#774 - MrBallen - Navy SEAL To True Crime: Insane Stories Of Courage, Fear & Resilience 03:28:52

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Mr. Borland. He's a storyteller, YouTuber, and a former United States Navy SEAL. Why are we drawn to learn about things that scare us? Whether it's war stories, true crime, or strange, dark, and mysterious tales, there's something compelling about discovering an unnerving part of life that we previously didn't know existed.

Expect to learn how to tell a world-class story, why so many people are obsessed with things that scare them, the three most terrifying but true stories that Mr. Borland has learned during his career, what being a Navy SEAL teaches you about life, why Mr. Borland received such a huge backlash from the Navy SEAL community, what it means to live a good life, whether there is life after death, what it feels like to get hit by a grenade, and much more.

This was very fun. John might be one of the best storytellers on the internet, and I love that today he tells a fully fleshed out, spooky, real-life story, and then uses the story he just told you to explain the art of how he tells a story, and then gives you takeaways on how you can tell better stories yourself. And I've used some of those tips over the last couple of weeks since we recorded, and it's actually made my stories more engaging. So it apparently...

It actually works, which is awesome. Lots to take away from today. If it is dark and rainy and the thunder is clapping outside, you may need an additional blanket for this one. In case you're wondering, 80% of you aren't subscribed, and that means you will miss episodes when they go up, like next week with Gary Vaynerchuk, and the week after that with the one and only...

Tim Ferriss. The only way you can ensure you won't miss episodes when they go live is by navigating to Spotify and pressing the follow button in the middle of the page or the plus in the top right-hand corner on Apple Podcasts. It's free, it supports the show, and it makes me very happy indeed. So go and do it. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Borland. ♪♪♪

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, I'll just, I'll try social media. And I, I, uh,

I tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work, very cringy, you know, like attempts at comedy and all these different things. And then I remember I had these two documents on my computer of ideas for TikToks at the time is what I was doing. This is like early 2020. And I had this one document that I'd exhausted all these different, you know, ideas for TikToks ranging from sketch comedy to all these goofy things that didn't work.

And I had this other document and it just said Dyatlov 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, nonfiction content.

And the Dyatlov 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 in different stages of decay and their bodies are radioactive and their clothes are half on and half off. And there's these totally unsettling pictures. And I was like, well, I've tried all these different things on this side. This document has been exhausted and didn't work.

I guess I'll take a shot in the dark on this totally random 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'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 called Great Wolf Lodge in Pennsylvania with my wife and my three kids. And I shoot this 60-second Dyatlov Pass TikTok where 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 reference, I had never gone even close to viral before in any way. It was like 10,000 views over a year was a really big deal. And now the internet has tuned in. And admittedly, I didn't think, 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 stories. And 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 no punctuation. And so if you glanced at it, it looks like John Ballin, not, you wouldn't think, oh, that's John B. Allen. And there was a time when I was doing my cringy attempts at social media content that was not working, 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 it was like to, what'd 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 I'd get these DMs that would say, dear Mr. Ballin, I have a question about being an ABC. Yeah.

I stopped correcting them and just went with it like, yep, I'm Mr. Ballin. And then actually early in 2020, right before I posted that Dyatlov Pass story on TikTok, I had been using John B. Allen on TikTok and it got shadow banned, I think. 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 made a new account and I thought, what better than Mr. Ballin? 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, 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 think that the way we've, we've thought about it is, um,

There's real enjoyment out of being scared. I mean, just as a person. Now, you don't want to be scared and also be in a dangerous situation. That's not fun. 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 inhabit 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

But you have the safety. Yes. And I come off, I believe, like a really comforting host because I'm the former Navy SEAL. So I got, you know, I can protect you. Oh, right. Yes. But I'm also a father, you know, and I, you know, I'm, I don't try to,

We were talking before the show about hamming up, you know, 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 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 I'm- 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 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 yeah 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 it? Like it was the first big podcast that broke through. Yep. And you know, you even look at things like, I think it was Project Manhunt, which is about the Unabomber. 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 military stories are for dudes what true crime is for chicks. Yeah, that's probably true. But there seems to be a particular degree of...

love and obsession for women for this kind of sort of true crime genre. I wonder whether, I spoke to an evolutionary psychology friend about this, they think maybe at least part of it is women kind of learning what to look out for. It's almost like a protectionist strategy. A cautionary tale. 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, I'm sitting, sitting in some pretty high stakes here, but,

For reference, I told this one live last year in Texas to a sold-out crowd at the Paramount Theater, and this story had a big reaction to it because the twist at the end is something else, and it's house-themed. So 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

And he just loves this girl. He wants to date her more than anything. And, you know, he's tried several times to, you know, woo her, but she's not that interested. You know, she's kind of playing hard to get, but you could tell there was something there. Maybe, maybe she likes him. And eventually she does kind of acquiesce 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 love 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 welcome their first child, their daughter.

And then two years after that, which puts us in 2009, they have their son. And then they're done at that point. They got the 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 had this thing where every morning the dad would, he would sneak into the kid's bedroom and he'd like spook them to wake them up, you know, as a playful thing.

And they always had, you know, family game nights on the weekend. And Mitch and Kayla made a point to still have those romantic dates, you know, anytime they could. They always got babysitters to spend time together. So this is like a, it's the American dream in many ways. You have this young family living a dream. High school sweetheart, white picket fence. Yeah, that's the idea. Two and a half kids, dog. That's it.

So it's 2009 and Mitch is at this little dream home and he's watching football. He's sitting on the couch watching football and 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 nondescript target lamp, it's a red lamp.

Mitch, he's seen this lamp a million times. It's in his house and he's watching football, but at some point 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 looking at the lamp, he's rubbing his eyes to see if there's something in his eyes, but still the lamp 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 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, still 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, man, whatever. The male denial of medical problems. It's like, I'm probably having a stroke, but you know, whatever.

So 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 is 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 might very well be having some sort of medical emergency, but

But for some reason that Mitch just could not place, he couldn't bring himself to call the doctor. I mean, 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 not watching the TV. He's just staring at this upside down blurry lamp.

And at some point that day or that evening, his wife Kayla and his two kids, they come home. And the second she comes in, you know, Mitch kind of breaks out of 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 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 is none the wiser that he spent the day staring at a lamp that's blurry and upside down. And when Kayla came in, the lamp was not blurry and upside down. She's not experiencing this. So that night, regular night, they put the kids to bed and Kayla and Mitch, they go to bed too. But then after Kayla had fallen asleep, Mitch is wide awake. 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 feel so sick. 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 eight, 10 hours later, when she walks in the house, all the lights are still off 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 lamp. 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 shooing 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.

He's looking for his wife and his kids. He can't see them. He stands up and he doesn't know what's going on. As he's yelling for his wife and kids, Kayla is yelling for his wife and kids. A police officer comes charging through the circle and he grabs Mitch. Without saying anything, he lifts him up, a grown man, and just runs with him to his police car. The whole time, Mitch is like, I don't know what's going on here. 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 the cop, without saying anything, he hops in the driver's seat and 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'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 five years old. And that was his life. And so 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. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, for him, I mean, how do you go about dealing with something like that? Because 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 an entire history, an entire family.

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Do you know who Paul Evans is? No. So Paul Evans is one of the directors of a big 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 fastened loose with his risks and stuff. And he 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. Why?

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 route 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.

everything, every single detail. It's in his book and tell you all of the details about how his life unfolded in Singapore, 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. Oh my gosh.

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 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. Yeah, that's the word, Inception. Yes. So 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. And 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 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 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? 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. But yeah, that story of your man, it does not surprise me. It seems completely unreal. And yet I've got...

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 of storytelling. 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 how would you categorize it?

Um, so I think that there's some necessary context. I grew up around professional writers and storytellers. My, my father is a Pulitzer Prize 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 the type of investigative journalism he was doing. My dad is this very high speed journalist. My mother is also a professional writer, radio host when she was younger, incredible writer. My older sister is a two-time Pulitzer winner, also a journalist at the Boston Globe.

