about me but that also they'd like send me what other people were saying about me as just a way to remind me that this is this is everywhere everybody a real Sac cow this thing you recently did Shawn Ryan Show yeah how did it feel to go so deep into your military history you must feel conflicted about this very conflicted am I reopening another can of worms is this me reg glorifying the thing I did Sean's got legitimacy with you know his background and many people have been on his show Rob O'Neal Tim Kennedy you know guys that are more high-profile for their military thing than you but yeah what was it like to speak to Shawn Ryan in depth about your military history given your conflicted military relationships yeah I mean in a way it was cathartic you know I it's been years really I I deleted so I should say this when and I was getting all that negative negativity from the seal post I was doing around the time I made that shift and was trying stuff on Tik Tok and then I ultimately landed on the Mr Ballin stuff there was a period of time where it was like am I going to delete everything and just accept that I'm going to have this black mark on my name from the active community and go another direction or am I just going to accept that my life's going to be a living hell but at least I'll have this social media falling and I decided no matter what I had grown so far online you my presence online from the seal stuff it was not going to be worth the mental toll of having this negativity so I deleted everything and uh after it was deleted um you know I basically stopped thinking about it I was I was embarrassed about it more than anything you know I as much s swinging a Miss big time like an epic swing in a miss and unfortunately one of the things you hear all the time in the SEAL Teams but definitely in the military this is a military thing is rep ation is everything it's everything and if you're a a Navy SEAL I you're a special operator you what your peers say about you is your currency there's nothing else it doesn't matter what's on your uniform because everybody knows there's a difference between that guy's combat tour and that guy's combat tour and for me the most devastating thing is I took my reputation from the teams which I would have said was I think pretty good and just obliterated it it's gone it's it's so bad and so destroyed that uh but then you sit down with Shawn and how long do you go five hours five hours so to dive into it again I think that what people likely were surprised at who listened to that show was I'm a pretty calm guy the way I speak about stuff and I I get animated with stories and stuff but it's undeniable that there was anger and resentment when I was talking about the the toxicity that I received on the back end even though again I I understand why it happens I mean this and would have maybe even been a purveyor of that had the sh on the other I would have been I know I would have been and but like therein lies the big problem that if you are a seal you are fund even if you're active duty you are aware that the publicity around seals whether to do it whether not to do it is a really big problem and it's making life exponentially harder for the seals getting out because they have to make a choice do I pursue something that involves marketing the fact that I have this pretty notable thing on my my backdrop or do I hide it which fundamentally hurts me and I know that no one really gives a [ __ ] about me now I'm out I'm not part of the the wolf pack anymore they might text me or call me periodically I might be on their radar but I'm not part of the team anymore they're not coming to save me or give me a job so like what what am I what am I not doing this for really I'm appeasing people that don't really care but they care if I do it and so it's just that and so I made the choice with real intent uh it's just it's just it's painful to feel like I prided myself on being like one of the boys on the teams like I was Trust worthy I was a good seal I I think I mean I wasn't the best but I was a good guy I you know carried my weight I I stood up for things that were right I you know I I there was even some stuff that I did that I think if you were in if you were in my platoon in my second rotation I did some stuff that nobody else was was prepared to do and it was like standing up to some leadership issues it just sucks that that kind of got thrown away because there's probably hundreds of people in the teams right now that have no clue that I've gone on to be Mr Ballin all they remember is who's that idiot John Allen who posts all it stupid [ __ ] on Instagram what do you make of uh what Sean's doing going super deep the the uh men's equivalent of of True Crime uh stories you know several hourong episodes with guys going really deep into their military history what you it seems like he's relatively unique in this kind of in this space and I love his show yeah no Shan uh so Shan being former CIA as well he's just he's really good at asking questions and and I found on his show you know you go into it expecting it to be really really long uh it's like 5 hours 6 hours and so I'm ready to just kind of go off on whatever tangent we go on but he was just really good at as we're talking about certain things he'd pick up on and you actually you do it too he picked up on little things that I would bring up you know I offhandedly mentioned as I was describing my upbringing that it was really difficult when my parents split up and I don't talk about my parents divorce it's not like a central part of my life at all it's just a d it's a point you know and he circled back to it later on in a way that he was like well do you think you know your your parents divorce had an effect on this and I was like you know what I never thought about that but he does the same thing with the military stuff and he also is