And my younger sister is a scientist. She's about to defend her dissertation, get her PhD to be a bee scientist. So I say all that because I was not like a big time academic. I was like, you know, barely scraping by and honestly did horrible as a student. But growing up, 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. It's almost like, yeah, 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, it's 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, um,

Telling a story where I'm holding off details, not to make the story not accurate, but rather using perspectives, 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 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 left all these holes and it gets filled in at the end for a big, powerful reveal. 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 school and fell on the floor. No, actually, it's devices that a lot of storytellers use that I think hurts their stories. For example, I could say, going back to the lamp story, he's first noticed the lamp, right? And so he sees a blurry lamp. And so Mitch, he sees the lamp. It's blurry. He can't make sense of it.

But what he didn't know is this lamp was going to ruin his life. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now that's an overt example, but there are little things that people think are good transitions between the story, like leading the audience to get ready, something big's going to happen. But if you telegraph too much early in the story that, 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 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 added something into that story and it's part of the story, but I usually don't add it in, which is when 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 level of reality that if you're the parent, you've come in and the parent's 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 whether Kayla did or did not shoo 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 shooed 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 game family game nights, right? 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 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. It's the way I did it. Yeah, he was in his house and he saw this lamp and it was blurry, but it turns out that was the beginning of this psychotic break he was having. But it's like the audience, there's no, that's the thing is when I'm telling a story, it's all about...

Stick around because you're going to learn something that you were not expecting. There's going to be a plot twist. There's going to be a reveal. Instead of telling you that, the way I tell a story always includes a payoff. Always. I guarantee you, you can look at every single story I've ever put on the internet, ever, and

And there's a payoff at the end that is absolutely intentional. And so your audience 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 this?

In the beginning as well, it seemed like that, as you're saying, they were in love and they do the family thing and it's the white picket fence and it's the American dream and they make sure that they look after each other with date night and this is the things that they do. That's adding a degree of stakes and I guess you're invested. Like you like these people. Yeah. Like you want to know what's going to happen to them. Absolutely.

I mean, 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 shooed 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 about. That's 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. This 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. But 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 purposeful omission of certain details. Yeah, actually, a good example of that purposeful omission would be take 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 misrepresent what happened. If people are 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.

will 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 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 they're killer, and you don't know they're lying, 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 you know I'm inhabiting that person's perspective.

So yes, it's a lie. But in the framework of that story, if I'm saying so-and-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 we're looking to find perspectives that allow us to basically lie, but using someone's real lie that was part of the story, if 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 or what do people get wrong when it comes to telling a good story?

Honestly, it's pretty straightforward and it is giving away too much at the beginning. If you think about it, 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 there's some element of mystery surrounding it. But in true crime, what was the question again? I just spaced on that. How do other people get it wrong? Okay, that's it.

Even if a story is not inherently a mystery, like any random story you tell your friend, people are listening to a story and they're invested in a story if there's some kind of payoff, meaning a mystery is solved. They want something to come out of the story. 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 let's break 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.

Yeah. I read, this is for the people who maybe intend on reading The Silent Patient by Andrew Michaelades, jump forward by about one minute. 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 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 on 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 I'm working with her afterward. And he's got this strange obsession with her and his, uh,

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 dude goosebumps so good this is one line where you realize he's put this balaclava on and he's walking in behind her and you go.

This is the guy that she's been writing about. Yeah, so it's so satisfying, that payoff. And to break the fourth wall around anyone that's watched a Mr. Beast video, Mr. Beast does these videos where it'll be like, 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 dopaminergic perspective, you drag it out. That's why we will release...

at least two clips from this episode before the actual episode is available. Guess what? Like it's a cock tease. Sorry, fucking sue me. 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 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. It's built in to the content. So I guess, yeah, that's such an interesting...

like neurological, psychological, algorithmic Venn diagram right in the middle of all of those things. So watch time nice and high, engagement nice and high. What happens when you tell that lamp story to a room of 1500 people?

A lot of gasping. Because when I told that one live, I think that I did such a good job. I had a really dramatic pause before I said what happened. And I remember looking out and it was probably the first time in the show where I really took stock of the people there. Because before, it's my first ever live show and I'm blacked out. I'm so nervous. But I looked out and not a soul was on their phone. They were just waiting for this big reveal that they've 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 fucking did it. Like that was cool. That's something. So, 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, live music gigs. Like the DJ drops some insane song and the crowd gives a, oh, like, you know, their hands in the air, the lasers come on, all that stuff. One of the things that I don't think I've ever seen live is like psychological satisfaction. Do you know what I mean? Like that, like...

Realization. Yeah. Live. Maybe in the cinema. You know, when I'm reading The Silent Patient, it's not like I have this 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. It's a really, do you know what collective effervescence is?

No. So collective effervescence is 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 effervescence. Interesting. And it kind of amplifies many of the...

emotions and realize it's why we laugh more when we're in a group together. That's why, you know, you put your hands in the air more than you feel the vibe. That's what it is. Precisely. It's vibe. It's vibe. It's a group vibe. Um, but yeah, the gasp, like a room full of people with this massive intent, like the pressure gets lowered because they're just, yeah.

That must be satisfying to see. Actually, if you don't mind, I'll tell another quick story. Let's do it. I got another one 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. Because anyway, so there's a portion they filmed where I got to see on this video, the actual reaction to this one particular reveal. And it was like,

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.

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 background was, she was brilliant. I mean, she went to an Ivy 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, early 30s. So she's 42. It was late 20s. She comes down with this illness and she's married. She's got kids. She lives in Southern California. And it wasn't like the illness...

the 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 horrible divorce with her husband who frankly if I'm being candid sounds like he was kind of a jerk because he immediately was like I'm out of here now that you're sick and

So they split up and so she's raising her kids on her own. She's got this chronic illness and it's getting worse, 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.

And so finally, come December 11th, 2011, by this point, her kids have moved out of the house. They are successful. They're in their 20s. They have their partners. They have their jobs. And 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 want to go die. And

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. 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, 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 climbed. 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 gonna go take a quick walk and then come back and die. Like it's pretty, pretty bizarre, you know, the usual Tuesday. Yeah, exactly. And so she asked her end of life care person to come with her on a walk because she actually had not even seen the town she was in. You know, she basically just went into her bed.

And so they leave this house, it's a beautiful sunny day and she's holding on to her end of life care person and he sees this really big guy.

And they're walking down the sidewalk and on their side is this beautiful field of flowers. And there's a little wood rail post fence between them and the field. And it's just beautiful and sunny. And for a second, Ellie, 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 want to live because she still wants it to end. But she's struck by this moment. For the first time in a while, I'm seeing something truly beautiful and that's all. It's 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 cause for concern. There are 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 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 this field. And

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 five, 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 end of life care person who has completely abandoned her, now he comes back and he scoops her up. And as he's running with her, all she thinks to say is, don't take me to the hospital. Because at this point, she's like, this will kill me. The bee stings will kill me.

And so he runs her all the way back to the house and says, fine, I'm not going to bring her to the hospital, even though you've been horribly stung. And I'm at least partially to blame. And so Ellie climbs back in bed. And now she's thinking, I'm going to die. Now it's either it's whatever's going on with me or the bee stings.

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 Lobel can sit up on her own. Well, she could sit up 15 years earlier, but 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, a deer tick that had Lyme disease. And when they bite you, they leave a very distinctive mark 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 totally curable.

If you wait and you let it develop, it 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 deeply immersed in Lyme 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. 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 stings. 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 guessed, they made this hypothesis that

Dude. Crazy, right? Wow.

That's insane. I mean, first off, whoever that end of life care person come off. You didn't do it. 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, man, thanks. It's a mixed bag. Probably not going to invite them to kind of save someone from a burning building. Yeah.

That is crazy. So when you watch the video of that, 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 it was very cool. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. You'll have heard me talking about Element

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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 drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Where are you finding most of your story? Presumably everywhere. But 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 an interesting question because we cover a lot of stories that other people do. And it's just the way we frame them out that separates us. And you'll notice or 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 consuming any content on a true crime medium, YouTube channel, TV show, whatever,

The emphasis is on the killer or 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's the lazy way, in my opinion, of doing content around kind of these transgressions.

tragic events. It's just focused on- How much pain she was in. Yes. Her face was disfigured. These African killer bees are unbelievably blah, blah, blah, blah. Exactly. Yep. 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 doesn't do much. If you want your audience to genuinely connect with the story, you need to make your characters three-dimensional and in true crime.

usually the three-dimensional characters are the killers. We make the three-dimensional characters, the non-killers, the victims and the kind of supporting cast. And you don't really notice it as the audience because it's just a normal story that results in tragedy versus this is a dark story. Here's the blood and gore. And so I would say that we do do stories that are very well trodden, 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. And I would say that the difficult part 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, 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 did, I did one, um, from this guy named Mike who was in the twin tower. 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. Um,

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 he was fine with it. But there are other stories we cover, like if we covered some serial 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 know 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, or 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 official... Yeah, that's it. But we do proactively... 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 for 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.

Yeah, yeah. And it's not disrespectful. It's people just saying, I'm not comfortable with this. Has there ever been one? Or is there some that stick in your mind? Just like, fuck, damn it. Like, I really wish we had that. There have been. There was one and I can tell it in generalities. You know, there was this story about this kid who

So 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 first person experiences that people will share that don't even really get that much traction. Like if you're searching for keywords in 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 all these lock. He found ways to get down to the next level, even though they were locked.

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 an era. There's like an underwater or an underground ocean or something. No ocean like water. There's a well, a huge well.

And there's animals in it. And like, so he goes into the basement and 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. Yep.

Um, but he went, you have this really intense moment where he knows there's something in the water. There's like this big crack in the ground. You can look down. And so I could tell, imagine if I told the story where I've got, I've got you down there, you're in this dark basement, you know, you know who this kid is. You can't, you can't, you get it. And 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 become its 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 feels, well, I mean, it totally feels to me in this environment, like that's what could end up happening. For the people that are just listening, by the way, we're currently in kind of like, what is this? Like a swamp? Yeah, like a swamp. There's a canoe next to us. It's raining. It's kind of sort of,

A little bit miserable and dark and gloomy. But yeah, 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, pull the gloves off, fuck it, we don't need to do real life stories? Yes. However, I am very in tune with the fact that a big allure to these stories is that they're true.

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, 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 called the Russian sleep experiment. It's on the no sleep. Oh yeah, they stayed 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 experiment that goes horribly wrong. 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. 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, 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 misrepresenting. And so,

I think that if we do fiction, it would need to be upfront. This is fictional. Maybe in a separate channel. I think that's right. Yeah. I mean, 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 would be very intentional. Because if we didn't make it intentional, it would call into question every story I've ever told. Because it's like, wait a minute, this is fiction? Is everything fiction? Yeah, and what we were talking about before, the stakes are a big part of this, right? The investment is because it's real, right? And I suppose, you know, that silent patient thing that I just finished, the reason that you have stakes in a non-real story is that you've spent four hours thinking

reading and becoming intimate with these characters and learning the machinations 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. I was a lot of the things that I, I am, I am the opposite of what I am now. When I was younger, I, I,

So I grew up in a town called Quincy, Massachusetts. It's just south of Boston, maybe 10 minutes south. And it's this blue collar, fiercely very Irish Catholic. A lot of the fathers that I was around were steel workers and the pipe fitters union and the elevator union, kind of like tough guys. And there was this culture in Quincy, which still exists today, of

young men feeling there's this little 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. Right. Yeah, exactly. And it became, it was so pervasive in, in, in my childhood that it felt normal that all the time, every weekend there was 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 I definitely identified as, you know, a tough guy, even though kind of ironically, 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. But yeah,

And that combined with the fact that I looked at my father, my sister, I looked at my family and they're all these really accomplished academics, if you will. It's like a number of Pulitzer Prizes, I think, amongst your family. 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, going to a good school, all that, that's success.

And I kind of didn't like that. I've always had, uh, there's 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. Cause 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,

And so, you know, I was just kind of a troublemaker, you know, it wasn't until I got into college, I went to the University of Massachusetts out in Western Mass at Amherst.

And I only got in because my mom, who's this amazing writer, wrote my college essay. And my grades were so abysmal at my high school that UMass contacted me after I submitted my application, my mom's application, to be like, you're not somebody we would normally accept on your grades. They're legitimate. And I'm in Massachusetts. I'm an in-state student. I should be allowed into the school, but they're like, it's so low. We can't let you in.

but your essay was so good. Welcome to the school. Well done, mom. And so I got...

I effectively flunked out and got in lots of trouble in one semester, didn't go to class. And so after a semester, 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 it's funny. Now I look back and I was like, God, I was such an idiot. Of course you're in your mom's basement 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 have 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 not allow me to stay. The lack of accountability. Oh my God. I was just insufferable. I was an insufferable kid. But- Where did that entitlement come from? I don't even know. I mean, you could make the case that my parents got split up when I was 13. 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've always been like highly impulsive, kind of obsessed with the thing I'm doing. 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 going to listen to that song 56 million times in a row until I fucking 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 wrong places.

But when I was in my mom's basement, pissed at my parents, it suddenly clicked that I was the asshole. I'm the guy that's really screwed up all the stuff that's effectively been handed to me. I mean, going to college, it was handed to me. I'm not even paying for it. My parents are, and they had to scrape the money together for that. And it 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 going to be an adult, you know, if nothing else to just stop being such an embarrassment for 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 four in the morning to scan people's badges in. And then I would take the red line, the subway into Boston and I went to UMass Boston. So a satellite campus where you can basically get in for free. So I got into 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 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, competent as a human. Mm hmm.

And so I did three semesters at that school, just the whole time. I'm just minding my P's and Q's, doing my job, scanning badges and 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 bar was set quite low. 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 schoolwork. And I began thinking about what's life on the end of college going to look like?

And I had told my family I was thinking about law school. And really, that was only because I took a liking to philosophy and to English just in my classes. And those oftentimes are majors that those pursuing law school 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.

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 enlisted 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 Dave and Pete, who are 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 SEAL teams. And 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 be, to be a Navy SEAL, it's just whoever can stick around until 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 Allen, the screw up. Life direction rehabilitation. Absolutely. You have to shake the etch a 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 mad for this thing. I got to, you know, got to be disciplined to get ready for training. I can serve in the military, something I wanted to do. And I can frankly just continue this evolution of being a responsible adult, you know, and John, not 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

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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 slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern 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...

mom's basement realizing okay time to go monk mode time to 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 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 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 an aspect of your life. 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, well, is this a good idea? Analysis paralysis. Yeah.

Sometimes you just got to say, fuck 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 satisfices and maximizers. And satisfices, does this meet the minimum threshold for me to have a degree of certainty that this is probably the right direction-ish?

And then they commit to the decision. Maximizers are what's the one that's got the lowest washout rate? What's the one that is closest to me, is closest to family, blah, 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. 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 think that, uh,

An aspect of me that's been very helpful is I probably border on being a narcissist, if I'm being honest. 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 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. 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. 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 could say they're trending down a bit now, but overall, I mean, that's a brand. I mean, the SEAL teams are a brand. So there's loads of people that want to do it. And in order to just get

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, you're

are like kick you in the face miserable. 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. And so the way it works is you go to bootcamp. This is if you go the enlisted route. There's the enlisted side and the officer side. I was enlisted. That means I didn't use my college degree to go in.

You go to boot camp, which is two months in Chicago, which is 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 coaches and some professional athletes. And all it is, is just strength training and swimming and running, but they're not trying to screw with you. They're trying to make you strong and as ready as you can be for the next phase of training, which is SEAL training. How did you find the prep period? Amazing. Amazing. What's taking you through a typical day?