familiar with the toxicity of transitioning out because he's received a lot of that too and so his questions were from a guy who really understood the dynamic of the awkwardness of transitioning out of the SEAL Teams and how much negativity comes with that and so it was kind it was cathartic to talk to him about it because I felt like I was talking to a guy that got it and frankly experienced it so there's some solidarity there um but also you know it was it was conflicting because I realize now that because I am Mr Ballin um and I have built this platform that's not on the strength of my military stuff I don't really it's a part of who I am but it's by no means the reason the channel is grown it's really it was hidden in some ways yeah but now I'm in a I am in a very leveraged good position against my active duty C Parts like what are you going to do you because it looks like champagne problems if you whine about this thing oh poor Mr Amazon Deal poor Mr 8 million subscribers it's like I just kind of damed if you do and dammed if you don't yeah and so I just feel like every time I'm talking about this stuff I very likely am triggering some people to feel both wow I really agree with him and wow I really hate that guy phenomenal um yeah I I found it very fascinating you know I've spoken to a variety of different sorts of operators and there is a hyper sensitivity at Tim Kennedy I don't know what he said at some point he it seems like he did or said something which is to do with additional gun checks for people and there is a fixation on the internet about that thing that he said uh Mike Baker excia guy um uh oddly Evan haer from Black Rifle doesn't seem to have the same bitri all but Mike especially I wonder whether it's like the people that were a bit more active and Conn genc versus the ones that are a bit more sort of administrative and whatever um but there is a difference like I British right we don't have the veteran Community isn't really this it doesn't hold the same you know there's no active military service please get on the plane first there's not of that stuff yeah um I am absolutely fascinated by the difference in perception of people that were in the seals or or or some other thing and people that were in the CIA yeah three-letter agency globalist piece of [ __ ] disinformation vaccine pushing cook soy estrogen in the water like bastard seal that doesn't talk about it much heroic Patriot Freedom Fighter all of these and there's I'm like I again maybe quite rightly maybe everyone is saying something that I'm not but it fascinates me especially given that many people that are in Special Forces phase into going into the CIA sha Ryan phased up into that Evan haer phased up into that like I don't know like it I I I'm yet to find a good explanation for why CIA is so there's so much distaste FBI slightly less so but Cia specifically uh and yet people that can be part of the same lineage but didn't graduate or whatever up into that uh aren't yeah I I I I totally know what you mean and I don't have a good answer either I I do think there's just a bit of hero worshipping that's gone on with the seals for a while uh and that probably has affected the way people view them and I think it's actually unfortunately kind of turned around and now it's like well they think they're Heroes therefore they're not like they're they're narcissists they're egotistical whereas before what I say is before is pre- Bin Laden like in the 20 2000s and the 2020s you know they were very much quiet professionals only in the sense that far fewer people seals were out there writing books and doing movies and stuff but then Bin Laden happens in 2011 and suddenly you have this like push of all these seals but it's because it's not even just the seals themselves that got out and they're like boy I'm going to cash in it's that the the world was interested in seals because of the bin Laden raid and then it kind of came to light like wait a minute they've done all sorts of stuff happens yeah and so like the world Special Operations and really the SEAL Teams really came into the spotlight and I think a lot of the people that were highlighted didn't necessarily seek out the spotlight they just happened to be the dudes that were getting out of the teams at around the time there's all this increased publicity and scrutiny and I think that that ultimately really led us to where we are now where there was all this interest and plenty of people totally took advantage of it and you know got really big on the exploits the SEAL Teams and now it's like well the seals because they think they're so cool so I think that there's there's probably some vital coming to the SEAL Teams that that is happening to the CIA that's probably going to be the same wow they're going to be Downstream from it so as Mr Bolan M someone who has had huge platform growth in a very short space of time having scrabbled around what can I do what is right for me talk to me about how you've dealt with the increase in attention working out who's got your best interests at heart avoiding people taking advantage of you those sorts of things yeah uh that's a tough one I've had unfortunately and I can imagine you probably have two I've had instances over the past couple of years you know since becoming Mr Ballin where blatantly after the fact I learned that people have stolen from me have taken advantage of me and unfortunately what I what I have discovered is as you know the kind of the Mr Ballin star has risen there really has been a lot of the what you would imagine is stereotypical of people kind of coming out of the work that were not necessarily close to you before this but now suddenly they want to be your friend and even though on some level it's kind of obvious who these people are because they're people you knew from like 15 years ago they're like oh dude what's going on with you some