So you have you had a I think it was a six day schedule. It might have been five, but you have the schedule where every single day you had three major activities, but there was four major activities available. So you kind of rotated through them and it was, you know, running ranging from just like short sprint work to very long runs like like half marathons and beyond.

Swimming, that was the one activity we did every single day. It was finning 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. 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 definitely do a swim. And then it was a gym workout, like a really intense power lifting usually. And then there was like a wild card, you know, Hey, we're going to go do yoga on the beach or something. But yeah, it was like three of those. They'd,

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 bootcamp.

BUD stands for Basic Underwater Demolition Seal School. It's the six month long famous rite 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 treading. Treading is fucking horrible. Like treading in the water, you know? Okay. Where you'd go in the pool and it'd be you and maybe eight or nine other guys that are in this line with you. You're looking at the guys back in front of you and your instructor will give you a brick. The first guy has just a brick you'd make a wall with.

and you got a fin, you know, 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, that's considered quitting. And so you get,

kicked out. You have to 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 and 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 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 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-meter underwater swim. That's pool competency. There's a couple like major test skates that are massive washout rate. I mean, hell week is five and a half days of –

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 24-7 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 puking up. It's not blood, but it's like this pink frothy sputum because their lungs are filling with fluid called swimmer-induced pulmonary edema.

toenails are gone. You don't have toenails by the end of 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 one 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 that we had a professional photographer out there for our hell week, just by happenstance, 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, hell week students running out of the water and they had their camisole 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 you jump in the water, your chafe is like the chafe you have is like hardened and the 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 Borland 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. I 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%

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slash modern 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 him he mentioned it in the gym one day and he's like uh yeah i'm gonna have to get quite a lot of zinc oxide i was like why and he's like because i'm doing the row naked like of 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 these long rows, it's called the Talisker Whiskey Race is one of them sponsored by Talisker Whiskey. And then there's a bunch of others as well.

And, uh, he rose on a sheepskin, you know, like an erg, like a concept too. It's kind of, I think it might even be the same runner, but obviously with actual balls. And, um, on the seat is a sheepskin, a sheepskin wool, uh, hypoallergenic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Naked. Wow. So there's a naked guy doing 14 million all strokes to go from Portugal to the Caribbean. How long does it take?

The record is about, it's less than two months. It's like they can do it in about around about a month. The weird thing is you can do it in teams. So you could 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. Most of them are unsupported. Weight of them plus the weight of their food, plus the weight of their water, plus the weight of all of the support shit 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 but yeah he uh he attempted it and there's 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 fucking tides and storms and all this sort of stuff

But it was, that was the first episode I ever did on that show. That's crazy. Yeah. And I think the record will have probably been broken now, but it's insane. So take me through just what class were you? I started in class 289. I 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 terror. It's like a, it's like a simulated drowning test. That's not what it's called, but that's what some, 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 probably going about 60 seconds to 90 seconds just on a breath hold. Then you begin solving the 60 second long problem. So it's like two and a half minutes, which for those who don't understand what that means, you are totally hypoxic, which is you're damn near about to pass out. And what they're looking for is...

can you stay calm enough to follow this procedure when your body is saying you're dying? And it took me a number of tries to pass that test. I was horrible at it because I was panicking. That's all it was. So I failed that. But I guess I was in good enough standing with the instructors that they said, you can stick on. Because normally two rolls is pretty rare. Usually you get rolled once, you get to stick around. Getting rolled twice doesn't happen very often. So I snuck through the cracks in the team's

But 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, which is not as hard as BUDS. And then you become a SEAL. What was the worst element of Hell Week in training for you? Pain, discomfort, whatever. Was there a particular moment that you went through that was the worst?

You know, I think looking back, I can say that overall, the worst part was actually just the collective sleep deprivation. Hell Week was five and a half days of no sleep. But actually, in reality, 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 sunup to sundown 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, you're 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 have to have a comic ready, like along with their donut and coffee. It's all these kind of extra chores that take a bunch of time. You got to shine 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 six o'clock at night.

And I lived off campus because I was married or off base because I was married. That's the only way you can live off base. And so I drive, you know, 40 minutes to get back to my house, get back at like seven. I'd eat a burrito, you know, California burritos are awesome. Get a burrito. And then 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'clock, which is not that late.

But it's a Monday, it's 10 o'clock and I have to be back at Bud's at like 3.30 in the morning. So you're perpetually genuine, like for real, you have not gotten enough sleep. Chronic, protracted sleep deprivation. 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, 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. The mission itself 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 mittens on. You can't use your, unless you're shooting a rocket launcher or something, but you need dexterity. And so I remember we, I'm not going to tell this whole story, but 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 there 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 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 am someone who actually is prone to panic to a degree, which is my fight or flight. I'm a flight guy and it took a lot to harness that part of me. And I don't even necessarily think I've done it, but that was something that was really challenging to work through. But I would say that I'm able to withstand discomfort for a really, really long period of time. And it's not because I'm some superhuman, 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, it's funny to compare, you know, the military to this, but when I first started making YouTube videos, so not the viral TikTok video I did at the water park, but when I transitioned about six months later, because TikTok was going so well, uh, to making long form YouTube videos, um,

I was a one man band and I was putting out four or five feature length 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 three to six 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. And when it's like four 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 a...

It's one of the most reassuring things to realize that whatever the challenges are that you're facing aren't bugs, they're features, and that everybody else has to go through this as well. 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. The point being, well, what is the...

universal selection criteria between episode zero and episode 21. But it's the same thing that everybody goes through. My friend Alex says 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. It's like, this is a feature. This isn't a book. 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. But I deployed the minimum. I did one combat tour. And that was the first tour I did. And that was to Afghanistan.

And we definitely got into gunfights. In many ways, it was actually what I thought it would be like. A lot of it was. You go through so much training, so much prep, and you get overseas, and it's like you're terrified. It looks like war. And I'm half smiling here because it's so weird when you first get there. It's so different from your normal life. Does this make you feel like you're kind of back there? Yeah.

You know, this actually looks similar to a fob shank, which is, so we landed at this, this base called a 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, this stuff happening. Crazy. Like when we came, actually my, my entry to Afghanistan, when I knew like, Oh shit, it's getting real is we flew from Virginia to Germany and

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. You're in this 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. But 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 a red light on the, on the aircraft, even though we're way above small arms range. And frankly, even RPG range or rocket launch, it's harder to see at a distance, 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,

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, because 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, 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 operating in a special operations unit, so much of what you're doing is choreographed with everybody else. 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 buddy or with small teams. And just seeing in this like crazy moment where like gunfire is coming in and you're looking at your teammates and your teammates are so well-trained,

that you just see this look of not calm. It isn't like they're like superheroes. I mean, 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 we get into a gunfight, 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 the idea that there are people that are walking around in sandals and AK-47s up against this team. It just seemed unbelievably unfair. 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 shit. This is an intense level of training.

So, the confidence level is really high, especially as the deployment went on. We were going out a fair amount. You know what that means? You feel invincible with the guys around you in some way. And that's actually something you need to keep in the back of your mind, that you're not- I am not invincible. Yeah, that complacency kills.

There's definitely an element of that invincibility thing. Most of us are in our early 20s, we're in the prime of our lives. You can see how that would happen. Anyway, so the grenade, about five months into the deployment, we were going into this village called Zargan Shah. The general mission set that we had in Afghanistan was our unit, we were tapped with trying to find suicide bombers

who were destined for Kabul, the big city in Afghanistan.

and stopping them or limiting their effectiveness before they got there. Because we were actually positioned on the one paved road in Afghanistan called Route Utah, kind of splits the whole country in half. And it went right to Kabul and we were deployed to this little outstation that was right up alongside Route Utah. And this is not a base. It didn't look like this. It was a couple of HESCO barriers and some tents, 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 the city, if you will, called Zarganshah. 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 architecture.

But Zaganshah, it was mud huts, but they were built on top of each other. I mean, 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 Zaganshah, it was just there were so many opportunities to get stuck on dead ends, to have corners where you can't see around, and it was covered in

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 Kabul. And the thing about Zaganshah 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 Zaganshahr are openly carrying their AK-47s and patrolling the streets. They know that this is a target, this place, and their job is, yeah, I'm a fighter and I'm protecting the people 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 Easter in 2014, I think it was April 19th. I think that's right before Easter. April 19th, 2014, we went into Zargan Shahr. 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...

Our partner force, 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 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 in. And again, it's like imagine being in a city that you don't know. There's loads of places that people 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 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 because we're still getting pot shots. And at some point a drone overhead, one of ours, an unmanned aerial vehicle

spotted a group of what we call ma'ams, so military age males that were crouched down by this wall kind of near where we would eventually exfil when we left Sarganshar. 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 was some threat with 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 happen to be physically closest at the time when this Intel came out that, Hey, there's these moms over here. And so our, I was not in charge. I'm just a typical new guy gunner. Our leader, uh, said, let's just go and see what's going on. Like just get eyes on these moms 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. Cause it didn't go the way we expected.

We, um, we ended 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 T intersection.

And so you walk down this, this wall or this, this hallway and you reach this T and our expectation was this wall right here that we're walking towards is like six feet high, seven feet 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, a hundred 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 hundred meters away on the other side of the field is going to be these maps. We walked 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're Crouchtown 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 to

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. This is not the way we want to engage with these people. It's way too close, way too much risk here. Back out. 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 what's to say they haven't heard 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, 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 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. Yes. 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 alleyway.

And it's the middle of the night, we're on night vision, and 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, it would look like darkness. But to me, on night vision, I have this blue-gray scale, pretty high-speed night vision, and

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 complicated why you would use a flash versus steady. But for whatever reason, we're in a flashing strobe. 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 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's even closer. I mean, it really felt that slow, even though this happened in a fraction of a second, but

Grenade comes over, it hits my shoulder and it lands on the ground. 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- Is that fear? What is that? 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. That 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 grenades 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, phew. It's going to blow me relief. Relief. Yeah. I was like, thank God. And then when it made it all the way down to my legs, I was thinking, oh shit, it 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 shit, this is pretty good. And then it detonated and 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,

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 wasn't able to talk to him, it was so traumatic. I avoided him. And frankly, he avoided me. I'll tell you what actually happened.

but we didn't talk to each other. It's like I get medevaced and I never talked to him. And then four years later, we finally have our talk and we debrief what happened. And it, and 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's like liquid 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 a grenade. I thought I had my legs, you know, I was pretty confident, but I knew that clearly there's been 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 tee, 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 tee, the top of the tee, 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. Yeah.

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 top of the gun had 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 my memory is somebody picked me up and dragged me not to cover 'cause there really wasn't anywhere to go. They just kind of took us down the base of the T, if you will, to the side of this wall.

And my medic put tourniquets on my legs and our JTAC who calls in airstrikes. They called in what's called a, I think it was a danger close airstrike, which sounds like nothing. But what that really means is if you call in a danger close airstrike, what that really means is you're calling an airstrike 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 approve you calling an airstrike on yourself.

Now you're not literally doing it. It's often when you have no other choice, like, Hey, they're five 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 feet away from where they're actually targeting. And so that did hit and it, and it neutralized 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. Mm-hmm.

And so there was just this chaotic, you know, trying to suppress the threat, trying to call in a medevac. And, you know, after my medic had put the tourniquets on me, he was so calm. He said, hey, 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 video of it, and it does kind of look like there was two. Video of it? The drone was filming it, yeah. And have you seen this? Yeah. It's grainy. You're not like, oh, there I am. It's more like, okay. But you can probably pick out. Yeah. Yes. How does that feel to watch your own mortal danger? I will say that...

I was glad that there was a record of it in a way, you know, for posterity or something. Framed and put on the wall.

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,

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. Okay. It's like you got shot. Being punched isn't enough. 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? Cause 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 end up getting, we run out of this place we are under the hail of gunfire to this helicopter that took us to a, 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, you know, I came home and I frankly was not prepared 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 ended up talking to my medic who is the guy who put tourniquets on my legs. Cause I would have bled to death. He also didn't want to talk about it. We both without saying anything completely avoided each other. We worked at the same SEAL team.

Like we weren't 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? I don't know. I think that's probably a trauma response. It has to be that. I can't think of any other reason I wouldn't. Was he injured too or was he okay? The thing with him is the deployment before that that I wasn't on, I was still in training, he was older than me, they had had a couple of pretty horrible injuries. I think there was even a casualty as well, death. And he was the medic for that deployment as well. 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's guilt. Yeah. And I think he had a little bit of survivor's guilt, um, coming into the, and he's like the nicest man. And it's funny if you saw him, you would not think this dude is a Navy 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 and medic who's just like a savage on the battlefield. But he, uh,

He had some survivor's guilt. And then when I got hurt, along with the other people that I was with, 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 really struggled with that. I didn't know about this. So I'm close with his wife. I haven't talked to her in a while, but I was very close to this wife and

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 him up and I just was like, hey, 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 and the grenade comes over, it blows up, it feels like rocks.

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 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 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 underneath you. Reflecting 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 can't work on John. I have to work on somebody else that's worth saving. He's a precious resource. He has to use it for who he can save. And so he left me to die. And I laid there dying. And 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 is

A hellfire missile is being called in on us. There's active shooting all this is. This is not some law. This is like an in the middle of a gunfight.

These people, I say that because I don't know exactly who carried me out, but I was carried out of the contact spot, put down next to a wall. I'm worthless. I can't get my tourniquets on. I'm not in the fight. I am completely a casualty. And between my medic and my interpreter, who I was also very close with because I was the guy that did a lot of work with our partner force, since I don't speak really at all Farsi, and so I needed an interpreter.

you know, my medic calm 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, I,

What I do recall, and 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 the moment of near death did happen to me, where I didn't have some profound... 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 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 and it disappears. And so I'm left truly in silence, just absolutely in this void. And all I was thinking about was

And not in a dramatic, not in an emotional way, but in sort of like a fact, 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? Will it say that I was a beloved friend of this person or that person? And I wondered 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 our entire existence is being alive, so we don't think about it.

It really hit home that your body is prepared to shut down really at any point. And it's very simple. Like 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, again, my interpretation about 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 after I finally did recover, I was told by, or not when I recovered, when I was at the hospital, I think when I first got to the hospital in Germany, I was told that I was probably within about 30 seconds of dying, had my

my medic not grabbed me, put tourniquets on me and save my life. So I was likely in the final 30 seconds of life. And it was not scary at all. It was kind of weirdly matter of fact and simple. It's like, 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 was 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 collarbone, like compound fractured, like tolerable 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 collarbone. As an adult, that would not be some revelatory thing. You fucking broke your collarbone, you'd see it.

But as a seven-year-old, I don't even think I ever gave any thought to the word collarbone 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 a hundred percent right there, it's like when serious shit happens to you, it's your brain goes into this hyper focus and you know, things you, you recall stuff that you just couldn't recall otherwise. 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 death, it was just like, I

I knew it was happening. It was not some, maybe it was, it's happening. I'm dying. And it was kind of like, fuck. 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 shit, 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. It'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 ya. We'll see you next, next month. It's like you go from 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

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, if 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 fucking killer who's been on the battlefield. Like you got to get out of here because 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 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 other surgeries and treatment. And so there wasn't really any sort of

system set up. I'm not calling the military out because 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 nothing. I am home and I am in the red. And the way I describe that is an enormous sense that everybody fucking owes me something. Everybody owes me something. 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 gurney in the, in the ambulance. And there was this like very nice woman who was working in the ambulance and EMT, who was just like escorting me to

to Virginia and I couldn't stop being mean to her. 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 nothing she's doing that in any way is antagonizing me, but I couldn't stop being an asshole to her like the whole two hours or whatever it was. And that's just, that's not who I am. And 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, I would get so mad at everyone around me.