of those people I love to hear from like old baseball coaches and close friends of mine that's great all day it's the people that I never really had a relationship with that are hitting me up acting like hey we go way back no we don't you're you're hitting me up because there's something that you probably want from me and I'm not saying that now out of speculation it's because that's the thing that happens to me like I've been asked for money from people that it's like so inappropriate um I've given money to people which I thought was the right thing to do which only meant well now give me more uh and then I would say there's very there's so many predatory uh I guess businesses out there that are looking to make a buck on upand cominging creators I'm not going to name names but there's quite a few and if you're not if you don't have good management you can get into deals with people that screw your growth screw everything for you yeah and actually one of the things that I did early on is I just had no clue what it was what it was to be a YouTuber podcaster and so in early or mid 2020 end of 2020 when I really I had you know millions of followers on YouTube by this point and I'm I'm doing this practically professionally at this point I was starting to get lots of people hitting me up for potential sponsorships and collaborations and it was so overwhelming because I just didn't know what was good and bad that I just developed this idea that for now if I don't really understand this I'm just going to ignore it and do nothing because doing nothing feels like a less risky way than agreeing to work with someone before I really understand what it is that also amounts to leaving an awful lot on the table yes and at some point that is what inspired me to say you know what I'm probably leaving a lot on the table I'm turning down everything and some of these things look pretty compelling yeah turn them all down and and so there there this is how I came to meet my my business partner and manager and CEO Nick WT and boyfriend Nick wits uh nick uh when I so this is I want to say this is like end of 2020 or early 2021 I wish I had the date now but either way it was relatively early in my YouTube Journey um we had just moved from another house in Pennsylvania and as soon as we move in within a couple of days of moving in there is this unbelievable rainstorm and it floods the basement like you wouldn't believe and we stupidly or it's only stupid because it's happened but we we move into this house and they have this huge basement and we put all our stuff down there and said don't worry next week we'll unload it we'll bring it upstairs and I kid you not like 80% of the things we owned are sitting in the basement and we were gone it floods I'm not kidding like a foot of water in the basement this is not an inch this is like a foot of water ruined ruined and but I was on this crazy tear of growing my YouTube channel I was putting out three four five videos a week and I was filming videos literally sitting in water I mean I'm sitting in I'm sitting in my chair my feet are yes doing these podcasts or these YouTube videos and so with that as a backdrop I'm hating my life because it's miserable to record in a flood but also I was just I was so burned out I was hitting that kind of burnout point I was turning everything down and it just it started to feel like if I don't bring somebody in to help me on some to some capacity I'm going to have to stop doing it because churning out five videos a week that are 20 to 30 minutes long that I'm doing the topic finding researching writing editing everything I did have an editor I did have an editor but I did a lot of the editing it was like I can't keep doing this it doesn't matter how well it pays it doesn't matter what opportunities come out of this it's just I can't do it and so I I went in my email to I'm going to see who's in there you know see who's emailed me and there's like all these unread messages I just ignored everything but I saw there was one message from this dude Nick witters and it was just like I think the title of the email was something like combat vet you know maybe I can help you or something and I was like all right there's very few veterans that are in the kind of entertainment space that have reached out to me and so I just the idea of getting to talk to a veteran it's like we can speak the same language a little bit and so I hit him up and I'm like yeah all right I I'll talk with you I didn't even really know what he did I knew that he had said that he was knew he was a veteran I knew he worked for night media and he was representing Mr Beast which was really cool but in my head I'm like I don't know how that's relatable to me this very different type of cont content different scale uh but I ended up saying I talk to him and I actually unintentionally completely blew off the meeting with him and and he would tell me later on he's like well I guess I blew it you know he do want to talk to me but I ended up uh speaking with him and it was I was actually sitting in my flooded basement you know hating my life and I don't know Nick I just have this email and I've missed the first meeting with him and I'm like I missed this call and I just cold called him it was like 8:00 at night or whatever it was it was just I cold called him and he picked up and I was like hey dude uh sorry Mr call but I'm going to just kind of unload here uh I am so burned out I don't know what I'm doing I don't know who to talk to I don't know how sponsors work I I'm just losing it and I I don't even know who you are but if you can help me like your email suggests I'd love to talk to you uh and it would turn out I had unwittingly met you know a unicorn in the kind of Digital entertainment space because Nick uh I mean he's like perfect for what I needed he is a combat veteran he he went to law school he