And so I was just mad. There's a funny story. Within a few days of being home, so we lived in a HOA, so Homeowners Association, and they have rules about what you can and can't do with your property, but you agree to this when you move into these neighborhoods.

And so 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 so 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 fucking way. Yeah.

I pick up the phone and I call 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 turned it into like, how dare you ask me to change my chimney cap? So huge level of entitlement, feeling like what 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. 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. I think there's an awful lot that people can learn from taking a frank assessment of your shortcomings and saying I was an asshole.

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, it's not a comment on my self-worth as a person for the rest of time. True.

I periodized assholery 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 a blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, I was a dick. Yeah. I did. I was a dick for a while. Okay. So you've done that. You you're, you're now back civvy life. You're going through this thing. Uh, physical, mental, emotional reintegration. Was there a process you went through?

Uh, not really. No, I think that, you know, no, I definitely saw a therapist and I would attribute a lot of my ability to be a normal, sane, happy person now to therapy. Um, you know, there's, 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, uh,

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 in combat or reintegration or trying to find my way in the civilian world. And it's in those moments, 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 is just saying, yeah, 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, escaped death, and you now study death, what have you come to believe about what constitutes a good life?

I mean, I would say that having purpose is a big part of what brings me happiness in my life. I mean, it's, you know, 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 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, 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 not, whether or not I achieve it in many ways is kind of secondary to having it.

It's like 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 more open to life after death 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 I think there's an element of things just kind of end.

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, what year were you born? 1988. Correct. Okay. So are you bummed about not being there for 1987? No, you weren't there. You, you don't have no frame of reference. That time happened, but the fact that you weren't there for it doesn't really matter. You don't have emotional baggage with, oh man, I wish I could have seen 1987. Yeah.

The same is going to be true 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 think that because I was so close to death, in my opinion, that it just feels like you got time now and take some fucking chances because it just kind of ends at some point. And then in 100 years, no one's going to know who you were. You're gone. And that's fucking dark, but

It allows me to not really worry about fucking stuff up. You know, take for example, doing a live event and I know you did a whole live tour. Unless you're the person doing the show, what you may not realize is that for talent, for the person who's leading the show, when you go on stage to do a live performance, especially for someone like me where I'm doing storytelling, right? 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 storyteller 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 a high wire act. 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 high wire type opportunities, take them. Yeah.

If you fail, who cares? Like who fucking cares? Everyone's going to forget you in a hundred years. No one cares about you. The truth is, is like no one fucking cares about you. They care about themselves. It's 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 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 remember that and you think about the fact that in 100 years from now, you'll be dead, 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 fuck 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. There is more...

There are more degrees of freedom that you have in life. There's more balance than you might believe. 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 rely on a lot and it's this notion of do things that scare you. I definitely didn't come up with this. And actually, ironically, Will Smith is the person that I get this from. It's complete happenstance.

He has this amazing clip he had. I think he was on 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. 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 skydive place down the road. Let's do it tomorrow. It was kind of like, oh yeah, maybe. 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? Because I don't know if I want to do this now. And his friend's like, oh, 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 more, 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 going to 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 Will's buddy goes out with his instructor and then it's Will's turn. They go to the edge of the door 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

And then it was like this profound, amazing experience. You know, I mean, have you skydived before? No. Okay. Well, it's, 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 oftentimes 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 stuffing your hoses, because it's scary. It's hard. There's a real danger there. Finishing that test and passing that test was one of the most fulfilling moments of my life because it was so fucking 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 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, 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. Put your money where your mouth is, dad. Yeah. 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 able to do it. I don't know. I think 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 of 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 heaters to keep us warm when it's cold we have tried to bring in the guardrails or like when you go bowling bring up the those bumpers bumper things on the side so there's no gutters yeah and i think that in certain ways it'll have made us hypersensitized to fear yeah that's 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 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 car on fire and a full moon and a weird house over the far side. Have you got any stories that fit this environment? I do. I do. I have a really good one from out in Utah in the 1970s.

It's actually one of the earliest stories that I covered. Actually, this is one of the first ones. So we don't have the names of the people involved. So I'm going to call them a man and a woman, but 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 I recall. So back in the 1970s, there was this

This young guy and young 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. 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 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 the worst that can happen? I already can tell this isn't going anywhere. And he says to his date, he says, you know, do you want to do something kind of unexpected? Do you want to like go do something kind of crazy with me right now? And the girl was actually like kind of taken aback. Okay, what? What do you want to do?

And he's like, well, I, I oftentimes go for walks out in Provo Canyon, this beautiful Canyon. That's not near it's nearby. It's got this amazing trail. It brings you out to this overlook with this incredible view of the stars. 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 chemistry that's like they're going into the unknown together.

And so they quickly leave the diner, they hop in his car and it's a short drive over to the parking lot where Provo Canyon is. You know, he pulls into the spot, there's nobody there, they get out. And now there really is, 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 nighttime, you know, just a very, 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 forest and 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, 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. This is their first date. They don't have the background of a relationship to begin touching on something that's hard to point out. You know, it's

Neither of them turned to the other and said, I feel uncomfortable. Instead, they just kept their mouth shut and thought, okay, I'll just keep on going. So they stopped talking. They begin walking faster out of this kind of nervous energy they have now they're holding hands 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 speedwalking 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

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 fuck 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 begin 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 tuned to like a dateline type of show, like a true crime show. And neither of them are really watching. But an interview comes on and 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 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 time I was caught. And so it turned 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.

That's great. So they got their first date was running into Ted Bundy. Wow. Yeah. Oh my God. And actually, if you're interested, there's several other close calls with Ted Bundy that if you Google close calls with Ted Bundy.

He came close to killing people several times. And it's, I don't have those- Isn't it the one with the VW Beetle? There's something with the VW Beetle? I forget what it was. Unfortunately, I don't remember all of 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.

Stuff like, or one person who Ted Bundy randomly befriended 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. Wow.

While he's killing other people at the same time 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 in?

that you've covered? Oh man, I have one for sure. I've covered people that have committed horrible crimes to children and just terrible, like John Wayne Gacy who just killed young boys. But the one that stands out as just the most heart-wrenching by far is Jack and I forget their names, Jack and Eileen. Okay, there's this older couple that

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 is a very nice boat. This is not a cheap purchase, you know, so there's some diligence there and they asked to go and test run the boat, but with Jack and unfortunately forgetting their names. Their last name is Hawes, I think.

Anyways, they go out on the ocean with the prospective buyer and two of his friends that came along, if you will. So it's like three of these people and then Jack and his partner. And they end up going out on the ocean, at which point the killer, they end up taking over the ship. They tie up Jack and his partner. And instead of just bringing them somewhere and dumping them and taking their boat, because 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 anchors here, the chain runs all the way and they're tied at 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

think about it. You've all this chain link. You have to wait for it to throw the anchor over. 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 psychologically horrible way to die. How do you know that story? It was on Dateline and the killer, he did a whole expose about what happened. Of himself?

Yeah. 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 horrifying. What do you think about how

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 people feel like they're the worst.

Not that I have any idea, but you're making a choice 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, but you keep doing it. And I'm not giving anybody a pass here, but crimes of passion is something a little bit easier to understand. It doesn't necessarily feel evil. It feels like, okay, 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 have a conscious choice to seek out violence over and over again, not even necessarily 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. So I think 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 violent activity over and over again by choice. And then to me, 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,

Skinwalker 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, you know, it's a hotbed of potential paranormal activity. 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 livestock are found in the mornings, you know, with surgical incisions and organs missing and, you know,

Of all the places in the world, this is one of the places where consistently people are saying weird stuff happens there. I don't know if it's true or not, but there's enough stories of people encountering. The most terrifying was there was one of the people who lived on Skinwalker Ranch and one of the main owners, I think at some point,

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 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 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 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 over, 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? Yeah.

Do you remember that period? Was it Tom DeLonge? Yeah. From Blink-182? Yeah. It was like huge in this stuff. He actually reached out to me. I spoke to him. No way. Oh, yeah. He reached out to me early on in my Mr. Ballin journey. 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 Blink-182 when he's on tour. Yeah.

I think that's his calling. His calling was making great music, not being like...

He is the guy. Tom DeLonge, the lead singer for Blink-182, is officially the guy who got the government to say, okay, yup, we do have footage of UFOs. And it's because he would go to DC and straight up hold meetings and pressure people to come out and say it because he's like, I'm telling you.

I know all sorts of people that have shown me videos and pictures and evidence. He's like, I'm telling, I think it's real. His whole life he's been hooked on aliens, you know, and he really, he pressured the government and they listened and they released all these files because of Tom DeLonge. 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 wear headphones, Joe and Jamie were able to talk to each other quietly while Tom was walking. I'm sure 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 fucking 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. Yeah, 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 credulous about this, or at least Joe 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. But that's the thing, the line between...

legitimate obsession with something other people don't see and outright delusion with something that you're imagining is by design difficult for the people outside of that situation to see. 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. Yeah.

The opportunity to look crazy is pretty high.

Very correct. Yes. 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've found, what I found with Tom was he's,

He's a guy who is not worried about what you think about him. He really doesn't care. He cares about

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 A-list rock star, but he has this very real passion. 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 really like Tom. 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, 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, uh,

with the actual apples and the, I guess 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

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'd Tim just go? And four or five people died just from going in suffocated in.

And 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 victims-

Actually, her other living son contacted me and just was like, you have broken her heart to bring this up again. You didn't contact us. This just happened. And now we're getting messages left and right because the video gets millions of views. Everybody's hitting him. Hey, do you know Mr. Ballin's covering your story? Hey, you got this detail 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 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, it,

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 a, you know, a whole livelihood off of that, but it was, you know, getting some views and, uh,

And 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 motivational speakers that talk about their military experience. The Duggins, the Jockos. Yeah.

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 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 kind of like an unwritten code of honor of some kind? Well, if you think of it this way, it's definitely not endemic to the SEAL teams. I think it's more combat units. It might even be just military in general that I think this happens. It's very profound or it happens the most in, I think, special operations units. But take, for example, Navy SEALs. I mean,

When you become a Navy SEAL, you get this gaudy gold pin of an eagle holding onto a flintlock pistol and a trident. And it's actually just called your trident. That's the name of this pin. You wear it on your uniform. And in the Navy, every other badge you wear, it's called your insignia.

There's dozens of jobs, 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 SEALs so far, who have worn the trident and died.

Those people, they're the ones that have built the legacy of the SEAL teams. And so the way it is put to you when you join the SEAL teams is this shit is not yours. This is the community's. You're wearing it because you're part of this community, but it's not yours to use, so to speak.

because men have fought and died to build what this thing is. I mean, the SEAL teams are super successful and regarded as this really amazing unit, not because of me, but because of all the people before me who have died into getting to this point. And so 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 ire 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, 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 I...

When I was in the active duty, when I was active duty, I would have shit 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 is ping pong tables and stuff.

And I remember we would talk openly about seals that were out that were very successful, at least publicly very successful, that we would just shit talk. Disparaging. Completely, for no reason other than, look at this guy talking about how great he is as a seal, right? Mm-hmm.

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 with your teammates and you're doing SEAL stuff. And when you're home, you're not active.

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 the same thing happens. Maybe, maybe, but, but to a degree, you know, you're, 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 work the weekends half the time there's training. And anyways, it's just a very, it's an intense job. It takes over your whole life. And there's

There's a big push to really contribute to the culture of the teams. Like you don't get to just be a CEO 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. 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

it's really hard to navigate. What do I do now? I was so- Who am I? Yeah. You lose your identity in a big way. And invariably, and I see this all the time, and 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 often find myself noticing when these people get out, because 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 a 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 is

That gives you so much credibility in a way. It's cachet, 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 there 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 are applicable to you you know it's like that type of content super benign not gonna hurt anybody it's not classified it's

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'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 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 cringy and all that stuff. It's easy to do that when you're active because you're not out there yet. You haven't 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 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 from...

very negative, very negative messages. I've gotten, you know, really like you're seriously deep cutting messages from people I served with on my team, like in Afghanistan, some of the people who are 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. Um,

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 sealed all the seal teams are I would run into guys and no one was like doing anything to me But I get looks from people that definitely knew who I was definitely didn't like me I'm like with my family I'm out of the grocery store getting stared at by a seal who's clearly menacing like staring at me. I don't want that

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 would have shit 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 very- Not the result that you expected. Yeah, exactly. And I'm not crazy. It's just, it's hard to transition. 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 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. Ballin. 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 you're 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 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 people if you could sit down and have a coffee with them?

I'm still the same guy that you served with. It isn't that I decided I'm going to morph into this 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. 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 fuck 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. I used to think it's so funny. I thought this in

I thought that in virtue of being a Navy 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 believed that, that there would be no work. I would just step out of the team. Look at the sacrifices 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 talk to you. They want to hear about your experience. They can totally see that there's value in being a SEAL and what you did could translate to business. That's definitely true.

It's not the end-all be-all. 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 because I did. Being a SEAL is cool. It's amazing. 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. It's jack shit. Yeah, it matters, but it matters only in certain ways. And I think that-

There's a part of me that always worried that people thought that I had really changed, but in the worst way, that somehow I had threw to the wind everything I knew from being a SEAL and just said, fuck the teams, I'm going to do whatever I want and post whatever I want. When in reality, I made a decision because I needed something to work. 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 Pandora's box, if you will. So it didn't surprise me when I got the negativity. It just surprised me at 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 fucking hates you. So it's a real sacred cow, this thing. You recently did Sean Ryan's 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 re-glorifying the thing I did? Sean's got legitimacy with his background, and many people have been on his show, Rob O'Neill, Tim Kennedy, guys that are more high profile for their military thing than yours. But yeah, it's...

What was it like to speak to Sean 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 deleted. So I should say this when I was getting all that negative negativity from the seal posts 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. Ball and 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, 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 after it was deleted, I

you know, I basically stopped thinking about it. I was embarrassed about it more than anything, you know, I- Swing and a miss. Big time, like an epic swing and 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 reputation is everything. It's everything. And if you're a Navy SEAL, I mean, you're a special operator,

What your peers say about you is your currency. There's nothing else. It doesn't fucking 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 fucking obliterated it. It's gone. It's so bad and so destroyed that- But then you sit down with Sean and how long do you go? Five hours? Five hours. Yeah. Yeah. Classic. 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 get animated with stories and stuff, but

It's undeniable that there was anger and resentment when I was talking about the toxicity that I received on the back end, even though, again, I understand why it happens. I mean, this is-

But therein lies the big problem that if you are a SEAL, 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 backdrop?

Or do I hide it? Which fundamentally hurts me. And I know that no one really gives a shit about me now. I'm out. I'm not part of 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 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. I was trustworthy. I was a good seal. 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 and 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 and,

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 fucking clue that I've gone on to be Mr. Ballin.

all they remember is who's that fucking idiot John Allen who posts all that stupid shit on Instagram. What you make of what Sean's doing, going super deep, the men's equivalent of true crime stories, several hour-long episodes with guys going really deep into their military history. It seems like he's relatively unique in this space. And I love his show. Yeah, no, Sean...

So Sean being former CIA as well, he's just he's really good at asking questions. And I found on his show, you know, you go into it expecting it to be really, really long. It's like five hours, six 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. I offhandedly mentioned as I was describing my upbringing that it was really difficult when my parents split up. I don't talk about my parents' divorce. It's not a central part of my life at all. It's a point. He circled back to it later on in a way that he was like, well, do you think your parents' divorce had an effect on this? 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 of, 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 was some solidarity there. 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 has grown. It's really, it was hidden in some ways. Yeah.