passed the bar so he's a lawyer he worked at WME and was on the traditional side working in non-scripted and also in commercials and he's met a whole bunch of traditional aless talent and worked with talent and then he went over to night media and he's a digital talent manager he's worked with Mr Beast and a bunch of other big guys and so he had this massive like like wealth of experience in entertainment and he was kind of looking for his kind of you know his stallion to to Really partner up with uh and it was just a natural partnership where what I really needed is I just wanted to tell stories I don't know how to be a manager or at least not well I I I don't really understand business strategy I'm when it comes to deal making I'm either asked for too much or ask for too I'm like not suited to it I'm a Storyteller that's what I do and I said to Nick I'm like dude if if you can just do everything else and I and I'll just tell stories and that would be great and you know what to Nick's credit you know he at the time had several other people he was managing along with me I wasn't his only thing but I couldn't tell at all I felt like I was the only the only thing that mattered in Nick's life but meanwhile he's working like 80 hours a week on other clients that he's like flying all over the world for uh but he was just he was really really good at being an advocate and then and that changed the game for me in a big way well you guys are doing ball in studios now so it's not just your stuff you're now seeking out other creators either kind of acquiring and bring them under an umbrella or or growing sort of fledgling ones who are your favorite storytellers on the internet well some of my favorite storytellers are are a part of Ballin Studios now uh so yeah we have so Nick witters are my my manager and he's also the CEO of of ball and Studios we founded it together and um that's the umbrella company and within that is you know we have a man talent management business which actually Nick is also spearheading uh where yeah we bring in some of the best storytellers on the internet and the idea is we don't just want to represent them and you know throw them you know brand sponsorships and take a piece of that like that's a part of the business but we want Nick frankly and his team that he runs he was able to take me a single person who did everything on his own and frankly at times against my will only in the sense that it was hard for me to let go of things he I don't all I do is record now I record stories that's what I do I tell stories I don't do the topic finding I don't do the writing I absolutely punch stuff up and I I'll read the script and and really know it but Nick slowly but surely through trial and error built all these people around me to the point where you know I can do only only tell stories anyways he figured out how to do that with me and our pitch to these storytellers is we can do it with you too and it's not [ __ ] it's like here are the steps we took like Nick has a map of how he got here and he learned a bunch of stuff along the way he knows how to do this it it it's a it's a combination of understanding what's a good opportunity and what's not so having that Creator not do certain things is almost more important than the things they choose to do it's like filtering away the bad stuff and then really it's you have to solve for one person doing everything as you know who are the who who are the the creators other creators that people should check out that aren't you oh man either under your umbrella or not well I'm starting with Under the Umbrella because we targeted them specifically because I think they're amazing amazing storytellers my favorite YouTu Channel and this is not [ __ ] it's my actual favorite YouTube channel is called Bedtime Stories and it's a it's a British Channel they have I think a million subscribers love it already yeah they're dude they're amazing and and actually their best episode and it's What drew me to them is they did a two-part series about Skinwalker Ranch and they're the ones that detail that tapping on the window thing it's horrifying the way they do it because they use these incredible drawings that are very iconic to their Channel I mean you don't see these drawings anywhere else it's it's that's a bedtime stories drawing it's beautiful but they they're so good at storytelling and it's a team they have it's it's amazing so bedtime stories they have this amazing YouTube channel uh and we brought them under management uh and we actually helped them launch a podcast so it's comparable to YouTube but it's it's the just the audio version this is new original content so bedtime stories for sure some people Americans in particular don't necessarily they can't listen to British accents I guess I guess that's a thing get out of here for podcast they're not they are definitely not 3 hours into this show if that's the problem they have yeah but like I actually I found it was easier to listen to bedtime stories because I liked the British accent cuz they sound more intelligent to me Exotic but understandable like it feels like intelligence because I think of journalists or even you it's like there's an air of of of intellect that comes with superiority all of the things so bedtime stories is amazing they have a great YouTube channel and a great podcast just called bedtime stories uh and then there's Ryan nexo his YouTube channel is it's just called nexo I've seen that yeah he's great he's got a couple million subscribers on there and he's going to launch a podcast pretty soon we hope uh we have Nick Crowley who also is a big YouTuber um there is wartime stories which is it's kind of a spin-off from Bedtime Stories where it's kind of it's like historical mostly military style stories as well but it's it's really well done it's excellent I resonate with what you I resonate with a lot because Nick sat down with me and a friend for dinner a couple of months ago and took me through his side of your story and then you took me through your side of your story and uh I always thought I ran a business for 15 years I thought I was a boss I thought I was a leader there was something kind of alluring about being the guy at the top being the guy that's in charge come to believe that I'm like an allright leader probably a pretty [ __ ] boss um way too much of a people pleaser uh way too concerned about people liking me um way too sort of overbearing and neurotic I think to be as good as a great CEO and then also not it's like some weird combination of too attentive and too much of a [ __ ] like just threaded the needle of a really horrible cocktail of particular particular skills and traits um and accepting that I think is and you see this a lot in you know I got a lot of friends that worked for me in my previous life and when they left University they're going to recruitment so we would you know we gave these kids a Navy SEAL hell week for three over three years of like how to run nightclubs and I would we would see these kids come in and work for us and they'd be you know 19 years old and you're 19 they a child that can vote and drink in the UK and over the space of you know 6 to 12 months they would go from being you know kind of unassured maybe not certain about themselves they've not really done business before they don't know the blah blah blah then 12 months later you'd see Halloween which is promoter Christmas it's the busiest night of the year and there would be 2,000 people trying to get into a nightclub club and a 6'3 Newcastle bouncer Dorman massive hairy gorilla guy screaming in their face saying if you don't get this queue under control I'm going to close the doors this is absolutely insane and you would watch this guy that only 12 months ago at 19 had become an event a junior event manager and basically didn't know his ARS from his elbow just go no worries mate I've got you hang on there give me one second hold that for me and just coordinate 2,000 people into a nightclub so they then phased up and graduated out of University and were you know they were like 29 in business world because they just had this really condensed exposure so they would then go into recruitment but what I saw a lot of the time was recruitment is basically sales a lot of the time they would crush at sales if you've asked people on a cold Wednesday in November in the northeast of the UK do you want to come into this nightclub I'll give you a wristband that gets you one pound off you can sell people on like a new tech job or something right um a lot of the time you would get a really great salesperson who spent enough time there and then was looking eyeing up the promotion to go to the next thing but they weren't built to be a manager no and what you do is you lose a great salesperson and gain a shitty manager yeah it's not a good tradeoff and uh it's kind of like one of those things where look I know this sounds alluring but one of the things that you learn as you get older especially when it's in business you learn as much about your limitations as you do about your capacities yes and knowing what you suck at is probably more important than knowing what you're good at because those are the things that you need to delegate relinquish you know get rid of um and I came up with this idea of the curse of competence um which is if you are someone that's a little bit psychologically flexible if you seem to be good at a number of different things you can do the reading of the stories but I bet you were probably pretty good at titles and thumbs as well yeah uh so okay well I it's not that I suck at that like maybe I'm even world class at that but I need to let go of something I'm world class at to then be like you know so um for the people who feel like they have a broad spectrum of capacities there is a unique challenge that again no one's going to give you sympathy for oh champagne problems guy has lots of things that he can do or girl yeah yeah like girl has you know she's like smart and funny and clever and she's a bit of an operator and she can do maths and you know she can do sales um and no one will give you sympathy for it yeah but learning what is your absolute highest point of contribution what are the vital few and what are the trivial many and where does that lie I think is is very very important it is what's next for you what are you focused on right now you know this is actually one of the times in my life where I've been doing the same thing a lot longer than I normally do uh you know even in the SEAL Teams even though I was there for seven years it's really broken up into segments you do you know tours they call them uh where you know for a two-year period usually you're with this group of people you're training you know these type of training blocks and you're going to your deployment and then when you come back like everybody goes a different direction you have a new platoon or you go to a new area you have a new deployment cycle and so it's like every two years you rotate if you will and you have new experiences even though you're still being a seal and then prior to that I had you know my chaotic high school life where I'm like screwing up and then I go to college and it's like screw it up and then it's like oh now I'm in the chapter of getting my life together and then it was now I'm in the chapter of training for the SEAL Teams and then I became a seal and then when I got out I I briefly did some charity work and then I did I started this like little I co-founded this little mentorship thing and then you know my social media thing started happening and and then you know there's all these different Avenues within the Mr Ballin sphere like okay we started Tik Tok then we made YouTube now we're on the podcast