But now I'm in a, I mean, I am in a very leveraged, good position against my active duty counterparts. Like, what are you going to do? Because it looks like champagne problems. If you whine about this thing, oh, poor Mr. Amazon deal, poor Mr. 8 million subscribers. I just kind of damned if you do and damned 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 fucking hate that guy. Phenomenal. Um,

Yeah, I found it very fascinating. You know, I've spoken to a variety of different sorts of operators and there is a hypersensitivity. Tim Kennedy, I don't know what he said. At some point, 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. Mike Baker, ex-CIA guy, said,

Oddly, Evan Hayford from Black Rifle doesn't seem to have the same vitriol, but Mike especially. I wonder whether it's like the people that were a bit more active and kinetic versus the ones that were a bit more sort of administrative and whatever. But there is a difference. Like 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 none of that stuff. Yeah.

I am absolutely fascinated by the difference in perception of people that were in the seals or some other thing and people that were in the CIA. Yeah. Three letter agency, globalist piece of shit, 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 seeing 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. Sean Ryan phased up into that. Evan Hafer phased up into that. Like, I don't know. Like it, I, I, I'm yet to find a good explanation for why people,

CIA is so... There's so much distaste. FBI slightly less so, but CIA specifically. And yet people that can be part of the same lineage but didn't graduate or whatever up into that aren't. Yeah, I totally know what you mean. And I don't have a good answer either. I do think there's just...

a bit of hero worshiping 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 early 20, 2010s,

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 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 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. This thing happens. Yeah. And so like the world of 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

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 of the seal teams. And now it's like, well, fuck the seals because they think they're so cool. So I think that there's, there's probably some vitriol coming to the seal teams that, that is happening to the CIA. That's probably gonna be the same. Wow. They're gonna be downstream from it. So.

As Mr. Borland, 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, that's a tough one. I've had, unfortunately, and I can imagine you probably have too. 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 have discovered is as, you know, the kind of Mr. Ballin star has risen, right?

There really has been a lot of the what you would imagine is stereotypical of people kind of come coming out of the woodwork 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 there are 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 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. I've given money to people, which I thought was the right thing to do, which only meant will now give me more.

And then I would say there's so many predatory, I guess, businesses out there that are looking to make a buck on up and coming creators. I'm not gonna name names, but there's quite a few. And if you don't have good management, you can get into deals with people that screw your growth, screw everything for you. And actually one of the things that I did early on

I just had no clue what it was to be a YouTuber or podcaster. And so in early or mid 2020, end of 2020, when I really, I had millions of followers on YouTube by this point, and 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. Turn them all down. And so this is how I came to meet my business partner and manager and CEO, Nick Witters. And boyfriend, Nick Witters. Nick, 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.

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 this happened, but 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 and 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, um,

I was filming videos literally sitting in water. I mean, I'm sitting in my chair, my feet are- Dry from the waste up. 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

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 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'll talk with you. I didn't even really know what he did. I knew that he had said that he was, 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 content, different scale. Uh, but I ended up saying, I talked to him and I actually unintentionally completely blew off the meeting with him. And he would tell me later on, he's like, well, I guess I blew it. You know, he doesn't want to talk to me.

But I ended up 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, fuck, I missed his call. And I just cold called him. It was like eight o'clock 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 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 a non-scripted and also in commercials. And he's met a whole bunch of traditional A-list 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 wealth of experience in entertainment and he was kind of looking for his kind of, you know, his stallion to really partner up with. 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 don't really understand business strategy. When it comes to deal making, I'm either asked for too much or asked for too little. 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 you can just do everything else 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, um,

along with me. I wasn't his only thing, but I couldn't tell it all. I felt like I was 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. 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 Ballin Studios now, so it's not just-

your stuff. You're now seeking out other creators, either kind of acquiring and bringing them under an umbrella or growing sort of fledgling ones. Who are your favorite storytellers on the internet? Well, some of my favorite storytellers are a part of Ballin Studios now. So yeah, we have, so Nick Witters, my manager, and he's also the CEO of Ballin Studios. We founded it together last

And, um, that's the umbrella company. And within that is, you know, we have a 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, uh,

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'll read the script and really know it. But,

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 bullshit. 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'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

And then really it's, you have to solve for one person doing everything, as you know. Who are the 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 YouTube channel, and this is not bullshit. 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. I love it already. Yeah, they're, dude, they're amazing. 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 a bedtime stories drawing. It's beautiful, but they're so good at storytelling and it's a team. It's amazing. So Bedtime Stories, they have this amazing YouTube channel and we brought them under management and we actually helped them launch a podcast. So it's comparable to YouTube, but it's just the audio version. This is new original content. So Bedtime Stories for sure is

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 podcasting. They are definitely not three hours into this show if that's the problem they have. Yeah, but I actually, I found it was easier to listen to bedtime stories because I liked the British accent because they sound more intelligent to me. Exotic, but understandable. It feels like intelligence because I think of journalists, or even you, it's like there's an air of intellect that comes with the British accent. 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 Nexpo. His YouTube channel is just called Nexpo. 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 cool it's like historical mostly military style stories as well but it's really well done it's excellent i resonate with what you say 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 all right leader, probably a pretty shit 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 pussy. It's just threaded the needle of a really horrible cocktail of particular skills and traits. And accepting that, I think is, 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. Yeah. 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're a child that can vote and drink in the UK. Yeah.

Over the space of, you know, six to 12 months, they would go from being, you know, kind of unassured, maybe not certain about themselves. They'd not really done business before. They don't know the blah, blah, blah. And then 12 months later, you'd see Halloween, which is promoter Christmas. It's the busiest night of the year. And there would be 2000 people trying to get into a nightclub and a six foot three person

Newcastle bouncer, Dorman, massive, hairy, gorilla guy screaming in their face saying, if you don't fucking 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 ass 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 2000 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's 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 trade-off. And 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. 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, get rid of. And I came up with this idea of the curse of competence, 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. So, okay, well, it's not that I suck at that. 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... So 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. He's too good at stuff. 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. 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 very, very important. It is.

What's next for you? What are you focused on right now? 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. Even in the SEAL teams, even though I was there for seven years, it's really broken up into segments. You do tours, they call them, where for a two-year period, usually you're with this group of people, you're training 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. Yeah.

And then when I got out, I briefly did some charity work. And then I did, I started this like a 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 TikTok, 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. Ballin thing. You got to keep making videos, keep making podcasts. Like in addition to the stuff we're growing and 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 I got to be honest, it's not a good, it's, it's what 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,

He's always aware of where I'm at in 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 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. But I'm anxious to do more stuff within the Mr. Ballin sphere. I think in the Mr. Ballin sphere or the Ballin Studios sphere, we really do wanna become the place, the home of the best storytellers in the world, which seems like a big claim. But if you think of it like this, if you are a baseball player, a really, really good baseball player,

And 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's 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.

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 chops, 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 it's not a cash grab. 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 also think about how much

dog shit content most people consume oh yeah it's everywhere constantly yes and just because something captures your attention just because something is popular does not necessarily mean that it's good yes 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 more to come 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 it just sounds like it's an amazing set 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 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 overcoming it uh very much so and you

very, like it's impressive being self-effacing and being like, look, hey, 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 whatever. So dude, I'm really excited to see what happens. I'm fired up for you, for the graphic novel, which is gonna come out soon as well. Boom, there you go. First 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 a book.ballenstudios.com. The strange, dark, mysterious delivered in story or delivered in book format. 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 at Mr. Ballen everywhere. Uh,

Also, I would say in terms of podcasts, because we now have a slate of shows, you can just search for Ballin Studios on any podcast platform and you'll get the Mr. Ballin podcast, Medical Mysteries, you'll get Run Fool, Bedtime Stories, Wartime Stories, all our podcasts. So yeah, just look for Mr. Ballin online or Ballin Studios and you'll find us. Oh yeah. I appreciate you, man. Thank you. Thank you very much, Chris.