but now it's like okay we've done a bunch of stuff and now you just got to keep doing it you got to keep doing the Mr balling you got keep making videos keep making podcasts like in addition to the Stu we're growing in the new stuff this is probably one of the few times where I'm doing the same thing a lot and that's uncommon for me one of the periods of stability that you've actually had and and I got to be honest it's not a good it's it's when I say it's not a good place for me I mean I'm now a little bit on edge and I want to do something new luckily Nick my amazing manager and boyfriend uh he uh he's he's always aware of where I'm at in terms terms of interest it's not just burnout he's always checking in on well how much do you really want to do this it's not a matter of can you do it because he knows I'll I'll White Knuckle it and do whatever I got to do it's do you actually care about this and if he ever senses that I'm not into something he's the first one to be like we're not doing that because we can't have you doing stuff that you're not interested in because it's going to kill you long term but we're still definitely in this kind of moment of stability which is incredible and it's champagne problems and it's all that um but I I'm anxious to do more stuff I uh within the Mr Ballin spere I think in the Mr Ballin sphere or the Ballin studi sphere we really do want to become the the place the home of the best storytellers in the world which seems like a a big claim but if you think of it like this if you are a uh a baseball player a really really good baseball player and you know you're in you're in high school and you're killing it you get recruited to go play in college you're killing it you Aspire on some level to go play for a major league baseball team that's the highest level of baseball you could easily make the case that the highest level of baseball you don't aspire to be the best independent baseball player you know what I mean like it's a point of Pride to play for the Boston Red Sox or whatever team is your favorite team and so we want to become a point of Pride for really talented storytellers that they are affiliated with Ballin Studios and we have the relationships everywhere to build TV film movies book I mean we have everything we just need the people and so we're being really aggressive about finding people that are one they got the chops the storytelling chop shops but two they are super ambitious and really want to grow as a Storyteller not as a content creator not as like an influencer but as a Storyteller that's the people we want to bring in house and we are and it's not a cash crab it's like we are going to invest time money everything to make you the best possible Storyteller you can be because if you succeed at a really high level even if you leave at some point you're giving the studio more and more credibility that it's the equivalent of the Red Sox to baseball players but for storytellers so think about how much dog [ __ ] content most people consume oh yeah it's every everywhere constantly yes and just because something captures your attention just because something is popular does not necessarily mean that it's good yes it's one of the reasons why you know you're the final episode that we've done on this run yeah uh you won't be the final one that's been published there's still multic comp but we really tried to push the limits with what we've done today with lighting with this the first time that we've ever used custom environments built in Unreal Engine 5 and you know tried to time things with the for the people that are listening they have no idea what we're talking about it just sounds like amazing thank you um but I really want to do that and it's like I want to do something cool I want to do I want to do different things and even if it falls flat on its face and I very much respect a few things from you certainly your acceptance of when you've got things wrong I think it it must help to keep your ego small and maybe that's you trying to um combat the oversized narcissism that that Creeps in from childhood or whatever it might be um but I think there's an awful lot to learn from that your approach to fear uh and and and overcoming it uh very much so and very um like it's impressive being self effacing and being like look hey I this is a thing about me that I know like that level of self-awareness I think helps you to account for your own shortcomings and maladies and and and whatever so dude I'm I'm really excited to see what happens I'm fight up for you for the uh graphic novel which is going to come out soon as well boom there you go first uh official publication it's got some new stories in there uh it comes out October 1st of this year uh you can get your pre-order now go to book.bin studios.com the strange dark mysterious delivered in story or delivered in book format the first time where else should people go to keep up to date with everything you do uh I mean so definitely you can follow me on every platform it's just mrbin everywhere uh also I would say in terms of podcast because we now have a slate of shows you can just search for Ballin Studios on any podcast platform and you'll get you know the Mr B podcast medical Mysteries you'll get run full bedtime stories wartime stories all our podcasts um so just look for Mr Ballin online or Ballin Studios and then you'll find us hell yeah I appreciate you man thank you thank you very much Chris thank you very much for tuning in this isn't me directing you to another video at least not yet uh I just wanted to say thanks this was technically very complex to do and um broke a couple of times but not much and uh I hope it was cool to watch I love John's storytelling I think that he has an obvious huge gift and if this in any way made it more immersive or engaging or scary I will consider that a win so thank you for joining us